Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Religion and schizotypy

Moved from voting page

 * This is such a small amount of information that it should be merged into another article. Forcing everyone to wait around a week, and to VOTE on it is stupid and anti-wiki.
 * People should simply make suggestions on the talk page as usual and make edits and merges as usual
 * It is asinine to generate 5 times more discussion than the amount of text involved here.

So I'm going to cut and paste the contents of this page to talk:Religion and schizotypy. Uncle Ed 11:47, August 7, 2005 (UTC)


 * There's a VfD going on, you don't just declare yourself right and call it off. This should not be merged or redirected, it should be deleted, and we're still voting on this. DreamGuy 12:05, August 7, 2005 (UTC)


 * Plus, there doesn't appear to be any substantiated information in the article that could be merged anywhere. Vashti 12:07, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

Votes for deletion/Religion and schizotypy
Someone asked me on my talk page about the result I called here. This is a copy of my reply. --Tony Sidaway Talk 16:32, 19 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Thanks for asking. We can compare and discuss the votes and see if it would have changed the result.


 * In the interests of transparency, this is the method I use for counting a vote:


 * Firstly I look at the article history. During this phase I don't read the article or the VfD, I just look at the editing history of everybody who has participated in the discussion.


 * I have pretty strict standards. I expect someone to have edited for one month and to have done at least 100 edits before showing an interest in VfD.  At this stage, I also often reject votes from people who haven't done much editing in articles, or those who wouldn't qualify by the standards above if one ignored a small number of edits many months ago.  People who appeared recently and made a bee-line for VfD are regarded with particular suspicion.


 * Then when I've decided whose opinions matter and whose are to be discounted, I step through the edit history of the VfD, recording each vote that I find.


 * Sorry, I don't take any notice of strike-outs by persons other than the person who placed the original edit. Deciding who can and cannot vote is something that I do and the on-page bickering about who can and cannot vote is completely ignored, because by the time I've seen it I already know at least as much about the editing history of the participants as they know about one another.


 * What I got was this:
 * Disqualified:
 * : only had 25 edits prior to July 18.
 * : first edit July 1, to a VfD page.
 * : suddenly appeared 6 August.
 * : three edits prior to 2 August.
 * : only four edits prior to 27 July.
 * : first edit 19 July.
 * : first edit 15 July.
 * Keep:
 * Delete:
 * Other votes:
 * (redirect, switched from delete)
 * (merge to schizophrenia)
 * Delete:
 * Other votes:
 * (redirect, switched from delete)
 * (merge to schizophrenia)
 * Other votes:
 * (redirect, switched from delete)
 * (merge to schizophrenia)
 * Other votes:
 * (redirect, switched from delete)
 * (merge to schizophrenia)
 * Other votes:
 * (redirect, switched from delete)
 * (merge to schizophrenia)
 * Other votes:
 * (redirect, switched from delete)
 * (merge to schizophrenia)
 * (redirect, switched from delete)
 * (merge to schizophrenia)


 * In my original count, I placed Robchurch in the "keep" column by accident. But it doesn't make any difference to the result. I'll explain.


 * When the votes are in, I look to see if the numbers match my standard for a clear consensus (80%+ for any option). There wasn't.


 * Then I look for the possibility of my establishing a rough consensus (anything in the range 70-80%). On this range I use my discretion and may be swayed by the arguments one way or another.  72% and convincing arguments beats 71% and a lot of handwaving. There wasn't such a possibility.  The numbers were wrong.


 * If there isn't a rough consensus, the policy is to default to keep the article. So I kept.  This doesn't preclude redirecting, merging, etc, but anyone can do that.


 * I made an error in counting Robchurch's keep vote. If I counted it, the vote was 12 votes to delete, 7 votes to keep and two others (12 out of 21 to delete, 57%).  If I discounted it as I should have, the vote was 12 votes to delete, 6 votes to keep and 2 others (12 out of 20 to delete, 60%).  It doesn't come close to 70%, where I would start thinking of calling a consensus, or 80%, where I would call an unquestionable consensus.


 * I didn't get to the point of looking at the article. I don't know or care what it's about.  I would have read it if the vote had been closer.


 * Note that with 6 keep votes and 16 delete votes, and 2 others, I would have been calculating 16 out of 24 to delete, about 67%. Still not enough to make me start thinking about rough consensus.  There are some sysops who would call that a rough consensus, but I'm not one of those.

In later discussion, it emerged that User:Khuhly (one of those excluded) was an admitted sock puppet of User:Gabrielsimon. Some of the other excluded voters asked me to consider excluding Gabrielsimon's vote; I consulted two other administrators who are familiar with Gabrielsimon's case, and our conclusion was that his vote should be counted. I was also asked to consider counting the excluded voters. While I don't intend to do this, I thought it would be a good idea to run an impact analysis to see if incorporating those votes would have changed the result.

The excluded votes were as follows:
 * : only had 25 edits prior to July 18 (delete)
 * : first edit July 1, to a VfD page (keep)
 * : suddenly appeared 6 August (keep)
 * : three edits prior to 2 August (merge)
 * : only four edits prior to 27 July (delete)
 * : first edit 19 July (delete)
 * : first edit 15 July (delete)

User:Khuhly's vote was still eliminated because it's a proven sock puppet, and Gabrielsimon himself has said that he thinks it would be fair to exclude it.

So the excluded votes worked out as 4 delete, 1 merge and 1 keep.

The revised result would be as follows:
 * I would have 16 votes to delete, 7 votes to keep, and 3 others. We'd have a delete vote of 16 out of 26, or 61%.  I'd still default to keep.

Some people asked me to exclude Gabrielsimon. I consulted with Ed Poor and SlimVirgin and they both opposed this. My vote was in favor of exclusion but was outweighed by theirs.

But if I had excluded his keep vote, what would have happened?


 * I would have 16 votes to delete, 6 votes to keep, and 3 others. We'd have a delete vote of 16 out of 25, or 64%.  Still a default to keep.

Note that some administrators adopt the relatively generous "2/3" standard for consensus. Even by this standard, and even excluding Gabrielsimon's vote and including all other excluded votes that were not from admitted sock puppets, we don't make 2/3, or 66.7%.

I am thus confident that nothing in my tallying of votes affected the outcome. --Tony Sidaway Talk 15:12, 20 August 2005 (UTC)