[Flag] Re: [WikiEN-l] Another AfD example -- a serious proposal to fix it

Sat Jan 21 01:25:30 UTC 2006

(another point)

Travis Mason-Bushman wrote:
> Let's be honest here - the VAST MAJORITY OF ARTICLES which get AFDed are 
> deleted by clear consensus without controversy. We are talking about a 
> small minority of controversial deletion decisions. Out of the 150+ 
> nominations each day, fewer than 5 make it to DRV. Some get speedy-kept 
> with no controversy, some get speedy deleted with no controversy and the 
> rest get some sort of consensus, or a no-consensus keep.

The vast majority of emails I get in a day are spam. They can be marked 
as junk and put aside without worrying. If I were to set my spam filters 
to mark almost everything as junk, we'd be talking about a small 
minority of controversial spam-labeling decisions. Out of the one to 
three thousand emails I receive each day [not an exaggeration... average 
is 1621 last time I looked], less than a hundred are not spam.

If I were to set my spam filters to mark nearly everything as spam, I'd 
lose messages that matter. Maybe not a lot, maybe it works most of the 
time... but I'd lose some. Whereas if I set things so that messages are 
only marked as spam if they absolutely are, I can get 0 real messages 
junked and only a few dozen bad ones slip through. Those get in the way 
a little, but I can get rid of them easily enough. In Wikipedia, they 
don't even get in the way of getting at things you want to see. They're 
just in the background.

Deleting one valid article is a significantly bad thing; not deleting 
ten bad articles is so minor a bad thing as to be almost beneath notice.

-- Jake Nelson