User:Quarl/AFD commentary

Mergism
I am a mergist. I don't get to say "merge" very often on AFD, but I usually opt to merge when I can. Mergism applies more often to articles that I see outside of AFD. See User:Quarl for my WikiPhilosophy on this.

Advertisements
One of the most common reasons given for deletion is "advertisement".

We should not delete an article for the reason of it being an advertisement for a company or product or religious group or whatnot. We should not delete an article on a potentially important/significant subject just because the first person to write the article was biased. Bias in an article should be fixed by deleting the bias, not deleting the article.

Now, it is true that many "advertisement" articles are advertising non-notable companies. The amount of adcopy in an article (for example, leading the article with an external link) is highly correlated with non-notability -- i.e. it gives you a big hint to check whether it is notable -- but it should not itself be a reason for deletion.

What to do instead
If an article is an advertisement but has no other problems (such as notability), tag the article with advert. This will hopefully get attention to cleaning it up.

Vote explanations
I use the standard "Keep", "Delete", "Slight merge", etc., and also:


 * Merge/redirect or merge with redirect: Merge the content to the target page, and leave a redirect. Most people simply say "merge".  Sometimes the nominated article is already a subset of the target and people get upset if I say "merge" instead of "redirect".  I say "merge/redirect" because it is functionally a merge; a redirect happens to be a degenerate case of a merge in this case.  Whether the target article is a strict superset or not is orthogonal to what to do with the nominated article.


 * Merge without redirect: Merge the content, but don't redirect to the target. The information should be kept but the name of the nominated article isn't notable for this sense.