User:Stifle/Delete unless cleaned up

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Just to be clear: this page is not a Wikipedia policy of any sort. Just my opinion.

I don't like the use of "Keep and cleanup" when it appears on AFD discussions.

It usually means that the person making that vote believes that the article in its current state should not be on Wikipedia, but that if somebody cleaned it up, expanded it, made it longer, made it NPOV, removed spam links, etc. etc., that they would then think it should be kept.

The problem with this is simple. Who's going to clean it up? At the time of my last update to this page (May 2008), there was a backlog at Category:Cleanup by month to June 2006, and a total of over thirty-two thousand articles tagged for cleanup, and that's just {{cleanup}}, {{cleanup-section}}, and {{cleanup-date}}. There's over a dozen other cleanup-type categories.

The net effect of "keep and cleanup" is that the article gets kept, tagged for cleanup and then generally ignored and remaining in its unencyclopaedic state.

As a result, I vote, and recommend, the use of "Delete unless cleaned up", "Delete unless expanded", etc. — if somebody cares enough about the article to have it kept, then they will generally fix it up during the AFD vote, which is five days long, and drop me a line on my talk page to ask me to have another look.

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