User:Sam Pointon/AFD draft

''This is a draft proposal, still being written. Don't take it as anything even near finished.''

Recently, there has been some criticism of WP:AFD as a deletion process. I believe that one of its fundamental flaws is that people with no interest or knowledge in subject areas are voting on the worthiness of articles in said areas. A partial solution to this is to categorise AfD nominations according to their subject area (a similar hierarchy to WP:REQUEST is what I have in mind, though there are other schemes).

Random ideas
None of these are necessarily good or even possible; they are merely what has occurred to me as a means to solve this problem.


 * There is a subpage of some page for each debate, and this subpage is categorised with the normal means. People can then look through the category lists of deletion debates for articles that interest them, or look at the top-level deletion category for the full list.
 * This would be far nicer and more powerful if we had category intersections.
 * This is actually compatible (I think) with the present system - the cats would need to be -ed, but that's a minor hassle.


 * Have a page similar to the current AfD setup for each subject area. These can then be transcluded together to form a listing quite similar to how it is today.

Disadvantages
The main argument against a scheme similar to this is that it promotes the creation of walled gardens, and it hampers editors giving an objective view on articles up for deletion. However, such objective views can all-too-easily miss nuances of the subject - unless said objective eyes take some time to really familiarise themselves with the article's topic, their opinion can be malformed.