Talk:Strengths and weaknesses of the current deletion system

I think the real problem is to do with human nature. Addition to the Wiki is considered positive, creative and constructire but in fact deletion can as easily be all of these things

AndrewCates(talk)

More weaknesses than strengths

Disclaimer of bias: I have recently spent a large amount of time and energy, largely in vain, fighting against the deletion of contributions of mine to the French wiki -- in fact against the rejection of my contributing style.

A conclusion should be drawn from the clear balance against the deletion procedure. I suggest to discourage deleting pages as a whole, and spending time voting instead of contributing. Concretely, deletion proposals should be removed automatically after one vote against them.

People taking part to the voting are not only non representative of the contributors' population, but in fact have a systematic bias in a negative way. Conflicts should be given value. They tend to disclose NPOV problems that are non obvious to everybody. They should be given explicit credit, trying indeed to reduce them but without any time pressure, and on a consensus basis. Very seldom is a merger page fair to both points of vue (structure, presentation order etc...). The result of forcing convergence is thus typically loss of value. Marc Girod 10:27, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

"Grass is Greener" issue

The major problem I have with this list is that it almost certainly suffers from the "grass is greener" problem; we all know from long experience (painfully) what the problems are with the current system, but the problems with a new system we can only guess at - and we certainly don't have the "experienced pain" factor working there. So any new system will look like it's a better choice, even if it won't be. Jnc 02:17, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hence the value of an experiment. 71.63.91.68 21:45, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

But then, there is the 'inertia to change' effect. People fear the disruption and risk of any change, even when the advantages are plain 62.41.132.181 08:00, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

So, what can be done? Perhaps it's better to experiment on other wikis that are more open to change, and then look at how it worked. 71.63.91.68 04:21, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Deletion

"deleted articles are eventually removed from the database but even then they can still be recovered from a backup by developers."

Are such backups actually kept forever?

Creation/Deletion

The way it is now, all traces of deleted articles disappear from the creator's contribution logs. Even when they're hoax/joke/gibberish articles. Repeat vandals of this sort can be nearly impossible to spot (or at least quantify their severity), especially if they create bad articles over a large period of time or between genuine edits, create the same article with a different name so it doesn't have a deletion history, when what they did wasn't severe enough to warrant a warning on their talk page etc. (If anyone wants to rewrite my rambling to be more legible and add it to the weaknesses section, they can.) Indium 07:23, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Retractions?

You know, we have this whole "don't bite the newcomers" policy, yes? Well. Being a newcomer, I'd like to not be bitten, y'know? I like the current system. But if someone doesn't quite understand the concept of "be bold," (like I did on the Porno Graffitti article when I marked it AfD), they could get themselves into serious trouble, cause a whole lot of commotion over something they don't mean to, and then make lots of people struggle to resist the urge to bite.

Soooo...what if we could have retractions, instead of causing long drawn-out debates. Someone could say something like, "Oopsie" and strip out the AfD.

Better yet, why not have pre-vote type activities. Like, "Someone's considering marking this page for deletion, but they don't know if they want to or not, check the talk page, etc." kind of stuff. That way, it'd be like a sample vote sort of thing, where people could try to scramble to find alternatives before sending it to the Chamber Of Deciding To Send The Article To The Other Chamber Of Semi-Infinite Article Death.

Hopefully, I'm making sense. Cernen 11:08, 12 December 2005 (UTC)