Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion/April 2005 Part Three

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problems with vfd nomination

I Vfd'ed "The Day Mobotropolis Fell." this morning; the deletion article is still there, but it doesn't show on the vfd mainpage, although it did so before. I tried to fix it, but couldn't do it (there was an edit to the nominated page in the meantime, but normally this doesn't affect the vfd procedure). What am I doing wrong? Lectonar 09:37, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

  • managed to fix it (it had to be reinserted at the bottom), but I still don't understand why it disappeared...Lectonar

Dogi nomination.

Somewhere, I messed up and it says PageName instead of "Dogi". I don't see how to edit.

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Vfd

I just noticed that SuperDude115 (talk · contributions) has created Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Vfd as a redirect to Deletion policy. Clicking on its "What links here" link, it seems that Template:vfd links to it. The template doesn't seem to be broken, though. I'm not familiar with the innards of templates -- is this going to have problematic side effects? FreplySpang (talk) 02:18, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Template:Vfd only links to Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Vfd because it uses the {{PAGENAME}} special form to automagically generate the link to the vfd discussion. If Template:Vfd were itself nonsensically vfd'd (instead of being put on TFD, where it would "belong" if it were being nominated in good faith), its deletion discussion would be held at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Vfd. —Korath (Talk) 12:29, Apr 17, 2005 (UTC)
I see, thanks. It got speedied last night (I think by Mikkalai), making this conversation even more academic. FreplySpang (talk) 14:16, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The VfD "process"

I have been thinking about the exclusion of GRider from VfD. I think that was a wrong thing to do, not because I share his views on the inclusion of schools, which I very much do, but because I can't help feeling that there should have been a better way to handle him but that people didn't want to. Factionalism doesn't do any good for Wikipedia. Admins vs nonadmins, inclusionists vs deletionists, good editors vs trolls, none of it aids the process of building a great encyclopaedia, which I firmly believe that both sides in all three of those disputes generally do aim for (or, at least, if I don't believe it, I am prepared to accept in in good faith). I know this has been said before but I wanted to say it too.

VfD is particularly unhelpful. It has become Wikipedia's premier battleground. It's far too tempting for hotheaded or conflict-loving editors. Other people's reasons for wanting things in or out often are stupid! We feel that and we can't help saying it.

Those who complain about "disrespecting the VfD process" are missing the point. The "process" is worthy of contempt! It makes people angry, is the scene of the worst kinds of trolling, achieves nothing.

Why list schools over and over? Is it because we want to have the same conflict every day? The issue cannot be resolved. Let's all admit that. Let's all agree that neither side can win. We can have votes, surveys, dictates from Jimbo and we will still have people who think schools should be in and people who think they should be out.

It would probably be better if we didn't have VfD. Much better not to have a "process" that invites conflict (and better not to indulge ourselves in the contradiction that we say that we have VfD to involve the community in the decision and give it a wider say but attack editors for soliciting wider support for their views! How else are we supposed to get each other's help to achieve what we think is right if we do not put messages on talk pages?). Better to put a notice on the talk page of an offending article saying I will delete this in three days if no one objects and take silence for consensus. That is how this place is supposed to work! If something is then deleted, it can be re-created. Fighting over it doesn't resolve anything.

But I am not proposing the end of our beloved VfD. Where would the demagogues among us strut their stuff without metapages that are all about strutting your stuff? I am not proposing anything. Just talking.

It would though probably be a good idea to say right, here's a list of everyone who is always for schools to be included, and here's another of those who are always against. No need for templates. No need to spam one another for support. The factions can vote once and leave the issue. Why not? Why must we vote over and over and over, until editors like GRider, well meaning, I believe, very much behind the goals of Wikipedia, are driven to distraction and do stupid things?Grace Note 03:44, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

While this wasn't really your main point, I think it's safe to say that the schools issue is part of the larger question of stubs. Most of the school articles nominated for deletion are dreadful; and a well-written school article would be a great thing. Except for a few hotheads, I think everyone would agree with both of those statements. The argument of the inclusionists is that having the stubs there, no matter how weak, will stimulate future good articles, while the deletionists think they're just cluttering up the encyclopedia and very few of them will every go anywhere. This is the same argument we've had about rock bands, songs, biographies, web comics, chemicals, and more. —Wahoofive | Talk 04:19, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)


I would disagree with your second point--many users argue that school articles, no matter how well-written or substantial, are simply not encyclopedic. If you ask me, it's an entirely different debate--over whether they're an appropriate topic. For rock bands, biographies, and webcomics, we've managed to come up with criteria that most people can agree on (Allmusic coverage, for example, or Alexa rankings). But those are all things where everyone agrees that some of them are notable.
Basically, everyone thinks we should include The Beatles. Not everyone is so sure about particular garage bands, but there's a broad range of notability, with many band distributed fairly evenly across it. For schools, OTOH, there's no sliding scale of this sort. Obviously, the Beatles> Local H> my brother's garage band. But it's not nearly so clear what makes a particular school notable and another one non-notable. With a few exceptions (Andover), all high schools have the same notability. Some people want them in, some don't. There's almost no room for compromise, but one will be needed. A shame most of the discussion seems to be going nowhere. Meelar (talk) 04:27, Apr 18, 2005 (UTC)
I probably don't have a place in this controversy, but I just wanted to make a quick comment. VFD serves as a place for discussion, and lets not forget that. I hope no one would prefer we just end it and expand the speedy deletion criteria (as that's probably the only option). The idea is consensus, which will never be reached in an isolated fight between some random admin and an article's author. I think it's constantly bringing up the politics of the situation that taints it for users like you. I frequent the VFD only to nominate dicdefs and obvious vanity (both of which can only be dealt with by vfd), and to see if I can propose a sensible redir or merge. Those who slander vfd because of a minor gripe (which the school conflict really is, just blown out of proportion) should imagine a WP without it. Why can't we just come up with a policy decision, or, lacking that, get back to real contributions rather than rehashing persistent conflicts? --Dmcdevit 04:39, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I do imagine a WP without VfD. It would be vastly improved. There are plenty of ways, existing and potential, of getting rid of articles that truly don't have a place here. The school conflict is not a "minor gripe". It is the battleground between two fiercely opposed viewpoints, which cannot easily be reconciled, and do not permit a consensus. It is not solely a distinction between "schools out" and "schools in" but between "selective" and "comprehensive". Each position is a sensible, reasonable standpoint. You can read any number of well-argued views on either side. Meelar, above, is just one of the editors whose views I don't share but whose description of the issues is very understandable and very acceptable. Any policy decision that settled the issue would seriously upset one of the factions, and people care a great deal about it.
I'm not seeking to rehash a persistent conflict though. I'm sorry you thought I was. I'd rather it was settled. Two lists, one of each side and be done with it. Allow VfD to be used for discussing dictdefs and the like, not flaming each other. Grace Note 05:52, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I don't think the school issue is quite as polarized as it may sometimes seem. Personally I usually stay out of votes on schools because I don't like the discussion, and I bet a lot of other people do too. I voted "keep" on an Australian school a while ago, where somebody (Capitalistroadster?) had expanded it to include quite a bit on the history and on what made it distinct. Most "X school is a school in Y" type stubs are worthless, and most school articles which only include info of an ephemeral character ("was 2002 ranked 76th in Mathematics in Z Province") are of dubious value. If somebody writes something about the history of a school that demonstrates some individuality and shows it to be of of at least regional significance, and the school has a history of a century or more, I am all for keeping it. But in fact, most of the persistent "keep" or "delete" votes are equally stupid and normally I would avoid these discussions. What about banning all inclusionist or deletionist extremists from voting on schools? / Tupsharru 06:54, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Do they not have POVs that should be listened to?Grace Note 06:58, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'd say Tupsharru is supporting my argument, which is that a majority of Wikipedians are not dogmatic on the schools issue (or anything else) and there are only a handful of extremists on both sides. Most people vote to keep pages with a lot of (undisputed) content, regardless of the triviality of the subject, so if all these high schools had substantial articles they'd get solid consensus to keep. These issues are still important, though, in addition to the philosophical question that GraceNote brought up:
  • The volume of school nominations, and the ever-increasing intensity of the partisans on both sides, is cluttering up VfD and turning people off from voting (or even reading VfD).
  • Unlike some piece of Pokemoncruft, the info in a school article will have a tendency to become obsolete, so even if some well-meaning inclusionist goes to the school's website and gathers a bunch of info, who's going to maintain it? (and school websites aren't that reliable or up-to-date themselves).
Maybe the philosophical debate isn't about selective vs. comprehensive so much as about topics of local vs. international interest. Many schools have interesting projects, curricular approaches (especially charter schools and the like), and so on which are of great interest to the local community, but no one 3,000 miles away is going to be interested. —Wahoofive | Talk 18:45, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The new VfD footer

The new VfD footer seems to be buggy. On Mozilla Firefox, it shows up all OK, but on Micro$oft Internal Exploder, the "I" and "II" boxes have black background, making the text invisible. If this were the other way around, I'd file a bug in the Mozilla project Bugzilla, but with Micro$oft, I'd probably have to pay thousands of Euros for tech support. — JIP | Talk 06:41, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think it's a problem with how IE interprets RGB colour values - fixed now. sjorford →•← 19:53, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I can verify that the new version works. Thanks. — JIP | Talk 06:25, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Easy?

I just posted my first VfD, so maybe my feedback is interesting as a first user experience.

  1. Coming from Wikipedia:Template_messages/Deletion, i simply inserted the template. I wasn't aware that i had to read the footer section first. So maybe that page should be adapted to the new process.
  2. When I finally found the footer, i was really impressed with the nice layout. The technical description is well done. However, i think the process could be much easier. It requires several repeated, detailed actions. Couldn't this be avoided?
    1. Could page name come from the template, which could take it from the original page?
    2. If the template contained a link to a (already existing?) "VfD" category, wouldn't that eliminate all of step III?
    3. Why is it necessary to create a new page in step II? Couldn't we just use the article's talk page?

Or is it intentional that we don't want to make VfD too easy? Sebastian (talk) 23:08, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC)

Comments from Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Templates for deletion

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Templates for deletion developed a side conversation about VFD policy in a section labeled "Comments," which I am boldly moving here.

  • I'm putting together an RFC on Xiong at the moment. I'll update this note when it's open for comment. Please feel free to invalidate this VFD, but don't delete this page. Thanks. -- Netoholic @ 06:59, 2005 Apr 19 (UTC)
Is this the place to make such comments? People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. The gentleman with the axe to grind is in arbitration and under temporary injunction. — Xiong熊talk 13:40, 2005 Apr 19 (UTC)
The gentleman with the axe being ground against him would do well to pay attention to other peoples' views of his behavior. --Carnildo 21:52, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Fortunately, the gentleman's opinion is not unanimous. — Xiong熊talk 00:50, 2005 Apr 20 (UTC)

The outcome of this vote seems pretty clear, and I don't think that we need to entertain this nomination much longer. Any objections if I move the VfD notice to TFD's talk page rather than the main page? -Frazzydee|✍ 23:53, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I agree that the eventual outcome is not in much doubt, but you seem to desire to abort the VfD process before its time. I'm not against that, but it does seem to set a precedent: good common sense should not be a slave to Somebody's literal interpretation of maniupulated policy.
If I can get just one wholehearted endorsement of that, I'll not only remove my every objection to the page, the tag, and the TfD process as a whole -- I'll eat my hat, apologize most sincerely to all. But of course, that preference of good sense over gamesmanship has to remain. What we do has to work -- we can't simply run amok, editing policy left and right to amuse ourselves from moment to moment -- and on the other hand, we have to be open to interpreting policy in whatever way best gets the job done -- fairly and squarely. Who could object to that? — Xiong熊talk 06:31, 2005 Apr 23 (UTC)
I'm not suggesting that we should end this prematurely for this reason (although it might be ended prematurely on the grounds that it is out of VfD's juridiction). I'm asking if the notice can be moved to TfD's talk page...it looks a bit ugly. -Frazzydee|✍ 23:50, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Now that is another way to resolve the matter. Does VfD process have any jurisdiction over Wikipediaspace? If not, who? Either some process has jurisdiction, or all Wikipediaspace pages are immortal. Which is it? Please, no vague calls for consensus on Talk.
As for the tag: Which is it? What is the rule? Whatever it is, I think it should be followed faithfully. Here are the choices, basically, that I can imagine in a rational world:
  • Pages -- of whatever nature -- nominated for deletion are invariably tagged on their main bodies.
  • Pages -- of whatever nature -- nominated for deletion are invariably tagged on their associated Talk page bodies.
  • (or my personal favorite) Pages nominated for deletion may be tagged either way -- but if an objection is raised to tagging on the main body by a defender of the page, then the tag must be moved to Talk. The assumption is that if a defender objects, he must know about the tag; therefore, he need not be further notified, and we can depend on him to rustle up all the support he thinks he needs in the upcoming debate.
I've explained this at length, and I will attempt to explain again, very briefly: To tag a page for deletion is to strangle it without process. The effect is to immediately deprecate the page. This is evil. Offsetting this is the need to notify interested parties. In some cases, the evil outweighs the good. That's why good common sense should rule, and -- as innocent until proven guilty is a bedrock principle -- any move from page to Talk page should be respected.
In the case of templates, tagging may be actually destructive -- the template simply fails to work properly with a tag stuck on top of the code. But all tags for deletion should follow the same commonsense rule. — Xiong熊talk 01:02, 2005 Apr 24 (UTC)
Yes, VfD has some sort of "jurisdiction" (if you want to call it that way) on the Wikipedia namespace, but trying to delete a project page on VfD almost never works. Older pages which don't mean anything anymore tend to be marked {{historical}} instead of being deleted. Only maliciously created Wikipedia: pages end up being deleted, and even then it can be controversial.
The reason the tagging is not done on the talk page is to attract attention to the debate. Else, the interested parties have a lot less chance of noticing (not everyone reads the massive VfD every day). That is the case with templates too (as a user of Template:usercomment, I of course liked to know it happened to end up on TfD!). This is also the reason why tags like {{merge}} and {{cleanup}} almost always go to the article, despite some misguided souls desiring for them to be put on the talk pages only.
This discussion has gotten really offtopic.
--cesarb 01:32, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Oh, it does? Sorry then, it would've been wrong to remove the vfd notice. I thought VfD was only for articles. My apologies. -Frazzydee|✍ 19:02, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
As I understand it VfD has jusisdiction over anything that is not within the remit of another deletion process
  • WP:TFD covers everything in the Template: namespace
  • WP:CFD covers categories
  • WP:RFD covers redirects
  • WP:IFD covers images and "other media" (I presume this relates to sound files and the like)
so if what you want to nominate for deletion isn't covered by one of the above, then it goes on VfD. Userspace is controversial, but it seems to be consensus that the proper place for debate on anything in user namespace is VfD. Thryduulf 19:43, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • In response to the above - yes, VfD has the authority to delete anything; that's the whole point. The other *FD pages were created to alleviate the load, and because different criteria apply there - most RFDs are a matter of procedure, and different people want to read CFDs. So it's a matter of organization.
  • "To tag a page for deletion is to strangle it without process." is an obvious falsehood, because there is the five-day grace period for voting, and it requires a strong consensus to delete anything.
  • And we do not in general prematurely end deletion discussions (with the exception of them being superseded by Speedy'ing) - not because we're sticklers for policy, but because (assuming the nomination was made in good faith, and it is policy to assume such) it is worthy of discussion. A speedy-keep mechanism was voted down as too easily abusable. If an article is an obvious keep, well, it will look a bit ugly for five days but that's all. Radiant_* 13:59, Apr 25, 2005 (UTC)
  • In my experience, adding a VfD nomination to a borderline page often results in a dramatic improvement—not premature deprecation and strangulation. The VfD tag definitely belongs on the main body of the article, because that is where it is most likely to be seen by interested parties. Moving it to the article's Talk page is going to make deletion more likely, because fewer people will realize the article is up for deletion. Putting up with a template on an article for five days is not an unbearable burden, is it? --TenOfAllTrades (talk/contrib) 18:07, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Renominations

What is the procedure for relisting something that had a VfD process in the past? The old page is still there; should it be renamed or what? Sorry if this is stated somewhere, but I can't find it. --Zero 14:00, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

  • It's never really been written down but the guiding principle is to preserve the old discussion as cleanly as possible. Here is my preferred process:
    1. Tag the article with {{subst:vfd}}
    2. When you see that the subst has created a bluelink reading "this article's entry" instead of a redlink, edit the article a second time. Manually change the link from [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/{{PAGENAME}}|this article's entry]] to [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/{{PAGENAME}} (2nd nomination)|this article's entry]].
    3. Now follow the link and state your reason(s) for nominating the article. Make sure you also mention the prior discussion and provide a link to it.
    4. When you create the entry on the VfD page, you must make sure that the transclusion link points to the new discussion. Depending on which set of instructions you follow from the VfD footer, that may mean two edits in order to point the link to the PAGENAME (2nd nomination) page.
      Rossami (talk) 16:42, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
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