On 1/20/06, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.org> wrote: So no action against those who vote to keep stuff that should be deleted? Remeber a keep vote is worth more than a delete vot on AFD. -- geni

On 1/20/06, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.org> wrote: Have you ever tried to bring up issues of copyright violation on AFD? I have. I got kinda outvoted (to be fair the subject was to do with schools). Hoaxes are subject to AFD. Are you going to claim that voteing to keep them does no damage? -- geni

On 1/20/06, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.org> wrote: Ok now it we've got it reframed so it is not such an obvious attempt to push inclusionism lets move onto the buracratic bit. While it appears the board at least favors increasing committes and the like: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolutions (looking at that you start to wounder if the foundation is running the EU as well) The general wikipedia community tends to be less in favor. Where would these board members come from? Anyway if you want to try and go forward with this you need to start discussing this on wikipedia as soon as posible.~~~~ -- geni

On 1/22/06, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: If the user is an inclusionist it is hardly imposible that they may propose policies that support their position. The original proposal did fairly clearly favor the inclusionist position. It is hardly ilogical to conclude that the intial proposal was in part meant to forward the inclusionist position. The regular anti deletionist sentiments expressed on this list renforces this conclusion. There is a significant differece between AGF and stop thinking. I fail to see the relivance for this. Recent experence suggests that for practical purposes disscusing something on wikien-I is not the same as discussing it on wikipedia. -- geni

On 1/22/06, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: Again irrelivant. If you want something discussed it is better to do it on the main wikipedia site. Recent experence shows this. -- geni

This would be a kangaroo court waiting to happen. We should of course do more to encourage research before someone submits something for deletion. However, people have different research skills, different access to resources for doing so, and differing opinions on where to set the bar for inclusion. So this "review board" would either confine itself to the worst offenses (like the guy who put up [[Jean-Luc Picard]] for deletion), which can be covered by normal admins and WP:POINT anyway, or have a chilling effect on WP by essentially criminalizing differences of opinion. Submitting an article to AfD really should be no big deal. Things that shouldn't be deleted get nominated, but that doesn't mean the sky is falling. Just vote keep and get on with editing. On 1/20/06, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.org> wrote:

Yes, I've been paying attention, thanks. I've personally gone to a number of message boards to discuss AfDs with groups who are offended by an AfD discussion. Usually patient discussion and explanation works wonders. Perhaps a "So you've been nominated for deletion" page would be helpful in this manner as well. Is it a problem? Yes, but I think your proposed solution would be an infinitely larger problem. On 1/20/06, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.org> wrote:

On 1/20/06, Kat Walsh <mindspillage(a)gmail.com> wrote: Something like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Geni/so_your_article_has_been_nominated_f… Feel free to suggest changes. -- geni

On 1/20/06, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.org> wrote: If you look at the list of deletionists over at meta you will find most don't list much stuff for deletion. -- geni

geni wrote: I was Officialy Informed that the page in question is "a joke page" and "was never meant to be serious". Last time I looked it was in [[m:Category:Humour]]. -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

On 1/21/06, Travis Mason-Bushman <travis(a)gpsports-eng.com> wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Geni/so_your_article_has_been_nominated_f… Just needs an introduction before being throw open to the general community to disscuss. -- geni

On Jan 20, 2006, at 4:17 PM, Sean Barrett wrote: Excuse me? My quote is a *direct quote* from your earlier e-mail. Unaltered and unedited. Are you now retracting your statement? You wrote: "I would like to think that -- really I would -- but two years on the ArbComm have turned me into a bitter, cynical, twisted shadow of my former cheery, optimistic, happy-go-lucky self. Have nominations painlessly canceled, with no repercussions at all, would make the deletionists /more/ likely to nominate stuff for deletion, not less." You proposed to form a committee whose sole purpose would be to punish "deletionists" by banning them from deletion pages. That is inarguably a hostile act that will do nothing but embitter those you target and make them more determined to oppose *anything* you present as being the work of, as you said, a "bitter, cynical, twisted" person. You could have made a rational suggestion, like geni's "So your article has been nominated for deletion" page, which I have already worked to improve, or kat's call for more speedy keeps. Those are both rational, logical ideas. Creating an anti-deletionist bureaucracy is nothing but spite. -FCYTravis

On Jan 20, 2006, at 4:48 PM, Sean Barrett wrote: You apparently missed my sarcasm in quoting your words at their face value, just as you quoted my words "pounding into dust" at face value. Both are, of course, hyperbolic and humorous. The fact that said "pounding deletionists into dust" mentality exists is inarguable. Witness Bjorn Lindqvist's missive, stating that "lifetime bannings (of deletionists) are OK for me," and that they "are doing more harm than any other type of troll or spammer." Just a wee bit inflammatory, you think? -FCYTravis

BJörn Lindqvist wrote: Define "deletionists", please. John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])

Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote: What's wrong with purging crap from the encyclopaedia? Nothing wrong there. And as for "don't care if what they are doing is harmful", I challenge you to name me anyone who you think seriously holds that philosophy. John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])

On 1/21/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa(a)gmail.com> wrote: You appear to be asking them to prove a negative. That is generaly considered to be imposible (outside maths). -- geni

On 1/21/06, BJörn Lindqvist <bjourne(a)gmail.com> wrote: Huh? No it wasn't Huh? -- geni

On Jan 20, 2006, at 4:36 PM, Hermione1980 wrote: One could say the same about a lot of articles that get put up for AfD. If an article's authors had expended a little more effort in writing them, so that they would clearly state the article's importance, they could have saved people a lot of time nominating them and voting on them. In my opinion, this all comes back to the fact that the Cleanup system is hopelessly broken. One cannot simply tag a borderline article - an article about a subject that may be worthwhile but is hopelessly poorly written, has no sources and amounts to a personal essay "cleanup" because in all likelihood that article will sit around untouched with a Cleanup tag for six months or a year or even more. So what's to do? Nominate it for deletion, because while the subject may be worthwhile, nobody's going to see it and be able to improve it into something resembling a usable stub unless someone sees it - and if you put it on AFD, at least someone's going to see it. WP:AFD is the *single fastest way* to get a borderline/potential article cleaned up into a worthwhile stub, because *people look at AFD.* I agree, that means our system is broken. Let's figure out how to fix Cleanup. -FCYTravis

The way these things keep going... ah hell, here's an updated version of what I suggested about a year ago: 1. No article may be listed on AFD unless a serious attempt at discussing cleanup, redirection, renaming, etc., has been made on the article's talk page. 2. No article may be listed on AFD twice in the same month. 3. If three (3) users (not IPs, have contributed to article space, had accounts for at least a week, not found to be sockpuppets, yada yada, etc, etc) say "Speedy keep" on an article's AFD, it is immediately closed as "speedy keep". (Abuse of this rule to stifle an actual debate on the merits would, of course, be a violation of policy.) Note: Copyright violations and other "urgent deletions" (for example, as in a past case, the revelation of the real name, city of residence, college currently attended, and exact place of work of a certain young woman depicted in certain pictures on the Internet under a stage name) should be dealt with outside of the system used for normal articles. Listing something that is not an "urgent" deletion on the page for those should be recognized as a violation of policy. I don't know why people have to hit over the head with the basics: If an article can possibly be merged or redirected, don't put it on AFD: talk about it on the talk page, use {{mergeto}}, and so on. If an article isn't a copyright violation and doesn't have some other really pressing need to have something expunged from history (cf. example above), then deleting it is not a priority- certainly ranking far below adding content to articles. -- Jake Nelson

Travis Mason-Bushman wrote: "clearly non-notable" - in this hypothetical, is it a business that actually exists? If so, it's not "clearly" non-notable: it's debatably non-notable. The correct action would be not to AFD it, but to put up the standard boilerplate template about "fails to state the importance", and make a comment on the talk page asking if anyone can demonstrate that it has any importance. If you can't find any evidence of such a business existing, put up {{unverified}} on it, and put a note on the talk page asking if anyone can demonstrate it exists. Then go off and do other things. Check back on it at some point, see if anyone's provided information that resolves the issue. If not, then you could AFD it. -- Jake Nelson

On Jan 20, 2006, at 5:25 PM, Jake Nelson wrote: I would vehemently disagree, especially when among those ten articles are hoaxes, thinly veiled attack pages, vanispamcruftvertisements and other such content that has the effect of actively making Wikipedia a *worse* and *less authoritative* source of information. -FCYTravis

On 1/21/06, Travis Mason-Bushman <travis(a)gpsports-eng.com> wrote: Why should anyone consider Wikipedia to be authoritative? It's written by amateurs. But I agree that we should get rid of tripe. BUt we should discuss it properly. Jimbo is right, there is far, far too much emphasis on deletion. Bad articles can be identified and improved, or if there's nothing good about them they can be deleted. But there should be more emphasis on improvement. There should be fewer AfD listings carried to term. We should encourage editors to seek innovative solutions, and not fetishize the deletion process. So often these days it seems like a fairground ride--once the journey starts you have to keep your hands inside the car, and mustn't tamper with the deletion proposal. Why on earth not? If an article looks like an obvious redirect candidate, then do it and thank you for saving us five days worth of debate about deletion. Any further discussion can continue on the discussion page.

I posted earlier about this brouhaha, but evidently because I had not yet subscribed, the message is in limbo. So there may be another one coming on this situation. I would truly appreciate some feedback from those who are more acclimatized to Wikipedia. The summary: I was contacted over a year ago by an author who was working on the Frances Farmer article for Wikipedia. He had linked my web article "Shedding Light on Shadowland" and recognized I had a certain expertise in this subject. He invited me to come to Wikipedia and begin revising/correcting the Farmer article (as well as others that linked to it), which I happily did. Prior to this, I had never even heard of Wikipedia (sad, but true). Over the past year, I have pretty much completely rewritten the article, adding a lot of salient information and correcting a lot of misinformation in the article, trying at all times to keep it completely factual, non-sensationalized and as free of POV as possible. I should state here for the record that my Farmer research has received worldwide attention and served as source material for several books and newspaper articles, as well as documentaries on both NPR and A&E Biography. So I feel, hopefully rightfully, that I know whereof I speak on this subject. About two days ago a user named Wyss started making wholesale edits to the article, which in and of itself doesn't bother me at all--if you look at the edit history I have let many a revision pass if it contains factual information. However, several of Wyss' edits contained outright factual errors. I don't want to pester you with details, but if you go into the edit history, you will see my first fledgling attempts to correct them. I then posted to her Talk page (evidently incorrectly, as I did it at the top and didn't sign it, which completely set her off), asking her please to fact-check her material before posting it. She then posted vaguely threatening messages to my Talk page, including such sinister sounding lines as "I don't know what you're up to" and "I'm watching this page." She then reverted her edits back to the incorrect version. She also denied she had made any errors. I ultimately provided her with a URL of her edit history, describing the errors she had made, and hopefully showing her that she had indeed made them. When I posted this to her Talk page, she, actually quite laughably, posted to my Talk page calling me a "bonehead." She then, rather incredibly, spent the next several hours denying she had called me a "bonehead." (I know, it's ridiculous, but it gets better or worse, depending on how you look at it). So anyway she has continued to edit, adding completely wrong information repeatedly. She also began wholesale copying of my copyrighted article "Shedding Light on Shadowland," which I, again, posted to her talk page about, warning her that she was pushing the limits of Fair Use and that she was facing possible legal action if she continued quoting my research without citing it. This is where is gets incredible to me: she then had me banned indefinitely for "making threats and harrassing." Interestingly, the person who banned me then immediately went "inactive." Now Wyss on both the Farmer talk page and her talk page is accusing me of having "cloned" her, whatever that means, and of harrassing her anonymously. I have made NO anonymous edits to any article prior to my editing privileges being revoked, and I certainly do not have the Wiki-knowledge to clone someone's user page. As Wyss herself took me to task for, I couldn't even post to her Talk page properly, and I have to struggle to make edits to Wikipedia. I state for the record I am a near-50 year old husband and father who, quite by accident, ended up spending 20 years researching Frances Farmer and who gained a certain renown as a Farmer expert. My web article has been read by tens of thousands of people and commented on by such notable people as Leonard Maltin and Washington Post reporter Jack El-Hai. So here I am, "banned" from Wikipedia, still struggling to correct Wyss' incorrect edits (though I am "banned" I can still edit--maybe someone can explain that to me), while I also am suffering from what I personally consider to be her near-slanderous comments that I have "cloned" her and/or harrassed her. She is also now claiming that I am not Jeffrey Kauffman and I did not write "Shedding Light on Shadowland." Hopefully my email address is some proof for you, but I also refer you to my website: http://jeffreykauffman.net/<http://jeffreykauffman.net/> I even posted to the Farmer Talk page what I believe has happened: I am rather well-known in the Farmer fan community and I know for a fact there are several others who have been following Wyss' incorrect edits for the past few days. These are all younger folk, the Cobain contingent as I call them, and they certainly have more Wiki-knowledge than I. It is quite possible that Wyss is being targeted (wrongly, as I myself posted on the Talk page) by one of these people, but I again state it is *not* me who is doing this. In the meantime, Wyss has just in the past 10 minutes added several more inaccuracies to the Farmer article, which, when I try to correct them (providing source material, as I always attempt to do), she immediately reverts back to her incorrect versions. All the while insisting I'm not "me." I would very much like someone to offer me a little help. If I have done anything wrong, I apologize. But I have worked for a very long time to make sure only the facts about this actress are published on Wikipedia, and it pains me greatly to see someone come along and destroy over 12 months' of very careful, considered work.

On 1/20/06 8:58 PM, "Tony Sidaway" &lt;f.crdfa(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Well, I am - attempting to wade through a few of these. There are 200 articles with a cleanup tag from January, 2006 beginning with A-Bo. Anyone like to join me in trying to reduce that some? It's barely scratching the outer layer of the surface, but it's a start. -FCYTravis

Travis Mason-Bushman wrote: The "fix" for the Cleanup system is also the source for the people for a "cleanup patrol": get everyone to stop wasting time at AFD. This was, in fact, much of the point for the creation of Cleanup in the first place, but it was only halfway successful: Cleanup was created, but people kept listing pages on AFD instead. I keep hoping, "this time it won't get stuck halfway", "this time people will actually try to fix it instead of just slapping it on AFD and running"... If we actually convince enough people to dig in at cleanup and get rid of the backlog, we might be able to dig ourselves out of this pile. Too often, I still think it'd take Jimbo himself deleting AFD to make it stick. -- Jake Nelson

Travis Mason-Bushman wrote: (writing eight paragraphs of a response, then deleting the whole thing) A lot of articles listed on AFD belong on Cleanup. A lot of time is spent watching AFD to try and keep things from being deleted that shouldn't be deleted. That time can't be easily redirected unless things stop being listed on AFD that shouldn't be. Maybe 'Article improvement month' - nobody delete articles for a month, while everyone focuses on creating and improving articles instead of getting rid of them. (Exceptions for "urgent deletions" as described prior, of course.) -- Jake Nelson, who shouldn't be up this late when he has to be at a big meeting all day tomorrow...

"Travis Mason-Bushman" &lt;travis(a)gpsports-eng.com&gt; wrote in message news:BFF6F744.94C8%travis@gpsports-eng.com... Isn't this the exact point? If the effort put into relentless AFD nomination and discussion were put into CLEANUP instead, that backlog could be cleared much earlier. And those articles which would have been AFD'd in the meantime? They'll turn up in the CLEANUP queue later on, and you can fix them then. It is actually much better to have a sub-standard article, clearly marked as such and requesting assistance, than a hole in the ground with a sign saying "the last article on this subject was a crock: don't even consider writing another because we'll nuke you until you glow in the dark and then shoot you full of lead". -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]

John Lee wrote: That's the point that annoys me most about AFD: You can't just redirect or merge the articles, because of course once an article is on AFD, it's sacrilegious to remove the AFD tag from the article and forgo the "discussion" that's supposedly happening. So, it's basically locked until it's deleted or kept. Of course, you can still edit and improve it, but I'm not going to do that to an article that I think should be merged or redirected anyway. grm_wnr

geni wrote: Well, lots of non-process stuff is done and gotten away with, as everyone probably knows by now. I'd just like to see this added to the normal deletion rules, so that users that don't want, don't dare or don't know about IAR can and will do it as well. grm_wnr

On 1/20/06 11:27 PM, "Ray Saintonge" &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: And we are saved from falling to the [[false dilemma]] [[strawman]] raised by Mr. Nelson, that somehow you cannot rid Wikipedia of patently bad articles without deleting good ones. -FCYTravis

On 1/21/06 1:10 AM, "Bryan Derksen" &lt;bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca&gt; wrote: Except such things are not nearly always "obviously bad." It takes a deliberative process, at least one that is semi-deliberative, such as AfD, to make the determination in many cases - unless, that is, you would like to give admins more speedy deletion leeway - which probably *would* result in more good articles being deleted, because there simply wouldn't be nearly as many eyes falling upon them - and Nelson's statement would be true. As it is today, AfD is far from perfect but it results in these borderline and questionable articles (is it a hoax? Is it fluff or really something good) getting eyeballs. It doesn't always work, but I'm waiting for someone to come up with a better way to do it and so far everyone's just said "it doesn't work" in 11 different ways. -FCYTravis

On 1/21/06, Travis Mason-Bushman &lt;travis(a)gpsports-eng.com&gt; wrote: I question whether AfD can be considered "deliberative" at this point. I think a deliberative process is obliged to listen to arguments presented and make a decision based on them, and the evidence that AfD does so is somewhat lacking. Kelly

On 1/21/06, Matt Brown &lt;morven(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: We can give people the opportunity to hold a discussion; unfortunately we cannot force them to take that opportunity. Although I think AfD does an excellent job in most cases (how much discussion does a self-written article about garage band formed three months ago merit?) it fails us badly when facile arguments are made in favor of deletion of perfectly good articles about people who have obviously achieved something that has been written about in reputable, independent sources or companies that, though quite small, are obviously an important part of the infrastructure of modern business.

On 1/20/06, Kat Walsh &lt;mindspillage(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: At your service.

"Kat Walsh" &lt;mindspillage(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote in message news:8e253f560601201327gbd28a80v3b8d847e9c0c0f3e@mail.gmail.com... [snip] Hmmm. Isn't this what SnowSpinner's {{user recovery}} template was esentially all about? Or am I getting confused with his "expertise and deletion" notice? I'd think anyone who nominations were getting pulled that often should be considered for a WP:POINT time-out... HTH HAND -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]

Phil Boswell (phil.boswell(a)gmail.com) [060123 22:25]: Well, yes. - d.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 geni stated for the record: geni, I wish you'd drop the straw-man arguments. As you know full well, those seeking and being denied link exchange are not comparable to million-selling authors whose internationally-published works are being falsely accused of being vanity printings. Complaints about being reverted are not so easily dismissed -- by you or me. The same nasty personalities who are delighted by calling a renowed scientist a quack or a best-selling author a hack are just as delighted by reverting well-intentioned edits with hateful personal attacks. So: yes, we should have a committee to oversee on-article personal attacks. I think we should call it something like ... the "Arbitration Committee" or something like that. I'll be one of the first to volunteer to serve on it, and I'll even accept a three-year hitch. And furthermore, I'll bet you that I'll serve one of the longest spans in office of any Arbiter. - -- Sean Barrett | I'm not a hero! I'm just an actor with a gun sean(a)epoptic.org | who's lost his motivation. --Bruce Baxter

Sean Barrett wrote: It seems as if Jimbo has finally installed electricity in the outhouse, and now he can see the light. :-) It's not the nominations or the votes that do the harm, but the decision based on those votes. We should be more interested in what happens to the article than to those seeking to delete it. A merely punitive role doesn't do anythng for us. I can forsee such a Review Board soon being taken over by the very people who are now giving everybody a headache. No attempt to delete for lack of notability should be considered valid unless there has first been a good-faith attempt to discuss it with the contributor so that he can improve the article. Articles that have had improvements should not be on the same footings as one that is totally unchanged. Votes that are time-stamped before an improvement clearly do not reflect a review of those changes. Whatever timeframe is chosen before something can be deleted should start with the last vote rather than the first. Undeletion should not be seen as some kind of personal attack on those who deleted the article who then feels obligated to defend his deletion. Perhaps the act of undeletion should be on a par with one more keep vote that just starts the clock running again. Even with all those safeguards I suspect that the vast majority of things that are deleted will stay deleted without much of a fuss. Ec

On 21 Jan 2006, at 01:24, Tony Sidaway wrote: Well I have marked his picture as {{nosource}} for a start. Yet another gratuitous copyrighted "promo" image. Justinc