Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion/March 2005 Part Three

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Contents

VFD into a list of day links

As per the above discussion (did anyone at all actually object to day links?), I'll be making WP:VFD into a list of day links probably during the day (UTC) on Sunday 13 March 2005. Wikipedia:Votes for deletion (full list) (or WP:VFDF) will be the full list with all day pages transcluded for a multi-megabyte monster page. I've left notes on Wikipedia talk:Bots, User talk:AllyUnion and User talk:VFD Bot about the change - David Gerard 09:39, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • Yes, I objected above. This has been proposed before and rejected every time. Please do not make this change until you have a lot more support. Rossami (talk) 18:35, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Suggested small change to the vfd template

Could the template be changed so that when it is added to a page, the link you click on to take you to the main vfd page to list it takes you to the current days log only? It'd make the process slightly faster.--nixie 00:06, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

You're talking about the template that goes on the top of the page being nominated for deletion, right? Changing the link to the day-page would shave a step or two off the nomination process but it would make it even more likely that subsequent readers - users who are often new to the VfD process - will fail to see the instructions and guidelines at the top of the main VfD page. Rossami (talk) 02:41, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
It could link to Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/Today, which has all the VFD headers and footers wrapped around the current day's listings. sjorford →•← 09:34, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Closing the debates where the decision is to keep

Why does it take such a short time to close a debate when the decision is to delete and why does it take such a long time to close the debate when the decision is to keep. Examples:

Any look at the Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 March 1 will reveal a lot of debates (with a keep consensus) which are not being closed. Sjakkalle 10:25, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

{{sofixit}}. —Korath (Talk) 14:02, Mar 17, 2005 (UTC)
Take a good look at the list at WP:VFD/Old. FYI, 75 articles are nominated each day. Give some of the administrators a break, would you? It takes a lot of time to go through VFD crap. -- AllyUnion (talk) 14:05, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Learn the process and try to help out if you can. If you're not an administrator, you can still do everything except delete. That's what I'm doing (hopefully, my mistakes are minimal). If you're not part of the solution... --Deathphoenix 14:11, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I've helped out a little with closing VfD votes. Since I'm not an administrator, I can only help with the ones where the result was Keep or Merge, but these are the most time-consuming to deal with anyway, especially the merges. Anybody can help out with these, and it lets the admins focus on the delete cases, which require their admin powers. --BM 14:40, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

My apologies to the administrators, they are doing a great job. So it is alright for us normal people to take things which had a consensus to keep off the vfd list? OK, thank you. I thought that it was the administrators' privelege to pass final judgement. Sjakkalle 15:08, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm pretty new to helping out with the WP:VFD/Old pages, so I'll leave the advice to the more experienced folks, but I'm not an admin either. I've tried to help out with some of the hairier VfD votes, but I suggest that if you decide to help that you should work the clear consensus cases first (such as 10 keep and 1 delete), and leave the other ones for the more experienced people. --Deathphoenix 15:14, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

A couple further notes on this point. I've been closing a few of the "obvious" keep/merge/redirect votes as a non-admin, and I'm glad to help out. To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, I think it's usually a good idea not to close votes where you have voted or contributed to the VfD discussion. I would certainly shy away from VfD entries where you are the nominator or a major contributor to the article. --TenOfAllTrades | Talk 15:24, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Uh oh... I just took Interrail (my nomination) off the list, merged it with Inter Rail and converted Interrail to a redirect. Was this a good thing or am I about to be tagged as a vandal? Sjakkalle 15:26, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I think TenOfAllTrades has an excellent point. I would modify it slightly. I've implemented the Keep votes in the cases where I voted Delete. If you work on the ones where either you didn't take a position or you implement a decision contrary to the way you voted or the vote was essentially unanimous, I don't think anyone will accuse you of a conflict of interest. By the way, there is a fairly intricate procedure for doing it, just like nominating an article is intricate. I think it is described at Wikipedia:Deletion process. It is more than just removing the VfD tag from the article. You have to clean up the voting pages, and also add information to the article's Talk page about the vote. You won't be helping the admins if you don't follow that procedure. --BM 16:05, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Someone please remove the following links from /Old

Hi all, I'm having a helluva time trying to save any changes to the main WP:VFD page. Specifically, I'm trying to remove March 1, Feb 28, and Feb 27 from the /Old links because the discussions have closed on these pages. I've already tried to do this multiple times and I'm getting a little pissed. If someone else has better luck than me, please try and edit this. Thanks, --Deathphoenix 20:32, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • Done. Thanks, Korath. --Deathphoenix 00:34, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Request for comments.

Over at IFD there's a request for comments going on about what to do with unverified orphans (images that aren't used, and have no copyright or source information). If you have an opinion on the matter, perhaps you can help us build consensus on the matter. Thanks, – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 01:48, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)

Deletion at the end of transwiki

In a recent deletion discussion, an article was nominated for deletion after it had been successfully transwiki'd to Wiktionary. That discussion got a bit long. And since it really applies to multiple potential situations, it should probably be discussed here instead.

I believe that the instructions at m:transwiki are quite clear. The original article gets deleted at the end of the successful transwiki. It is, as Kappa said, a "move", not a "copy". I also believe that it is eligible for immediate deletion and does not require discussion on VfD because it is a reversible decision. History is preserved (assuming that it's been done right, anyway). Content is not being destroyed just because it has been moved to a different WikiMedia project. If the move turns out to have been controversial, it can be reversed by any editor by transwiking in the other direction (admittedly, a tedious manual process).

Some confusion may be occurring because WP:CSD rule A2 explicitly states that "Foreign language articles that already exist on another Wikimedia project, as a result of having been copied and pasted in to Wikipedia after their creation elsewhere, or as a result of having been moved via the transwiki system" are eligible for speedy deletion. When that clause was written, the only other WikiMedia projects were alternate languages. Wiktionary and its peers did not yet exist. If the clause were written today, I believe the words "foreign language" would not be included. I don't think there has been a press to change the wording, however, because there was wide understanding that the process description at m:transwiki took precedence.

Am I wrong in my understanding? Rossami (talk) 23:07, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • Transwiki is not legal and probably won't be legal until the edit history is copied over cleanly and automatically (like Special:Movepage does within a single wiki). Until this is fixed, nothing should be deleted speedily; even many deletions currently made after listing on IfD are illegal. -- Toby Bartels 21:19, 2005 Apr 10 (UTC)
    • Well, Jamesday posted the opinion that it "appears" to conflict with the law and he usually does good research. However, so far that is only one opinion. He posted it on 29 March 2005 and there has been neither endorsement nor contradiction so far. It did inspire me to read the statute. I'm not yet sure that I completely agree with his conclusion. There is a reasonable interpretation of the law and of GFDL that the appropriate definition of the "part of the work" to which derivative copyright applies is at the article-level, not the section-, sentence- or word-level. Under that argument, as long as we keep track of who contributed to the article, we are not obligated to track each edit. Further, the limits on liability section does seem to apply to the transwiki process. Now I'm not a lawyer and neither is Jamesday. Until someone who is a lawyer weighs in with a legal opinion, it is too strong a statement to say that "transwiki is not legal". Rossami (talk) 02:10, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
    • This claim has been repeated at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion. As I said there, the assertion that transwiki is not legal is not borne out by the vast number of non-wiki uses of the GFDL. See m:Talk:transwiki for details and further discussion. Uncle G 10:32, 2005 Apr 11 (UTC)
  • I believe that the intent of m:transwiki is that if the transwikiing editor decides to delete the article on the source project, it should be done through that source project's normal deletion process, whatever that is. (Not all projects even have a speedy/non-speedy split in their deletion processes.) In other words, it's the article itself that determines whether or not it is speedy deletable, not the fact that it has been through the transwiki process. After all, anyone can transwiki any article to any (GFDL) project. The exception, of course, should be articles that have already been through the normal deletion process, and the conclusion of that was "transwiki and delete". However, the fact that the Wikipedia deletion policies don't cover this case is one of a number of ways in which the transwiki process and the deletion process conflict. As I've mentioned before, there's actually a loop between the two, and in theory an article could circle it forever. See Category:Transwikied to Wiktionary for some ways in which these long-unaddressed problems are being addressed. Uncle G 11:02, 2005 Apr 11 (UTC)

"Ballot-stuffing" is fine

Given the huge size of VfD, and the fact that monitoring the page properly is virtually a full-time activity, contacting like-minded users to notify them of particular nominations is clearly an acceptable action. To verbiage "ballot-stuffing" should be reserved for sock puppets. Pcb21| Pete 21:38, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • I disagree. Block-voting is antithetical to the principles that Wikipedia is not a democracy| and "Votes for deletion is not really about voting". Concensus should be built based on facts, evidence, logic and clear references to the Wikipedia community standards (as codified in policy, precedent and tradition), not based on how many people you know. BAsed on the behaviors shown to date, I am okay with those who take the time to research and then denounce attempts to recruit for block-voting. (Though more civility is called for all around.) Rossami (talk) 03:15, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • Contacting like-minded users to notify them of particular nominations is just "not cricket." I see it as taking advantage of VfD's openness. It's akin to paying for one newspaper from a vending machine and then taking two. Just because the news vendor chooses not to prevent this from happening does not mean it's an admirable thing to do. But on the other hand it should not be called ballot-stuffing, because ballot-stuffing implies the illegal casting of forged or improper ballots. Organized bloc-voting in VfD is not against the rules, and as Wikipedia:Deletion guidelines for administrators points out, "If you think about it, how could you have "voting" in a group you can't count the participants of, and which anyone can join?" Dpbsmith (talk) 00:00, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • The term I prefer to use is vote garnering, and I think it should not be allowed. It subverts the vfd process and has a high chance of being abused. Imagine if I found a group of people who thought every article related to Pokemon should be kept, then notified them whenever an obscure pokemon character was nominated. Once again, Wikipedia is not a democracy|. Dave the Red (talk) 07:25, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)
  • Would this notion of ballot-stuffing include notifying a WikiProject of an article that is up for deletion and is in their scope? Courtland 13:53, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)
  • I think notifying people who might be interested in a particular VFD discussion is in itself an excellent idea. After all, all wikipedia contributors are permitted to give their opinion in the forming of a consensus. I think it would be far worse if people who would have liked to have contributed to a VFD discussion don't hear about it, and discover that the page they're interested in is suddenly gone! Kim Bruning 14:22, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • Something similar to this happened during a recent IfD vote. The two problems I had with that case were that the user spammed about 55 English Wikipedia user talk pages and about 9 French Wikipedia user talk pages (I think spamming is a bit naughty in itself and recent arbcom actions suggest that it can be against Wikipedia policy) and (more worrying) he only made an effort to contact those who he thought would be interested in deleting the image (because they had recently voted to delete a similar image). Some other person responded by contacting those who they thought were interested in keeping the image. I don't think this was a good solution because it meant even more spamming and it was still clearly an attempt to turn what should be a discussion on deletion, aimed at reaching consensus, into a race for votes that could only increase factionalism on Wikipedia.
  • We already have watchists built into Wikipedia, for those of us with logged-in accounts, and there is also Village pump for notices of community importance. User:violetriga has also produced a public watchlist system Wikipedia:Watch. These methods are much more community-minded alternatives to spamming. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 11:40, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • I have no problem with listing pages on a relevant wikiproject (e.g. WP:W). What I do have a problem with is spamming user's talk pages asking for a vote, and particularly spamming only talk pages of users expected to agree with oneself on a controversial issue. Radiant_* 15:16, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

Missing link?

Is there a link from the main Vfd page to Wikipedia:Aticles_for_deletion/The_mystery_of_Dewinter's_"unalloyed_Fascism"? I cannot find it. Something wrong here... Thanks. --Edcolins 22:04, Mar 26, 2005 (UTC)

There wasn't (as evidenced by the article's "What links here"). I've relisted it on today's page. —Korath (Talk) 22:21, Mar 26, 2005 (UTC)

I screwed up

Forgot to put the === subheader in the description for You Kicked My Dog, so it got merged with the previous entry (Noll Scott). Probably needs administrator intervention? Sorry! --Wahoofive 23:47, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I see from the page's history that you figured it out. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:33, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

No personal attacks reminder

In the light of the recent schools related votes seeing (accusations of) personal attacks flying in various directions, is it technically possible to insert large bold "Participants in Votes for Deletion debates are reminded not to engage in personal attacks" (or words to that effect) banner at the top of each VfD sub-page? I know a template could do it but if there is a way that we can do it without the need for any instruction creep? Thryduulf 22:33, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Policy consensus gets transcluded at the top of each subpage by VFD Bot, so that's probably the most practical place to put it. —Korath (Talk) 23:26, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)

Either were talking at cross purposes or the bot isn't working. I'm talking about the top of live VfD pages, e.g. (to take a random example) Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Brenda Dickson. Thryduulf 23:42, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • There is no easy way to do it under the current instructions. It could be added by hand or by template but that's instruction creep. It would also bloat the log pages and the VfD page even more than they already are. Can we bring the behavior under control with polite Personal attack deleted edits? Rossami (talk) 00:10, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • That would be ideal, but ideally it should be by someone who is not involved in the discussion. If we want a message at the top, I suppose VfD bot could be tasked with adding it to the top of each subpage when it compiles the hourly list or does its daily maintenance. To avoid log bloat it could be delted when the vote is closed, just replace {{vfd-npa}} with the standard this vote is now clsoed header. Thryduulf 08:13, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)