[WikiEN-l] More AfD toxicity

Wed Feb 15 10:53:46 UTC 2006

Sigvat Stensholt wrote:

>>As noted earlier in this thread, that is exactly the moral I've learned.
>>Wikipedia has no tolerance for works in progress.
>>    
>>
>
>I tend to agree with Guy's and Aaron's evaluation here. The article, once it 
>enters main namespace, is in the frontline. People making a "normal" search 
>for it will be able to access it. The article should be able to stand on its 
>own legs by then and if it doesn't it should be deleted, even if the subject 
>is notable and a proper article can be written in its place.
>
>For example, the first edition we got about Robert Aumann contained
>
> "He won the Nobel Prize!"
>
>Lets go through why this type of article is bad. First, the article is not 
>very useful to the readers. The people who are likely to look up Robert 
>Aumann are those who read that he had won the economics prize already. The 
>people who didn't know this would also find the article useless. (They would 
>think "Huh?, What Nobel prize? When? For what?". Second, it is an 
>embarrassment to Wikipedia if people look this up or follow a bluelink, 
>expecting to find a real article, and find this. The reader is annoyed and 
>decides that the reputation of Wikipedia being low quality is absolutely 
>true. Third, the presence of such articles, written by a veteran Wikipedian I 
>might add, tells newbies that they don't need to put any effort into writing 
>the articles (after all the vets don't), and that makes the quality of newer 
>articles very poor.
>
>Therefore, that revision of the article was speedy deleted, based on the 
>criterion of little or no context. So when you push the save button on a new 
>article make sure that you have made an attempt at answering
>
>*What/Who IS the subject?
>*Why should the reader care?
>*Could this article be useful to anyone?
>
>If you plan on making a longer article for first submission and don't want to 
>suffer a browser crash right before you submit it, you can put work in 
>progress on a subpage of you userpage, and then move it off to the main 
>article namespace when the article is in reasonably good shape.
>
>This is not extreme immediatism. A poorly written, or short article which is 
>still useful and establishes context can be included.
>
>Sigvat Stensholt (AKA "Sjakkalle")
>  
>
Just curious...have you read the revision Sean saved? Because while 
stubby, it was far from one or two context-less sentences. (I do think 
brenneman has a point, but a lot of the messages on this matter seem to 
think Sean's initial article was crap.)

John