[WikiEN-l] The heart of the deletion problem

Mon Dec 12 00:27:05 UTC 2005

I must say that I strongly disagree. Contention in AfD has nothing at
all to do with the rules that are needed for it's implementation.
Look, for every AfD-nomination on wikipedia created, there is atleast
one user who really, really wants it in the encyclopedia, and one user
who really, really doesn't (ie the creator and the nominator). One of
them is going to be pissed of, either the nomination fails or
succeeds. No ruleset, however simple is going to change that deletion
is going to piss people off.

Listen, wikipedia works on a few basic principles, as you say, but the
fact is that the english wikipedia is creating an enourmous
encyclopedia of over 800000, and it has to coordinate thousands of
users from all over the world to cooperate to do it. Without the very
strict ruleset that we have (which, by the way, arose quite naturally,
none of the rules excepting the core principles was forced, all of
them came out from consensus) it would never work. Take RfA for
instance. Most of us will agree that it works pretty smooth (atleast I
think so). The reason it works is that the procedures are fixed and
the rules rigid. When someone complains, we say "Well, he did have 85%
support and the bureocrat thought it was a good nomination, so he was
promoted. That's the rules". And it works fine!

Another example, take WP:MUSIC. Many nominations on bands and such go
very smoothly because inclusion-criteria is fixed and rigid. If only
we had such a good guideline (read: rule) for every subject!

Wikipedia doesn't work in spite of the rules, it works because of them!

Have as few or as many templates as you want. Have as few or as many
different alphabet soups as you want. Make it as easy as you want to
nominate or whatever. The deletion problem will still be there,
because the heart of the deletion problem is that people have a
fundamentally different idea of what should be in the encyclopedia.
And that wont go away.

On 12/12/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> The heart of the problem with AfD, DRV, and the rest of the deletion
> suite of pages is this: It is increasingly a pile of rules. Rules
> encourage playing to win. Deletion, like most of Wikipedia, used to
> be based on principles. Principles do not encourage playing to win.
> Principles encourage playing to get it right. But now we have rules.
> Now if an article is improperly speedied, it has to be brought to DRV
> where the masses can vote to send it to AfD and we can have a whole
> AfD with virtually no votes to delete because nobody ever actually
> wanted the article deleted, they just mistakenly thought it was a
> recreation of old content. And let's not forget that the AfD, being
> the second AfD for an article of that title, requires our second AfD
> template, because HEAVEN FORBID we just use one AfD template for all
> our nominations. No, no, we need a second template for second
> nominations.  We also, I believe, have a third for third nominations.
>
> In a setting like this, it is no wonder that people begin to think
> the goal is to win - we've totally abandoned all notion of figuring
> out the Right Solution and implementing it. Instead we value this
> absurd game of Nomic, because we've apparently come to believe that
> the winner of Nomic must be right.
>
> Screw shutting down AfD. Let's shut down AfD, TfD, CfD, RfD, IfD,
> MfD, DRV, RFC, RFA, RFM, RFAr, AN, AN/I, AN/3RR, and CVU, and get
> back to a system based on understanding what we're doing and doing it
> instead of this goddamned alphabet soup.
>
> -Phil
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>