User:Stifle/Delete unless cleaned up

''Just to be clear: this page is not a Wikipedia policy of any sort. Just my opinion.''

I don't like the use of "Keep and cleanup" when it appears on AFD discussions.

It usually means that the person making that vote believes that the article in its current state should not be on Wikipedia, but that if somebody cleaned it up, expanded it, made it longer, made it NPOV, removed spam links, etc. etc., that they would then think it should be kept.

The problem with this is simple. Who's going to clean it up? At the time of my last update to this page (April 2020), there was a backlog at Category:Articles needing cleanup to February 2009, and a total of over twenty-six thousand articles tagged for cleanup, and that's just cleanup, cleanup-section, and cleanup-date. In July 2009, the backlog was to October 2006, in April 2010, it was to November 2006, and in February 2011, the backlog was to December 2006. From February 2014 to February 2015 it moved from June 2007 to September 2007... and in March 2016, it was still backlogged to September 2007. I didn't update for a while, and then checked in April 2020 when the backlog was to February 2009. Basically, in a good year we clear maybe three months of the backlog. In a bad year we get none. Anything you add to the backlog today will still be there in 2060.

The net effect of "keep and cleanup" is that the article gets kept, tagged for cleanup and then generally ignored and remaining in its unencyclopaedic state.

As a result, I vote, and recommend, the use of "Delete unless cleaned up", "Delete unless expanded", etc. — if somebody cares enough about the article to have it kept, then they will generally fix it up during the AFD vote, which is a week long, and drop me a line on my talk page to ask me to have another look.

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