User:Jorge Stolfi/DoW/DeletionsJunk

Junk - under work

Apparently this RfC was launched only because the deletionists expected that the outcome would be 99% "yes" for the proposal. Since the proposal was soundly defeated, it seems that the deletionists will just ignore the polls and forge ahead — on the grounds that a poll that runs contrary to their tastes is "obviously" spoiled. That is not news; this is the sort of "consensus building" that has brought us the "notability requirement" and the notability criteria in the first place. Check the archived discussions. The few polls that were among those who are predisposed to vote "yes", and squeezed majority (or even frank minority) opinions being labeled "consensus". Just in case I was not clear, I claim that the current deletion policy — never mind the proposal that prompted the RfC — is a "consensus" only because deleting an article is a hundred times easier than creating or fixing it; because it is almost impossible for ordinary editors to reverse a deletion; because permanently deleting the work of a hundred editors is a big ego booster; and because deletionists assume that their opinion is worth more than that of all ordinary editors who created and edited an article. In other words, the current deletion policy is "consensual" in the same sense that a gang of Hell's Angels is. Te 7-day period is just a farce that the deletionists play in order to claim that they gave the author a chance to comply — which they obviously do not want to happen, lest it spoils their fun. What harm has Obviously the notability rule was not created for the good of Wikipedia, but for unconscious reasons that perhaps not even Freud could explain.

More junk
When the unreferenced tag was developed, a poll was held *among the editors who had designed it* about where it should be placed. The three choices offered were "top of article", "bottom of article", and "talk page". (needless to say, the obvious fourth alternative "nowhere" was not even in the ballot). There were about 30 votes cast (out of a universe of perhaps 10,000 regular editors), and "top of article" was the *least* voted option (a little less than 1/3 of the vote). So, if that tag is now showing at the top of perhaps 200,000 articles, it is because nine editors wanted it there, eighteen did *not* want it there, and 9,970 editors did not have a chance to give their opinion. The story for the A7 (notability) rule is quite similar. There never was a wikipedia-wide poll about "should Wikipedia start classifying people into "notable" and "non-notable"", much less about what should constitute "notable". I found a vote in the Wikipedia talk:Notability page, again *only among those editors who had collaborated on the writing of the notability rule*, about specific details of the notability criteria. Less than 200 people voted. On several items on the poll, the vote was evenly split; and I was unable to tell whether the current guidelines reflect that poll, or (as in the case of the tag) the final "consensus" was only the opinion of a minority within that minority. In contrast, we have thousands of editors who wasted their time cleaning third-party articles that were later deleted because they were deemed to be "non-notable". Each of those editors should be counted as an emphatic vote *against* the notability requirement (and that is not even counting the original creators of those articles). So labeling the A7 rule a "consensus" is an outright lie; and anyone who believes in that lie has been terribly misinformed. Article tagging and deletion are not being done "for the good or wikipedia". If they were, we would see the doers of such things taking pains to measure the real costs and benefits of those actions, and reverse them if they turn out to have been wrong. Instead, when other editors post such data, taggers and deletors simply ignore them. Tagging and deletion are being done for other deeper reasons, that the doers themselves do not seem to be aware of. Unfortunately, those actions are much easier to do than sourcing, checking, and editing contents, so an editor can "leave his mark" on 500 articles in the time it it would take to clean up one. Besides giving taggers and deletors an unfair advantage over constructive editors, it makes the former feel a hundred times more "productive" than the latter, and hence a hundred times "better" than them. Moreover, ordinary edits can be undone, but deletions cannot. A tag is much flashier than a well-written paragraph; and reads like a message for Higher Up, so ordinary editors will believe its statement that the tag cannot be deleted unless the tagger consents to. If a tagger wants to tag an article but ten other editors don't, he is right and all them are wrong, and there is no arguing about that. Therefore taggers and deletors see themselves as "police", and look down to the other editors as an unruly mob of "mere civilians". They are the "masters" who decide what work needs to be done, the other editors are "slaves" who must do their wishes "or else". One does not have to be Freud's cleaning lady to understand what is going on here. It is not that taggers and deletors do not care about the feelings of the authors of those articles. Quite the opposite, iritating those authors is the whole point of the game. Their feeling of power is proportional to the feeling of powerless frustration that they can inflict on their victims. Where is the pleasure in deleting a good article, if not in being able to ignore the complaints of its editors while imposing one's will? What use is it to have "superior" status, if one cannot stomp on one's "inferiors"? That is why deletionists and taggers do not want to hear about statistics or votes. That is why they will not even discuss the possibility of tags being treated like any other edits, articles being blanked instead of deleted, contributors being given an "undelete" button, articles staying on the AfD long enough for them to be rescued — or of the unsourced BLPs "problem" being recognized as a non-problem. These alternatives could result in millions of new good articles and hundreds of thousands of new good editors; but where is the fun in that? --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 20:48, 9 February 2010 (UTC)