Wikipedia talk:Deletions and Openness

good points

Good points. I hate to be so negative but I want to give you a realistic view of what you are up against. We can start with #1 in section one.

"Rename "Articles for Deletion" to the title of "Articles For Discussion"." This is a Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals of sorts. Look through the 64 archived pages of Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_deletion and you will see this come up again, and again and again. One is: Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_deletion/Archive_53#Renaming_this_process_Articles_for_Discussion

So, after years of talking about naming the word "Deletion" to "Discussion" no one has agreed to change it, what chances does a newbie with no connections and networks have in changing it? none. I just don't think you are willing to commit the months it would take to even make this one small cosmetic change a reality. I don't think it is important enough to you to study all the arguments, and stroke all the egos, and build all the networks first, before even posting the proposal.

And that is the resistance you will have for just cosmetic change #1.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote "No man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age and country, and however powerful a man may be, it is hard for him to make his contemporaries share feelings and ideas which run counter to the general run of their hopes and desires."

Social Scientists have stated in research papers that Wikipedia is a bureaucracy. It is becoming more and more bureaucratic and closed everyday. One newbie with great ideas is not going to change this. Igottheconch (talk) 04:40, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Bummer, but thank you anyway, Igottheconch!. WP will change when User: Jimmy Wales wants it to change, or when the WP Foundation wants it to change, but in the meantime perhaps some incremental improvements can be made. I will look over the discussions you referenced. Sincerely, your friend, GeorgeLouis (talk) 05:15, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

• We don't want people nominating things just to have a discussion, as sometimes happens anyway, wasting everyone's time. They should discuss it on the talk page. Sending something to AFD should be the last option, never the first. And people that do drive-by tagging usually don't bother to explain what they see as the problem, or actually helping with the article, they just wasting everyone's time. You see tags that have been around for years, and simply ignored, they right up top, just messing up what the article looks like. The Wikipedia Foundation isn't likely to change things, since they haven't done so yet. And Wales actually makes more money when people give up on Wikipedia and start editing over at his Wikia instead. Dream Focus 15:23, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Several people point the finger at a founder or the foundation-- but is this really the answer? My instinct is that the foundation has been very attentive to the editor retention issue.

"And Wales actually makes more money when people give up on Wikipedia and start editing over at his Wikia instead." If this is true, then I'm sure the board takes appropriate steps to 'firewall' Jimmy from the decision if he really does have a conflict of interest. --HectorMoffet (talk) 19:43, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

After he created Wikia a very large number of articles started being deleted on Wikipedia for character pages and other things called "fancruft" by some. People who seek this information will find their way to the wikia. I created several wikis over there to preserve information being mindlessly destroyed from Wikipedia, as have others. You can go to http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Special:Export and export pages and their entire histories and easily import them over to Wikia. Plus editors who enjoy working on such articles, will be working at Wikia now. They drove them away from Wikipedia to the Wikia and elsewhere by mass destroying all the content they found interesting, not just deleting articles, but taking the ones that remained and removing all the "fancruft" from them to make them as short and boring and pointless as possible. How many people formerly came to Wikipedia to read content that is no longer there, that now go to Wikia instead? They previously had 2 million registered editors over there. User:Dream_Focus#Wikia_is_now_insanely_popular.21 Dream Focus 20:06, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

thank you for the invitation to post here.

I don't know if Wales is pushing people to Wikia deliberately. It is speculation. I don't know anything about the commitee. All I can speak to is the documented choices Wales has made here on Wikipedia.

Biography of Living Persons purges

In January 2010, a group of four or five long term established administrators decided to delete hundreds of biographical articles with no process.

The response was Jim Wales publicly personally thanking one of these administrators, Scott Macdonald for deleting these articles.

On the other hand, read through Jim Wales talk page. When the question arises, he continues to support bitey bulling veteran editors. He fosters these editors.

Evidence does not matter

Even if someone created a definitive link to Wales and editor retention, nothing would change.

Everytime editors cite a news article, scientific study, or does their own study on wikipedia, showing the way new editors are treated, it is severly criticized by certain established veteran editors then forgotten.

For example, several editors last year decided to do a study: they created fake new accounts and made new articles to see what would happen. These new fake accounts contributions were treated the same way you were HectorMoffet: like total shit. When the published their findings they were brutally attacked by editors who have a philophy that new contributions are shit (one editors pictures on his user page showed an Indian man climibing out of a sewer -- with a caption about new editor contributions).

Battles raged on several pages, and some of the moderate (weaker) members of this test backed down. The result? The page was archived and the findigs were ignored.

I don't have the desire to look up all the links, but if you are really interested in the history you can find it. I don't have the desire to spend more time giving more examples. Officially I have retired.

No "incremental improvements" can be made. isn't changing the name of a page an "incremental improvement"? Okip 23:25, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't say that the findings of wp:NEWT were totally ignored - Sue Gardner is one of the people who still refers to it. And we have appointed a very large number of wp:Autopatrolled accounts, so that's one of the recommendations at least partially enacted. Oh and though the EN community had a majority for stopping newbies even creating articles, the Foundation vetoed it. So yes there is a tension in the community between inclusionists and deletionists, but we are still managing to slowly grow the pedia. ϢereSpielChequers 00:07, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Comment

I have been asked by the creator to look over this. While I would agree we should be more friendly and helpful to all users, I think all the individual ideas here have been raised previously. I'm not convinced that there's anything new here worth looking at. I would suggest that the creator pick on one idea, and try to get consensus for that via the usual venues. For example, pick a warning template and start a discussion on the template talkpage on rewording it to be more friendly SilkTork ^{✔Tea time} 16:54, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

deletion and quality control

I'd take out the bit about deletion and quality control. Deletion isn't part of our quality control processes except perhaps re hoaxes and similar crap. We delete badfaith stuff, and we delete non-notable articles regardless of their quality. If anyone were to delete something for being poorly formatted or poorly worded it would be in breach of our deletion policies. If someone were to argue keep - well written on an article on my recipe for onion seed bread it would still get deleted because third party sauces don't compensate for a lack of third party sources. Personally I'd like to have SHOUTING as a deletion reason as I regard all Caps articles as too much trouble to salvage. But currently deletion and quality improvement are pretty much unrelated. ϢereSpielChequers 21:43, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Recommendations section

I would like to add more to this section, but don't feel I know enough to recommend solutions. I would contribute ideas if there a was section called brainstorming ideas, or some such. Maybe others would too. Ottawahitech (talk) 03:13, 15 March 2012 (UTC)