[WikiEN-l] More quotes from AfD

Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 UTC 2006

On 6/19/06, Cobb <sealclubbingfun at googlemail.com> wrote:
> The problem is, I think, that lots of people who comment here don't actually
> take part in AFD.
> They don't see the  day-to-day crap... they just see a system that keeps
> struggling along
> despite being hopelessly broken and unscalable. AFD is such a demented
> system that
> it's very often less hassle to just ignore rubbish than even try to get it
> deleted. No doubt
> certain inclusionist factions on Wikipedia rather like things that way, and
> claim it is a
> self-regulating mechanism rather than a system that cannot cope and which
> people
> avoid.

I greatly disagree.  Though I've not been very active in the last few
weeks, AFD in the time I've been on Wikipedia (last year, roughly) has
made the right decision most of the time, and looking at the various
nominations, the vast majority are pretty uncontroversial.

AFD is fine for dealing with noncontroversial deletions.  So is Prod,
but any lone individual can de-Prod legitimately, so AFD is a fair
fallback for that.

AFD is a clunky mechanism for dealing with contentious deletions.  But
even in those cases, it seems to largely work out ok in the end.

Contentious deletions would be helped, in my opinion, if the
nominators had gone through the policy steps of marking bad articles
for cleanup, attempting to get them cleaned up, etc prior to AFDing
them.  People argue less about things which were listed for cleanup
for a month or two and nobody bothered to salvage.

-- 
-george william herbert
gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com