For those looking for your daily dose of VfD (Because, really, why pretend changing V to A changed anything) abuse, I submit for your amusement http://www.slate.com/id/2126570/entry/2126575/ Which is deleted at 60%, with one of the delete votes being very weak. When someone sensibly objected to deleting at 60%, which is considerably below the MINIMAL and highly disputed 2/3 threshold, and undeleted... A delete/undelete war started. Yes, there was a fairly conclusive VfU that said keep deleted. But as has been noted, VfU is exceedingly deferent to VfD, such that bad calls on VfD have no real recourse. Adding to the problem is the fact that we're apparently adding a condition of extreme deference to the closing admin, which means that the final fate of articles is more or less being single-handedly decided by whether or not the closing admin happens to be of the 2/3 flavor, the 60% flavor, the 75% flavor, the "I just delete what I feel like" flavor, or what. If nothing else, we should accept that deletion will be handled like blocking, with objections to deletion being taken very seriously, and with admins being given a wide latitude to undelete what they see as bad closings. To summarize, there are two key problems that NEED to be addressed, and that exist outside of whether one is an inclusionist, a deletionist, or a big blue frog. 1) AfD is simply too busy for the statement "Any good article that is nominated for AfD will be noticed by someone within five days" to be plausible, leading to a high probability that the generally deletionist tendencies on AfD will delete articles that, by most reasonable standards of the Wikipedia community at large, would be kept. 2) The closing procedures for AfD and subsequent appeals processes are heavily biased towards deletion, meaning that the only time that noticing and objecting to a good article being nominated is useful is in the first five days. -Snowspinner

Whoops. Wrong thing on my clipboard, apparently. Here's the actual thing I'm bitching about: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_gags_in_Airplane%21 -Snowspinner On Sep 20, 2005, at 12:02 PM, Sean Barrett wrote:

A couple of days ago I was on the verge of taking this matter very seriously. Then I looked at the net growth rate of the Wikipedia page count. Around 1500 new pages per day remaining undeleted after seven days. I compared it to the sclerotic maximum capacity of Articles for Deletion (AfD) (average of 112 listings per day early June to early September) and the fact that AfD participants complain bitterly about their inability to keep up with AfD at present. Bottom line: AfD doesn't scale. Whatever problems may exist with AfD's tendency to randomly delete a selection of perfectly reasonable articles, and VFU's growing unwillingness to rectify this, the problem will decrease in significance in the long term as page creation rates accelerate inexorably beyond the reach of AfD, and possibly even any defensible extension of speedy deletion. Perhaps requiring editors to sit a short examination on deletion policy would help to keep inappropriate nominations down and increase the overall capacity of AfD, but this would not address the problem of scale. We should speedily delete obvious rubbish, and we do. In time this manual mechanism may be augmented by cooperative RC (recent changes) monitoring tools, which would improve our efficiency. But AfD is already swamped by growth and this will only get worse. Correcting its strong exclusionist bias and restoring its connection with the deletion policy would not solve its fundamental brokenness.

On 9/20/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: Actually my conclusion is the opposite, from more or less the same set of observations. Firstly, as Wikipedia grows larger at an accelerating rate, the likelihood of a given article ever being listed for deletion diminishes. AfD is not growing in size, it seems to have stabilized, while I presume that the article growth rate rises. Secondly, while it is true that it's harder to make the case against deletion, a consensus is not required to avoid deletion. Thirdly, an article that is salvageable can be improved with a small amount of effort during the discussion, and this has an immense effect on the result of the debate. Exclusionism may become more popular, because it appeals as a quick fix to feelings that the project is growing beyond control. However the same accelerating growth ensures that exclusionism confined to AfD can only have a diminishing influence on the overall end product, as a smaller proportion of both incoming new articles and of existing, established articles, falls within the limited reach of AfD.

On 9/20/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well there is a substantial exclusionist faction on Wikipedia. While they obviously don't enjoy consensus support (viz: Deletion policy, history of organised attempts to exclude articles about schools, pikachu, cartoons, etc) they're entitled to express their views. Wikipedia isn't supposed to have a consistent policy. It's just supposed to make decisions we can live with, even if we need to grit out teeth. I suspect that the more exclusionist a position one takes about wikipedia content, the more likely one is to have resource to gritting one's teeth. Wikipedia is filling up with articles about animators, books, radio DJs, episodes of old TV shows, drinking games, jokes, and all manner of subjects that would probably not make it into a paper encyclopedia. This process is inexorable. In the absence of widespread uproar at this massive influx of articles on obscure subjects, the exclusionist position is unsalvageable. By default, we have created an aggressively inclusionist encyclopedia. There are no effective policy tools by which this situation could be reversed.

On 9/20/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch(a)agora.rdrop.com> wrote: If this should ever become a serious problem, the GFDL ensures that the information removed can be copied and retained indefinitely.

On 9/20/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, we don't. A ton of obvious rubbish must be sent to AfD because it's not covered by the CSD. Band vanity is the most obvious example, but there are many others, such as: neologisms, corporate vanity, personal essays/rants. No one can give any good reason why these should be deliberated upon, but they are, all in the name of making sure we never, ever delete a good article by accident; even if that means making editors who could be using their time to write articles deliberate on the merits of garbage. - Ryan

On 9/20/05, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com> wrote: the most frequent user of IAR. Afd does fulfil a need by letting us delete vanity and rants with a clean conscience, you're quite right. What I'm saying, and I'm sorry I have to repeat this, is that whatever it is that AfD does, it doesn't scale. By the way, impressions can be deceptive. I just looked at AfD for September 1, chosen at random. I could have sworn that the delete rate in AfD must be around 90% if not higher, but I'll be buggered if I can find over 73 deletes, speedies, transwikis and whatnot out of 102 nominations. 71%. So I randomly chose September 5. 88 out of 138. 63%. So maybe this is a recent thing? August 20. 75 out of 102. 73%. Further back? April 12. 41 out of 68. 60%. Definitely not what I expected.

Has any editor yet complained that an administrator has unprotected The Wrong Version?