Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2012/Candidates/Kww

Kww

 * It's important for ArbCom members to communicate reasonably well to avoid appearance of an isolated institution, and the ability of this candidate to fulfill that require appears questionable. Well reasoned and supported queries about any details of their decision process from an assortment of parties are met with either dodging/silence or at best unhelpful vague answers. Also contrary to their statement that wiki should be well trimmed ("consolidation of material"), they appear to have no reservations about leaving behind a mess of broken links and whatnot as a result of aforementioned deletions despite being prodded about it (yet finds time instead to shut down any more complaints). By the candidate's own reasoning this rather opaque and uncooperative behavior shouldn't be so readily exhibited in the sort of editors that constitute wiki's highest authority. Agent00f (talk) 14:05, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I've answered. I've answered several times, in fact. The fact that you disagree with my answer doesn't mean that I haven't answered, it simply means that you disagree with the answer. You can't keep asking the same question over and over and demand that someone reply each and every time.&mdash;Kww(talk) 18:02, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Just because there are words in a non-answer doesn't mean it's the same thing as an answer. Let's hope that candidates for ArbCom at a minimum are able to tell the difference. To be specific, you were asked by numerous people for the reasoning behind deletion decision(s) which are not only at odds with other admins but seems to completely ignore the detailed discussion at AfD. I acknowledge there were words typed in reply to a couple of them, but all of the questions and concerns still lack answers.
 * It's now finally evident from the ArbCom candidate Q&A that this implements a personal view that wiki is getting too large. However, this isn't a paper encyclopedia and ignores one of the major benefits (and original vision) of an electronic site. This is reflected in the fact that most hits are through the long tail of search (eg. Google), where size is only an advantage not a drawback. I might add that a very detailed and well articulated comment concerning this and more on your talk page by another editor was also met with silence. Perhaps answers would be more forthcoming for the larger audience here. Agent00f (talk) 23:52, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Then I will repeat the answer for clarity: the issue is not about notability. Notability arguments are irrelevant when the deletion argument is based on WP:NOT. Only after you provide evidence that refutes the WP:NOT argument can arguments based on WP:N even be considered. You have asserted that the coverage afforded this event does not come under the umbrella of "routine news reporting ... on sports". You have not demonstrated that, you have only asserted it. A review of the coverage of UFC 155 convinced me that the delete argument is built on a solid foundation. You want to persuade me that my reasoning is incorrect? Demonstrate that the coverage of the event is substantially different than the coverage of other sports events and cannot be considered routine. Argue that point in an AFD, and you can win. Arguing that there's lots of coverage, that similar articles exists for other sports, insulting the nominators, and bringing in sockpuppet accounts to disrupt the discussion does nothing to refute the deletion argument, and, by the deafening silence, reinforces the deletion argument. As I've said multiple times, I allocated most "keep" arguments no weight because they did not address the policy foundation of the nomination, and relied on a guideline that has no bearing on an article that fails WP:NOT.&mdash;Kww(talk) 04:25, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Most individual sporting events do not get immediate mainstream sporting coverage when they are announced months in advanced. That is not routine. A football or baseball season schedule getting announced will get coverage but there will not be actual articles on Yahoo Sports or ESPN.com or in the L.A. Times about a specific game that happens to fall on the schedule. This is not the case with most UFC events, even as they've rapidly increased in number. Let alone would that game get follow-up coverage as more details emerge. However, major sporting events like ATP Tennis Tournaments or the Daytona 500 do. The proper analogy both in practice, relevance, and media coverage is ball game:MMA fight::season:MMA event. No one is advocating that individual MMA fights get their own articles. Probably only a handful would qualify. UFC events however, have established counterparts across many different sporting articles and the major ones easily supersede the practiced guidelines of "routine" coverage, well beyond what your typical Olympic tournament would in fact (please enlighten me as to how deep the non-routine coverage of specific Kayaking events from the Beijing Olympics are, or individual Olympic Mens Taekwondo tournaments by weight class). If you allowed the reestablishment of UFC 155 I'm sure we could populate it with non-routine references if you like (I believe there were some there to begin with but I can't exactly verify that now). The Portuguese language version of the page has non-obscure (Portuguese-language) coverage that started in August and I believe the English page had coverage even earlier than that. The reason I'm saying this here is because it indeed has not been easy getting clarification from you on these issues, and making blanket statements such as comparing a UFC event to a Penn State football game or claiming that it wants to be treated differently from other sports are things that have been brought up many, many times in the sizable debates over the last year over targeted UFC articles. I would think they require a more elaborate explanation, when you claim to have already read the many previous UFC AfD discussions and summarily dismissed the arguments of other editors as "vote counting". I appreciate your reiteration above as it does clarify the core of your reasoning but WP:NOT, too, is an argument that has already previously come up many times. My question as it pertains to ArbCom: if it were determined that 90% of non-biographical sporting events failed to meet WP:NOT and WP:N to the letter (something I believe UFC 155 actually does meet but that's not my point), and a mass-AfD effort was aimed at upwards of 50k articles simultaneously, then should they be given the standard term of a few days each to rebut a mass AfD effort, or should their simply be a much more long-term threat with Wikipedia admins working with contributing editors to improve references, citation, and prose, before a gigantic culling? Beansy (talk) 05:43, 26 November 2012 (UTC)1
 * Most of that advance coverage would appear to be well-orchestrated promotion rather than coverage. If consensus came to the belief that we had a large number of sports related articles that failed WP:NOT (something that likely is true, but probably not 90% of them), then the community would have to adopt something similar to our BLP PROD process: faster and more efficient than AFD but allowing the small percentage that should survive to do so.&mdash;Kww(talk) 14:15, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
 * It's really quite annoying when folks with zero expertise on a subject still deem themselves fit to make decisions over those trying to explain what's going on. Much of the advanced coverage concerns event details, and here specifically it tends to change over time as contestants drop out over injuries and whatnot. This can be trivially derived from glancing over any of the hundreds of other peer articles to the ones deleted. A summary of a temporal event both in advance and afterward is exactly the sort of modern advancement which a digital crowdsourced encyclopedia enables, and it's very unfortunate when those who're supposed to represent its interests only see fit to copy a dinosaur paper version by rhetorically reinterpreting an unrelated newscopy rule. Agent00f (talk) 14:35, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
 * You're claiming that advance coverage from mainstream media outlets or subsidiaries of mainstream media outlets (Sherdog.com for instance is a subsidiary of CBS Sports) that are not official press releases are "well-orchestrated promotion"? Seriously? Regardless if a journalist is getting their information anonymously from a promoter, or from a source at an elite camp, or by regularly calling major venues and asking about reserved dates, or because they asked a question in an interview or a press conference, all of these publications still ostensibly print these articles because they consider the information to be newsworthy. Whether there was any attempt at manipulation on the promoter's part or not is immaterial. The only other possible interpretation of your argument amounts to accusing numerous ostensibly legitimate news outlets of taking payola, including USA Today and numerous major foreign outlets. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're not claiming a global sporting press conspiracy. So, if there are no global media conspiracies here (please correct me if that is what you're saying), if major outlets are successfully "tricked", or simply go along with "well-orchestrated promotion" because they consider it newsworthy, how does this affect whether an article meets WP:NOT or WP:N standards? Beansy (talk) 03:25, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Also, are you saying you'd go along with simultaneous speedy-deletion protocol for over 50% of all non-biographical sports articles if they were simultaneously AfD'd? This would probably destroy tens of thousands of articles in the process and hundreds of thousands of man-hours worth of effort to add information and knowledge to the Wikipedia database. I assume you are aware of this. How is this a superior arrangement to instead giving Wikipedia contributors at least a month to get the articles up to snuff via citation, reference, and improving prose before starting mass (non-speedy) AfD procedures? You know, like an arbitrated compromise that doesn't rely on summary mass-deletion of knowledge with only ~24 hours worth of appeal? Do you seriously think that Wikipedia should only consist of articles that are either irrefutable nearly to Encyclopedia Britannica standards or are so popular that a strong, organized defense by veteran contributors can be mounted in under 24 hours? Beansy (talk) 03:25, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
 * That last claim is so blatantly ridiculous that I'll reply, and then point you at WP:DRV if you think my logic on deletion is so flawed that it won't be upheld on review. There is nothing, nothing, nothing at all, in anything I've said from which a good faith reading could derive support for a "simultaneous speedy-deletion protocol for over 50% of all non-biographical sports articles" which would require an "organized defense by veteran contributors in under 24 hours". You've made that up out of whole cloth.&mdash;Kww(talk) 05:56, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
 * You seem to be pretty quick at denying, but slow at explaining what you mean. Perhaps the former would be less necessary if the latter were better communicated. Given an absence of any information, or even the appearance of interest in answering simple questions, people are forced to make their own assumptions about what your plans may be. Agent00f (talk) 06:24, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
 * @Kww: I'll retract the "speedy" part after re-reading the WP:BLPPROD page (damn reading and writing these things 2 AM; misread "special" for "speedy", and misinterpreted the part stating it is to be used on articles that are unsourced for every single sentence for articles that have even a single sentence unsourced). However, the deletion protocol appears barely any different in efficiency from AfD with the only advantage being that there is a "highly-recommended" attempt to contact the author and a 10-day time limit, which I would think fine for a normal AfD but highly onerous to the defending editors in the scenario of a mass-AfD targetting tens of thousands of pages simultaneously. There would still be a mass AfD effort. At the same time, WP:BLPPROD protocol repeatedly states it can only be applied to articles that are completely unsourced, which actually seems like a fairly reasonable starting point in addressing a mass-deletion request. However I'm kind of wondering why do you would think only a "small percentage" of pages would survive that? Following this protocol I would think that it would be the admins' job to immediately dismiss AfD proceedings for every page that has at least one reliable source, and proceed from there. Almost every sports page I've ever seen has at least one reliable source. I'm still a little confused on your statement regarding "the small percentage that should survive." Why would only a small percentage survive? Take the bottom 50% of sporting articles in terms of WP guideline adherence and relevance, and I'm pretty sure the vast majority still have at least one good source each (if I'm wrong on that please correct me). Also, as for the question above it, I stated and signed it separately because I was hoping for an answer to each, although obviously that choice is up to you. Beansy (talk) 06:06, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
 * If that's what you're still claiming, then it appears the AfD discussion simply wasn't read much less understood before jumping to judgement, because the reasoning which refutes this rather limited NOT argument were not only covered there but also on your talk page. This is not a good start on the road to Arbcom responsibility. Specifically, I would even argue that the reasoning wasn't even necessary given that those remotely familiar with sports coverage on wiki should be aware the statement "Demonstrate that the coverage of the event is substantially different than the coverage of other sports events and cannot be considered routine" doesn't makes sense since the average sporting event(s) articles on wiki pales in comparison to those in question for routine and regularly survive AfD as deemed by assortment of other admin. This was perhaps why folks were justifiably displeased since it seemed to them they were simply being ignored, when in fact the admin on hand was not knowledgeable to rule in this category and evidently doesn't intend to be by reading either reason or precedent.
 * If you or others desire the basic logic again, I'll simply repeat what's been covered on this topic over the past year: the section you quote from is explicitly designed to prevent wiki from becoming a newspaper as self-explanatory in its title. This is substantially different from a summary page of all factoids related to the event from history to context to analysis or any number of oddities which may present themselves to large public happenings. This may include news items but not limited to them. A summary of all facts and exposition for future reference (and the figures were directly presented to you) is exactly the point of an encyclopedia as opposed to a newspaper which is only concerned about the day. This simple logic should be rather self-evident, especially to existing admin, which is why it's puzzling it even needs to be explained to someone posing for higher office. Agent00f (talk) 11:49, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Questions
Questions for Kww

Kiefer .Wolfowitz  10:18, 5 December 2012 (UTC)