[WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

Sat Oct 25 02:40:11 UTC 2003

--- Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com> wrote:

> I'm not that sure about that.  I've actually run
> across non-articles on 
> Wikipedia before while doing research, which was
> rather annoying (for 
> example, a dump of the full text of some treaty
> masquerading as an 
> "article" on that treaty). 

So put them on Cleanup! Leave "VFD" as your sole POV
opinion of the "issue" -- but report the actual *issue
on Cleanup.

> If we didn't delete
> these sorts of things, 
> there'd be a lot more of that, which I think would
> hurt Wikipedia's 
> credibility ("250,000 articles, but only 190,000
> real ones" isn't a good 
> tagline).  

"If we dont kill them they are going to kill us...
Aarrggh!"  You dont belong to any... cults... do you
Mark? I mean besides this one. :)

> When someone finds a Wikipedia article,
> it should be at least 
> a decent stub, in order to keep our reputation for
> quality at least 
> moderately high. 

This can be better emphasized with consistent
correction -- by example -- wikifying, making a
comment, etc. Not slapping the hand of the people that
make a wiki work. Dont be wikelitist now....

> "Oh, Wikipedia doesn't have an
> article on this 
> subject" is a lot better than "Wikipedia has an
> article on this subject, 
> let me click on that... oh, never mind, it's not a
> real article, just a 
> 155KB text dump."

All your complaints are about newbies and their
newbieism -- its better to deal with them with some
respect than simply flushing what they do down the
drain. I remember when "Stevertigo" was up for
deletion -- someone ( I forget) made it a simple
redirect -- I remember feeling sort of.. picked on
just for that... and maybe if people werent reasonable
about it (Rick...) then that would have soured my
opinion of the community.

> I do agree that the whole process should be less
> antagonistic, but I'm 
> not too sure what to do about that.  

Try "Cleaning up" articles instead of automatically
"Delete" ing them.

~S~

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