User:Radiant!/Deletion

Problems

(and suggested policies that could alleviate them)

VFD is nasty and unpleasant

• Wikipedia:Blocking policy/Personal attacks
• WP:RPA

Many 'obvious' deletes remain listed for a week

• The recent CSD expansion
• If an article is speedied, its VFD discussion should also be speedied
• Wikipedia:Expeditious deletion etc

Some debates are repeated over and over again

• Establish more guidelines like WP:MUSIC and WP:FICT and make them enforceable

VFD result depends heavily on the closer

• Strongly establish certain rules
  • The nomination itself is or is not a deletion vote (if not clearly specified as such)
  • Votes to e.g. BJAODN may or may not be counted as votes to delete
  • There is or is not a minimum number of votes for any discussion

Backlog

• Get more volunteers??? Tricky.

Not problems

Bad faith nominations

Happens rarely, and those that are tend to be speedily unlisted. It is important to note that usually when a nomination is called in bad faith, it is in fact a honest nomination that happens to have a general consensus to be kept - or even one that the voter simply disagrees with. Thus, a strict system for removing bad faith nominations is likely to be abused.

Renominations

Happens rarely, and those that are tend to get a bunch of votes like "keep, previous nomination was unsuccesful". There have been some proposals for a strict limit to renominations, but consensus seems to be that those aren't necessary since it doesn't happen all that often.

Sockpuppetry

Sock-infested VFDs are annoying but not really a critical problem. Since any strict limit to edit counts is gamable (see Wikipedia:Suffrage) the only viable solution seems to be do disallow anons from editing Wikipedia namespace. This is possible from a software point of view, but it feels unwiki.

See also User:R. fiend/Why VfD isn't seriously broken.

Proposal

Premise: Many VFD nominations are deleted by unanimous vote. Read the VFD logs if you believe otherwise. It would not be a problem to make procedure easier for those obvious deletes.

Premise: All other VFD nominations are contested, or even obvious keeps. It would not be a problem to make procedure for deleting those a little more difficult.

Premise: People sometimes get angry and uncivil on VFD. Whatever the cause, this is likely aggravated by the sheer length thereof.

Premise: VFD is severely backlogged. The likely cause is the sheer length, and complicated closing procedure.

Thus. Proposal.

1. If you consider an article an "obvious delete", you may tag it with {{subst:od|reason}}. This is a colored box similar to {{vfd}}, and includes the "Category:Obvious deletes {{CURRENTDATE}}".
2. If anyone disagrees with this article's deletion, for whatever reason, they may cancel it simply by removing the template.
3. All those articles are in a neatly alphabetized category, and most keep-worthy articles can be spotted by title. Only a couple minutes' work per day.
4. If the template is not removed in (3?) days, the article may be deleted except by the person who put on the template (this ensures that at least two users agree on it). No bureaucracy involved.
5. VFD may still be used for controversial debates, that's what it's for, but a 'speedy keep' procedure should be added for the obvious keeps.
6. Yes, people can edit war over this, but they can already edit war over anything else and we know how to deal with that.