User:S Marshall/Essay2

UninvitedCompany said here: There are three patterns to the way deletion process has evolved:
 * 1) The criteria expand over time reflecting trends at xFD and actual practice, which often pushes the boundaries purportedly set by the criteria.
 * 2) Over time the ratio of xFD deletions to CSD deletions declines, which means that CSD is increasingly becoming the deletion policy of the project. This is due in large measure to the fact that few Wikipedians find XFD participation to be a worthwhile form of contribution.
 * 3) There is a tendency over time for administrators, as a group, to delete more and more qualifying pages under any new CSD that is adopted, without assessing the value created or burden posed by each article or considering WP:BITE. Over the course of years, we reach the point where all pages matching any one of the criteria are deleted. For a recent example the copyvio and advertising CSDs, which with both interpreted quite narrowly when first adopted.

CSD use is expanding rapidly, mainly because it's so much easier than WP:AFD and so much quicker than WP:PROD. This is a good thing, but CSD does need checks and balances in some form. The question is, what form should the checks and balances take? There is precedent.

WP:PROD says: Note: To ensure independent judgment, an article should not be deleted by the same person who added the prod tag. Users citing this essay believe that as a general rule, there should be some separation between the tagger and the deleter. In other words, for most deletions, there should normally be at least two pairs of eyes on the article.

However, an exception should certainly be made for content that is, or could be, harmful to Wikipedia or to a living person. So in terms of the CSD criteria, users citing this essay hold that those coloured red in the following chart could often be deletable with only a single pair of eyes, those in yellow sometimes, and the others only under exceptional circumstances.