[WikiEN-l] Another AfD example

Fri Jan 20 17:14:53 UTC 2006

On 1/20/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> >I went through a rather tortured process yesterday in which I had to
> >really put my foot down to put a stop to a CfD vote which was taking
> >place without _any_ community dialogue or discussion first.
>
>
> This appears to be the preferred way of proceeding for many: try to
> beat a bad idea into the ground *rather than* discuss it.
>
> Presumably, that's the way COMMUNITY CONSENSUS works!

That seems to be the trend throughout Wikipedia; I'm sure that you can
recall a number of cases in the recent past where trying to delete
things without attempting to engage in discussion has caused trouble
;-)

The solution is to stop treating all of these issues with such
urgency.  Nobody will die because Article X or Category Y exist in a
"bad" state for a few days while we talk things over.

Our byzantine system of deletion rules doesn't help, of course;
there's an enormous benefit to getting an AFD result on something
quickly, since it can then be used to bludgeon everyone else (with the
"re-creation of deleted material" CSD clause, or simply to cry that
there was "no consensus to delete/merge/whatever" if anyone tries to
make major changes).

The other option would be to transwiki "Don't be a dick" back to en:
and to link to it prominently on every policy page ;-)

Kirill Lokshin