Wikipedia talk:Amendment to deletion policy

Please discuss the proposal here. If discussion seems to hint at consensus we will start a poll. Loom91 18:26, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with this proposal. If a topic is important, anyone can turn the article into a NPOV one-paragraph article with a source (which requires 10 min if the topic is valid). If this is not done during the 5 days the article is under the eyes of a lot of people, why expect someone is doing something afterwards? If the topic is so important that we really should have an article about it, the title can be listed at Wikipedia:Requested articles. My problem is that this proposal effectively turn the creation of an article on a topic we may have into an obligation for Wikipedia to have that article, while not giving precedence to articles we should have. - Liberatore(T) 19:12, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Disagree. In practice this is already how it works. If anyone on AFD is interested enough in the article to write a stub, then it doesn't get deleted. If noone is interested enough to even write one line about the subject and add a stub category then this in itself is a good reason not to include it. --Darkfred ^{Talk to me} 19:18, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Disagree (edit conflict)(As Fred said while I was posting:) We already do this. Yeah, sometimes we delete things which could be cleaned up, but usually only if "cleanup" would involve a total rewrite. Articles aren't usually deleted because the content is NPOV or whatever. This is just instruction creep. If you intend to pursue this, you'll want to move this to a correctly spelled title so it looks more professional. NickelShoe (Talk) 19:21, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Anyway, POV articles are only deleted when they're inherently POV, like if the title is Why Christians suck, and unreferenced is just a way of saying that it appears unverifiable. I don't see the problems this proposal is claiming to exist. NickelShoe (Talk) 19:24, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Disagree Right now this looks like a solution in search of a problem. When articles on AfD are stubbified and kept, it is often because of the attention AfD gave them. If the nominator thought the article could be salvaged and had a clue how, he would generally have done so. Nominating an article for deletion is a non-trivial effort -- I can't imagine there are many editors who wouldn't stubify instead if the article salvagable. Robert A.West (Talk) 19:31, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Disagree; I support the idea that the topic of an article can be more important than the current content, but this ideal does not translate to a sensible policy. Quite simply, on AfD you don't know everything about the subject, and you don't have the ideal article in front of you. Sure, before voting delete, I'll run a couple of Internet searches, but it isn't my responsibility to prove that a topic is unverifiable or inherently OR or POV or even non-notable; that task is impossible even in principle. The burden of proof must lie on the article itself and those who support it. And, as said before, this is the current practice. Melchoir 19:46, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Strong Disagree. If an article named Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu was considered for deletion, the explanation behind the notability of the article is wrongfully omitted. --Zsinj^Talk 19:50, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Or Dante And Randal And Jay And Silent Bob And A Bunch Of New Characters And Lando, Take Part In A Whole Bunch Of Movie Parodies Including But Not Exclusive To, The Bad News Bears, The Last Starfighter, Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, Plus A High Scho for that matter. --Zsinj^Talk 19:54, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Seeing that has inspired this: Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (books)#Article title length. Melchoir 23:19, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

• I can't say that I disagree with this proposal but I can't endorse it either. The Deletion Policy already says all these things - and has the necessary exceptions. (See #Problems that don't require deletion.) No amendment is necessary. If people misunderstand or misread the policy, we should teach them the right way, not create yet more policy pages that they won't read. Rossami (talk) 21:47, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

So the policy currently givers listers the right to pare down pages to stubs simply because the actual content may influence a voter otherwise just given a blank topic to stare at and decide. What part of the current policy says this? Ansell 23:33, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Strong Disagree This would mean that anyone who even wanted to put something up for deletion would be able to blank the page at their will. That is usually called vandalism (with the obvious exception of copyvio). The content of the page means a whole lot to me in my AfD decisions. I would be lost without knowing what exactly was going on with the page at that time. Who exactly thought this would be a good policy? Voters are totally free to fix up pages during the process as well, which would be completely destroyed. It is almost like saying the current contributions were worth nothing. How would you feel as an editor? At least now they have the freedom to cleanup pages after someone suggests AfD. There are pages regularly on AfD that are only there for cleanup reasons. Ansell 23:24, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Strong disagreement with proposal There are plenty of cases where articles are so bad that starting again improves our chances of getting a good article some time soon. We decide these on a case by case basis and should not be deprived of the right to do so. CalJW 23:39, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Disagree. No need for this, as generally AFD voters focus on the topic already (not the current content). But in some exceptional cases, it is necessary to delete something that has an entirely valid topic, but totally inadequate content. Specifically, articles/lists that are potentially defamatory if untrue. You can't always find the need references in five days, and some things can't remain for any duration without references. One example is some of these awful "List of people who have Negative Quality X"-type articles. Often people insist they could be turned into something encyclopedic, but they languish with unsourced material, until somebody figures out they'll be deleted without a fixup. --Rob 03:04, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

• Very very strongly disagree. There are plenty of occasions where an article's subject is encyclopedic, but the article itself is not. Under this proposed policy, I could create the article Properties of light waves with the content "Lite waves have proppertees. Me mate Gordon is a assehole and he don't think so At ALLL!!!!!!!". Under this policy, the article would be immune from both CSD and AfD, because the subject was ok. That's a vandal's charter - create whatever the hell you like, but give it a plausible name.

The policy also forces the burden of proof on to Wikipedia's editors. Instead of requiring that a writer proves what they're saying, the people who want the article deleted would have to go to the trouble; since you can't prove a negative, the article survives because you can't disprove the title of the article; Wikipedia rapidly becomes Uncyclopedia and dies painfully.

Also, this policy attempts to tie people's hands in voting. At the moment, we trust our editors to vote sensibly and with good reasoning. We trust the community to balance votes, with a bad-faith vote (in either direction) being cancelled out immediately by someone else voting the opposite way to nullify the vote. It's our brand of democracy (and, if too many people do it, the result is "no consensus", making it not worthwhile for either side to do it in the first place).

This policy changes that natural balance; it requires those who would like an article to be deleted to jump through more hoops than those who want an article to survive have to. In effect, it ties the hands of one sector of the voting population, requiring them to meet a different set of criteria than the other. Wikipedia is not a democracy, but then one would hope that Wikipedia is not apartheid South Africa either. ➨ ❝REDVERS❞ 23:05, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Also, now I think on, this policy would abolish CSD-A3; that would take us back to 2001 and the days of creating blank articles. The incentive we have at the moment to make red links go blue and stay blue would be lost - the click on the link Properties of light waves, leading to an article (immune from deletion) that said "Please put the properties of light waves here", wouldn't cause someone to write the article there - it would cause them the move on and hope someone else does the job. This entire proposal seems based on the idea that, from beginning to end of the Wikipedia article creation process, someone else should do all the work. ➨ ❝REDVERS❞ 23:10, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Also disagree. If an article is on AFD, and someone finds it useful, they'll expand it and it will be kept. Deletion at AFD does not imply salting the earth against future recreations. Stifle (talk) 19:52, 17 April 2006 (UTC)