Wikipedia talk:Requests for deletion

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Too many people have been abusing vfd. It was okay, while we had too few admins, but now that there are over 100 active ones, a simpler system is called for.

Everything about the article should be discussed in one place: the article's talk page. If you want it deleted, merged, improved, or whatever: just discuss it there - instead of hiding the discussion on some power-tripping, hard to read, listed-by-date-only, cumbersome den of disruption! Uncle Ed 19:53, August 1, 2005 (UTC)

So we should instead discuss deletion in the place where only the authors, who have a self-proclaimed interest in keeping their poorly written POV-laden pieces of promotional crap will see them? Even a category list won't fit everything listed on VfD on a single page. How the hell is this supposed to work? -- Cyrius|✎ 21:58, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Actually, if a m:DynamicPageList was used, it would be easy to get everything on one page. Dan100 (Talk) 07:11, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Untrue--you would still only have lists of article titles that were nominated, with no idea as to the reasoning or argument. To participate, you would have to click on 100+ links daily, rather than quickly skimming through Vfd. Meelar (talk) 17:55, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
What's wrong with templates? I started using them on my other MediaWiki encyclopedia website. You can place a discussion on two pages at once, by turning it into a template and starting it with a header. Then you get an "edit" link on the right side of the page which goes directly to the template. And the finished product appears in both places. In fact, in any number of places. Uncle Ed 01:23, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
I've been wanting such a "multiple places at once" feature for quite a while; its generically useful for user talk pages, related article discussions, etc. So where is this thing? How about an example of how to use it? linas 23:44, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
It's quite simple. As for an example, check out the WP:VFD page, if it's still around. Its structure uses them everywhere. For example, see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 August 4. Look in the source by clicking edit. If you want an unrelated example, consider the just-created User:Superm401/MultLoc. The text on that page is meaningless, but note the section heading. The whole page is included at User:Superm401/MultLocTest1 and User:Superm401/MultLocTest2. The edit link is available at both pages. To include the page, all I had to do was put {{User:Superm401/MultLoc}} where I wanted it to show up. Check out the page's source if you want to see for yourself. Superm401 | Talk 01:21, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] An inspiring post on wikien-l

This was from David Gerard [1]

VFD performs a useful function about as damagingly as it could possibly be performed. It's being used as a substitute for cleanup, wikify, and copyvio. It's being used to push agendas of all sorts. It's constantly creating increased animosity between editors.

The VFD regulars are openly hostile to non-regulars. One of the arguments against breaking up VFD from the all-on-one-page to day pages a couple of months ago was that it would attract too many people to vote if the pages were more usable! I mean, what the fuck?

VFD the idea is one thing. VFD the present reality is pathological. More rules on it won't fix it - it needs to be taken out and shot.


MOTION: That while VFD nominally performs a useful function in clearing crap out of Wikipedia, its current operation and subcommunity is so pathological and damaging to the Wikipedia community that it should be removed entirely. Remove it completely. Then talk and think how to come up with something that works without becoming an engine for rancor.


Sorry, but it's not "inspiring". It's all been said before. It would be useful if people would propose an alternative solution that might actually work instead of vandalizing the site and inciting others to do so by carrying on the inclusionist "VfD is broken" claims. Angela. 21:29, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
Well I did propose If you need a page deleted, add the Category:Delete tag to it, and present your reasons for wanting it removed on the article's discussion page. Did you think that wouldn't work? Uncle Ed 21:56, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
There are roughly 725 articles on VfD right now. Nearly all of them need to be killed with a very large axe (to borrow a David Gerard-ism. A category page will only display 200 articles, and cannot be ordered chronologically. There is no way of knowing whether something is newly-listed, or whether its 5 days are up and it needs evaluation without going through and checking each and every single one individually. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:03, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
This could be done with a m:DynamicPageList Dan100 (Talk) 07:40, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Without supporting the proposal (for reasons that I will raise elsewhere) the category can be sorted by using a tag with a sort key like [[:Category:Delete|2005-08-01]] using the ISO format date. When was the voting period reduced from 7 days? Anything less is far too short for people whose habits restrict their editing to one specified night of the week. Every item SHOULD be chcked individually without your proposed shortcut. Eclecticology 00:26:23, 2005-08-02 (UTC)
Can our template system do this automagically? i.e. could a template that was as simple to include as "{{rfd}}" instantiate into containing something like "[[:Category:Delete|2005-08-01]]" ..? --Stormie 01:20, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
If it can't do it today, let's ask the MediaWiki programmers to change it. It's not a very complicated change; I bet Magnus or Tim could knock it out in much less time than this vfd rfc debate has taken any one of us! Uncle Ed 01:27, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
Looks like we probably can, by using templates such as {{CURRENTDAY}} inside the template. Here is a test: 2007-03-30. (source: "{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}") --Stormie 02:29, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
As I understand, this would only cause them to be sorted by date; it wouldn't actually display the dates. Not what we want. Nickptar 02:24, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
How about [[:Category:Delete 2005-08-01]], so we'd have one category per day? --Stormie 02:29, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
Well, it inspired Ed ... um. If I had a point with any freshness to it, it was not merely that the current mechanism is broken, but that it's actively poisonous to the Wikipedia community, to a degree that should not be tolerated - David Gerard 23:45, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
I am pleased to note that Angela's deletion tidbits page includes a quote from the infamous Louis Kyu Won Ryu, and that it matches nearly verbatim some similar nonsense I was spouting just a few hours ago. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 02:01, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Don't change the ballots

Somebody changed the title of the subheading from "agree with deleting vfd" to something else. This is improper, as Angela pointed out.

Shall I revert to the version before this change, or just undo the change itself?

And was this a sneaky ploy to discredit the whole idea, or what? I'd rather assume it was an error, like the one made by the guy who deleted category:Delete and then 'fessed up to the mistake. I really want to assume good faith. Uncle Ed 21:23, August 1, 2005 (UTC)

Call 'em "rough count". This isn't a vote (one of the problems with vfd) - David Gerard 23:45, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Support for deleting vfd has dropped to 47% - maybe my perception of consensus was flawed after all. Should we undelete the page now, or what? Uncle Ed 19:11, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

Lol :-). Mind you, I expect a lot of the antis are members of the "subcommunity", named above... Dan100 (Talk) 07:13, August 3, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] The butt-simple option

I'd like to propose the following as the butt-simple option. The goals are fourfold:

  1. Involve contributors in voting directly, by placing it on the talk page.
  2. Hold the instruction creep to a bare minimum. Users who want to nominate an article for deletion should not have to do any more than add one template with a reason for deletion.
  3. Keep the voting system simple: set out an initial state (from the template) which encourages voters to vote properly, and permit anyone to clean up invalid votes.
  4. Deter suspicions (unfounded or not) of administrator abuse by allowing only uninvolved administrators to close a vote for deletion.

The proposal is as follows:

  1. Article needs to be deleted? Put {{subst:d|reason}} on its talk page. This substitutes in a template which includes:
    • Your stated reason (required),
    • The current date,
    • The date 7 days from now (the target delete date),
    • A category tag based on the target delete date,
    • Three empty subsections: Keep, Delete, and Comments.
  2. Stated reasons must allege that the article fits some deletion criterion. Anyone may remove a deletion nomination which fails to allege this. (E.g. if the stated reason is "the article is ugly" and that's not a deletion criterion, the template and all responses to it may be removed.)
  3. People place votes in the subsections created by the template substitution. Ideally, they use numbered lists in a way that the numbering always reflects the vote count. If anyone makes a non-vote (e.g. a Transwiki or Cleanup "vote", or a sock-puppet "vote") in a vote section, anyone may move that non-vote to the Comments section.
  4. On the target delete date, an uninvolved administrator may close the deletion and, if there is a sufficient majority to do so, delete the article. An uninvolved administrator means one who has not:
    • Proposed the deletion;
    • Voted on the deletion or attempted to influence others' vote; or
    • Edited the article in the past month.

Thoughts? --FOo 07:15, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Rename it, and it will kick butt! Uncle Ed 16:58, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Hell no! No centralized location for viewing the deletion debates--it's a deal-killer. To find out what articles are up for deletion, I would have to go through and click every single article in a category (approx. 100 per day or more). Debates would be far less transparent and attract even less participation than before. Meelar (talk) 17:10, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Placing all the deletion discussions on one page is what makes VfD unworkably huge and unwieldy. I take "the problem with VfD" to be threefold: it's huge and unwieldy; it's developed instruction creep; and it's become too hostile and difficult for many people to participate in. I can't promise a solution to the third problem, but the other two are fixable. I think that moving deletion to the talk pages will do a great deal more to bring in people who watch the articles but can't follow one big VfD, which should do something for the hostility and difficulty of participation. --FOo 17:37, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
And it will systematically exclude all those who aren't watching those articles. This will make it impossible for users to monitor what's getting deleted and what isn't unless they have those pages on their watchlist before they get nominated. That, to me, is unaccpetable. Meelar (talk) 17:55, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
I'm afraid I don't honestly see what this changes, apart from reducing the VfD-nomination process to 1 step from 3. That might itself be a good idea, but this is not the reason (I presume) that User:Ed Poor decided VfD "doesn't work". I see no difference between having the debate on a talk page and getting there from a category, and having it on a subpage of VfD and getting there from the article. It's just cosmetics. Categories have no time structure, and I'd have to remember which ones were yesterday's/today's so I knew which section of the cat was sensible to look under. Along the way, this proposal extends the bloodshed to 7 days, when nothing much ever happens after the first 3. Having a specific recommendation that an "uninvolved" admin/editor close the debate is sensible, however, and would occasionally avoid problems. We'd have to work on the criteria for non-involved, but something could be agreed, I'm sure. -Splash
Whoa, slow down a little! :) "Categories have no time structure", but we can easily make a separate category for each day's worth of deletion nominations, just as we now have a separate subpage. So the ones nominated today are in Category:Deletion nominations closing 2005-08-10 or whatever. (The date is the target deletion date, the date the article will get deleted if the vote is in favor of that action.) The deletion template gets changed every day to point to the new category, and the category tag gets stripped from the article when the deletion vote is closed.
The number of days for which a deletion vote takes place is of course arbitrarily adjustable. Three seems too short to me, since it means someone could come back from a three-day weekend to find stuff unexpectedly deleted. Seven may be too long -- five?
The "uninvolved administrator" bit is really intended to close off complaints about administrator bias. I don't believe that administrators abuse their powers to further their biases except very rarely, but I recognize that some other community members do believe so. I'd rather encourage trust. It looks bad for the same person to nominate for deletion, vote, advocate deletion, and then close the vote and delete the article. In order to avoid credible accusations of bias, administrative actions such as deleting an article need to be clearly and visibly above such accusations. --FOo 17:37, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Time structure. Yes, we could do that, but then we really are reinventing the wheel we already have. The differences would just be cosmetic. A category-per-day, rather than a subpage-per-day, and a talk page-per-debate rather than a subpage-per-debate. I am not too clear on what part of the problem the category suggestion seeks to solve.
Five days is the current length of the VfD process (formally, anyway). I think that 3 days is too short, as you say, and was using it to illustrate why I think an extension beyond 5 days is probably not necessary.
I think the RfC that spawned this discussion rests on the question of 'deliberate interpretation' by an involved admin in several of the specific cases under question. This idea would ensure that 'justice is done and seen to be done', because there is a clear way of knowing whether or not it has, in fact, been done. -Splash 18:00, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

I am employed at another wiki. (Yes, someone actually pays me to be their Technical Consultant on how to set up and use a wiki for collaborative development of important documents!)

While there, I figured out a way to use templates to handle lists. If anyone is interested, I'll document this at Help:templates and lists. Uncle Ed 17:50, August 3, 2005 (UTC)

  • By putting the reasons for deletion on the talk page, wouldn't we eliminate the record of the debate when the result is "delete"? How does that help justice to be seen to be done? Robert A West 17:57, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
    Good point! I suggest that the administrator who closes the vote should put the record on some sort of deletion log. --FOo 19:07, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
  • My big problem with this is: author creates a vanity page, editor puts a delete on it, author goes back and removes the delete. Edit war. At least with VFD the deletion goes on a deletion page. --Outlander 16:08, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
    • Much of the time this won't happen. (Lots of vanity pages are created just to have been in WP; vanity creators have commented on VfD that they were suprised to get five days.) Often when it does happen, it can be settled like any other edit conflict, on the talk page. (This is why I like wiping out a page by redirection (to their school, for instance); anybody who can remove a redirect knows about talk pages.) There will be a remainder where that doesn't work; take those to VfD. VfD would be working if it were only used for extreme cases. Septentrionalis 16:32, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
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