[WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

Mon Oct 20 22:39:51 UTC 2003

Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote (regarding VfD):
>
>>
>> The process actually works reasonably well now, so it would be wrong
>> of me to try to decree some huge change to the process.  This is a
>> process that has grown up 'organically' over time.  All we need *right
>> now* is just the tiniest bit of formulation of what the final decision
>> rule should be.
>
>
> Are you sure?  I think it's true that VfD works well in the clear-cut 
> cases.  Probably 80% of the cases are clear-cut, in that there is a 
> clear consensus in favor of deleting or retaining the article. 

80% sounds like pretty good results to me. :-)   There's no need to 
become obsessive about deleting the others.  If there is any reasonable 
argument for keeping an article, it should be given the benefit of the 
doubt.

> For the other 20% it works poorly.  These are cases where we end up 
> discussion what Wikipedia is, or how the article space should be 
> organized.  Most of these conversations end up deadlocked, and the 
> outcome is that the articles are kept.  The many "List of," "Slogan," 
> and "biography" discussions are examples of this.  The quality of the 
> decision making was low, and the number of Wikipedians made upset in 
> the process was high. 

The "List-of" articles certainly have a place.  As much as there are 
people who like to create these, there is likely a similar proportion of 
viewers who are fascinated by simply reading lists.  What harm is done 
by keeping them?

Who judges the quality of the decision making?  I agree that it is often 
low, but getting Wikipedians upset by deleting their contributions isn't 
going to solve that.  

> A good deletion process should meet three goals: it should produce 
> high-quality decisions, it should require minimal effort, and it 
> should stress out Wikipedians as little as possible. 

Yes and no.  High-quality decisions are an ideal.  If you perceive that 
someone is making low quality decisions, simply deleting his efforts is 
a decision of equally low quality.  You need to begin from the position 
where that person is, and respecting it.  If you accomplish something 
with User:A you also need to accept that on the day after tomorrow when 
User:B appears you'll have to start the whole process all over again. 
 We would all like every article to be perfectly accurate and consistent 
with NPOV, but it ain't gonna happen so easy.  If one starts using his 
status as a university professor to justify an action that won't be 
broadly acceptable.  Much of the educational process is geared to 
developping that good citizenship skill called conformity with accepted 
views.  Those who have left the sysstem somewhere along the way have 
never had to write examinations  about it.  They sometimes have unique 
ideas about a subject.  Some of the ideas are downright goofy, but 
others can also exhibit the creative genius that conformity suppresses.

>> As such, while I'm sympathetic to the notion of excluding votes from
>> mysterious users who have only edited 1 time, I think that unless it's
>> a huge huge problem, we can safely ignore it.
>
> It is only going to get worse, and if we actually have _votes_ rather 
> than a consensus system, we will have to address the matter of who is 
> entitled to vote.  The project has greater public prominence than it 
> once did, making such questions more relevant than they once were.

If we can accomplish things without votes, we can accomplish them 
without the problems that votes bring.  If we need to determine who is 
qualified to vote, then we are setting up hierarchies.  The challenge in 
the up-scaling process is how to maintain the same broad openness that 
got the project there in the first place.

Ec