[WikiEN-l] Proposal: Article Improvement Weeks! (was Turn off article creation AND deletion.)

Sat Dec 10 22:48:07 UTC 2005

Matt Brown wrote:

>On 12/10/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>  
>
>>That's an abuse of AFD per the increasingly decorative policy. It's
>>explicitly not for editorial work.
>>    
>>
>One of my long-standing beefs with the deletion process is that people
>use it as cleanup, and when you call them on it, they say "But doing
>it this way gets results under the threat of deletion, while if you
>list something on cleanup, nothing ever gets done."
>
I can understand this argument.  When a kid doesn't get his proper and 
needed attention he feels compelled to cry louder.  The challenge has to 
do with convincing people that washing the dishes right after a meal 
avoids having a difficult stack at the end of a week.  If we do end up 
with a big stack of dirty dishes they still need to be washed rather 
than thrown out.  The Karate Kid's first lessons were very important.

>And then people turn round and say that if anything's ever deleted
>through AFD, the topic is never again allowed to exist, even if the
>reason for deletion was that it was a crap article that needed
>cleanup.
>
This is why I support making undeletion easier.

>The discussion we should be having is one of "Should we extend
>template syntax in order to allow more clever things to be done in a
>sensible, maintainable way that won't impact system performance?" 
>Ugly template hacks to do logic and programs are not really the way to
>go there.
>
I am clearly a minimalist when it comes to templates.  These, including 
the shortcuts, are just another form of jargon.  The more of them there 
are, the easier they are to forget, and the less friendly they are to 
the newcomer.

Ec