User:Thesteve/AFDbad

=Policies Commonly Misapplied in AFD=

I have noticed a trend recently in AFD of throwing various policies around as reasons to delete. A lot of these make no sense if you actually go on to read the policy in question.

WP:SYNTH
This one bugs me a lot.

What it actually says: Don't use two sources to come up with something new. This isn't even a good reason to delete, as you can just remove the synthesized conclusion, and the article is still fine. The only time you can delete is if the entire article is new, extrapolated, expanded, or otherwise expounded stuff. That makes it Original Research, which is a far better reason to delete. Very, very few articles are entirely OR, so SYNTH is never a good reason for deletion.

What deletionists say: This source is about something different than the article. This is explicitly allowed in the GNG, our primary policy. (Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention but it need not be the main topic of the source material.)

My Conlusion: Don't use WP:SYNTH as a reason to delete. Ever.

Too Trivial
Yes, we have a lot of trivia. No, its not a bad thing.

In theory, we could split an article into finer and finer articles, until each one is very specific and has a lot of detail and minutiae. For instance: Shakespeare, Shakespeare's reputation, Shakespeare's reputation in the 20th century, Shakespeare's reputation in the 1940s. Obviously we don't want that. We want a certain level of significance in each article. We should not have an article on Lady Gaga's shoes, even though we probably could. But don't delete it! Just merge it. Anyone can. If you get resistance, discuss it on the talk page. You can merge it to Lady Gaga. In fact, you could merge Meat dress of Lady Gaga and Lady Gaga's shoes into Lady Gaga's wardrobe or Lady Gaga's clothes or Fashion of Lady Gaga. Anything you consider too trivial probably has another very nice article target that you do not consider too trivial. If it really is too trivial for wikipedia, you actually meant: Fails the GNG for lack of sources. If it has the sources, it's not too trivial for wikipedia - but those could surely be used to enhance an existing article instead.

My Conclusion: Learn how to MERGE people! "Too trivial" is not ever a reason to delete, but it is most certainly a reason to merge, and a good one.

WP:NOTDIARY
NOTDIARY: "Even when an individual is notable, not all events he is involved in are." Avoid excessive detail. This is, in general, good advice, especially for an encyclopedia article. However, it shouldn't ever be used as a reason to delete. Why not? Because of the way reliable sources are treated on Wikipedia. If the article has few or no sources, why would you quote the weak WP:NOTDIARY policy rather than fails the GNG. If an article does have sources, and good ones, these sources must have said something important. If they said absolutely nothing of value, then they aren't good sources, are they?

Even if you distill the article as much as you possibly can, there will still be something left. That something is something notable, something usable, about the topic of the article, and therefore its a viable article, and shouldn't be deleted.

If you can distill the article down to nothing using NOTDIARY, then you have a sourcing problem, which, quite frankly, is much more serious than "excessive detail or trivia". You are far better off saying that all sources are only trivial mentions or unreliable (blogs and such).

My Conclusion: Don't use WP:NOTDIARY as a reason to delete. Ever. (Its a good reason to merge though) Italic text