And these written policies are apparently developed in back rooms with no input from the community. Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the unwashed masses.

Nicholas Knight wrote: directly No, they are almost always developed in the open by documented consensus and by people who reasonably and in good faith interpret and codify our best practices. It is my opinion, whoever codified this rule was writing down the best practice of leaving deletion notices on articles to be deleted, because doing so is in the spirit of our (largely unwritten) polices of openness and transparency. Otherwise some authors may not know why their article was deleted. We aren't talking about a lot of work here compared with the potential avoidance of needless ill will. For example, an article called [[Fumocy]] was recently listed on VfD without having a VfD notice placed on the article. A week passed and nobody spoke up for the article. I noticed that this apparently well-researched article was listed and I tried to confirm the title; I couldn't. I then tried to confirm some of the information on the page; I could. Apparently the author (a professional astronomer) and a few of his friends wrote the article using a brand new term for "full moon cycle" that is not yet (nor may never be) accepted by the scientific community. Luckily instead of deleting the article I moved it to the author's userspace and then later found out all the details. The author, however, was a bit miffed that there wasn't /any/ notice left on the article that it was about to be deleted; if a notice had been there, then anybody who knew about the subject could have argued for keeping the article based on the content (although the title is wrong). If however, I deleted the article, the author would not have known why, and the readers likewise would have been denied the opportunity to defend the article. That is, unless they read every entry submited to the VfD page; but who has time or want to do that? IMO, the loss of even one article like this is worse than having 10 crappy articles slip by our destructo beams. Fairness sometimes requires a bit of work (of course, in retrospect, whoever wrote the policy to begin with could have provided a bit more by the way of informing everybody about it; if for no other reason to ensure that it is followed more-so than not). too And is it too inconvenient to leave a deletion notice on an article listed on VfD because somebody who actually cares about the article might disagree? Two way street.