User:Balloonman/CSD Survey

Well, here is the next stage of my CSD reviews. Rather than simply give my take on some CSD's I've decided to get some feedback. Here are some recently nominated articles for deletion and the criteria for deletion. Please review these articles and determine if you:

1) Agree with the criteria stated to speedily deleted the article.

2) Disagree with the criteria stated to speedily delete the article, but believe the article should be deleted under another criteria.

3) Disagree with the criteria stated to speedily delete the article, but the article doesn't technically fit any of the criteria, so this is a case to Ignore All Rules (IAR.)

4) Disagree that the article is a candidate for speedy deletion.

Some of these may be obvious, but please take your time and review each CSD properly. You are required to pick one of those four options, but you can add a short (100 character) comment to clarify your position.

NOTE: Yes, it has already been pointed out to me that I misspelled rationale a number of times in the survey ---damn copy/paste. Anyways, I'll fix it later:

While the survey is complete, I may update the results down the road, so feel free to continue to take it. It now becomes a learning tool. As long as the surveys are still available on Survey Monkey, feel free to take them. BUT manually keep track of your answers. Then come back and compare your results with the rest of the communities and see the rationale used by myself and the community.


 * CSD Survey 4 of 4
 * CSD Survey 3 of 4
 * CSD Survey 2 of 4
 * CSD Survey 1 of 4

NOTE: There are 40 total questions, 10 on each survey.

Participant Demographics
Most participants identified a leaning towards a deletionistic philosophy (although some debated the concepts of inclusionism/deletionism).

Most participants believed that routine use of IAR should not be encouraged.

Background
This survey is an extension of several "surveys" that Balloonman conducted on his own---A1*A7*G1*G10. This is not a scientific analysis and the deletions selected below should not be viewed as indicative of all CSD's, but it does highlight several of the problems/issues surrounding CSD. Many of the deleted items were chosen explicitly because, in the eyes of Balloonman, they were deleted incorrectly OR (in rarer occasions) were excellent uses of the criteria.

The examples in the CSD were all deleted by an admin as speedy deletions using the criteria identified in the rationale.

Results
The surveys will reopen and I will update the results on occasion. The results presented on the chart below are as of January 1, 2009. The results on each of the individual summary charts may differ as they were pulled on December 30 and 31, 2008.

The * in the first column indicates a more elaborate analysis.

Where results differ from those on the individual pages, it should be noted that these results are more recent.

Overview:

Agree with Rationale: Of the 38 CSD's only 5 of them had over 50% of the respondents agreeing with the deletion criteria.

Disagree with Rationale, but agree that it is speedy deletable: 13 of the 38 had people who agreed that the article was speedy deletable, but under a different criteria than used.

Disagree with Rationale, but deletable per IAR: Only four articles of 38 had 10% of the respondents stating that the rationale to delete was incorrect, but that it should be deleted per wp:IAR.

Disagree with speedy deletion: 17 of the 38 deletions had at least 45% of the respondents disagreeing that the article was eligible for speedy deletion.

My Motivation
CSD is an area of Wikipedia that is absolutely necessary, but has developed a negative reputation around the rest of the project. This is demonstrated the loudest at RfA's where a person who focuses on CSD work will find it very difficult to become an admin---unless they have a solid track record of building the encyclopedia as well. Many people have negative stereotypes of CSD'ers and low opinions of those who work in the area. Hell, my first essay on the subject was titled, ''Why I hate Speedy Deleters.

Yet, this reputation is undeserved. There are plenty of CSD'ers who do excellent jobs and I dare say, most try to do things right. The problem comes from the few Admins who believe it is their lot in life to delete everything and that they can unilaterally decide which articles should be deleted even if they don't fit CSD criteria. These Admins, IMHO, do more damage to wikipedia than the vandals and self-promoters they are trying to fight. A vandal/self-promoter will come to the project, make their edits, have their edits reverted/deleted, and then leave. These Admins, on the other hand, will carelessly delete the good faith efforts of editors (often newbies) and drive them away from the project. Those editors might be the future of the wikipedia. They might have become the next crop of admins or FA writers, but because their article was speedily deleted, they never return.

Some of the problems with CSD is that there are no monitoring functions to ensure consistency and the appeals processes don't work. If a person consistently performs bad CSD's, nobody notices. Individuals might take them to AN/DVR/ANI, but those locations rarely delve into the issue to determine if the issue isolated or part of a larger trend. Heck, AN/ANI are often more about rallying around an admin than trying to stem admin abuse of powers.

Furthermore, there is little to ensure that people are exercising the CSD criteria consistently. There are few people who monitor WT:CSD, but those who participate in the discussion are rather few when compared to the number of people who engage in CSD work. They are also the ones who are concerned about the negative reputation CSD has, so convincing them that problems exists is like preaching to the chorus. Plus, there is a difference between discussing in theory what constitutes an A7 article, and actually looking at an article and attempting to decide if it is worthy of being deleted.

That is where this survey comes in. It is intended to identify questionable deletions. This is done for several reasons: But the biggest reason, is because I want people to see how others think. We had 98 people reviewing some of these articles, and there aren't always clear consensus in how the community regards some of these articles. I want to get people to start asking themselves, "This is how I view the article, but is my view consistent with what I know others think about the article?" I think the results from this survey show otherwise.
 * 1) To get people to start discussing CSD criteria in a concrete manner.  Debating the wording on A7 is one thing, applying it to specific articles is another.
 * 2) To demonstrate that there is a problem.  Every one of the articles on this survey were deleted---and they come from about a 4 or 5 day period in December 2008!  Everyday articles that should not be deleted are.
 * 3) To demonstrate that sometimes articles can fit under more than one criteria, but to discuss why one criteria is better than another.