[WikiEN-l] Re: No need to speedy vanity pages

Mon May 30 23:40:34 UTC 2005

> From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>

> An example of a vanity page which is routinely deleted by unanimous  
> vote on VFD:
> "John C. Shaw is a freshman in high school in Portland, Oregon. He is
> a fan of Indie music, and films. Near the end of eighth grade, he had
> pneumonia, so was taken to the hospital, where they found he also had
> scoliosis. He wears a brace, and will wear it for another two years.
> He takes it off at concerts so that he can mosh easily."
>
> I understand why we can't generally speedy non-trivial content, but
> it's very inefficient to go through VFD for material that is just
> going to be unanimously deleted.
>
> Can't we nominate some consistent wikipedia inclusionist to allow to
> delete, say, any article less than a month old or with less than two
> edits, they they believe would be a unanimous delete vote on VFD?
> Articles that they don't choose to delete would continue go through
> the normal VFD process. If they delete something they shouldn't it can
> be VFUD or speedy UD by another admin.

But articles like that doesn't really take much time to handle on VfD.
Speedying those articles wouldn't really affect the VfD process much.

Here's a counterexample. Here's an article in the form in which it was
nominated for VfD. The entire article:

"Jessamyn West, AKA the Rarin Librarian. One of Library Journal's
Mover & Shakers, West is best known for her 'blog, librarian.net."

It turns out that Jessamyn West is the name of two people: an
absolutely-100%-notable famous novelist, author of _The Friendly
Persuasion_, adapted into a 1958 movie that won the Academy
Award for Best Picture, etc. etc. on which we had no article.

And it's _also_ the name of a blogger, who is at least arguably
notable, whose entry got about an evenly-split VfD vote and
hence was kept.

The benefit of running the Jessamyn Wests through VfD
outweighs the very small costs of requiring a few people
to cast pro-forma "Delete, vanity" votes on the John C. Shaws.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/