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A newbie has a problem with the deletion process

I was looking for an administrator to help me with a article deletion process, and "Requests for administrator attention" sent me here. I edited a section of an article, restoring chronological order and NPOV mostly, but also various little but necessary tweaks like a broken ref and redundacy. Part of the changes is under discussion on the talk page.

Someone created a new article copying the pre-edited content whole with POV and errors hours later, then went and linked it from many article. I was unfamiliar with the deletion process so I went and read the deletion policies. I couldn't find anything relating to this particular problem: is it OK to bypass the discussion process and simply create a content fork using old material? I'm not asking about weither this particular section deserve it's own article (I think it don't, it's just one controverstial ad campaign among many others and merely a content fork to evade debate), but rather what is appropriate for me to do in this situation (afd, proposed deletion or speedy?) and what arguments I'm supposed to make since they don't mention content forks. I can't go and edit the new article either, since it's the basicly the same content as in the main article and still under discussion on the talk page. I'll just be accused of silencing criticism anyway (again). Any help is appreciated. Jean-Philippe 23:54, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Content can be split out from articles. I notice that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is a very long article, so if the content was originally in that article and moved to Holocaust on your Plate, that would make sense. However, most of the detail about the campaign seems to have been left in People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, so if a split is being done then some of the material in the PETA article should be cut down. Alternatively, you could turn Holocaust on your Plate into a redirect to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, discussing it on Talk:Holocaust on your Plate if necessary. I don't think an AfD is necessary - a redirect would make more sense. --Sam Blanning 00:01, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
If you think it has been forked off just to provide a POV you should discuss it on the talk page (and make sure that editors from both articles are involved). This may be useful in the discussion: WP:POVFORK. It is only a guideline but at its root it goes back to WP:NPOV, so if you are unable to resolve the problem on the talk page you could list at AFD as a POV article. WP:RFC,WP:RFM and Misplaced Pages:Mediation Cabal are (possibly less aggressive) alternatives to listing it for deletion if you can't resolve it amongst the editors. Yomangani 00:13, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
For now I'm redirecting the fork back to the main article. I've given an explanation on the fork and it's editor talkpages. As well as initiated a discussion on the main article in addition to the content dispute. I do think it was meant as a sort of pov fork, but we'll discuss it, maybe fork it later. It should be fine. Jean-Philippe 00:50, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

seperate closed discussions

Would it be reasonable to move closed AFDs to a seperate page, and replace them with a one line summary & link? The sheer size of the daily log and the time it takes to load is hard to work with; seperating the ones that are no longer open for discussion seems like the simplest way to shrink this. -Steve Sanbeg 16:48, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me. At times, there are over 200 AfD's, some of which have a response rate of 15 or more bullet point statments. Lets see if we can get a consensus though. SynergeticMaggot 16:51, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm for it. Speedy deletes and closed relisted discussions can sometimes take up half the log page even on the day they are listed. Yomangani 17:11, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm not. It would create more unnecessary work for admins closing discussions for the sake of - what - people having to press Page Down less often? We have enough of a backlog at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Old as it is. Scrolling down a list of 100-200 AfDs (Ctrl-F doesn't work on the edit window) looking for one in particular is annoying enough on the few occasions I'm relisting an article (taking it out of the old log and inserting it into a new one). If I had to do it on every single AfD, I would in all probability stop doing one of my favourite admin activities. Without wanting to sound elitist and "har har you don't know what you're talking about", none of the above three supporters are admins and I'm not sure they appreciate how annoying this extra step on an already sufficiently burdensome process would be. --Sam Blanning 17:21, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

To endorse Sam's position, we used to have that step as part of the archiving procedure. It was never properly followed. We lost a lot of deletion discussions that were never properly archived. We got into countless arguments over renominations - arguments which we have been able to quickly solve since we changed to this archiving procedure.

What you can do instead is to create a .css subpage which will automatically hide all the closed discussions from your view while leaving it visible for people like Sam who still need it. Instructions follow. Rossami (talk) 19:31, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

  1. Check your preferences and see which Skin you are using. The default is "monobook".
  2. Create a new page titled User:Foo/skin.css (where "Foo" is your username and "skin" is the name of your skin - mine is at User:Rossami/monobook.css)
  3. Paste ".vfd { display:none; }" into the new page.
  4. Save.
  5. To disable the hiding, go back to your style page and temporarily blank it, then reload the AFD page. Note: You may have to manually purge your computer's cache.

I'm sure we all know how burdensome the the process is. I just wanted to know if it was reasonable to make the page a bit smaller, so we wouldn't have to wait so long for it to render each time, since this makes it more tedious to participate in the discussion.

If admins don't want to do it (and of course, why would they) couldn't a bot just summarize the closed AFDs, and leave a link to the full discussion?

It looks like Rossami's css doesn't quite do what I wanted, but seems to speed rendering up enough that I'd do something like that anyway. But a few small changes to a few templates would probably make it feasible to keep a summary and block the discussion. -Steve Sanbeg 20:26, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

FWIW, while I was closing deletion discussions during my lunch break at work, I had to use Internet Explorer rather than Firefox to view the daily log, as viewing it in Firefox would crash the crappy company laptop. So I don't object in principle to making the daily logs shorter. However, it certainly shouldn't be a human activity, and I'm unsure about bots. For example, when deciding how to 'summarise' the debate, I assume that would involve saying what the outcome was, and for a bot the natural choice would be to pick out whatever the closing admin highlighted in bold. However, not all discussions get closed with a single term in bold - while the majority are 'keep', 'delete', 'transwiki', etc, in some cases it can be more complicated. For example, in nominations involving multiple articles, "Delete Article X and Article Y, keep Article Z." Or I may use bolding once for the outcome, then once again for emphasis in my reasoning. Or I may just forget to bold the outcome at all.
Really, that's the sort of reasoning that should be left up to those that can actually create bots and know more about the difficulties. All I can say is, I freely admit that I was in the extreme minority when I got annoyed because I had to use a slow browser during part of the process, and wouldn't consider suggesting any more than the most minor change to remedy that. --Sam Blanning 21:43, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Wasn't there an experiment with closing *FDs by deleting all the content/discussion except the closing admin's result, and then compressing that between the {{*fd top}} {{*fd bottom}} templates? A link to the last full-screen edit might be useful for those who wish to view it.
Another option would be to use the new hide/show tags, if they ever get the crossbrowser/crossskin bugs worked out. -- nae'blis 21:54, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Using noinclude tags in the closing templates might be a solution - it wouldn't create any more work for the admins, but properly implemented would make the discussion disappear from the log page while still appearing on the article page.See what I mean: User:Yomangani/Sandbox/AFDtest and User:Yomangani/Sandbox/AFDtestlog just has noinclude added to the closing templates. There's probably some escaping to take into account as it's one stage removed from the template and it needs a link to the discussion page, but it did take me all of 3 minutes, so you'd expect some polishing to be needed. Yomangani 22:33, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, that would have been a good solution if <noinclude> tags could be nested or escaped, but a little research has revealed that isn't yet possible. Yomangani 12:08, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Check out this lovely bit of voodoo by Locke Cole, found here: <incl<includeonly>u</includeonly>deonly></incl<includeonly>u</includeonly>deonly>; might be a place to start. -- nae'blis 15:04, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Ah, I was playing around with splitting the tags, but not embeding the other tags inside them. I'll have another go. Nice, thanks. Yomangani 15:07, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
I was thinking to summarize the debate by keeping at least the name of the article and the admin's result, and possibly the reason for the nomination, but moving the discussion somewhere else, and leaving a link to it. I agree with Sam Blanning that it wouldn't be useful to try and sumarize the admin result. I've forgured out a way to reduce these using css, as Rossami recomended (thanks!):
 div.vfd dl{display:none}
 div.vfd ul{display:none}

Which seems to kill most of the discussion, while still listing the the result, and leaving a lik to at least the wikitext discussion. Using a bot to move/delete the discussion would be a nice way to make things simpler for people to participate without css hacking, though. -Steve Sanbeg 14:21, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

voodoo

Thanks to the Voodoo from Nae'blis, I have a working version of the afd templates that compact the closed discussions down to title and result, without the need for a new page and let you see the full discussion by clicking on a link.

See: User:Yomangani/Sandbox/AFDtestlog1 for an example.

It doesn't require any more work from admins as far as I can see: although the reason for deletion is a parameter to the template, it defaults to delete (as most AFDs are deleted I believe) and automatically signs it for you, so in theory it should be less work. It's not the most attractive template code in the world, but does anybody care about that? Yomangani 16:45, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I like it. I'm not sure if everyone would agree with hiding the heading & removing it from the TOC, since that could confuse people. I agree substing the sig is the way to go; I do that when I add the afd2, also. Could you post a link to the template? -Steve Sanbeg 19:10, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Slick work. I notice that {{afd top}} uses a noinclude tag to just avoid closing the div, so that {{afd bottom}} can envelop the whole thing. Rather than making the reason for deletion a parameter, can you emulate this behavior instead? That would alleviate a lot of confusion on the part of closers who want to try adopting this. -- nae'blis 19:24, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

The templates are here: User:Yomangani/Sandbox/AFDtop and User:Yomangani/Sandbox/AFDbottom. I tried to think of a way round the parameter thing, but the reason for deletion is above the closing of the top template now (to allow the discussion to be enclosed in noinclude tags) rather than after it as it is in the current template. I can't see anyway of solving it without adding a third template {{afd middle}} which would be more work. See if you can see any solution in the templates. Yomangani 19:54, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

it seems unlikely that there would be a good way around that. When it occurs at the very end, as it does now, it makes sense to keep it outside. In your version, probably not. One minor thing, it looks like you may have overdone the <includeonly>. Assuming I'm reading this right, they're only to break up special syntax, so you could just have an empty pair in key places, like <<includeonly></includeonly>onlyinclude> or ~~<inlcudeonly></includeonly>~~, and the rest may be overkill. Nice effect, though. -Steve Sanbeg 21:36, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Unless you use them to cover the whole of the tag in one way or another you get (partial) display of the tag when viewing the original template. It doesn't actually cause any problems but it looks ugly. I figured it was better to look ugly in the template itself. I fixed the heading so it appears in the summary btw (although the link is broken while it is in the user space it gives you an idea of how it would look) Yomangani 22:36, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
I don't mind if the original template is jacked up (use a section to prettify it, if that's your concern), as it's only a Part 1 of 2 template; maintaining consistency with current template behavior would go a long way toward increasing the likelihood of this being adopted, IMO. Thanks for running with this, though... -- nae'blis 14:03, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
I think we are talking at cross purposes (or I've lost the plot). I had to move the closing admin's comment to be a parameter to the template because it has to be inserted before the end of the {{afd top}} template in order to allow the <noinclude> tag to start after it and above the discussion (otherwise the discussion will be visible or the result hidden). I agree it would be preferable to keep the process the same for the admins, but I can't see any way to do that and hide the discussion, which is the object of the exercise. I was hoping the fact that for a "Delete" result the admin would have less work (just pasting in the top and bottom templates) would offset the disagreeable business of changing the system. On a point of trying to get concensus maybe we should reopen this discussion somewhere where Category:Admins who do a lot of AFD closing hang out? Yomangani 15:14, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Aha. Yeah, I think I got sidetracked there. I don't see a clean way to get around that problem; being as we're already at Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_deletion, I'd try WP:AN to get more feedback (I've even included a handy new section header, at Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_deletion#voodoo). -- nae'blis 15:29, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Is the entire aim of this to hide closed discussions so that the ones that are still open are easier to locate on per-day pages? We already have a mechanism for that. Being able to read prior discussion pages in their entirety without any extra hoops to jump through is useful, especially when articles are discussed again, as they sometimes are. (There have been several in the past few days alone.) Please don't prevent that. The discussion is just as important as the decision by the closing administrator. If your problem is with scanning through old per-day pages, please use the existing solutions for that. Uncle G 17:38, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

The aim is to hide closed discussions on the log page - it does nothing to the discussion page itself. If you look at the examples above User:Yomangani/Sandbox/AFDtestlog1 is how it would appear on the log page, User:Yomangani/Sandbox/AFDtest1 is the discussion page (unchanged and in its entirety). It uses noinclude and includeonly tags to show different information on the log page and the actual page. Yomangani 17:53, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
The reason I started the thread is that one of the barriers to participating in AFD is that it takes so long to render the log page, and it gets rerendered each time you post a comment. So there is a fair amount of latency if you want to go along and participate in the discussions. Since there are so many that get speedied out quickly, the most obvious way to speed up the rendering is to only inline the discussions that you can actually participate in, and have the archived entries be visible, and only a click away if you want to get the details on this. It seems like if these templates are used to close the discussions, it would approximately double the rendering speed of the current log page, and probably have more of an affect on older pages. -Steve Sanbeg 18:04, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
  • You can also wrap the log page in a div, and do some fancy CSS to hide everything between the tags without using <noinclude>. For example, put a <div class="afdlog"> at the top of the page, and then do something like this in a global CSS page:
.afdlog *  div.vfd, .afdlog *  div.vfd ul{display:none};
Titoxd 19:53, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
But since that only hides the items once they have been downloaded, so it wouldn't speed the load times would it? I doubt it would save much rendering time either as I suspect the hidden divs are rendered then hidden (but I must admit I know nothing about the internals of css rendering engines). The advantage of noinclude tags is the content is removed before it is served. Yomangani 20:03, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

There's a better solution down at Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_deletion#A_bot_to_seperate_closed_discussions. Yomangani 20:32, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Header - time stamps

Anyone think it would be a good idea for header on each AfD to say something like:

Created: 10:20, 10 August 2006 (UTC); Current date: 18:20, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Similar to how an RfC header is, so that people can immediately see how much longer to go (barring early closure, of course). rootology (T) 19:25, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Don't you already know the start-time just by looking at the timestamp of the nomination? And does the theoretical end-time really matter since the AFD/Old page is usually backlogged by days or more? The instructions are complicated enough already. What does this extra step add? Rossami (talk) 19:35, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Just an idea, to make it even clearer, really, with the extra line of text at the top. It's not a big deal I guess. rootology (T) 19:41, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
RfCs close in 48 hours, so it's a big deal if I create an RfC at 23:58 on Monday, and an admin deletes it at 00:01 on Wednesday, after only running for one day and 3 minutes, just over half the time it's supposed to. That's why we judge '48 hours' to be from the very minute it starts. But AfDs run for a minimum of 5 days, and often don't get closed that early due to backlog. I've never seen anyone complain that an AfD only lasted four days and a bit instead of five - ok, I suppose they could complain about ~20% of potential discussion time being lost, but I can't imagine it being a solid reason for overturning. --Sam Blanning 21:48, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
The general rule was that you can't close a discussion until the log-page has been moved over to the /Old page - a bot-enabled action which happens pretty much right at day 5 plus or minus a few minutes. Other than speedy-closes (which have their own rules), I've never really seen anyone jumping the gun. I know the bot was down for a while but thought it was back up by now. Rossami (talk) 23:06, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

stupid bloody icons

So, I notice that those "vote" icons might be making a comeback. If so, let's all try to do the sensible thing and hack them down mercilessly before the rot spreads in and Winamp gets stuck on Britney Spears for an hour, okay? fuddlemark (befuddle me!) 12:23, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Why? What does Winamp or Britney Spears have to do with this? Can you explain your objection using some sort of arguement? HighInBC 12:54, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
The icons take up unnecessary bandwidth, make out that some editor's comments are more important than others (which in turn leads other editors to start using them in a race to the bottom), and furthers the misconception that AfD is not a vote. I would certainly encourage all editors to remove icons from comments they see posted in AfDs. --Sam Blanning 13:00, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
...and furthers the misconception that AfD is not a vote. Uhh, Sam? One too many words there? -- nae'blis 14:50, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. --Sam Blanning 19:14, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Bah, that's what I get for trying to be funny. That's it, I'm off to the Monastery ... fuddlemark (befuddle me!) 13:37, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
One other reason for their removal: on debates with a lot of those icons, my computer freezes. I don't know if that's happening to anyone else, but it appears to be a further reason for their removal. Srose (talk) 13:43, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Back to ye olde scary devil monastery, I take? Kim Bruning 14:54, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Oh, I'm not worthy to have those fine fellows delete all my files, send a threatening email to the boss in my name and trick me into corrupting the entire Accounts database ... fuddlemark (befuddle me!) 08:24, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

It's funny that there are almost adjacent threads on how people can make the discusison render faster, and this one on how people can make it render slower. I'd absolutely agree with removing icons from the discussions. -Steve Sanbeg 19:13, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm all for a series of very nice notes explaining to the users why they are pure evil. I've had abouta 97% success rate in the past. It should also be noted that before I've tracked it to use of *horrer* automated voting scripts, which should also be killed with fire. - brenneman 08:37, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

image:pastelbox.gif - (image text-link by HighInBC see history for reason)

I think really think that it would add a touch of class to AfD to add a few decorative pastel boxes that would improve debate by calling attention to the best and most valid points of the discussions. We used to have them. AfD really looks pallid and dull without them. Do I also need to add image:ironyalert.gif here? Dpbsmith (talk) 13:27, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
I agree, get rid of them, quickly. We are already having technical issues in AFD because we're transcluding too many pages (see Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)#New template limits, Special:ExpandTemplates) - why do we need to burn the 1MB of transclusion memory we have by wasting it on pretty icons? Titoxd 19:43, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Is there anything like a policy statement or guideline on this? I notice WikiCats has just added a section, top of this page, pointing to vote icons for use in these discussions. Mike Christie (talk) 02:24, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

And I have deleted that section and link. The use of icons has been discussed repeatedly and rejected every time. We already have problems getting new users acclimated to our deletion processes. We don't need to deliberately aggravate the problem by making it easier for users to misunderstand. They have no place in our discussion processes because we are not voting. Icons are polarizing, prejudicial to discussion and create technical complications to the page. I encourage everyone to continue removing them on sight. Rossami (talk) 13:11, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
If the icons are causing technical problems then their limited merits do not justify them being used. HighInBC 02:34, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

A bot to seperate closed discussions

I've been following the discussion on the voodoo and seperate closed discussions thread. I'm wondering if a bot should handle this work instead. Thus alleviating anyone having to do it. I have someone willing to make the bot, and I'm willing to run it. If I can get a consensus here, I'll post it to WP:BRFA. Any thoughts? SynergeticMaggot 18:09, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Do you mean tracking through the page after the afd templates are put on and adding noinclude tags around the discussion? It would have the problem of trying to detect the end of the admin's comments, but if they alway date stamped them it would be fairly straightforward and isn't a bad idea. Personally, I think my template is an easy solution (as it saves the admins work most of the time) but getting people to change to it will be a struggle because it requires a slight change in how things are done. Yomangani 19:40, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, the idea I had in mind was for the bot to remove the closed AfD altogether (to a subpage), and leaving only a link, similar the one found here: User:Yomangani/Sandbox/AFDtestlog1. I'm not entirely sure how it would work, as I wouldnt be the one designing it. Although I can say that I dont think there would be much of an issue in tracking, the bot would look for the template top being used, possibly even if its subst'd. So anything under {{Afd top}} and above {{Afd bottom}} would be moved to the subpage. Any suggestions for improving the bot or concerns can be raised, and addressed here if needed. The builder is Eagle_101, who has created WikiVoter for AfD's, and I believe has also helped work on VandalProof and VP2. Its my feeling that the bot would in fact be at its best. SynergeticMaggot 19:57, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
If the link on the log page says it is closed it only has to link to the discussion page, there is no need for another subpage (and in fact another subpage would be pointless). I think the information in User:Yomangani/Sandbox/AFDtestlog1 is probably the bare minimum that should be left. That isn't supposed to be a subpage, it is supposed to show what the link would look like in the main log page (I probably should have surrounded it with some dummy open discussions to illustrate). Yomangani 20:13, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Yeah you're right. I forgot that the discussion is its own page. Then all the bot would need to do is provide the closed template. Which in my opinion, would require no new changes to closing by admin's and non admins. SynergeticMaggot 20:23, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
I agree - I'll stamp on the other discussion Yomangani 20:30, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for supporting the idea. I'm also looking for any objections from others before we begin working on the details of the bot, coding and what not. I'm still concerned about how often the bot should be run. I'm leaning toward every few hours, or possibly something like the Mediation Cabals bot is run. Its spots a change, and automatically adjusts. I'm just not sure if it would be better for the bot to run 24/7, and check all five current logs, so it can catch the close as soon as possible or not. The downfall of not letting it run 24/7 would be making it a semi-bot, and running it only at special peak times. And in a large stretch of time, many AfD's could be closed, as speedy delete, speedy keep, etc. This however wouldnt help out much, since approx. 15 AfD's will close in the first 6 hours, but there is really no way of knowing how many will be closed, or relisted elsewhere (to MfD, TfD, CfD, etc. ). SynergeticMaggot 21:35, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
But then again, I know nothing about bots, which is why someone else is going to be making it, and updating the code. SynergeticMaggot 22:01, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
I don't think it is necessary for it to constantly cycle checking for changes. The size of a new log page doesn't become a problem for several hours and an occasional pass to compact the closed AFDs should take most of the sting out of it. Running it something like every 4 hours would probably be fine. Yomangani 22:39, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
"if they alway date stamped them it would be fairly straightforward and isn't a bad idea" - this is getting above my head but I thought I'd better pull this out - sometimes admins post 'P.S.'s, so that there are two signed comments in the closing summary. I'm certain I've done so at least once. --Sam Blanning 23:26, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I often come back and either expand my closing comments, or add additional information beneath. I also often note if something has gone to DRV or other similar events. - brenneman 06:21, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I doubt this will be a problem - when I made my earlier comment I was thinking on simpler terms. The bot should only replace the included link in the log, not the actual afd file, so you will be able to treat the discussions exactly as you do now. It will have to go through the bot approval process anyway, so any problems should get caught there. Yomangani 15:46, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

I confirm that SynergeticMaggot has been in contact with me. I will set forth the proposed paremeters for the bot in a few hours from this post. —— Eagle (ask me for help) 22:21, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

As of right now, our data shows that the bot should be run approx. every 12 hours. The bot will be located at User:SynEagleBot. SynergeticMaggot 01:39, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Whoa there, steady on fellows... perhaps we should engage a slightly wider audience first? - brenneman 06:21, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Did you just get off a ranch partner? :) What did you have in mind? I figured AfD talk was the place to discuss this. SynergeticMaggot 07:25, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
This is the place to discuss it, but most people's watch lists are very busy, and the section header "a bot" does not exactly scream "Hey we're about to make a functional change to the way this works and then run a bot over the top to enforce it." I'd suggest a note at the adminstrator's noticeboard with a brief summary and a link to this thread. Greenhorn. - brenneman 07:37, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Suggestion noted. Before I run to AN, I would like to know what others think first, here. It wouldnt hurt to have a bot name and trial runs to show off (sandbox mind you). SynergeticMaggot 07:41, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
For me it seems like much complication for very little gain. I do wp:afd/old all the time, and I don't have that much of a problem with the way it already works. But I am a luddite. - brenneman 07:57, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Well thats the great thing about it being a bot, to the previous two talk headers to which this thread sparked from. You wouldnt have to change the way you close. The bot picks up the closed AfD and replaces it with a link to the discussion, thus alleviating long discussions and uneeded reading. SynergeticMaggot 08:24, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
I did put a request on AN with reference to the previous discussion above, and made a note to look down here. But judging by the massive response, another one wouldn't hurt. Yomangani 09:22, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

There was discussion on the other thread about the possibility of doing it with a bot before the template voodoo came about. Considering how frequenty AFDs get speedied on the day they're submitted, I'd think the bot would need to run fairly frequently, at least on the current day; maybe every hour or so. For previous days, maybe not so much. Although I do like the instant gratification affect of the templates, I'm not too worried about how it's done; if a bot did the updated frequently enough, that would be cool. -Steve Sanbeg 13:56, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

I haven't closed in a while, shame on me, but I found the js automation that hid closed discussions to be very useful. (I forget where it is from but it's the two functions hideafd() and showafd() in my User:Lar/moretabs/monobook.js along with loading code for when you are on an afd page) ...you still pay load time cost of course but the still open ones stand out nicely. So is this other solution necessary? js of course only works for those that use it. ++Lar: t/c 16:20, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
As you say, it doesn't change loading speed and relies on you having the js installed which isn't possible for (or desired by) everybody. Yomangani 01:28, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
I've posted to AN per the request. I will admit that I know nothing about js. SynergeticMaggot 01:35, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

An AfD I started recently was vandalised to look closed when it really wasn't. Don't know how often that happens, but it seems like this bot would prevent admins catching things like that. --Jamoche 07:55, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Log/2006 August 9

All of the discussions on the afd log page aren't transcluded properly for some reason. As far as I can tell, it's just because the page is too large, since removing random entries would cause the rest of them to format correctly. The problem seems to have started somewhere between these edits (when the amount of discussions on the page took a dive, even though the page itself didn't change). It probably doesn't belong here, so if you know of a better place to post this, pass it along, thanks. - Bobet 12:08, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

It's back to normal now, for those who care. - Bobet 22:01, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Jim McDermott (illustrator)

Does anyone recall if this article ever went through an AfD, perhaps under a different name? It was deleted April 14 as speedy non-notable and recreated May 26 this year. It was tagged today as a speedy but this time as reposted AfD article. I can't find the AfD and it appears to me there is some claim of notabilty that I believe stops it being a speedy. Thanks. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 23:35, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

My best guess would be that it never went to afd and the person who says it did doesn't know that afd specifically means this process instead of speedy deletion (he has no edits in afds himself). People tag speedied entries with db-repost all the time which is likely here. - Bobet 07:53, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 09:53, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Battrick

This article was first posted for AfD on the 4th of August, it was then relisted on the 11th. Shouldn't it be closed by now? --JRA WestyQld2 09:46, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

AfD is subject to backlog every now and then. It should be closed soon. Also note that others in that days log arent closed yet, or else that days log would have been removed from the main page, and into the archives. Regards. SynergeticMaggot 09:57, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Link back to the log page in the template?

Sorry if this has been suggested/discussed before, but I'd like to suggest that a link to the appropriate log/day page appear on each individual AfD. The log pages transclude the AfDs themselves, so when you've edited an AfD to record your comment, the link at the top is Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion, from which you have to scoot down to the day links at the bottom. Am I missing some obvious navigation back to the log pages here? If not, it would be nice to have those AfD articles have a link back to the log page, so that for example on Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/The Banjo Story (2nd nomination) there would be a link that leads to Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Log/2006 August 20. If it could lead back to the #section title, that would be even better; that would drop you right back in to the list where you were before you edited. Hope this makes sense. I don't yet understand templates well enough to go and experiment in my sandbox on this, but it seems to me that a change to afd2 is what would be needed. Mike Christie (talk) 00:25, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I tend to agree. It does get rather annoying to have to do this, even when closing. SynergeticMaggot 01:19, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
I don't think it is straightforward as the template on the individual AFD page would need to link back to the log page it was linked from, and, since nothing is transcluded from the log page into the individual AFD page, I don't know how you would know on which log page the AFD was listed (think about relistings for example). However it is late here, and my brain may be broken. Yomangani 01:26, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
Could this be combined with the suggestion above for header timestamps? If so, on creation the template could perhaps parse the date for the appropriate log page to link back to? I'm arguing by analogy from other coding languages here, so the argument may not go through for templates, but essentially I'm suggesting that if we pass in a date we can use it to create the link at article creation time. Again, I hope this makes sense. Mike Christie (talk) 01:33, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
That's possible, but again brings up problems for relistings and AFDs where the main page is created at, say, 11.58pm and the article listed in the log at 12.02am the next day (both of which would go "back" to the wrong page). Personally, I use the back button or history in my browser to get round this, or launch the link to the article from the log in new window and work from that. Yomangani 09:36, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Talk page notice template

Perhaps am overlooking it, but I am suggesting that we create and make available a notice template for inclusion in the talk page(s) of related article(s) to one being suggested for deletion and to make this part of the steps suggested. This is useful in AfD for sub-articles, when a large number of editors might want to be informed of an AfD, and easier than informing each one. However I do not mean it to be a substitute to notifying the page creator in his/her talk page.

Something like this:

A related or sub-article of this article, Article title, has been listed at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Article title. Please look there to see why this is, if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you.

Comments?--Cerejota 09:17, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Why? We have the AfD tag on the article page. User:Zoe|(talk) 02:57, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes, why would this be necessary? You're supposed to put the afd tag on every article included in a particular afd discussion, this would be redundant. - Bobet 08:28, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm guessing that Cerejota meant to place a tag on Talk:Unreal, for example, if Totally Unreal was nominated for deletion. I've done this before in an informal way, to get a better consensus, but I don't think a template is necessary. -- nae'blis 22:41, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
Might not be necessary but more templates are a good thing. Any common wiki action needs a template! Mathiastck 19:28, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

User:Eagle 101/WikiVoter

What's everybody's opinion on having an automated process for voting on AfD? Seems to me to violate the "discussion" purpose of AfDs. User:Zoe|(talk) 02:57, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Personally, each time I see a discussion contribution via wikivoter I discount it. It may not be rubberstamping—there may have been long rumination before deciding which button to push—but the appearance is that of rubberstamping. There is much brouhaha over not calling what we do at afd voting. I think we do no violence to the word voting by employing it, but I understand the reason for that semantic prohibition. If it is discussion we want, and not simple voting, this automated process is our worst enemy.--Fuhghettaboutit 03:35, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
The only automation this program does is filling in some of the manual-labor type stuff. Editors still see the actual AfD page, the article page, plus some additional tools to help make an informed decision about the AfD. Like any Misplaced Pages tool, it's the responsibility of the user to use the program appropriately, according to Misplaced Pages policies and guidelines. --AbsolutDan 03:47, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
I agree, it's really not automated, you actually have to manually type in a reason as to why you are making such a vote. I find that the tool saves a lot of time by making it easy to find AfD's based on the date the AfD was created. Dionyseus 03:54, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
I believe this is a total non-issue. If people leave a relevant comment, why should it matter whether they used this to make it or not? If they just leave a vote with no discussion, would it be any better if they hadn't used this thing? If someone thinks it's useful, let them use it. - Bobet 08:26, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Deleting redirects to deleted articles

I was randomly meandering around today and ran across a redirect that pointed to an article that was deleted via AFD (Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/List of pejorative political puns2). Is it SOP to leave redirects after a successful AFD requiring the redirects to go through RFD or should these have been deleted? --Bobblehead 21:25, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. Added tags to redirects.--Bobblehead 21:45, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Suggested changes to guidelines

Can I suggest that step one of the process is tweaked in the following way to help make the edit summaries more helpful?

Also, step two could be improved with the following changes:

(1):

  • Current text: "replacing PageName with the name of the page to be deleted"
  • Suggested text: "replacing PageName with the name of the page you are proposing for deletion"
  • Reason: current text assumes deletion will happen, the change removes this prejudicing statement.

(2):

  • Current text: "Consider the Edit summary "First deletion reason"
  • Suggested text: "Please use an edit summary such as "Creating deletion discussion page for ] and providing reason for deletion nomination", replacing PageName with the name of the page you are proposing for deletion"
  • Reason: current suggested edit summary too short and uninformative.

Overall, standards of edit summaries should be high here, to allow people to trace the history of such discussions and see more easily what is happening when viewing edit summaries either in a page history, or in a User contributions list. Carcharoth 12:16, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree. I think the proposed wording is better and more towards a NPOV. SynergeticMaggot 22:36, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
I don't know how many people even pay attention to edit summary guidelines, and my guess is not many. I don't know if adding mroe steps and making the process more complex will have any significant results. Titoxd 06:38, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
If you want to use those summaries go ahead. But these are only suggestions anyway, and people are free to use whatever summary they like, or to use none at all. There are no requirements and making them longer and more complicated will just make more people ignore them completely. -Splash - tk 13:43, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
May the Lord save us from helpful people! What Misplaced Pages needs is more process? fuddlemark (befuddle me!) 14:04, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
Frankly, I'd prefer that they went to the main AFD page first and not directly to the deletion discussion. There are some very important instructions and very useful tips either directly on the page or on one of the linked pages. Newcomers (the only ones who would be really helped by such a link) are the ones who most need the chance to read those instructions. Rossami (talk) 00:42, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
I'll not be following these discussions suggestions, as it is more work, with two more times the need to copy the pagename. It's a bit overkill IMO. Fram 11:27, 29 August 2006 (UTC) (correction Fram 13:26, 29 August 2006 (UTC))
This looks like a horrible case of m:Instruction creep - we don't need more i's to dot and t's to cross here, we already have to fill out forms in triplicate, sign them, send them in, have them lost, queried, and buried in peat moss for 6 months before having them recycled as firelighters. - Stephanie Daugherty (Triona) - Talk - Comment - 09:20, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Erm, why? — Werdna talk criticism 09:26, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

WP:AFD/OLD

Is there really a point of having Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/old and Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Old? The first is the one that is rarely up to date and gets included in the main afd page, the second is the bot-updated one at WP:AFD/OLD. Wouldn't it be better just to get rid of /old altogether and include /Old on the main page with the irrelevant parts tagged with noinclude? - Bobet 13:37, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Cuddle puddles?

hey guys, the article Cuddle puddle was marked for deletion, but i don't see anything wrong with it- anyone think it should be deleted? 71.136.78.103 19:04, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

section

how do you propose that a specific section of an article be deleted?— Preceding unsigned comment added by Shawn88 (talk • contribs) (20:16, August 28, 2006 (UTC)

Just do it; if someone disagrees, they will replace the section. It is best to explain in your edit summary why you want to remove the section, and if it's established and well-known material, consider discussing it on the talk page first. What section of what page are you thinking about deleting? -- nae'blis 01:32, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

The new cat section of the afd2

If this comment is in the wrong place, I would greatly appreciate direction to where such changes are discussed.

Am I alone in my dislike for the changes being made to the AfD nomination process? I was already not very fond of the new strong suggestion about putting the AfD discussion link into the AFD1 and the article title link into the AFD2 edit summary. Now we have a requirement that involves clicking an external link and looking down an ill-conceived table for a category. The most offputting thing to me is that I can't seem to locate an edit history for the template that gets inserted into this page describing all of this to see if there is some decent reason for the changes other than making nominations more difficult. Erechtheus 02:54, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't think much of it. A lot of articles are hard to categorize , and most people won't bother anyway (the majority so far on the new template are uncategorized). Whose idea was this, anyway? Fan-1967 03:03, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
I figured out how to get into the template namespace and found the 3 steps template. I then found this dicussion WP:ElC. That proposal is why we're now going to be coping with this rather awkward new system. I do feel at least a bit better even though I do dislike the implementation quite a bit. Erechtheus 04:13, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
It comes from Misplaced Pages:AfD reform. Christopher Parham (talk) 19:37, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
As far as actually, being required to do anything, if you don't feel it's useful then don't do it and see what happens. Christopher Parham (talk) 19:48, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

A really odd VFD

User:BrowardPlaya nominated Windows Neptune for deletion ... but the user used an old vfd substed - so it went to the old votes for deletion page.

On the deletion page it said:

I don't give a fuck about this shit! Quit clogging up the internet wtih this BULLSHIT

I just reverted since it is probably a speedy keep anyway... the question is how should this be filed? As-is or take the trouble to move it to the proper AFD page, closing templates etc.? RN 21:56, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, looks like it was deleted so i guess that answers my question :). RN 11:50, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Centralized discussion

Okay, I give. What does {{cent}} have to do with "Articles for deletion" and all of its logs? Rfrisbie 02:59, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

As far as I know, the template {{cent}} acts like a huge summary for experienced users and administrators to take note of. It also makes navigation easier for them. This acts like a reference template as well. (Note to admins:If I am in any way inaccurate about this, please correct me). --Siva1979 04:16, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
I think its cruft on the log pages. It may be useful for the main AFD page though. - Stephanie Daugherty (Triona) - Talk - Comment - 09:16, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

How to delete articles on smaller Wikipedias?

I'm trying to delete spam articles from some of the smaller Wikipedias, and I can't figure out how to do it. I insert the <<subst:afd1>> tag (according to the English instructions), but all that happens is that the tag is shown as the content of the article. I also can't figure out how to contact the administrators for those languages. For example, I am trying to delete an inappropriate article from the lu.wikipedia, and so far I haven't found any way to do it. Malangali 18:46, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Every language's pedia probably has a different process, but if I'm guessing correctly that you mean lb.wikipedia.org (Luxembourg), you may find help by posting at lb:User_talk:Cornischong, as that user seems to do most of their currently-informal deletions. Otherwise please post back and clarify what you're asking for... -- nae'blis 20:56, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I mean lg.wikipedia.org (the Luganda language). As far as I can tell, there are no systems of any kind in place. In fact, there are no registered users who have ever edited anything in the language (although we will be working to change that). Malangali 21:13, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
Oh, sorry for the confusion. You're right, I don't see any sysops there. You might try asking at meta:Requests_for_permissions#Misplaced Pages to get yourself the rights (and that page has a link to a place to find Stewards to clean up what's there already). Good luck, looks like you'll need it. -- nae'blis 21:28, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
I can confirm Nae'blis' comment. Every project has it's own deletion process, traditions and tools. The process and templates used at the english Misplaced Pages will be no help and probably won't even exist at the other language wikipedias nor at Wiktionary, et al. Look on each project's Main Page from something akin to the Community Portal. That's generally where you can find the project's instructions for administrative and clean-up actions. Rossami (talk) 21:20, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
Doesn't exist (see http://lg.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Community_Portal) Malangali 21:27, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
Wow. I see your point. And looking at the very few contributions made to that project, almost all seem to have been vandalism of one form or another. The project is listed as having no admins at all. According to the User Creation Log, the first user was created in Sep 2005. Almost nobody on that list has any contributions other than to their own userpages (if even that). Given the history, I have to wonder why this particular project was created in the first place. Thanks for volunteering to clean it up. Rossami (talk) 22:20, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar

Hey, I believe this article was deleted inadvertantly during a group of deletions in the commemorative coin department. User:Taurus876 created a few coin articles with copied text or no text and those have been deleted, but I think the Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar got marked and deleted along with them when it shouldn't have. I've checked the logs back to Aug. 25, with no luck. I'm not sure when all this occured. Here's a Google cache. If this page can be restored, great. Joe I 20:33, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

It was deleted by User:Pschemp as a copyvio, but does not appear to actually be a copyvio. However, User:Taurus876 did edit it, so it may contain copyvio material. Please inspect it. I've restored it. Deco 22:13, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
It's fine, the Spanish Trail Half Dollar article was the copyvio from the US Mint site which was properly deleted. Oregon Trail deletion was an accident or misunderstanding. I did the original article and had reverted Taurus' redundant edits. All is well now. Thank you! Bobby 22:41, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

What should my action be in this case?

The article Virtual record (or "virtual album") has been created. The article claims to define an album that is only available as a download (such as itunes exclusive albums) as a "Virtual album" and cites Tim Armstrong's album as the coining of the phrase. The thing is that the article is created and maintained by the guy who also created the article for Tim Armstrong's CD; so I asked the person if there was any actual citable source that uses the term virtual record besides Tim Armstrong's. He didn't reply. I posted the same question in the article's talk page, and I'm waiting to see if anyone replies there. In the meantime, assuming this is what it seems to me to be - an article that is attempting to actually spread the use of this term virtual album as a real used term (which I've never heard in any capacity as official), what should be done. Should the article just be deleted or what? I don't think the list itself is necessarily "Crap" but the actual intro and title "virtual album" seems baseless. The same person is going about changing entries for albums to make them read as "virtual albums" and I don't think that a term that I (am pretty sure) no one knows should be being put in the header when the basic definition of the term is usually right after that term (that the album is only available online). I don't know what makes a virtual album that special either. Albums used to be on vinyl, and 8track and cassettes. Download is just a new medium. It's still just an "album". It's not a special album. Thanks for any advice anyone has. TheHYPO 01:00, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Nominate it for deletion. The rationale is that it's a neologism and cites no references. You may want to back it up with a Google search showing how it's completely unused anywhere. howcheng {chat} 07:00, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll do that :) TheHYPO 13:31, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Lost AfDs and slow closing

With the AfD categories in place, and testing my bot, I noticed some interesting query.php output; it seems that several AfDs are getting lost. I've compiled a list of AfDs unclosed for over a week according to the category at User:Ais523/UnclosedAfDs (this is basically the table the bot searches to find closed AfDs to decat), but many of them still seem to be unclosed, including some from September 2. The oldest (first on the list) obviously got lost because it wasn't transcluded to the logs, but many of them have been; this looks like it could be developing into a problem. Any thoughts? --ais523 12:05, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

That's a mere 5 day backlog. We've had far worse backlogs before. Closing AFDs is a volunteer activity and a relatively thankless one. Furthermore, there are only a few regular closers and the closure has to be carried out by someone reasonably independent. It's not uncommon for difficult discussions to sit idle for a while until someone who didn't participate in the discussion volunteers to clean it up. I wouldn't start to worry until the backlog is measured in multiples of weeks. Rossami (talk) 13:30, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
I was just wondering how many got lost altogether. (WP:AFDC was introduced on September 2, so the bot can't detect before then). I just closed a 2-year-old VfD (as 'no result' because it had been superceded by a more recent AfD): . It's probably not a problem now, I'm just going to keep monitoring the backlog to see what happens. --ais523 13:34, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
You may have a false-positive there. In the past, discussions were not always explicitly "closed" with the formal addition of the header and footer and a detailing of the decision. The prior process was to simply unlist the discussion from the main AFD page with a note in the edit summary about the decision. The actual decision was "recorded" through the action - either the article was deleted (in which case, it would show in the deletion log) or it was kept (in which case, we usually tried to make a note on the article's Talk page). Given the nature of this debate, I can see why it would be hard to find a record of the actual decision. Even today, we struggle with the process for these mass-nominations. Rossami (talk) 14:23, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
I've seen the occasional nomination where the subheading is missed ,so when transcluded it doesn't appear on the TOC but merely gets appended to the end of the previously submitted nomination. If the nomination is something along the lines of "Non-notable, delete" it doesn't even look out of place. Any of those in there? Yomangani 14:32, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
Updated with new data; there are still Sep 2 AfDs in there (so that's a 16 day backlog at the moment). To answer Yomangani's question, something like that would be noticed when the debate before was closed, and I don't think I've seen anything like that. --ais523 11:11, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
It seems that most of the really old ones are either relisted by an admin to generate further debate or were incomplete and listed by DumbBOT at a later date. (The list is is nice feature though, maybe you could link from the AFD page when the bot is approved.) Yomangani 12:06, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
I know, I can't really do much about the relists on the table, although the list is quite useful for finding the incomplete ones. I don't mind the situation really, I'm just trying to make sure that AfDs don't get lost. --ais523 12:20, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
There were three orphaned or broken ones for dates before the 8th, two of which I've fixed and the third of which I've contacted the nominator about, so should be fixed shortly. Yomangani 12:34, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for your work in fixing those! I may have to work on changing the format in which the output is dumped to the userpage; it would probably be useful to have a link to the article as well, so redlinks were obvious. In fact, I'll do that now. --ais523 12:47, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

DRV and consensus

Join us at deletion review's talk page for a discussion about moving DRV to a consensus-driven model. --badlydrawnjeff talk 15:32, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Officially it never LEFT the consensus model. All you need to do is enforce it. Kim Bruning 15:55, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Discrepancy wrt Encyclopedia Dramatica

This page was deleted *and* protected against recreation. (A rather drastic last measure). The actual Article for Deletion page lists it as kept. Could an admin please fix this discrepancy?

Fixed it so the reference goes to the correct page at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Encyclopædia Dramatica (3rd nomination). --khaosworks (talk • contribs) 16:17, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Informing the creators is being ignored

Crossposted message. Please discuss at Misplaced Pages talk:Deletion policy#Informing the creators is being ignored. Whispering 16:49, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

  • So now Whispering, what happens is that people who only focus on this page don't know what the discussion is about in the first place. Let people read for themselves and then there will be a natural coming together of discussion without your artificial proddings. So I will re-post the message (below) for the sake of passing it on fully. Thanks for your understanding. IZAK 18:01, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
    • I have removed it as well. Fragmenting the conversation over multiple pages is a guaranteed way to get inconsistent and redundant responses. It is a massive waste of time. Post a link. Stop spamming your complaint over multiple pages. Rossami (talk) 19:01, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Bad faith AFD

Can a bad faith AFD be considered vandalism? A series of ip addresses have been putting the AFD tag to General Electric for the past couple of days. Should they be just be warned with the regular vandalism templates? -- Lost 07:37, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

What has happened to this page?

Until yesterday there was a series of helpful templates for each step of listing an article. Apart from bundling nominations they seem to have gone. Can they be reinstated, please? BlueValour 23:33, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

I was going to ask the same thing.--Húsönd 00:52, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
Someone had vandalized {{AfD footer}}, it's fixed now. - Bobet 09:51, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

AFD notification template

Is there any general AfD template for notifying a user when someone else nominated the article? For example {{AFDWarning|somerandomarticle}} produces this:

==AfD Nomination: ]== I've nominated the article somerandomarticle for deletion under the Articles for deletion process. We appreciate your contributions, but in this particular case I do not feel that somerandomarticle satisfies Misplaced Pages's criteria for inclusion. I have explained why in the nomination space (see What Misplaced Pages is not and Deletion policy). Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/somerandomarticle. Don't forget to add four tildes (~~~~) at the end of each of your comments to sign them. You are free to edit the content of somerandomarticle during the discussion, but please do not remove the "Articles for Deletion" template (the box at the top). Doing so will not end the discussion.

Notice how it says "I've nominated blahblah for deletion" but I'm thinking more along the lines of "(Insert user here) has nominated such-and-such for deletion" you know in case the nominator forgot or something. --WikiSlasher 15:22, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

  • Comment It might even be better to make it passive: "...has been nominated for deletion". Sometimes the nomination is procedural, by a neutral party. Similarly, instead of "I do not feel" which makes it look like one person attacking the article (sometimes, but not always, appropriate), it may be better to say something like "This article may not satisfy Misplaced Pages's..." -- Fan-1967 15:39, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
Don't worry I found it: {{subst:AFDNote}} --WikiSlasher 06:58, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Should old "current" events be deleted?

There is an article on the future 2012 Olympics which has a large section on the bidding process. There is also a main article on the bidding process that led to London being selected.

Is it realy necessary to keep either of them, let alone both? The event was quite interesting at the time, but no-one realy takes an interest in it now its over. --The Spith 18:36, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

This sort of thing might be very fascinating from a historical standpoint, although I must admit it lacks general interest at the moment. For some reason, things have to go through an extended "old phase" before they're old enough to be of real historical interest. For example, I think I'd be pretty interested in reading the bid process info on the 1980 and 1984 Olympics. I think these old articles could certainly be trimmed down, but perhaps we might consider retaining anything of potential historical value. --Anivron 01:09, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
This seems like a textbook case where AfD isn't needed. Such articles could simply be redirected into the parent article - to use your example, if it's decided that London 2012 Olympic bid is excessive detail, it could be redirected to 2012 Summer Olympics. That would also allow material to be merged. An AfD on such an article would almost certainly result in a keep consensus - albeit probably with a mixture of 'merge' and 'keep', but there's functionally no difference at AfD. --Sam Blanning 01:18, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Alternatives to AfD - Pruning

Sometimes I see articles nominated for deletion that should in fact be tidied up and improved and have sources added. Some articles are a mess of Original Research, lack of sources, etc, but clearly there is scope for some sort of article on the subject. In these cases, is it proper to nominate for deletion? I would have thought that a better options is PRUNING. ie. reduce the article to a stub by vicious pruning, and then step back and watch it grow again, hopefully in the right way this time. The horticultural analogy works quite well. When you prune a plant, you often encourage new growth. So is it possible to encourage those nominating for deletion to try pruning instead? The example in question here is this one. Carcharoth 10:36, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

  • It's not too unusual for articles to improve a fair amount while they're in AFD. The issue when you're nominating it is whether the article is worth the effort to prune it, and whether there would be anything left. I guess the same holds if it's already in discussion; you could always prune the article, then note that in the discussion. -Steve Sanbeg 19:12, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
  • There are also, quite frankly, articles so bad that an editor may judge (and I often agree) that it would be better to deepsix the whole thing. The problem with pruning (especially on articles that are full of OR and POV) is that there's nothing to stop the original author from going right back at it. One of the common issues is authors who genuinely believe their OR is not OR, and their POV is NPOV. If nobody wants to take on the task of babysitting the article to prevent it from devolving again, it may be a better course to just kill it and hope that, if someone wants to write a real article on the subject later, they can start from scratch. Of course, each situation is different, but I think that's the logic behind deleting an article that, theoretically, could be pruned. Fan-1967 19:20, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

More description in reasons

I'm not sure if this is the correct place to raise this, but it would be helpful if the reason for deletion gave a few words of detail about the nature of the article, where this isn't obvious from the title. This would allow casual browsers of the AfD pages to pick out those debates that they are likely to be able to contribute meaningfully towards, without always having to click through to the article page. This is a particular problem with biographies, where the article name often gives no clue as to whether it's about, say, a wrestler or a woman's studies academic.

I'm aware that there's already a considerable burden on submitters, but this would only take a few extra seconds for the submitter and would save time for all the hundreds of AfD browsers. It would also make it less likely that controversial items get missed in a host of less controversial ones. Espresso Addict 01:34, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Editing closed AFDs

I am cleaning external links from the Special:Linksearch log, and there are several found in closed AFDs that are not necessary. In example, there are around 25 links to Digg which are not necessary in closed discussions. What would people say if the discussions are edited to remove the external links (by either deleting the http:// or using nowiki tags)? This is expansible to every other url, too.

It is not _that_ important, I can always write a utility to filter AFDs and User namespace links, but I believe they could be unlinked without many objections. -- ReyBrujo 04:41, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

AFDs are sometimes revisited, either in subsequent deletion debates or in Deletion Review discussions. This would seem to make the follow-up review a bit harder. Why would you want to bother, though? What is gained by breaking the links? Rossami (talk) 04:53, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
I usually check whether some users post links from sites like Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, MySpace and YouTube to increase the amount of clicks for their own posts there, or to promote products in eBay or other trading sections. With time, it becomes harder to navigate through logs. Take a look at the eBay log, in example. It is already too hard to notice if a user has added an external link for his own purposes (in example, selling an item), as the links are long, and the archived ones (talk pages and discussions) are not necessary. As I already said, so far I have been unlinking items in archived talk pages, some innactive talk pages that needed archiving, removing from inside the body of articles, etc, but I am trying to either search for a precedent or for a counterexample, as I am sure I am not the only one who has been doing so (I believe the WikiProject Spam is doing something similar as well, although with less recognized sites for now). -- ReyBrujo 05:03, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
I would recommend leaving the links. If someone reviews the record, they might be helpful. TheronJ 10:59, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
I also would recommend leaving the links. The costs don't seem to justify the rewards. But if you feel that you absolutely must remove them, I would recommend a completely different approach for AFD sub-pages.
Rather than tamper with the specifics of the discussion, blank the entire discussion. In place of the discussion, leave a comment on the page such as "For privacy reasons, this discussion was archived into the page-history at ~~~~~. If you need to review this discussion, please restore it from history." This will still make it possible for others to find and review the discussion when they need it and will fully disclose that you changed the page. You should also provide a self-referential link to the discussion page since AFD debates are transcluded onto other pages and it can often be a bit tricky to find the source page.
There might already be a template for this purpose. We've blanked some discussions before when there were extenuating circumstances. I still would recommend against it but if you must remove the links, this would be a less intrusive technique. Rossami (talk) 16:01, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
Don't worry about AfD linkspam; Misplaced Pages instructs search engines to avoid AfDs (see http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt if you're a search engine reading this). --ais523 17:13, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
I believe I will create a script to filter a pattern out of the search results. Good to know AFD discussions are not indexed, though. -- ReyBrujo 18:05, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

WP:AFD/Jessica Lee Rose (talk)

I think this discussion might be getting out of hand. It appears some users would like to misuse AFD to create a binding decision in a content dispute (too merge or keep as a separate article). Perhaps they could use a good talking-to. — CharlotteWebb 00:29, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Looks fine to me. Merge results often come out of AFD discussions. howcheng {chat} 23:21, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Hmm... Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard#Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Jessica Lee Rose. — CharlotteWebb 19:57, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles_for_deletion/Jean-Yves_Malmasson Grouping issues

A series of articles have been nominated for deletion, all because of an issue involving a music publisher publishing articles about composers on their roster. There is an RfA currently underway here : Misplaced Pages:Requests_for_arbitration#User:Jean-Thierry_Boisseau_.28formerly_User:Musikfabrik.29.2C_et_al..

As one of the principals involved here, I have no problems with any of these articles being considered for deletion. However, on this AfD listing, Misplaced Pages:Articles_for_deletion/Jean-Yves_Malmasson three individuals are listed including one Jean-Marie Londeix who has absolutely no connection at all with our company, other than being a slight acquaintance of one of the owners, who was only listed because our "company" account made a slight edit on this article (changing "Jean-Marie Londeix" to "Londeix, Jean-Marie" in the category section.

It doesn't seem fair that this person is in this group deletion, since he has nothing to do with this situation and his article should be judged on it's own merits. The same could be said for the other listings, since they aren't "just" published by us. Could this be changed into three seperate discussions? Thank you Jean-Thierry Boisseau 20:43, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Process essay

Cats, meet pigeon. User:David Gerard/Process essay is progressing and needs clueful input. AFD is mentioned in an unfortunate incident. Talk page to rip it to shreds - David Gerard 13:37, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

How to recommend deletion for a deleted then recreated article

Dominique_McKinley was deleted back on July 14, and it just popped up again. The lack of notability hasn't changed since then -- how do I properly mark a AFD request for the second time through? Thanks. -- ArglebargleIV 20:03, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Start with tagging it as a repost (I have done so). If nothing significant has changed, it may save the trouble of another AFD. Fan-1967 20:11, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
Okay, thank you! -- ArglebargleIV 20:16, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Pizzamonster's contributions

Seeing that several articles created by this user have been speedily deleted, I have looked through his contributions, and discovered several very short articles about defunct minor teams. (They are: Reading Indians, Albany A's, Richmond Generals, Pittsburgh Patriots, Raleigh Renegades, Hawaii Mega Force, Jacksonville Wave.) I don't know what is the correct procedure - should they be nominated for speedy deletion? Regular deletion? Or are such teams considered notable? - Mike Rosoft 10:55, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

No reason to hack'n'slash when you could preserve. It's conceivably useful information to someone. Aggregate into a list article and make the existing articles into redirects to the list - David Gerard 11:14, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Qobble

The AFD for it was completed a couple of days ago but it hasn't yet been deleted. In a case like this would a speedy be allowed? --TheSeer (TalkˑContribs) 12:33, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Deleted. Technically, I'd say that deletion was just part of the closing, rather than a speedy. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 12:49, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
If the closer forgets, you can speedy it as {{db-afd}} (a WP:CSD#G6 subreason). --ais523 12:52, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Happens occasionally, since closing admins are human (I caught one last week). As ais says, just tag it and someone will grab it. Fan-1967 19:47, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

If AfD is not a vote, why is it a vote?

I'll guess this has been covered a bajillion times so if someone can point me in the correct direction... Policy states an AfD is not a vote. But that's the format most AfD's take. If someone agrees with the nom or a previous statement and has nothing to add, they'll state "Delete/Keep per whoever" which adds nothing to the dicussion - except for a vote. Wouldn't a better structure be for noms to list where they think an article fails, and have each point answered in a separate subsection? (Insert perennial disclaimer here). Thanks. *Sparkhead 19:43, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages's book burning

It seems like there is currently a wiki-wide effort to delete articles from wikipedia. Many of the articles I have seen tagged as AfD have useful information on it. However, once they are deleted, that information is gone for good. I agree a balance needs to be set between bredth of subject matter and quality of work. Right now, balance looks off. Most of the contributions being trashed are from new users, who are put off by the quickness in which their work is destroyed. Has wikipedia reached a limit where the servers can no longer accept new pages? What is going on? Its no surprise people feel no longer welcome to contribute. --Alpharigel 17:51, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

  • That's a very general statement. Can you provide specific examples? Fan-1967 17:58, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
  • The so-called "book burning" is a crucial effort at quality control. And no, once an article is deleted, it is not permanently destroyed. The content remains on Misplaced Pages's servers. It is not "gone forever". It can be brought back through WP:DRV, though in most cases the content is deleted with good reason Bwithh 20:59, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Need help with a category

I have been participating in the discussion here concerning the deletion of Evolutionary argument against naturalism. The article at issue describes a philosophical argument. The subjects of the argument are naturalism and evolution, but the argument itself is philosophical, NOT scientific. It has been placed in the category AFD:Science and technology. Is there a more appropriate one? This is a problem because (in my opinion) the afd discussion has attracted science-oriented Wikipedians who dismiss the argument (and by extension, the article) out of hand because it is unscientific. Philosophical arguments don't have to be "scientific." I think something like "humanities" would be a much more appropriate category, but there is no such category. Please advise. Lamont A Cranston 12:46, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

I've been involved in the same page, and would like to second Lamont's concern and his proposed solution of the addition of a Humanities section. Gabrielthursday 19:36, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
This 'category creep' is one of the main reasons people were objecting the proposal. In TheGrappler's original analysis, humanities was too small to have its own category, therefore, I think it was merged into 'S' (society topics). I'll double-catchange the category on the AfD for the time being. --ais523 10:26, 11 October 2006 (UTC) (changed --ais523 12:32, 11 October 2006 (UTC))
Thank you for your help. I (like most people) don't really follow AFD unless an article I'm interested in is listed. Lamont A Cranston 11:12, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

more newbie problems

?right place As a newcomer, I find the whole deletion process to be highly arbitrary and authoritarian, almost the complete opposite of what I had imagined wikipedia to be. One way to improve the situation would be to adopt some software from slashdot, www.slashdot.org. Slashdot has features that, in wiki language, allow random and not random users to give opnions on random pages. This would at least remove some of the highly arbitrary small numbers problems in the current deletion process, whereby a very very small number (relative to usrbase) effect the decisions. I guess the current philosophy of deletion, which i find highly offensive, goes somewheres else...can someone redirect me ? For instance, why are non notable articles candidates for deletion ? The only rationale is that wiki is in fact a paper dicitionary, with paper limits; if the search and other software features actually worked, then you would not need to worry about a gazillionn non notable aritlce clogging up the space; they would transparnetly vanish. I also don't understand why there are not obkective citereia Chelsea Charms eg, if a person has a certain number of hits on google, they are , by definition (not counting spamm/ballot stuffing/bots etc) important and the software should automatically generate a place holder aritcle stub with a plea for info.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.60.137.141 (talk • contribs) 15:30, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

The newbie is right. The deletionists have gone too far. Mathiastck 17:04, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
The newbie is wrong. We don't delete articles for fear of "clogging up the space". We delete articles for failing to meet notability (and other) criteria. Counting google hits is not research, and any automated system for determining notability (or lack thereof) by such a criterion will never work. Valrith 18:43, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
I have seen a great many articles on notable subjets deleted. The deletionists are putting the burden of proof upon the article to prove it's notablity.
Respectfully, both comments seem wrong or off base. Who is it to decide if something is notable ? Surely, any mature person has had occaisons when things they have thought minor turned out to be imporant; thius, criteria that might seem good today will seem bad tomorrow. I fully admit counting google hits is not research, and implied that in my post; but you have to stat somewhere; saying it will never work is rarely a productive solution. Cinnamon colbert 19:30, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
Your suggestion about the google thing can't work, since google can't distinguish between names and other hits, it can't distinguish whether a name is simply common or notable, and we really don't need articles that say "There isn't an article about this subject and we don't know what it should be about, but google gives a lot of hits so it's here". If anyone wants google, they can use google, this is supposed to be an encyclopedia.
About the notability thing, if something seems non-notable today, it can be deleted today. There are no binding decisions so the article can be recreated if it becomes notable tomorrow. In the meantime, it's not feasible to have an article about everyone or everything that might become notable in the future. As for your original comment to start this discussion, everyone can comment on the deletion discussions so the problem you describe there doesn't exist (unless you mean speedy deletion, in which case you commented in the wrong place). - Bobet 11:48, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

REspectfully: sure there are problems with using google hits as a auto include for notability; the discussion shouldn't, at this point, revolve around technical issues, but around the concept of automatic inclusions; to make the point, surely there should be an article on each nobel prize winner As for the idea of recreating articles - is that not precisely the sort of things that computers are supposed to alleiviate you from, tedious repetiton of manual tasks. Stepping back, I have not hear a good reason why it is better to prune and delete, then include everything and give the user prune and delte tools to choose as they wish. I recently authored an article, retrogrouch, which seems to no longer exist. Assuming it was decent article, in that it concisely and pithly summed up the subject, why should I have to re write it ?

You took part in the discussion so you should know why that particular article was deleted. Misplaced Pages isn't a dictionary and you provided no reliable sources. In the more common cases you list: as far as I know, there is an article for every Nobel Prize winner, people are perfectly capable of creating them without a bot. In most cases, having a redlink is a lot better than having a placeholder, since it will tell people that the article doesn't exist so they won't waste their time clicking on nothing. If you wish to continue this discussion, you should probably post it at Misplaced Pages talk:Notability, since you don't seem to actually have a problem with this process, as opposed to the notability guideline. Forking discussion on this issue here isn't really productive. - Bobet 17:06, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Inappropriate AfDs

I haven't visited AfD in a while, but the atmosphere seems to have changed a bit. There are rather a lot of inappropriate AfDs that could easily be dealt with under Misplaced Pages:Deletion_policy#Problem_articles_where_deletion_may_not_be_needed. Is it not possible to point people to those guidelines and speedy close some of these inappropriate AfDs? Even the ones that have attracted a lot of delete votes already? Carcharoth 11:07, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Could you give examples of some of the more egregious cases? In general, such speedy closing will come across as disruptive, unless there is general consensus among the contributors that the nomination was inappropriate.  --Lambiam 22:23, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Have a look through the AfDs I participated in on 8/9 October. I'll try to provide more specific links later, if I have time. It was just a general impression that people participate in AfD without reading the guidelines, and are guided by the atmosphere. My general impression is that 'delete' prevails over 'clean-up' and 'merge', which to my mind is the wrong way round. Carcharoth 12:03, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

AFD makes NYT!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/weekinreview/08word.html - David Gerard 07:20, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

BTW, kids - this is why public-facing levels of civility are needed on AFDs. They're not just internal communications. Doing press, I get people upset that Misplaced Pages has called them a "vanity author" when their article was marked as "vanity" and they had no hand in it, and asking who to sue. Explaining it's a jargon term only goes so far. (And I thought the word "vanity" was supposed to have been expunged from AFD vocabulary for this reason anyway.) If it's a jargon term, please urgently pick another jargon term that doesn't say actual disreputable things about a third party if read as being conventional English. We're #12 website in the world now, we're going to be Top 10 very soon. To be sure, almost all such living bio articles marked for deletion on AFD are just that ... but the term causes us a hell of a lot of trouble. If those who participate in living bio AFDs could please help keep such discussions at public-facing levels of civility, it would be most helpful to all - David Gerard 07:37, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

To second the plea for putting your best behavior on while doing deletion discussions, with another reminder: Due to our heavy internal linkage, the deletion debates are often very highly ranked Google-wise. Not only does it make us look bad if we're unkind, unprofessional, or just ill-informed, it can have actual *gasp* real world impacts on the subjects being discussed. - brenneman 07:39, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Robots

Does wikipedia ever use robots.txt to keep pages invisible to Google? I'm sure there are pluses and minuses to doing so, but it's a tool we have if we want to use it. Regards, Ben Aveling 08:06, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Actually, http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt mentions AfD, telling search engines to stay out of the individual debates (although the shortcuts WP:AFD, WP:AFD/T, and WP:AFD/Y are not excluded so in theory some deletion debates might be indexed in their first day on debate and revealed in searches after they'd finished). --ais523 08:19, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
  • We've received complaints before (Heresay! I have no evidence.) and I've done searches for terms and seen unflattering deletion discussions returned. If this is the case now, or if it is an aberration, I cannot say.
    brenneman 11:16, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
We should also bear in mind that there other search engines, as well as many mirrors out there. Although they could take hints from robots.txt, that technically only applies if they crawl the web site, not if they use the dumps. We couldn't really complain if someone shows something from the dumps, even though robots.txt prohibits crawling that page from the site. -Steve Sanbeg 18:55, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Stable pages

It might be nice if we could offer Robots only the 'latest stable version' of pages? e.g. If a page has been changed in the last 8 hours, offer the youngest version that remained stable for 8 hours. I guess that could apply to the Dumps as well? Regards, Ben Aveling 23:12, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Some articles are never stable that long. I happen to watch Christopher Columbus, and revert it several times a day (strictly vandalism reversion -- that doesn't even count actual edit disputes, that I don't get involved in). Check the edit history and tell me how you would find a "stable" version of that article. Sometimes even the edits marked as "revert vandalism" are bad, because someone reverted one piece of vandalism back to an earlier still-vandalized one. Fan-1967 14:06, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
That's an impressive page. Using 8 hours as a benchmark, there's been one since you posted.
  1. (cur) (last) 15:41, 10 October 2006 JoeSmack (Talk | contribs) (wording, clarity)
  2. (cur) (last) 05:58, 10 October 2006 JoeSmack (Talk | contribs) m (→Campaign for funding - er, last word, last word!)
The previous stable version was a few days ago.
  1. (cur) (last) 15:43, 8 October 2006 65.10.68.57 (Talk) (→Background to voyages)
  2. (cur) (last) 21:12, 7 October 2006 Omicronpersei8 (Talk | contribs) m (Reverted edits by 68.210.93.11 (talk) to version 80081724 by Antandrus using VS)
So they do happen. Regards, Ben Aveling 21:33, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Vanity

There are some AFD instructions still including "vanity" - is there any way to get these changed in reasonably short order? Just how many places would one have to give reasonable notice? - David Gerard 09:20, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
I dived in head first and made this edit - needs rephrasing less clunkily, if someone please could. But the key point is "stop saying 'vanity' even when it's almost certainly the case" - David Gerard 11:43, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Comment on column

I don't see the point that Noam Cohen is trying to make. Is it that we have an open process for determining if something is worthy of inclusion? To try to make us look ridiculous because we are forced to debate the inclusion of what many would consider trivial? Or, was he having a lazy day and decided to pad half his word count with GFDL content? Unfortunately, NYT Online doesn't have a comment section or I'd ask him myself. -- Malber (talk • contribs) 19:38, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

He must have thought it was an entertaining look for his readership of what's going on behind the kitchen doors of Misplaced Pages. I did not have the sense he was particularly trying to make a point, nor that the selection he made was aimed at making us look ridiculous.  --Lambiam 20:53, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I just took it as him having a look at our little ways. Misplaced Pages is mainstream - today we're #13 website of any kind in the world. It's good that he started off the article saying we get 4000 articles/day and over 2000 are shot on sight ... though those are the Nov 2005 numbers and I'm quite certain it's much worse. I posted the link here as a message to say: "play nice, the world is watching us!" - David Gerard 10:55, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
See I thought it was some new Misplaced Pages Scandal. And then I go and find out he wrote about More Cowbell and Garfield's stuffed bear. —Malber (talk • contribs) 19:07, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

I like the way he started: "Somewhere in the hierarchy of personal celebrity, between the discovery that you are listed in the phone book and, say, being knighted, sits the Misplaced Pages entry." - hilarious! This was picked up by the Signpost as well (see here). I wonder if anyone has added it to Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages in the news? Carcharoth 12:06, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

It has already been posted at Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages in the news. Carcharoth 12:09, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Rather Baffling...

I can't even grasp why this editor thought it more adequate to move his talk page to an article :-

Had to add this one as it was PROD'ed but the author of the article removed the tag. Dracontes 13:30, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

I reverted the move on the first one, and changed the 'happy smiles' thing to a redirect. - Bobet 13:39, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for sorting this out. In these instances I rather be not too bold ;-) Dracontes 14:11, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Yet another talk page on article. And selected for CD?!

Dracontes 13:29, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

I've undone the page move. Someone please keep a watch of this user's future contributions - if more page moves like this occur, the user should be blocked indefinitely. Mindmatrix 14:47, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

This one's a doozy (I think) but I'll state it here in case the author of the article decides to remove the PROD. Again!

Web 3.0 AFD created at wrong place

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Web 3.0 (10th nomination) was listed last night, but it's only that article's second nomination. I moved it to the correct title (Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Web 3.0 (second nomination)), fixed the tag on the article, and updated the log entry. Should this be relisted? If the move was inappropriate, feel free to revert it. --Coredesat 11:19, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

It's fine - it doesn't need relisting at the bottom: although it had the wrong title it still got plenty of comments, and nobody seems to have taken the 9 "other" discussions into account. Yomangani 11:26, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Log problems

Some weird issues have cropped up all of a sudden at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Log/2005 January 13, namely some entire talk pages appearing instead of the actual afd debate. I'd really like to get this fixed (mostly just to get the templates outta there), but I can't for the life of me figure out what's causing it. --InShaneee 14:36, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

It seems to be the interaction of two bots - one moved the Vfd page to an Afd page and the other "fixed" a double redirect to the talk page. It's probably more widespread that just that day. Yomangani 14:53, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
(edit conflict reply) It's because some of the discussions were moved to the articles' talk pages, and those are included now. I fixed one but there's a couple more left, you can look at which discussions are transcluded in the edit box and figure the ones that are redirects to the talk pages. Fix the rest if you still want to. - Bobet 14:56, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
I tried that with the page that's causing the Paranormal template to appear there, but moving and fixing redirects hasn't done it. --InShaneee 15:48, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Oh it does work, you just didn't move all of the previously moved discussions. Talk:James Worson incident was still transcluded and had the same template, I put the contents back in an afd page. - Bobet 16:40, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Excellent, thank you very much. Now I suppose all that needs to be done is figure out what bot/s are performing these moves... --InShaneee 18:26, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
It wasn't a bot that originally moved the discussion, it was the closing admin (User:SimonP in this case). The bots just fixed some other things later on, the first one moving all changing all vfd pages to afds instead and the second to fix the double redirect that resulted. So there isn't a bot running around hiding afd discussions, which is good. - Bobet 13:33, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Yes, the bot accusation was just me jumping to conclusions Yomangani 14:33, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Moving (Renaming) articles en masse

There are a great number of articles pertaining to Imperial Japanese Navy ships, and to other topics, which need to be renamed, in order to be in accordance with WP:MOS-JP policies on macrons. This is unfortunately not as easy as it sounds, because many of these ship articles have categories, templates, and ship class articles associated with them. I am an administrator, and I do believe this should qualify for speedy moves, without discussion. But I do not know how to effect that change without a bot. I have just begun using AWB, but I am not sure if I can move/rename articles with that, let alone categories or templates. Please advise. Thank you. LordAmeth 16:46, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Strange situation

I am not an expert on AfD, and I wonder if the situation at Mall sainthwar is normal: nobody has commented save about 10 of newly registered users/anons objecting to it's deletion... -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  16:37, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

On the website http://rajputms.co.in for members of this warrior caste fighting for recognition I read this: "WE ARE READY TO SACRIFICE WHATEVER IT REQUIRES TO ESTABLISH OUR IDENTITY." Maybe that also includes users who recommend deletion of the article. :(  --Lambiam 22:06, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
Would that have anything to do with this rather bizarre edit? -- Fan-1967 22:16, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
I suspect it is more a sign of cluelessness than of readiness to sacrifice.  --Lambiam 23:34, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Images

I have an image and it's too small to use in the article I was hoping to. In fact, the same image I uploaded is already in the article except bigger. I was wondering if we could delete it somehow. Could someone take care of this for me? Thank you. Oh, and does anyone think we should archive the article? Sasuke-kun27 20:49, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

I do believe that would qualify as author's request, tagging for speedy deletion as such. For future reference, Misplaced Pages:Images and media for deletion is where image deletion requests are taken care of. BryanG 22:16, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

AfD in the news

AfD has made the news again. Not quite the NYT, but have a look at this from The Stanford Review. I found this in the latest Signpost (see here). One of the better points was this bit: "The language used amongst Wikipedians is intimidating and bewildering to outsiders. Words like “walled garden” and “spamvertisement” are used to degrade articles. Inexperienced users are called “SPAs” or “single purpose accounts” as an attack on the credibility of anything they write on Misplaced Pages." Carcharoth 22:17, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

You are right in citing that sentence, which shows the bad parts of AfD; however I'd also like to mention some other sentences from that article:
  • does it make sense to sustain an active and easy process to eliminate information?
  • Misplaced Pages and similar communities on the internet allow people to occupy themselves with seemingly useless tasks, such as researching and recommending random Misplaced Pages articles for deletion
  • It’s unbelievable to me that a person with no connection or self-interest in an article on The Review goes to such effort to compile reasons to delete it
  • Several Wikipedians making the argument that opponents to the deletion were inexperienced, and probably only contributing because of self interest (which was actually the case)
  • it’s actually really silly. The entire article on The Stanford Review is only four lines long.
  • In some ways, the article helps legitimize our paper as a source for news and commentary.
In other words, Misplaced Pages is a free web host; there is no point in deleting stuff, even a 4-liner and especially our article we wrote to promote ourselves and with which you have no business anyway. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 10:10, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
My favourite part is the bit about college students being so busy that they just don't have the time to conduct counter-research against massive Wikipedian afd research efforts. Their final line about "just let us have our bit of fun and you lot find something else to do!" sort of undermines the whole column too Bwithh 00:22, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

"It’s unbelievable to me that a person with no connection or self-interest in an article on The Review goes to such effort to compile reasons to delete it"

Am I alone in believing that AfD tends to attract people who are primarily interested in deleting articles? Obviously I don't mean everybody who contributes to AfD, but there are some individuals who take great delight in seeing anything (that does not match their particular frame of reference) get deleted. There must be a certain psychology at work—perhaps a sense of empowerment? It's certainly much more difficult to compile a good article than it is to delete it, so possibly the later route gives a quicker "fix"? I'm just curious. — RJH (talk) 16:28, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
The psychology of AfD is indeed something worth of consideration. Another interesting phenomenon is the following one: even if an article requires a complete rewrite (by that I mean not just copyediting, I mean going back to the research phase are rewrite the article completely), some people feel compelled to rewrite it rather than going to Misplaced Pages:Requested articles and choosing an article they feel important enough to write (or thinking of one themselves). It is certainly plausible that that article was the next one they intended to write, but that seems unlikely.
I guess there is some psychology at work here as well, something like "I would be bad in deleting this article, even if there is nothing in it that can be saved and I could better spend my time writing something else." Note that sometimes not even the original title survives. This may be related to the sense of guilty in removing something someone else has written; the strange part is that sometimes nothing of the original text or information survives.
Amazingly, the editors I am referring to are among the best ones partecipating in the AfD; they are certainly much better editors than the ones advocating keeping articles without actually editing them (nothing of this refers to this particular case).
BTW, the quote from the article you posted above shows an attempt of building a walled garden was actually taking place. Why this is bad is something we should certainly not be discussing. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 18:40, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

People that don't read before voting

Hmm. Does this irritate anyone?

Especially the "per nom" votes, which most of them did not even bother to review the case. In some other times, people simply rather choose to use a lame, ignorant statement.

AQu01rius (User | Talk | Websites)  23:29, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

I hope you are not making a sweeping statement that all people that say "per nom" didn't read the assosciated material. I say per nom a decent amount of the time, and that is just because I agree with his/her reason(s) for listing the article for deletion in the first place. I do have to ask though, how is it that you decide who reviewed the case and who didn't when all you have to go on is one line of text? Personally, I just assume good faith. Markovich292 00:14, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Same here, thanks for your concern. --Svartalf 02:00, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
It occasionally happens that a contributor clearly did not bother to read the nominated article nor the preceding discussion. I have seen things like: "Nominated because article is nonsense. • Keep – article was vandalized; I've reverted it to a good version. • Delete per nom, we don't need nonsense articles."  When I spot this, yes, it irritates me, but I find the too-common practice of not giving a (reasonable) argument for recommendations more irksome.  --Lambiam 08:32, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
I read a great essay on common mistakes made at AfD, including the common mistake of just saying "per nom" without adding anything to the discussion. Ah, here we go:
Should be required reading. Carcharoth 11:37, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for the article! That's exactly what I was talking about. Of course saying "per nom" is fine, but if that's the only comment, it's really unnecessary. AQu01rius (User | Talk | Websites)  15:17, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
That essay should probably be in wikispace so we can link to it more easily. I rather like the WP:ILIKEIT shortcut to it (I can never rememver the full name...). --ais523 13:49, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

When does overuse of AfD become actionable?

Jeff_Rense went through an Afd in June, which passed as a keep. Not "keep (no consensus)", but rather "keep". It's now been nominated as AfD again by the same user with a subset of the previous reasons (just WP:BIO this time). At this time, nothing has been provided to show procedure was followed per WP:CCC: If you think a consensual decision is outdated, you should ask around a bit, for example at the Village Pump or on an article talk page, to see if people agree with you. You cannot declare a new consensus all by yourself. Wasting the resources in another AfD without taking proper steps seems like an abuse of process. Opinions?

The second time I'd suggest just rerunning the debate; if consensus hasn't changed we'll find out. If it were three times in three months speedy-closing for disruption might be in order, but twice in four/five months seems reasonable. If there are no new arguments the proposed deletion will just fail. --ais523 14:49, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
On a related note, an attempt to have articles that closed as keep at AfD be speedy kept if renominated within 6 months failed to gain any consensus. --badlydrawnjeff talk 14:53, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
On the consensus front, the problem I keep seeing is consensus may fail to form due to the following, regardless of delete or keep. Say there's an article about moose. Half the editors vote "Keep" citing policy, etc. The other half vote delete because "a moose once bit my sister", or, more likely blatant denial of how the article passes requirements. That's logged as a "keep, no consensus" and the article shows up again in a few months because "no consensus had been formed". It keeps the door open for repeated nominations. Note this is not always the case, I do AGF as much as circumstances allow for it. *Sparkhead 15:04, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
The opposite is also true; I put up an article on AfD, and despite the clear violation of policy, there were so many supporters of the article's content - fanboys, so to speak - that it was simply judged "no consensus" despite the irrationality of the arguments on the keep side.Michael Dorosh 15:06, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Reply to ais523: That's what I suspect, but I question what's been labelled elsewhere as a "pitch 'til you win" mentality with certain nominations. Especially when it's the same nominator and the article has only gotten more scrutiny and better references since the previous AfD. I know there's no timeframe surrounding AfD's, and this one isn't a particularly egregious case (just a current one that caught my attention), as I've seen some renom'ed within 24 hours, but, and I suspect this is a constant suggestion, perhaps timeframes should be placed around AfD renoms. *Sparkhead 14:58, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Your example is about repeated nominations of a particular article. I'm more worried about general, widespread misuse of AfD to nominate articles that could be rewritten or merged. In fact, I recently came across an old arbitration case that reminded me how much the atmosphere at AfD (then VfD) can change from year to year. See Misplaced Pages:Requests_for_arbitration/GRider and the Request for comments linked from there. Back then, VfD/AfD was different. I haven't quite worked out which way the pendulum has swung yet... Carcharoth 15:38, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

I honestly got worried about high publicity for the AfD of the iconic dot.com bust company eToys.com. It clearly needed a re-write, so much so that when a user who was unaware of the company and didn't know what a major part of internet history this company played by the article as written, nominated it for AfD within 5 days of article creation. I came across a similar case with Anchor Blue Clothing Company. It seems that more and more users are nonchalantly nominating AfD's without consideration for rewrites or improvements. These really can be embarrassing for Misplaced Pages. --Marriedtofilm 01:01, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
I don't want to worry you, but some articles like that can get speedy deleted for not asserting notability. It's not really a problem, because someone can always recreate the article. But I'm guessing this can put people off if it is their first article. Carcharoth 01:28, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Before Nominating...

I've moved the "before nominating" section above the "how to nominate" sections. Seems to make more sense both chronologically and logically. Hopefully more users new to the AfD process will view that section before putting forth an AfD. Any concerns with this? *Sparkhead 01:22, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Cultural insensitivity?

Folks. The page Bat bathing is scheduled for the chopping block. Neologism is the reason. But I say that something existing in other cultures of which we may not be aware doesn't mean it's a neologism. See the arguments I made to keep the page and tell me if my arguments have merit. Thank you. --LegitimateAndEvenCompelling 06:34, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, but no, your arguments don't have merit. You are accusing other people of cultural insensitivity towards a phenomenon of wxhich you don't really know if it is done elsewhere, and for which you seem to have invented a word. So this is WP:OR and it is not verifiable. If it was really happening regularly anywhere in the world, some antropologist would have written about it (or National Geographic or some such), and then you would have a source, both for the term and the phenomenon. Fram 07:45, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, the question mark is there for a reason. This question is here for a reason. I am not accusing anybody. But I do know your statements are factually inaccurate, besides your claim just addressed. First, I know for a fact bat bathing happens in Guatemala and Honduras, and I guess the name given it there is not in English. Second, I did not make up the term--that is how is was described to me. Besides, what else would anyone call it? Third, it is not original research--I can assure you I have never gone bat bathing. Fourth, it is definitely verifiable, but just because Google does not mention it doesn't mean it is not verifiable. The source may be hard to find or not even online, but the wiki may spur someone to dig up the information that's there and place a link here. --LegitimateAndEvenCompelling 08:25, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

RFC in the middle of an AFD?

An editor unhappy with an AFD on an article he created has opened an RFC in the middle of an AFD: Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Opposition to Iran-Iraq War, arguing that the article was being targeted by "Wikipedians of Iranian ancestry". (IMO the article itself is unsalvageable, but the author's perception is clearly different.) A few of the commentators in the AFD seem to have a number of edits on middle-eastern topics, though I have no idea of their ancestry; I have no ancestry in that part of the world.

I have a concern about what will happen to the AFD process if RFC's are routinely opened in the middle of it. Is there a policy on this? Should RFC's be used to mediate an AFD, or should AFD be considered a separate process which shouldn't be interrupted by another process? I've posted the same question at RFC talk. Fan-1967 02:56, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Do not post an RfC before working towards a resolution with other article contributors first
Normally, I would think that would mean letting the AFD finish, and possibly going through Misplaced Pages:Deletion review as well. Normally, I would say that discussion should be on the discussion page for the AFD, or on the talk page for the article itself. In this case, they're going against all the usual rules and it seems to be working. Regards, Ben Aveling 08:53, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Moving comments on AfD for length reasons

Is it appropriate for a user to move another user's comments on an AfD discussion page to that AfD's talk page on the grounds of excessive length (Misplaced Pages:Talk_page_guidelines#Good_practice)? And is an AfD page considered a "talk page" in terms of policy reference, for example things like WP:ARCHIVE and WP:REFACTOR? It's a bit confusing to a newbie since those pages have their own talk pages? --Milo H Minderbinder 12:29, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

AFD pages are generally only active for a short period of time - typically 5 days - before they are permanently archived. We can tolerate a lot in that short time. The changes which are generally allowable include:
  • Standardize the indentation. By convention, AFD discussions use nested bullets. Users who mix bullets and tabs or who forget to use the bullet can make the discussion harder for the rest of us to follow. Feel free to fix those.
  • If edits are added which disrupt the generally chronological flow of the discussion (for example, new comments added at the top), you can correct those.
  • Add attribution if someone forgets to sign their comment. {{unsigned}} is helpful.
  • When the discussion gets very long (my personal rule is about 6 screen-shots), go to the AFD page and untransclude the discussion. Replace the transclusion with a short explanation that it was untranscluded for length and provide a regular link to the discussion page.
  • In especially egregious cases, consider removing any personal attacks. Note, however, that this can be a very controversial practice.
  • If the some participants drift off on a tangent which is irrelevant to the deletion decision, those tangential comments will sometimes be moved to the discussion's Talk page. That's not as helpful as you might think, though. The closing admin still has to read through all the comments regardless of where they've been moved.
  • And of course it's always allowable to revert vandalism.
Those are the only changes I can think of which are generally tolerated in AFD discussions. Refactoring merely for length is not among the edits we encourage. Rossami (talk) 19:57, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Perhaps the user above should have clarified that it was his comments that were moved to the discussion page, as they were a well-beyond the pale 3-page 1500 word response to an earlier "delete" comment posted by one user-- although the above user claimed an "abstention" and provided no actual recommendation on the article in question, or basis in WP policy. The AfD comments were the user's fourth edit on Misplaced Pages, indicating (at the time) his was a WP:SPA. He has subsequently made additional edits.--Leflyman 18:26, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
  • I don't believe any of that changes my original question. Is "newness of user" or "beyond the pale" (whatever that means) or "response to other comments" or "abstention" grounds for moving comments from an AfD page? I also take offense to your suggestion that my comments had no basis in WP policy (I referenced it throughout my comments) and your accusation of SPA. This is the talk page for AfD, I don't see how debating my comments here is on-topic. --Milo H Minderbinder 19:33, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

If a topic is deleted, then similar topics should be deleted.

Example: Someone deleted the Myg0t page. Myg0t is an association of trolls. However, the GNAA page is still up and running, and GNAA is another association of trolls. If someone want to wipe out a topic, then shouldn't pages relating to that topic be deleted? The velociraptor 02:07, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

  • CounterExample: A software program called X is deleted. Should software program Y (or all articles about software programs) be deleted? Clearly not. If X = some software I created 3 minutes ago in my basement, and Y = Microsoft Windows, it becomes clear that there is a question of notability involved in the decision on whether to keep an article. Valrith 02:23, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
    • BTW, people have, in fact, tried to use that argument. I've seen a number of AFD's where someone from a small software company with a dozen employees tried to claim that they should have a page if Microsoft has a page. Nobody's bought the argument yet. Both GNAA and myg0t have been repeatedly reviewed and discussed. Consistent judgement has been that GNAA are notable trolls, and myg0t aren't. Fan-1967 02:29, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Ambar - deleted and then restored

Not sure if this has been pointed out, but it looks like AfD screwed up. Just to start the ball rolling and institute a culture change, I'm trying to get all admins closing things at AfD to remember to check the page history of an article before deleting, so that drastic changes in the nature of a page are spotted, and also urging those voting at AfD to do the same. See the following for details:

Copied to closing admin, restoring admin, deletion nominator, all who voted in the AfD discussion, and the AfD talk page. Carcharoth 23:48, 31 October 2006 (UTC)