Wikipedia:Deletion reform/Generalize

Generalize
It isn't always clear what direction articles should take; there is some precedent, but seldom any clear guideline as to what should be deleted and what should be kept. The result is that any visitor to VFD applies his personal standards (even to areas that person might not be entirely knowledgeable in), and that VFD outcome may depend on which users happened to be online during that week. It may be possible to create general guidelines to certain topics (e.g. WP:MUSIC) to alleviate this. This page is for discussion to that end, as a result of the main discussion at Deletion reform.

Problems with VFD that would not be solved with this system

 * 1) Discussion and voting based on whether an article topic fits the new clear criteria, same as whether a person is notable. The better crafted the criteria, the better. DavidH 05:30, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Comments

 * 1) I'll vote for this one.  There seems to be no agreement on a lot of fundamentals.  From my POV, there are errors of judgment on both the inclusionist and deletionist sides.  People bring articles to VfD that they could have boldly' merged, or marked for improvement, while others defend articles that will never be encyclopedic on the theory that a citation on someone's poorly-researched POV website is "verifiability".  I could go on, but absent some consensus of what we should delete and why, we will go nowhere.  Robert A West 03:34, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) This is the issue that is most about content and least about process, and it I hold that it is therefore the most important. Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 07:16, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
 * 3) As an admitedly new (but active!) user, agree with #1 and #2. It's the crux of the biscuit, as Zappa said. Voting in VFD should have nothing to do with article quality or current content -- a topic is appropriate for the encyclopedia, or it isn't. Yet voting is often based on the current state of an article. Also, merge and redirect get confused with delete and keep. Anyway, clear, categorical guidelines for potential topics that would allow deletion/no deletion seems very important to saving/replacing VFD. (Mechanical improvement (tags, pages) and a method of qualifying voters would help the current situation, but the clear guidelines for categories of articles is the most important). DavidH 05:29, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
 * 4) Big yes to this from me, although I fear it will lead to further endless debate about the inclusion criteria. Hiding talk 21:29, 9 August 2005 (UTC)