[WikiEN-l] Preliminary Deletion

Fri Nov 12 18:10:25 UTC 2004

Preliminary Deletion's voting has closed; alas, a consensus was 
unobtainable, although some have been making effort arguing that a 
consensus is not necessary, as a 2:1 majority in favour of the proposal 
was achieved. I take no sides in this debate. However, I have taken the 
leisure of rewriting the proposal to include a suggestion of anthony's, 
and answers to nine questions/objections. I have also merged a popular 
suggestion with the proposal itself, albeit cutting out a lot of fluff.

I hope I can get quite a few people from the mailing list to go over the 
proposal again, because I fervently believe we need to do something 
about VFD before collapses under its own weight. I wanted to address 
people's objections, I really did, but I can see no conceivable way to 
do so without alienating yet another sizeable segment of Wikipedia. 
People want less bureaucracy, but they don't want to give admins a free 
rein. So what do we do? Let users delete and recreate articles freely? 
Imagine the delete wars! I think it's very sad that about half of the 
objections couldn't be addressed with more than a list of points about 
why they cannot be handled. I'm quite unhappy that we can't have our 
cake and eat it too, but I'm even more unhappy that it seems quite a bit 
of people think we can.

Some others seem to have voted against the proposal without giving a 
reason beyond that "it's bad", so I could not address their objections, 
whatever they may be.

In closing, I beg some of the wiser and not-so-wiser ones reading this 
list to read (or reread) [[Wikipedia:Preliminary Deletion]] and engage 
in discussion about it; we need all the suggestions we can get. If we 
could still somehow grasp that elusive cake from our stomachs and yet 
obtain full nutitrional benefit...

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])