Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Free Lunch Design

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[edit] After closing

After I closed this, User:Zoe edited the close to attribute to me the words:

The result of the debate was no consensus. Even taking into account some socking, there just isn't consensus to delete this.

This was not the result that I called. I said "keep". In the absence of consensus, the default is to keep. The article is kept. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 23:48, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

• Well, it seems to me that Zoe is right and you called the wrong result. There's no harm in going into specificis regarding a debate's outcome. Of course this won't matter to the article in question. Radiant_>|< 07:46, August 29, 2005 (UTC)

  Yeah, because it really matters, hey? Because if we say there was no consensus, that means the article will be deleted... oh, no, see it won't. The outcome will still be that it's kept. I suspect that this sort of discussion is fuelled by an idea that we might at a later day relist all these articles, claiming that because there was "no consensus", we really wanted to delete them. When, actually, we really didn't much care, so they're kept. Grace Note 07:07, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

This was my original call: "The result of the debate was keep. Even taking into account some socking, there just isn't consensus to delete this."

Could you explain in what manner it differed from the call that Zoe attempted to make, except for Zoe's lack of precision in failing to state the actual result, mandated by deletion policy, that the article must be kept? In my close I mentioned the absence of consensus to delete, so it can't be that I didn't use the C-word. I've changed my wording in the interests of stemming her continued edits (which I assume was unintentional--she altered the wording in such a manner as to falsely attribute the changed form of words to me). --Tony Sidaway^Talk 11:12, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

• Semantics are important to some people. Keep because of consensus to keep is, to those people, different from keep because of lack of consensus. Their reasons could be many - a desire to keep statistics maybe, or a desire to not generalize, or maybe they're just nitpicking. The point is that there's obvious precedent for closing VFDs as "merge", "redirect", "transwiki" et al. I note that this particular article has been redirected. I also note that said action was 1) supported in the VFD, and 2) would likely not have occured if the VFD hadn't been there. So it is semantically correct to say that the article was kept, but it's semantically also correct and more precise to say that the result of the VFD had been to redirect.
• It would be semantically correct and less precise to simply say that the debate is now closed. That would force people who are interested to look closer to see what actually happened. Your method of closing also forces people to do that. And some of them don't like it. You are to my knowledge the only one that makes the bureaucratic distinction between an administratorial action and an editorial action. Radiant_>|< 11:22, August 29, 2005 (UTC)

It's simply incorrect to state that redirection was in any way "supported in the VFD. Not one single person during the entire five-day discussion mentioned the possibility.

My first closing of this discussion, which Zoe challenged, clearly said:

The result of the debate was keep. Even taking into account some socking, there just isn't consensus to delete this.

I am not impressed by Zoe's antics. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 05:39, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

Nor I yours. Zoe 05:52, September 4, 2005 (UTC)

Whatever. My close was utterly unobjectionable, what puzzles me about the whole thing is that you obviously don't believe that, nor does Radiant, but not for any reasons that either of you seems to be able to explain in an intelligible manner. For instance, when I point out to Radiant that my original call did refer to no consensus, he gives me a reply that seems to assume that I did not do so.

By the way, could Radiant explain why he thinks that redirection was supported by the discussion? I also think it's somewhat contentious to suggest that a redirect couldn't happen without a VfD. The one thing that strikes me about the small band of vociferous objectors that I seem to have gathered of late is their capacity for making utterly baffling and often demonstrably contrafactual statements with apparently complete sincerity.--Tony Sidaway^Talk 06:03, 4 September 2005 (UTC)