On 6/16/06, Cobb <sealclubbingfun(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
"George
Herbert" wrote,
AFD is not an acceptable substitute for a cleanup notice and some cleanup
efforts.
I didn't say that it was... but you snipped all that out, and just replied
to
the bit that suited you.
I snipped down to what I felt your focal point was. However, if you
insist, then here's that paragraph in toto.
But... the only reason this AFD was "keep" is
because of the number of
Star Wars voters. Take a look at the history of the article too. Short of
slashing and burning it (and then it may as well have been deleted),
it's not going to get any better because it was named for and written from
a fictional viewpoint by masses of fans who cannot tell real from
imaginary... and as a result it is fundmentally unencyclopedic. It should
have been deleted, if only to preserve the illusion that AFD isn't a big joke
and to give it a chance to start again (with a different name).
The comment "because it was named for and written from a fictional
viewpoint by masses of fans who cannot tell real from imaginary" seems
odd to me. They don't own the article. If I had bandwidth today I
could hop on over there and start doing a major edit on it. Or you
could, or we both could. The majority of the active current
contributors being fans doesn't mean that we can't fix it.
You seem to think that AFD is a big joke because we have bad articles
surviving. My point, and several others point, is that we have bad
articles on appropriate encyclopedic topics survive AFD, and my
argument is that that's entirely proper since we should be doing
cleanups on them instead of arguing about deleting them. When you
just go in and AFD it, part of the perceived point is that you believe
that it's not a topic worthy of being in Wikipedia. In some cases
that's not the AFDers intent, but largely it is.
WP editors and admins seem to be largely inclusionary, so you've
already lost many of those battles. When you lose it by a landslide
because of a bunch of energetic Star Wars fans' it's making another
more unfortunate point as well. In a sense, every time AFD is misused
in this manner, trying to "clean up" an article on a valid topic by
AFDing it and perhaps recreating it, it brings disrepute to the
process and a lot of "no" voters in. We would be better off if such
AFDs weren't called in the first place. AFD should be the last final
response to an unsalvagable article after you've tried cleanup tags,
getting involved in cleaning it up, and asking other editors to help
if the article's usual editors feel too much ownership and keep doing
unencyclopedic things.
--
-george william herbert
gherbert(a)retro.com / george.herbert(a)gmail.com