User:Simon Dodd/Some AFD considerations
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I have been a wikipedian for nearly five years. In that time, I have formed (and reformed) many views on the jungle of wikpiedia policy and process. Some of the following observations are long-simmered views; others are snapshots of attempts to resolve difficult questions in the context of specific events. Either way, this is a draft essay that attempts to share views, insights, and opinions that I think other editors may find useful.
Heat melts SNOW
As SNOW itself says, "[i]f an issue is 'snowballed', and somebody later raises a reasonable objection, then it probably was not a good candidate for the snowball clause." In terms, that's only useful after the fact, but ex ante guidance can be distilled from it simply by asking oneself: is it foreseeable that someone might object to an early close? To be sure,
In sum, one should never attempt to use SNOW in proximity to
AFD
When to nominate
Editors are too trigger happy with deletion nominations. I once wrote a stub article that lasted nearly three minutes before it was
A better tack, I think, is the way I have approached
Why is that better? The creator thought Levitt is notable. I didn't (and don't) see it. But I could be wrong. If we let the article stay, an editor could add material supporting notability, and the encyclopædia will have grown and benefited. If we delete it, and the same material later emerges,
I am a
Precedential effect of previous decisions to keep
When the community has decided through an AFD to keep an article, that decision has force - or at least inertia. Although no policy says it explicitly, the underlying community judgment that previous decisions to keep merit deference is glimpsed through many policies and practice. For example,
We saw this understanding in action in, for example, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Criticism of Bill O'Reilly (political commentator) (3rd nomination), where many editors argued that the previous nominations should be conclusive. Although I argued that the previous nominations of O'Reilly lacked force because they did not address (as NOTAGAIN envisions) the merits of the nomination, but rather were closed on the basis that the nomination was in bad faith, there are many deletion discussions where I have expressly deferred to previous consensus to keep despite personal misgivings. See, e.g., Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Allie DiMeco (2nd nomination); Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anti-globalization and antisemitism (5th nomination). (Derived from [3])
What to do (and what not to do) at AFD
Be candid
Explain what is really on your mind as the basis for your action (paradigmatically, a delete vote at AFD). Try to expressly identify and deal with the policies and concerns you have that bear on the decision (e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Christina Koshzow; Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Charles Davi). You don't have to make arguments or persuade anyone, just stating your position is fine, but either way you should set out why you are doing something. And you should likewise read what other people have said on the assumption that they, too, are setting out what is really on their minds. It helps you, and it helps other users. I routinely read other people's comments at AfD and end up voting at odds with my initial instinct. Identify flaws in other users' reasoning (e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Frank Smith (fireman) (2nd nomination); Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Traditional marriage movement) and be responsive to flaws they identify in yours (e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Allie DiMeco (2nd nomination)). Don't hesitate to change your mind if a user puts forward an argument you find compelling or hadn't thought of, and indicate that you've changed your mind (e.g. Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Houston_Tower; Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jess Cates).
Be consistent
Accordingly, an argument that "article X exists, so why doesn't article Y" should be evaluated on its own merits, not met with a blithe citation of WAX as a sort of wikipedian thought-terminating cliché. That isn't to say that such arguments are always persuasive. For one thing, the community may simply have never considered the compared article in an AFD (OTHERSTUFF is at its zenith when the community has not decided that the other article should be kept). For another, I see users offering bad analogical reasoning all the time here, and I suspect that's why the concept got a bad name on Wikipedia. Nevertheless, although a given (and often unadorned) "if x, why not y" argument may not be persuasive, I object to WAX's abstraction from "that's an argument that's often ill-taken" to "that's an argument that's never valid."
Note, by the way, that if you take my advice about being candid, you'll find it a lot easier to be consistent. That's not a bug, it's a feature. Derived from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Criticism of Bill O'Reilly (political commentator) (3rd nomination)
What the fork, let's do it
When to delete a fork
Although NPOV problems aren't by themselves a reason for deletion, the question I think we should ask in such situations is this: if the salvageable material from the fork were in the main article, would I be inclined to remove it for violating one policy or another (paradigmatically NPOV and/or WP:UNDUE? If the answer's yes, a fork basically consisting of such material with perhaps some air blown in for appearances should be deleted. Derived from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Criticism of Bill O'Reilly (political commentator) (3rd nomination)
The remerge fallacy
When a fork is nominated for deletion, an argument will sometimes be made that there is too much material in the fork to merge back into the main article. See, e.g.,
"In part" is an important qualifier, too. Even if some of the content is to be retained, articles are often written at greater length and in greater detail than necessary. The movie Titanic expends more than two hours telling this story: "the ship hits an iceberg and sinks, causing the deaths of most passengers." We should aim for a happy midpoint between those extremes, and detailed exposition is not necessary beyond the point where adding words stops adding illumination. It should also be kept in mind that a fork or subarticle can and often should contain a level of specificity that doesn't belong in (and should be deleted from if added to) the main article because of
Because the material in the fork can almost invariably be compressed, arguments based on
People are reading Wikipedia RIGHT NOW.
Although it isn't my philosophy, there is much to be said for
Actions authorized or mandated by policy
Never get involved in a land war in Asia
- Addenda 1: about "poorly sourced." WP:BLPexplicitly forbids "us[ing] ... blogs ... as sources for material about a living person." A contentious claim resting purely on a source disallowed by applicable policy is inherently "poorly sourced." Accordingly, policy authorizes immediate and unilateral removal of any contentious material in a BLP that rests solely on blogs, without any 3RR penalty.
- Addenda 2: about "contentious." WP:HANDLE("Questionable material about living people in any article should be removed immediately"), all of which seem to assume the same understanding.
(Derived from Talk:Sarah_Palin/Archive_56#BLP and [5])
SPLIT and process
If SPLIT's mandatory language is in fact advisory, we create a zone of administrative discretion to punish users who ignore the requirement when the administrator doesn't like the edit, relying on SPLIT, or not, when they when they like the edit, relying on BURO. Users must be able to rely on policy being enforced evenhandedly, and while I have no beef with policy being enforced as a construct of both its letter and animating purpose -- I agree with much of
Deleting other users' comments
Generally: No. There are all sorts of laws that tell people not to do something without implying a cause of action for a third party to tackle someone who breaks that law. Wikipedia isn't a legal system, but the same concept applies here. NOTFORUM tells editors what to do and not to do in their own comments and contributions. It also delineates a category of article-space material that should be removed by any other editor. It does not, however, authorize you to police other editors' talk page comments, removing those that you don't think measure up. Since NOTFORUM doesn't authorize you to remove talkpage comments violating it, and TPO has a general rule forbidding it, there is no incompatibility between those rules, and both should be followed.
With that said, TPO does make exceptions to its general prohibition, and one of them incorporates a version of NOTFORUM's rule: it allows deletion of comments (even discussions) that are irrelevant to improving the article. As
So long as the comment can reasonably be understood as be a good-faith effort to improve the article, you should not delete it - and you should
Notability
The specific controls the general
Wikipedia is not a legal environment, but the maxim of statutory construction that the specific governs the general (see, e.g., Morales v. TWA, 504 U.S. 374 (1992); Gibson v. Ortiz, 387 F.3d 812 (9th Cir. 2004)) seems no less instructive - indeed, persuasive - in this context, too. The mere existence of notability guidelines other than GNG overwhelmingly makes the case that GNG does not override the more specific guidelines, because if it did, there would be no need for any notability guideline other than the GNG. The "escape hatch" conception makes surplussage of the more specific guidelines, and since that can't be right, it probably isn't. (Derived from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bristol Indymedia (2nd nomination); Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Centre for Research on Globalization (2nd nomination); Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jess Cates)
Gone for a song
This analytic structure can also be applied in the context of
Understanding WP:SPS
Although blogs are troublesome as sources at Wikipedia, they are not entirely banned.
The exception to this general rule is that
Use of WP:TLDR
The fastest way to look like a clot. "How well he's read, to reason against reading!" - Ferdinand, in
But... Write carefully
The internet is a written medium. Write well. Read and keep at hand
Concision is good, but remember that concision and verbosity are not about the word count. They are about a healthy and appropriate ratio of words to ideas. (In Glen Greenwald's case, for instance, the ratio is usually ∞:0.) Some ideas, points, or tales take longer to explain thoroughly; you should never waste your reader's time, but leaving things out sometimes means wasting even more time later because you left a gaping hole in what you told them. Keep always in mind Einstein's advice: things should be made as simple as possible - but no simpler.
- Simon Dodd {