Wikipedia:Quarantine

This proposal is a work in progress. Once it is in a mature and developed state I shall plug it on various related pages. Until then please feel that you can contribute.

The quarantine proposal would change the current system in two ways. It would allow an article to be tagged with the following tag.

This would (as mentioned in the text) have the consequence that this article would not be picked up by our mirrors. Also in the search function on wikipedia the quarantined pages would have a separate section. Having a quarantine tag (and some code in mediawiki that recognises it) will allow further measures to be taken with regard to quarantined pages whenever the community agrees.

The second change is to create a deletion context for pages. Hence Meme would have a talk page Talk:Meme and a deletion page Deletion:Meme (if someone decided it should be put up for deletion). A deletion tag should be created which includes the quarantine tag allowing propoganda or vanity to be efficiently quarantined and simultaneously put up for deletion. The voting for or against a given page's deletion could then occur entirely on the deletion context of that page. If a single page is put up for deletion more than once then the deletion context of that page will hold the history of previous attempts to delete that page. Further if a page is deleted the deletion context page may be allowed to hang around to allow people to view the reason.

Vfd would then become just a special page linking the pages up for deletion in order of submission.

I. Introduction

The purpose of this page is to propose the categorization of some specific deletion candidates according to field of knowledge.

II. Reasons behind the proposal

I) VfD is too long, and VfD is overwhelmed

Every few days, someone on the Village Pump will argue that VfD is too long. VfD reaches over 40kb routinely, even when there is not a contentious debate on it. Indeed, it is so long that some people do not list articles there, and many more do not go to vote there. This proposal will not reduce the lengthy debates. Nor will this proposal eliminate the vital deliberative nature of VfD, but it is designed to make VfD easier to use by moving a few specific deletion entries elsewhere.

On September 23, 2004, there were thirty-one new nominations to VfD for the single day. Of these thirty-one, almost all were proper deletion candidates and received nearly unanimous "delete" or "redirect" votes. The nominators to VfD were acting appropriately, and yet it was extremely difficult for voters to consider all of the candidates. The sheer volume of nominations can make it virtually impossible to reason together and consider articles carefully, case by case, which is what VfD is for.

How can we cut down on the number of nominations? We may not be able to; however, we may be able to: (1) make it easier to work on those nominations by identifying some specific cases that often crop up (2) cut down on debate by bringing similar cases together on the same page.

ii) "You mean this isn't a speedy delete?" and the use of precedent

Inevitably, VfD gets hit with articles that are obvious deletes. They rack up ten to fifteen "delete" votes with no "keep" votes but that of the author, and someone will say, "This is really a speedy delete candidate." In some cases, that person is correct. In most cases, that person is not correct because the article is an obvious delete but not a speedy delete. Now, why is the delete obvious? Because there has been precedent for it before.

There are a number of articles that come up for deletion all the time. For example, computer societies in United States cities that are not known outside that city, high schools, obscure patent-holders, etc. Now, on these articles, precedents have been established by the deletion articles that fail to meet certain standards, and by the keeping of other articles that did meet certain standards.

iii) Experts in specific fields

Some articles are very specific to certain fields and require someone knowledgeable in that field to properly evaluate them. This can apply to mathematics or scientific fields like biology, chemistry, or physics. It can apply to other types of academic fields, like philosophy. It can also apply to genres like comic books. It is clear that each Wikipedia editor is knowledgeable about certain fields (or knows the VfD standards of certain fields well from frequent editing within that field) and not so knowledgeable about others. Articles listed on VfD in specific fields of knowledge tend to see the same people voting on them. This proposal will hopefully encourage such "experts" to look at articles within their fields of knowledge.