User talk:Stifle/Delete unless cleaned up

Untitled
Great minds think alike. I've been saying almost the exact same thing for years. -R. fiend 00:15, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Agree, 100%. — Feb. 28, '06 [11:19] 

Thanks, guys. Feel free to edit it and/or link to it. I may try and refine it and move to Wikipedia: namespace in the future. Stifle 19:19, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I also like this formulation. I'd suggest that anyone who thinks that an article should be cleaned up, but has not time to, can always put it in their own storage somewhere and work on it when they do.  Another thing that perhaps should be on hand as WP heads toward 1.0 and becomes a regarded source, is an !unreliable! template to go on articles that survive afd but are not something everyone involved thinks should be relied upon. Midgley 23:46, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

*cough cough* eventualism
I share your frustration with people who want to keep articles needing massive cleanup, but never seem to clean anything up themselves. We do have a huge backlog of articles needing cleanup. But the thing is, if an article is on a verifiable subject, it tends to get better. It might take a while, but it will happen. I don't think these articles should be deleted just because they're in bad shape... if they have the potential to be improved, what's the harm in keeping them around? In other words, if we deleted everything that took more than 5 days to get cleaned up... I think it would slow down the rate of progress for the project.

However, articles that never seem to get cleaned up often are in that situation because they're on unverifiable topics. It's actually impossible to improve these articles (beyond formatting them better) without doing original research. That's why these articles just sit there, in awful shape, and no one does anything with them... no one really can.

So in other words, usually the lack of cleanup is symptom of a more serious problem. Sorry for rambling! --W.marsh 01:17, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

I like this
I've been doing some work on WP:CBM for a while now, and I've reached the conclusion that in a great number of cases no article would be better than the article we have, since what we have is a tangled mess that scares off all but the most determined editors. Far better to have a temporary hole that gets filled whenever an interested editor comes along than to have a massive, intimidating mess that'll sit there for a year untouched. Deleting articles that actively inhibit progress in this way is a very good idea, in my opinion. --RobthTalk 03:46, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

If it were easy
Many things require images, graphs and visual explanations that can immediately convey complex ideas without long winded explanations. Unfortuneately artists and visual people aren't jumping up and down looking for ways to express themselves.

My biggest gripe with the Wikiworld right now is that the tools seem static, and full of jumbled jargon and cryptic G1:CDR type comments that take me longer to find and figure out that it takes to work on a few articles. Better tools would save the community thousands of hours (where is the spell checker which I obviously need!!!) Is there any reason that Open Office couldn't be modified to support WIKI? Unless you are deeply concerned with the trivial, complex articles are a pain to carefully craft, and then someone who doesn't know their head from their ... goes and edits it. Then crafting a balanced reply takes more hours. So someone needs to get the millions of college students out there motivated to fix pages as part of their homework assignments. Luckily I don't teach, so 60 young people are spared the pain of learning this arcane lexicon and learning how you express the math on here. Tmcsheery 03:44, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Um... what? Stifle (talk) 22:51, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Support
I love this opinion - I feel the exact same way. You should turn it into an essay. - Chardish 00:46, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Hmm.
I must say that I respectfully disagree with this idea. There are indeed times that an article is better off deleted rather than cleaned up, but my opinion is that such times are only when an article simply cannot be cleaned up. Otherwise, what's there may be ugly, but it could provide a base upon which to improve. On the other hand, if the page were outright deleted, then the article has no base and it is then even less likely that a good article will later exist at that page, since one has to start from scratch. So I argue that deleting pages needing cleanup makes Wikipedia look better in the short run at the possible expense of the long run. Moreover: is having no article really better than having a poorly-written one that's clearly marked so? There's little maintenence involved in having them around, except for of course actually cleaning them up (whenever it actually happens), which isn't the sort of maintenance to complain about. :) - furrykef (Talk at me) 19:56, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Support
I've seen many AfD nominations where the article is in truly awful shape (POV, OR, EL, COI problems - you name it) and where the debate follows the same old pattern; deletionist editors !vote "Delete" pointing out what a mess it is, and inclusionist editors !vote "Keep And Cleanup", citing arguments ranging from "it isn't doing any harm" to "that's not a valid reason to delete". Interesting variations sometimes occur, such as editors who find external sources verifying notability of the subject, and post them to the AfD, but not to the article. In general, however, the debates tend not to be very interesting once you've seen a few dozen.

Of course, we need to make sure that we don't drive away the good faith contributors, and we need to give potentially good articles a chance: as has been said, if sources are available, the article will tend to improve over time. But it seems that few editors are willing to take responsibility for many of the masses of poor-quality articles out there.

Perhaps the solution would be to condemn the articles in question: to put them on WP:DeathRow, with a tag that states they will be deleted after a certain date unless they are improved.

At the end of the day, there are two ways to improve Wikipedia: adding good stuff, and removing bad stuff. Let's not forget that both are valid options. Sheffield Steel talkstalk 20:13, 9 October 2007 (UTC)


 * WP:Deathrow is a very interesting idea. AfD already sort of incorporates the concept, with the short and limited review period.  WP:Deathrow might grant reprieves of, say, one month, after which the deathrowed article gets automatically relisted, quoting the original AfD rationale, asking if it still applies, and offering only one more chance.  I'm fresh from the extravagance AfD where the Keep-voters basically just kept insisting that the article only needed more love.  But the only person doing any truly productive work on the article and on its relatives during AfD was a Delete-voter: me.  Well, love happened, just not the way they expected: I did a caesarian section on this brain-dead mother of an article, removing a topic from it that was tangentially related but truly encyclopedic, and started a new article: tryphé.  I think it's got legs.  Its dicdef mother article has since expired.  But, you know, if its late mother had been put on a WP:Deathrow instead, I bet not one editor voting Keep in that AfD would have gone back and given it any genuine improvement.  So let's make it a condition of WP:Deathrow that nobody who'd voted Keep in the original AfD gets a vote in the next re-listing.  Put up or shut up, I say. If you think it needs work, do the work, or feverishly recruit capable help, if you don't have the time/ability yourself. Yakushima (talk) 15:57, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Ugh
If it's kept it may be cleaned up eventually, if it's deleted it won't be. People act like deleting bad articles makes Wikipedia better somehow. It doesn't; all it does is make it smaller.P4k 03:44, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Having bad quality articles makes the Wikipedia look worse. Stifle (talk) 20:00, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
 * There are several issues here, relating to the fundamental nature of a wiki - how it grows, how it builds community, and how community members gain skill and experience.
 * Bad articles make Wikipedia look worse, but to whom? Who exactly is looking at the bad articles? What exactly is the harm? Since Wikipedia unfortunately disabled its page counters, we cannot be sure how many people actually see each article. However, we have reason to believe the number of edits to an article is proportional to the number of views it gets. Popular articles tend to improve the fastest; obscure articles may languish. However, this means the languishing article does not make Wikipedia "look bad" because hardly anybody is looking at it.
 * Of the (few) people who see bad articles, a disproportionate number are probably searching specifically for bad articles. This would include people who are not searching for specific topics, but people who are searching for articles by their properties, such as small size, recent creation, few edits, cleanup tags, etc. In other words, administrators and others who try to find bad articles. The administrator's view of Wikipedia is very different than the average visitor's view. About half of visitors visit articles from search engines and external sites that link to them. Most likely, few of these incoming links point at our currently bad articles. Or the casual visitor searches for a specific topic, likely to be a popular topic. Or the casual visitor follows links within Wikipedia, and again these links are more likely to point to the better articles.
 * Since hardly anybody is viewing the bad article, it isn't hurting much. But how much harm results from deleting the bad article? Believe it or not, behind every bad article is at least one user. Probably a user who is new to Wikipedia and hasn't learned all the Byzantine rules yet. Many new users have no idea yet that Wikipedia deletes thousands of articles. They may be shocked when some invisible strangers delete their article for reasons they don't understand. They may then leave Wikipedia and not go on to becoming skilled editors who can fix bad articles.
 * I suspect that the typical article on Wikipedia creates about the same amount of "harm," i.e., that approximately the same total number of viewers see it when it is in a "bad" state. Consider, if an initially "bad" article is on a currently popular topic, such as a person or event that only recently became notable, then thousands of people may vew the article in a short time. The initial viewers will see the bad article, but some of them will improve it. The result is the article improves quickly in terms of time, but not in terms of the number of view. It still takes thousands of views to get the dozens of edits which improve the article. Another article which is on an obscure topic may need years to get thousands of views so it also gets dozens of edits, and the same improvement. But in the end, about the same number of people will see each article in its initially bad state. The only people bothered especially by the second article will be deletionists. But that is a reflection of their personal taste, not a reflection of objective damage to Wikipedia.
 * Editing skill at any time follows a Pareto distribution: the great majority of visitors to Wikipedia do not edit; of the few who edit, most have only a few edits. Only a tiny minority of Wikipedia users have enough edits to have gained in-depth knowledge of Wikipedia's arcane policies, guidelines, and procedures, sufficiently to enable them to improve the bad articles. But this number is steadily increasing. We just have to wait. The more we punish the bad editors, the harder we make it for them to become good editors.
 * For some reason, a very common motivation for someone to start editing on Wikipedia is to create a new article. The common scenario is for a visitor to search for a topic, find no article, and then decide to start one. It seems easier for many new editors to get the idea that a new article is needed than for them to get the idea that the existing articles need improvement. Therefore, Wikipedia somehow needs to more effectively convey the idea that articles need improvement. One way to do this is to keep lots of bad articles around, with specific instructions on how to improve them. Then more visitors might start getting motivated to edit because they want to improve some existing articles.
 * Wikipedia by its design encourages the encyclopedia to grow "wide" before it grows "deep." That is, we make it very easy for brand-new users to create new articles, without requiring them to demonstrate any knowledge of what they are doing first. The result is that the number of bad articles increases rapidly, while the number of featured articles increases very slowly. However, because of the Pareto distribution that Wikipedia is built on, the small number of featured articles actually rest on the giant pyramid base of bad articles. The giant base of the pyramid is actually the huge net we cast to draw in new users and set them on a course of improvement that lets them work up the to the peak of quality.
 * However, lots of smart people are working constructively on this problem. For example, see the articles for creation Wizard. There are reasons why Wikipedia has so many bad articles, and we can improve the tools to guide the new users better. We are also improving the tools for improving bad articles. Maybe five years from now we will be much better at improving bad articles than we are now. The only way to encourage Wikipedians to get better at improving bad articles is to keep lots of bad articles around to motivate this creativity. If we simply delete all the bad articles, who will then invent some new technology for improving them?
 * Someone who visits a bad article may know how to make a small improvement to it. Not enough to make it a good article, but enough to make it slightly less bad. However, if that user knows the bad article is likely to get deleted anyway, why waste the time to make the small improvement? Deletionists discourage users from making such small improvements as they can. This is a problem because then we don't allow the opportunity for ten or twenty users to add their small improvements. Articles that get few views may need years to attract enough editors to improve them. But in the meantime these articles are causing negligible harm.
 * Dietrich Dörner's book The Logic of Failure points out that most people tend to evaluate a system according to where it is now instead of according to how it evolves over time. The important point is that Wikipedia is not standing still. We are getting more users, and more skilled users. More people with technical skill are coming to Wikipedia and seeing opportunities to invent better tools. What looks like a problem today may stimulate someone to invent a clever solution tomorrow.
 * Of course we should delete articles which by their nature can never meet Wikipedia's requirements. But we should not delete articles simply because they are not improving as fast as someone would like. That deprives future users of the opportunity to improve them. Articles which need improvement are how we ask the world to help us. --Teratornis (talk) 19:16, 14 February 2008 (UTC)


 * i agree with Teratornis' points. Unless an article "by its nature" is not appropriate for the Wikipedia, then we should remember that this encyclopedia is written using wiki software. While the quality of many articles (e.g. many physics/maths articles) is high, why do we have to pretend that Wikipedia is not a wiki? In university classes that i teach here in Poland, as of 2011, i continually find that about 100% of students "know" the Wikipedia, and about 0% of them know what a wiki is and the fact that Wikipedia is a written as a wiki. If they saw more boxes at the top of articles warning about a need to clean up, then they might suddenly realise that it's a wiki. On the other hand, i suspect that some users will ignore warning boxes, read the content, and then say that Wikipedia is rubbish without qualifying that as saying that Wikipedia articles-needing-cleanup are rubbish. If the non-convergence of the backlog of articles needing cleanup continues, which could be expected for the Pareto distribution (power law distribution) mentioned by Teratornis, then making the cleanup boxes more prominent would be a reasonable step. My subjective impression is that many web users go for the "content" and ignore boxes, top bars, side bars, that all have relevant info that at least gives the website authors' POV and attitude to how seriously they expect their content to be treated. Something like fluorescent, flashing pink? More objective user surveys should really be used, and AFAIK was ostracised from html manuals of style several years ago, so maybe some more modest increase in the prominence of the warning would be more reasonable. Boud (talk) 22:05, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Good idea, but how to implement?
I really like the concept but worry how it can work in real life? People don't seem to mind voting for a deletion, but few will actively take responsibility for keeping it by cleanup. I've done a couple but it wears on you and I guess for some it seems easier to just vote Delete :-) Cheers! fr33kman (talk) 03:03, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Darn it
I disagree with your opinion. . . well, I did when I got here. I think you have excellent arguments. I don't like using AfD as a bludgeoning tool to improve article quality, but I can't deny that it works. When it comes down to it, even though there is no deadline, humans work best when there is a deadline. But with the massive amount of articles on the chopping block, I don't think there are enough dedicated editor-hours around to improve all the ones worth improving.

I concur that this should be converted into an essay, and I'd be happy to collaborate if you decided to go that route. The fact that I'm of two minds on the issue tells me that it's important for others to have an essay to turn to that will make me think twice in any given debate.--otherlleftNo, really, other way. .. 13:55, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

One way to deal with bad articles
Hack off the offending text and restore the article to a stub, but keep the stub there for others to edit.Likebox (talk)

Agree wholeheartedly
How often do we see articles kept because its defender jump up and down going "Keep! Keep! We can clean it up, and source it, and expand it!"? Then when the AfD closes and the article is kept these same people vanish back into the woodwork, with exactly zero intention of cleaning, sourcing or expanding anything. Their only interest in the article from that point on will be in six months time when it's nominated again. Then the tune will be "Keep! Keep! It was kept last time, so it's super duper mega disruptive to AfD it again!"

You think it's got potential as an article, prove it. Reyk YO!  08:33, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree. I've run into this attitude Articles for deletion/Fictional history of Spider-Man (3rd nomination). The last time it was AfD'd the various were noted but they have not been corrected. Instead, they were made worse. The response? One person claimed it was borderline abuse of AfD because the article had passed AfD 1.5 years before. How long are we supposed to wait for things to be cleaned up? Apparently forever. --Hammersoft (talk) 12:59, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
 * And I'm going to have to renominate that article soon. Stifle (talk) 09:49, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Starting to turn the corner?
Category:Articles needing cleanup down to 38,000 now. Maybe enough users have implemented the ideas in this essay to prevent the backlog getting bigger while older ones are cleared... Alzarian16 (talk) 11:47, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Disagree
That viewpoint is totally screwed up. If you are a new user, and you finally learn enough to actually get a page to come up, and then it is immediately (sometimes within a few seconds) put up for deletion, it is a real kick in the gut. And then somebody puts up some sort of time limit within which you have to get the article to 'encyclopedic standards'. You aren't being paid for this, and so you decide 'fuck it'. Why attempt to author an article if it is just going to be deleted? So you don't. I certainly will never contribute to WP again. I sure as hell am not going back to 'clean up' anything if it is just going to be deleted.

Sure, your policy might only affect 'newbies', it certainly got rid of me, but WP needs the newbies. If the only people allowed to contribute are the Wikipedia Jocks, then nothing new will be developed or expanded. Then WP stagnates. Then it dies.

Good luck with your screwed up policy. KTrimble (talk) 22:48, 23 November 2011 (UTC)