Wikipedia talk:Managed Deletion/Voting

I swore that I wouldn't do this, but I suppose I will and just regret it. Ok, some issues:

1. "Broadening speedy deletes": That's what this proposal more or less is, but with the added caution of having consensus.
2. Admin only voting: This is about speedy deletes, so it's no different from that. I was at great pains, I thought, to point out that this proposal gives not an iota of power to administrators than they already have. The only thing it does is broaden the category of speedy deletes and yet make sure that the speedy deletes are agreed upon so that there are fewer administrator abuses.
3. Changing VfD: This policy was made because the author has seen two different attempts at changing VfD fail miserably, and this is not an amendment or change to VfD at all. Changes to VfD are not germane to this discussion, because this is a proposal for a juried method of speedy deletion, not a destruction or change of VfD. The author fully supports efforts to change VfD, but this is not one of them.

Sorry if I seem exasperated, but I kept the discussion well publicized and wide open for more than two weeks so that the complexities of this proposal could be well understood, and now I feel (perhaps incorrectly) that people have not weighed the policy carefully. Geogre 15:35, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• I concur with the proposal, but not for all the provided reasons.
  • I don't think we should worry about mirrors. It seems too heavy a burden on the design of Wikipedia to think about how they handle things. Easy come, easy go. If they never remove articles we remove, they'll accumulate a lot of cruft anyhow. Not our problem.
  • I strongly disagree that VfD is too long or overwhelmed. People who can't deal with it shouldn't be voting. It's not that hard.
  • I disagree with the majority keep provision.
  • I don't think it's a problem to have editors have this special power. They've generally been around a lot longer than other people, and, I think, have earned the trust of the community. The conflict between egalitarian and meritocratic ideas are present in any system. We shouldn't disconsider this move because it shifts the balance a bit.
  • I oppose the Jury Pool alternative.
• And so ends my thoughts. --Improv 18:22, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

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It appears that people only oppose because it gives sysops more authority. So why not make the voting process be 5-10 regular users as opposed to 3 sysops? — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 18:21, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I dont think the policy does give sysops more authority; on the contrary it would appear to restrict sysops ability to unilaterally delete articles... especially if Early deletion became the "standard" deletion system. I suspect that the objection to useing "normal" users would be that it either would just become another version of VfD (if voteing was entirely unrestricted), or else it would require an aditional cumbersome system of selecting the "Early Deletion Commitee". Iain 18:39, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I disagree. I believe this will take what would have been VfD and move them closer to being speedy deleted. I think you see it the other way around. I believe speedy delete will remain in place and that this gives sysops more power to abuse.[[User:Nricardo|--Nelson Ricardo >>Talk<<]] 21:06, Sep 25, 2004 (UTC)

Whether or not it would really be a problem, the feeling of voters is clearly that they don't want sysops to have what they see as additional voting powers. My personal view is that every community over a certain size needs to appoint people who they trust to make some decisions for them, but the community is currently not in favour of this. I also think that allowing non-sysops to vote would not make that much difference to the process, based on how many 'keep' votes there are on articles that would qualify for early deletion - usually it's none. I've made a small alternative proposal on Wikipedia talk:Managed Deletion which I think would work.

On the subject of mirrors, I believe there may be an easy way of ensuring that objectionable rubbish does not get left on our mirrors for ever. See talk page too. DJ Clayworth 18:38, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

"Sysop tyranny"

It would be funny, if it weren't so sad, to see people voting "No" because they believe that they are opposing power for administrators. The proposal does not give administrators additional powers. This is clear beyond doubt. However, the alternative, having anyone vote, is not something I can support, but let me tell you why.

1. The system is set up so that any "keep" vote immediately sends an article to VfD.
2. The system is set up so that only two keep votes sends the page directly to Clean Up.
3. If voting is open to everyone, the authors of the articles will presumably wish them kept and vote accordingly. Therefore, it would be a zero sum attempt.
4. If voting were open to all but authors, I suspect that the more clever authors would create nonce accounts or call upon their friends to vote "keep," and the page would be zero sum again.

So, if we want universal voting, then we can't, I think, have the "any dissent equals VfD or CU" provision. Instead, it would have to be "any dissent means VfD." That reduces the proposal to the level of a change in VfD practices whereby unanimous named-account delete votes in X time equal quick removal and deletion. Again, that's not a problem with me, but it doesn't really do much with handling these obvious deletes in a discreet manner, which is what I hoped for, and it still leaves us with a cumbersome process that political campaigners, for example, can exploit. Geogre 01:36, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• Okay, so why not just increase the amount of dissent necessary for sending to VfD? We don't need a sysop-only rule. Rickyrab 01:40, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• One of my reasons for voting "No" was that I interpreted the proposal as giving special authority to administrators (Though I think "sysop tyranny" is far too dramatic a description). If I was mistaken about this, I'll obviously need to reconsider the issue. I'm not at all sure that the proposal doesn't give additional powers, though, even after reading the above. It seems as though the proposal would create a new deletion method, and that only administrators would be allowed to cast votes in it. Surely that means that administrators would be given some new special power? Factitious 02:03, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)
  • Not really. See, right now administrators are abusing the Speedy Delete process. No one wants to talk about it, because nearly every admin is guilty of it. Regular users are also guilty of tagging things as speedy delete that aren't really CSD. Now, most of these cases are valid. The deletions are against the rules but actually proper, because the rules for speedy deletion were written back when Wikipedia's #1 goal was to attract and keep contributors. VfD was supposed to be a fast, deliberative manner for dealing with things that weren't obvious CSD. Things have changed to a degree that now administrators and users routinely abuse speedy. Now, I've watched three attempts at changing Speedy Delete and VfD fail, and fail even more spectacularly than this proposal. So my idea was to allow an expansion of speedy delete that was not as radical as a rewrite of the candidacy rules. Once the Speedy Delete guidelines are rewritten, administrators just delete on sight. My idea was that, since we can never agree on expanding CSD, let's come up with the things that we usually want to make speedy candidates but make sure that we act properly. The idea was to reduce abuse by asking 3 admins to agree. With even one admin disagreeing (and there are some admins, like Rossami, who are very precise about the rules and opposed to speedy deletion), the matter would revert to VfD. There wouldn't be any more power. There would be an expansion of the things that an administrator could legally consider for speedy deletion. Anyway, that's how it was written. Geogre 15:23, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Exactly. The proposal will create less abuse, not more. I think too many people didn't really read the proposal carefully. I would like to offer yet another idea: if someone isn't sure if something is a speedy or not, they should drop a note on Geogre's page and let him decide. :) func(talk) 18:14, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Thanks for the explanation, which has indeed made me feel better about this proposal. I'm still not sure there's a need to add yet another deletion process, though. Wouldn't the concerns mentioned be better addressed by enforcing the existing rules? Administrators need to be made aware of the rules for Speedy Deletion, and if those rules are no longer relevant to Wikipedia's situation, then they should be changed, using the existing process. None of this seems to merit adding a new process. I certainly agree with the goal of reducing abuse, I'm just not convinced that this method is warranted. Factitious 19:16, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)
  • Ah, well, when it comes to that, we're up against the wall. Look at the votes here. Right now, people are speaking kindly of expanding CSD, but I can guarantee that a vote will be an absolute massacre. I don't mean to be so jaundiced, but it keeps happening. If admins and users were precise and never speedy deleted except within the letter of the law, and if users didn't slap on the CSD tag except when perfectly justified, then VfD would grow considerably. I don't like this situation. I really don't like the fact that we're between leaving pernicious junk (and my expansion was only to cover articles that abuse the site and are therefore dangerous in one way or another) and acting cowboy. That's why I wanted a way for us to act less cavalierly. I can't argue with the idea that it adds more stuff to do. It will. However, it will add more stuff to do for admins, not the whole user base. Part of this is designed to slow the quick triggers, and part of it was to allow the trigger to be fired on things that are demonstrably (and agreed upon) dangers for the slow process of VfD. That was the intent, anyway, and I won't say it doesn't add procedure. It does. That might not be bad. Geogre 20:48, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Alternative proposal: Quarantine

This alternative proposition has been copied from the talk page 
Wikipedia talk:Managed Deletion in the hope that it'll get more comments/criticism here.

AFAIA, the real problem is propagation of false info during VFD. I suggest the following: articles eligible for "managed deletion" (silly, harmful, nonencyclopedic) are moved to subpages that are seen only by logged in users and are not mirrored and banned from web crawler bots. Voting is by usual crowd, and there is no time pressure. If you think there is some merit in this approach, I (or you) may elaborate it further. Mikkalai 08:14, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I agree that we should have a mechanism to quarantine pages. Perhaps we could just change the database mirroring system to prevent certain pages from being mirrored. Adding a tag or creating a new namespace may be a sensible way of doing this. However we quarantine this material people should be able to access it by ticking a box "Include quantined articles in your search?" or "Include quarantined articles in your database download?".

I think that there is also an issue with the size of the page Vfd. I think we should change the way this page is structured. Why not have a deletion context just like the the discussion context for a page. So each page would have a Talk page and a deletion page:

• Meme
• Talk:Meme
• Deletion:Meme

The page wikipedia:Votes for deletion could then just be some explanatory text with a link to Category:Pages on votes for deletion and a list of links to the articles deletion pages. This would allow the pages to be listed in order of submission but would keep the discussion on the Deletion pages.

The text for the Vfd template should become:

We could alternatively reduce the size of the deletion subpages by implementing the following procedure:

• If you agree with the proposer of an article (and all votes so far are in agreement) then do not vote if in so doing you would increase the number of votes to 3 or more (i.e only vote to second the motion).
• If you disagree with the proposer make your vote. The voting time will then be 5 days from when you voted.
• If you are an admin and 5 days have passed since proposing the vote then the article may be deleted if it has been seconded (so long as no one has opposed the motion).

(A possible caveat to the above could be: The creator of a page should not be allowed to vote against it's deletion.) This would allow clear cases of propoganda and vanity to be dealt with quickly but would respect the general wikipedian principles.

I hope others can build on these suggestions. :) Barnaby dawson 10:51, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• I like the QUARANTINE Proposal.--AAAAA 22:11, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

a question about the voting record

May I ask why there is only "No" votes here on the current version? It seems this edit removed a big chunk from the page, and that was a mistake, right? Tomos 03:55, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)