Wikipedia talk:Preliminary Deletion/Vote

Rationale for my vote

VfD has become bloated, in case you haven't heard about it. I agree with this policy's idea to reduce the size of VfD by removing "almost certain" deletion candidates from the page. This way, truly contentious deletion debates can have more attention paid to them, while, at the same time, admins aren't given more and more unilateral power over inclusion of articles. As an admin myself, I think that this will also help in getting deletion decisions acted upon more quickly. I try to help in clearing out items from VfD/Old when I have time, but, to be honest, a lot of articles get put there every day. Splitting them up will enable admins to concentrate on one class of candidates or the other. Also, new and/or unsure admins may be more encouraged to become involved in clearing out these candidates, which will be easier to deal with: they either get deleted or referred to VfD. --Slowking Man 05:28, Oct 29, 2004 (UTC)

This rationale is sound, Slowking Man, but if admins are allowed to disregard keep votes as they please on the basis of "common sense" then it's just a slow speedy delete with widened criteria. Dr Zen 01:03, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you're basing this on. Kindly reread the proposal and point out to us where it says admins may disregard any keep votes they'd like to. The policy says no such thing. Johnleemk | Talk 04:45, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Btw, if you're basing it on my debate with anthony on the proposal's talk, believe it or not, that's how admins handle this on VFD. In the end, they count the votes — as has been stated before elsewhere, it is the admin's call as to how to weight a vote or whether to discard it entirely. Of course, to avoid possible fiascos, the proposal does its best to avoid forcing the admin to make any calls on the legality of a vote — if you read the corollary carefully, you'll find that it merely encourages people to give reasons for their vote, and doesn't give the admin any authority to count votes based on the reasons voters gave. 06:48, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It does not say so in the proposal but in the discussion you, and others, have made it very clear that this is how you will implement it. Yes, I know that it's how admins carry out votes for deletion. I have seen at least one vote for deletion give a clear verdict to keep, in which the admin threw out nearly all the keep votes, claiming that they were invalid. I've no doubt in that case that the vote was abused by interested parties getting friends to register and vote on their behalf but it is my understanding that anyone may vote just as anyone may edit. Are you sure that you wish "count the votes" to be interpreted as "count the votes however you see fit"? I think there's at least the danger that this will lead the process to become a more drawn-out version of speedy deletion.

At least one contributor to this debate has said "Wikipedia is not paper" will not be considered a valid reason for keeping a page, and yet this is policy, and at least a starting point for a reason for keeping. What if a school is listed, for example, and is defended by saying it is notable in some way, but the admin disagrees, says the reason for keeping is not valid, and bosh, it's preliminarily deleted. I know, a school doesn't seem to me an obvious candidate for inclusion, but for some it is (and I do totally understand, if not share, their point of view). What safeguards are there to prevent that from happening? Dr Zen 02:29, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

We will implement it? I was acting under the assumption that the community would be the one to implement a proposal they approved of; my statements were based on my understanding of VFD, which is why I intentionally avoided placing any such thing in the proposal, opting for more objective criteria for handling this. As I have already said, the proposal merely encourages a reason for voting keep/delete; it never gives the admin the right to discount any votes, keep or delete. You seem to be basing this on a strawman, since on the talk page, I was stating my own assumptions about VFD, and not policy of any sort. Regardless, if you've read the policy carefully, you'll have noticed it never says anything about giving the admins the right to weight votes as they see fit.

I was using that discussion on the talk to brainstorm for ways to avoid a debacle where madhat inclusionists vote "keep" for everything. There's a reason why I came up with more objective criteria instead of "let's pool all the power into admins' hands", criteria which doesn't focus on the reason for deletion, but strong consensus for deletion. I was just using "Wikipedia is not paper" as an example in my suggestion, since I believe that that is not a standalone reason for inclusion; otherwise, as I said, we might as well get rid of Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wiktionary, etc. and offload all their material here, since Wikipedia isn't paper. Thusly, "Wikipedia is not paper" is a reason for inclusion, but should never be the reason for inclusion.

Of course, I realised that's only my opinion, so, as I said, I wrote up an alternative which wouldn't rely on such subjective reasoning, an alternative that depended on hard numbers, to tackle the issue of careless "keep" votes. Like I said, there's a reason why most of the ideas thrown out in that discussion didn't make it into the final proposal. Johnleemk | Talk 10:32, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Definition of consensus

"Consensus" is not defined. This is improper! Default result should be to the most restrictive, not least restrictive option. Where is the support for the proposed default. Eclecticology 12:05, 2004 Oct 29 (UTC)

Regarding Eclecticology's comment, having finished writing the questions, etc. three days ago, I posted to the mailing list requesting someone to go over the questions, etc. and fix them or notify me if anything was wrong or they had suggestions. [1] Neutrality copyedited the voting section; nobody said there was anything wrong with them. I tried my best to follow the Survey guidelines which do not include making a definition of consensus, so I think we'll just have to follow it; it uses our article on consensus as a definition. Johnleemk | Talk 14:16, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Rebutting some "no" voters' reasoning

• "expand speedy deletions instead"

Shall we rereview the results of Wikipedia:Managed Deletion? I'd love to expand speedy deletion criteria, but that proposal would get shot down easily. There's a reason why nobody's drafted such a proposal — nobody but a few deletionists (or centrists leaning towards the deletionist side) want it.

The largest complaint about Managed Deletion was that it placed too much power in admins' hands. A good part of the community distrusts three admins to handle a deletion, so our alternative is to let one admin decide? That makes even less sense.

There's another compelling reason not to expand speedy deletion criteria. We might expand them, but the inclusionists always whine about the deletion of prose. It's one thing to delete "ioshgohgoaghoeg". It's another to delete a paragraph or two which some inclusionists might actually claim to be notable; these are borderline cases which some admins delete, but some admins don't. Expanding the speedy deletion criteria destroys the beautiful, if flawed, process of VFD.

Now, I'm going to discourse on why VFD is one of those genius-istic systems that some recognise and some don't, much like the U.S. Electoral College. VFD is not merely a place to delete articles. VFD is a place where borderline articles are placed when people don't know what to do with them.

For example, take a poorly written article on some rather obscure subject, say, a 1920s Bulgarian actor well known within his home country only, for pioneering filmmaking there. Google probably won't yield too many results on him. It may look like vanity. So following our current system, an editor places it on VFD, which basically advertises to Wikipedia: "Hello, I'm an article which is so confusing, nobody knows what I'm about or whether I should even be here. Can somebody help sort me out?" Anyone who knows the actor can easily describe how he is encyclopedic and should be kept.

Speedying full-fledged prose destroys this process, and as such, is probably not too feasible.

• "confusing bureaucracy" OR "instruction creep" OR "too many problem resolution pages"

This is confusing? Then what's VFD? The heart of this proposal can be boiled down to one sentence; if you'd like one or both of the extra additions, they add at the most two or three sentences, total. How is this confusing? It's simply based on VFD.

Wikipedia is growing. We're getting more visitors. The population always contains a few baddies. At first we had one or two baddies, nothing our system couldn't handle. But as we grew bigger and bigger, we got more baddies, because we got more visitors. The percentage of baddies remains fixed, but not the total population. So naturally, we had to expand our systems for handling baddies as we grew larger.

Now, I'd say our current system is not scaling. Look at the debates on VFD. There are many contentious ones; however, there are always a few cases where practically everyone is for deleting the article; an obvious violation of policy, for example, such as irredeemably POV articles, or original research, or simply vanity pages. It's impractical to have them cluttering VFD, which is already damn bloody long to read, thank you.

So, our system simply isn't scaling. We will need to tackle this eventually, because people on dial-up simply cannot participate in VFD. Categorising VFD (another proposal) is an excellent start. But we will need to add extra pages. There is no doubt about this at all. We will need to expand our system for handling these, because there will be more people adding vanity pages, which will lead to more listings on VFD, which will lead to an extremely long page that only those on broadband can even read.

We have to cut down the size of VFD. The only way to cut down its size is to cut down the pages nominated, or move them elsewhere. The only way to cut down the amount of pages listed would be to loosen our policies, which surely a lot of people would oppose, or to develop other avenues for listing them, which leads back to "move them elsewhere". So it's your choice, folks. Either you centralise everything on one monolithic page, or you categorise deletions in some manner. Johnleemk | Talk 11:15, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

New users

I am a fairly new user to Wikipedia. I initially resisted registration because I was (and remain) concerned about security issues. I recently registered because an administrator asked me to. It was clearly useful for him to know that I was editing certain articles that are in his field on interest.

When Netoholic first added the my number of edits to my post, I inferred that my opinion was of less value than other regular users. Is this part of Wikipedia's policy? Now Johnleemk accuses me of being a 'sockpuppet'. While I am a little surprised that some users would feel so strongly about an issue as to employ such underhand tactics, it is not inconceivable. I am left with the feeling that Netoholic, Johnleemk and probably other users as well, consider my opinion as less important, if not bogus. There should be an official policy (or at least a warning) for new users to follow with regard to voting. Axl 12:54, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

We're not undervalueing your opinion; we're just highly suspicious as to the validity of your account. Although it seems rather unlikely, what immediately set my alarm off was that your first edit was to a user talk page, which is atypical of most new users. I'm sorry if I hurt you, but it's just convention to point out to other users that certain editors could be sockpuppets. We don't devalue your opinion; sockpuppets, like anyone else, can contribute valuable information. This doesn't change the fact that they're sockpuppets (not that you're one). Johnleemk | Talk 14:33, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Okay, I understand your point. [Actually 'my' first edit was in the Sandbox but I wasn't registered then.] I still think that it would be helpful for newbies if the reason for the addition of edit numbers was included. Axl 16:49, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I don't really understand what the consequences are of commenting on editing records. Say someone has 20 edits and then votes; another person adds a comment pointing out the editing record. Now what? Does this vote not get counted at all? Does the comment instead discount the vote? Do these users then have an extra burden to justify their right to vote? Who decides whether someone is a sock-puppet? Who decides whether a vote counts and, if so, how much it counts? -- Ben James Ben 02:35, 2004 Nov 10 (UTC)

As a new user I also find it difficult to understand. I agree that a user who has no paricipation, or only has only vandalised pages should not be allowed to vote, but does having less than e.g. 30 edits mean that their opinion counts for less? What if someone has only 2 long edits of a high quality? What if someone has 40 very minor edits, some of which were subsequently removed? It seems to me that criticising people on the basis of their number of edits is a little arbitrary. --Sextus 01:39, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)