User:JzG/AfD
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I am often active in AfD votes, and have been known to nominate articles. Some people think this is good, others think it's bad. Here's the outline of my thinking on deletions in general:
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[edit] Above all...
Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopaedia. Not a fansite, free webhost, directory, blog or matchmaking service.
[edit] AfD is never bad
If an article is submitted to AfD in error, it won't get deleted. If it turns out to be a good subject, just very badly written, it will get correctly identified and tagged. AfD brings the problem page to the attention of highly-motivated Wikipedians and gets problems sorted out. It's a heads-up.
Yes, it might be the wrong process. But it's a process,and one which has a good track record of not deleting good content. Nobody has perfect judgment.
[edit] Attacking nominators is always bad
Remember, we always assume good faith (don't we?). If you think I (or anyone else) has misunderstood the process, please feel free to say so and to explain the basis for that feeling. But attacking the nominator of your pet article is very poor etiquette. If you can't make your case clearly and concisely in the AfD discussion, consider that maybe you are wrong. I have been wrong in the past, and have had at least one article on which I did a lot of work nominated. They were right, I toned it down a fair bit, merged the content with another article, cut a great chunk out, and the old one is gone.
Some people try to bully delete voters into changing their vote. This is bad. By all means add a comment to the AfD vote addressing the concernes raised by delete voters, but in the end if there is a consensus to delete you have to respect it. And if there isn't, why worry? No consensus is required for keep, it's the default.
[edit] A Vision Thing
I have some views about Wikipedia. My vision may be different from your vision. That is why the AfD process requires consensus, I guess, although that does mean that one vision is capable of overrriding a competing one by default (e.g. schools). I also believe that Wikipedia should strive to be grown-up. That which obsesses the adolescent male mind is rarely, if ever, remembered with anything other than acute embarrassment once the initial rush of hormones wears off.
[edit] Just the facts please ma'am
I sincerely believe that huge articles on imaginary people and objects have no place on Wikipedia. I am a long-standing fan of science-fiction, was an active wargamer and fantasy RPG participant in my youth, my kids play fantasy RPGs now. In my view very few mature adults are sufficiently obsessed with fantasy RPGs to write (or read) long articles on Wikipedia about them. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia.
WP is not Britannica, of course, but that does not mean we should eagerly espouse things which Britannica would never give even a passing mention. As far as I'm concerned hobbits deserve a short paragraph in the article on Lord of the Rings (an influential and important book), and nothing more. The facts about hobbits are that they are fictional creatures playing a pivotal role in Tolkein's fiction, that he describes them as small hominids living in burrows, human in most characteristics, and that the heroes of the books, Bilbo and Frodo baggins, are hobbits. Maybe a bit more, but not much. And that's for hobbits, a major character in probably the most influential fantasy books ever written. Don't expect me to vote to keep articles on minor characters in games which (if Dungeons and Dragons is anything to go by) will, in a few years time, be barely remembered outside a small fan base.
The same applies to extensive bios of fictional TV characters - and indeed to the shows themselves. Is it really sensible to have more detail on The O.C. than on Shakespeare?
[edit] Who the hell is (s)he?
I am also in favour of removing articles about people who have no claim to notability. That includes daytime local radio hosts, pointless celebrities, and of course band and personal vanity pages. I vote to delete these people. Moreover, I think the space devoted to many contemporary figures is vastly in excess of what can be defended. The article on Robert Hooke has, at time of writing, a shade over 1,000 words. The article on Katie Price (aka Jordan), famous mainly for her silicone-enhanced breasts, is over 900 words and (like her breasts, apparently) growing. Hooke was the father of microscopy, Jordan is the mother of two babies by different (though equally unimportant) fathers. Hooke rebuilt London after the Great Fire, Jordan rebuilt her tits after she found The Sun would pay her money to expose them. Hooke is remembered 300 years after his death, Jordan is barely remembered 30 seconds after you turn off the TV. Is this an encyclopaedia or Hello magazine? Come on, people!
[edit] Band vanity
WP:BIO and WP:MUSIC both require that a subject is notable. I interpret this as being notable beyond the immediate circle of friends of those involved. The reason is simple: most bands vanish without trace, never having left a mark. Sure, they might play the Cavern. Thousands of bands played the Cavern. Only one of them went on to be The Beatles. Some places (King Tut's for example) make a point of giving unsigned bands a gig. Only a tiny propoprtion go on to be notable, and those that do not can't claim to be notable because they played the same place as some who are notable.
Information about minor bands is unencyclopaedic almost by definition. The only people who will write about them are those who have heard them, and few if any of those will have a neutral point of view. There are plenty of people who have heard the music of Queen or Status Quo and are sufficiently uninspired as to be able to balance out an article. Wikipedia articles should not be hagiographies.
[edit] Listcruft
Wikipedia has a lot of lists. In fact, it even has a list of lists. Some of these are encyclopaedic, in that they add genuine information (such as lists of presidents or monarchs, with dates and comments); even dear old Britannica has some lists. Others are bare, include little or no encyclopaedic information, but still provide some utility, perhaps as placeholders as work-in-progress for creation of articles on established notable people (I suspect the list of Belgians might be, but I am one of the few living players of Famous Belgians so it's equally possible that it is listcruft); obviously once the articles are created the list will likely become redundant per the resultant category.
But many (possibly most, but I recognise that's a controversial view) list pages could be replaced with the following:
- arbitrary and permanently incomplete list of arbitrarily selected subjects conforming to some arbitrary criteria
It says somewhere around that WP:ISNOT an indiscriminate collection of information. These lists are, in my view indiscriminate. Wikipedia has categories; these attach to individual articles, so a category for "people from Belgium" will include the notable people. Simple, self-maintaining. Lists are often redundant when a category exists. They duplicate the functionality of categories without adding anything apart from extra maintenance. A recent case in point is the article "list of songs in triple metre". It made absolutely no attempt to establish why this might be considered remarkable. A full list of songs in triple metre would be vast, spanning several hundred years, so the author decided to restrict it to songs form certain genres in certain decades. But still without saying why that might be interesting or notable, or giving any kind of estimate of how large this group might be expected to be (hence a measure of how complete the list is). No criteria for notability, so band vanity can creep in - well, you see where I'm coming from, I hope.
Some people call this listcruft (see cruft). They are right. I am not opposed to lists in principle but please, please show me why any particular list is anything other than an indiscriminate collection of information.
I am particularly disgusted that List of SWIFT codes survived AfD. The reasoning was along the lines of "seems like a useful list" - in the way, I suppose, that a piece of paper with random phone numbers seems like a useful list until you realise that (a) it is a tiny subset of the numbers available, the list of changes to the database in a single month is several times bigger than the entire article as written, and (b) the numbers might be wrong anyway. Oh, and (c) there is a link in the main article to a database lookup which would allow you to check the SWIFT code authoritatively for any bank. Get a grip, people! It's an out-of-date list of an arbitrary subset of arbitrarily selected data for an arbitrary class of business! There are over 17,500 SWIFT codes, and this list has a couple of hundred, of unknown currency. That's less than the number of changes in the last published update!
There is another problem with lists. Let's say I created a "list of alleged child molesters" and added some people against whom I have a grudge. Who is going to notice? If I add a Category:Child sex offenders to the article on Mother Theresa it's odds-on that it will be spotted fast and reverted almost immediately, but the list page may appear on very few watchlists. Maybe only mine. Plus, the links could be suborned to push a POV, thus the list item Mother Theresa could be directed to Mother Theresa (child sex abuser) using the wikilink alias format. OK, it's a bit far-fetched, but there have been numerous examples of lists being abused to a lesser extent in exactly this way; the most obvious example is the various "List of Jewish foo" articles where a distinctly elastic definition of what constitutes Jewish appears to be in use. As Spike Milligan said: "he was Jewish. Not actually a Jew, just Jew-ish". Categories are far less vulnerable to this arbitrary classification problem, since the editor community on a given article is likely to notice and speedily revert inappropriate categories.
[edit] Schools
There is no consensus for deleting schools. I reluctantly accept that: they exist, they are verifiable, and for the most part they take up little space. Sometimes schools get massive articles for no apparent reason: this is bad. Not only is much of the information transient and of not importance, it also falls prey to the problem of all those "top 10 / top 100" voting shows, in that contemporary events are given disproportionate emphasis. My old school is over 1000 years old, and is the only school in the UK to boast a pope among its alumni. It has an article of around 250 words, plus a list of notable old boys which includes Pope Adrian IV, Stephen Hawking, Matthew Paris, Tim Rice, Rod Argent and others. That seems proportionate. When I come across 1,000 word articles on 50-year-old-schools which tell me, in essence, that they do the same things as every other school and nobody famous ever went there, I tend to become exasperated.
So I no longer vote to delete schools, but I reserve my right to be bold in reducing the amount of flannel and padding in schools articles. Current trivia? Please take it to Wikicities.
