Wikipedia talk:Countdown deletion/JRM's preemptive rebuttals to obvious objections

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] JRM's preemptive rebuttals to obvious objections

These are just my personal ideas on common objections and the replies to them. This doesn't mean my answers are necessarily right, and the proposal is of course still editable.

• What if people use sockpuppets to get around the single-user-editing policy?

Sockpuppeteering is, as always, illegal. This policy is not meant to keep out dedicated trolls and vandals, only to lighten the load of VfD.

• Shouldn't we make a difference between registered and unregistered users somewhere?

Traditionally, we have been very careful to make such distinctions only when absolutely necessary, to keep the wiki as open and accessible as possible. Anons may be disallowed from voting if there is enough concern—they can still improve the article, which is the proper way of dealing with it anyway.

• Aren't inclusionists just always going to vote Improved at the end? Aren't deletionists always going to vote Not improved? Why is this different from preliminary deletion?

Because it's embedded in much more obvious criteria. Whether or not an article has been improved since it was created is much easier to judge (and much more likely to be judged fairly) than whether an article should be kept according to your interpretation of current policy. No deletion policy can ever fully protect against zealots from either side, but this one is much less controversial. We all know good articles when we see them. Only the most dishonest of inclusionists would vote Improved for an article that's clearly still crap. Only the most dishonest of deletionists would vote Not improved just to get an article out that people are honestly improving. This is the baseline; if you can't keep people honest here, forget about any other deletion policy.

• According to this, a countdown delete will always take either seven or ten days. That's way longer than even most VfDs. Isn't this just going to be an even bigger burden?

No, for two reasons. The first week has to be spent on improving the article. In the case of advertising, hoaxes, obvious vanity and unexpandable substubs, the article is unlikely to ever be edited again and will get deleted painlessly. You can just look at it, shrug, and move on, no resources wasted. In the case of political speech, what could be better than NPOVing it? If you can't, then leave it alone—if everyone does because it's beyond saving, then again, no resources wasted.

Second, see above: after the vote, the article is either definitely deleted if we all agree that no improvement has taken place, or there is at least some improvement and deletion (or even a VfD listing) is by no means certain. In both cases, there is definite progress. VfD listings can just be navel-gazed to death without anyone lifting a finger to do something constructive for the offending article.

• I see a problem with the editing rule. Some cases of vandalism aren't clear. Is a revert war vandalism? What if, after the revert war, the article's still the same? Is it deleted?

This is actually part of the vandalism policies. In general, you should not revert anything that, assuming good faith, isn't clear vandalism (just because someone writes something you don't consider an improvement, that's no reason for wholesale reverting). That goes double for articles on countdown: reverting to the original with the explicit goal of getting the article to fail countdown, rather than helping to improve it, is a Very Bad thing to do. You better have a damn good reason for reverting things on countdown, or the admins are gonna come-a gunnin' for ya. JRM 00:28, 2004 Nov 8 (UTC)