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So, I am giving up my usual no-userpage policy to start making wiki-related rants. I'm not really interested in summing up who I am in neat little userboxes. I'm not even too interested in doing my own research most of the time. I'd rather just pop in and fix clumsy wording, neutrality issues, formatting inelegancies and simple grammar, spelling, or clarity mistakes. If someone wants to know me or needs some clarifying, user talk pages exist for a reason.

I'll freely admit I'm not a major contributor and that I don't source things very well, so most of my edits are formatting ones. That said, this shouldn't lower the value of my opinion.

Rant the second: The problem with AfD is...

Articles for Deletion is simply broken. It leads (as you can see below) to rampant accusations of sock- and/or meatpuppetry, permanent damage to our good faith, overzealous wikilawyering with unexplained links to policy and guidelines, (which people actually take seriously as an arguement!) people joining in a deletion discussion for an article they have little or inappropriate expertise or interest in, and worst of all, people who simply express their opinions without justifying it in any way. This often happens on both sides of the same debate, too.

The suggestion: Remove polling

As per WP:NOT, Wikipedia is not a democracy. If this were truly the case, we would never resort to a vote before we had attempted to establish a consensus. Polling failed to gain support amongst the community, yet we persist in using it to determine whether to delete articles!

I'd much prefer that AfD consisted entirely of comments which were weighed by the closing admin, rather than votes, especially as some admins already weigh AfDs this way. This would encourage people to actually form consensus rather than troll users' edit histories, it would mean that to influence a deletion you'd actually have to state something that hasn't been said before. To influence a deletion, you would have to argue persuasively with policy or consensus on your side. To influence a deletion, you could actually ask like-minded people to bring in comments without having a destructive effect on the process as a whole, allowing people to be less reliant on watchlisting any page they're remotely interested in to protect it from deletion where necessary.

Removing polling would also have another really great effect: it would also make biting on deletion articles a lot less of a problem. Newbies without a clue of wikipedia policy can easily feel bitten by even a kind explanation of the fact that their votes may be discounted. Finding an AfD on a page they feel is valuable tends to drive off web-savvy newbies, who are often lurkers, because they get accused of being sockpuppets when they try to defend the article... for knowing policy and having small editcounts- because they're lurkers! These are potentially highly valuable wikipedians who the deletion process consistently marginalises. This is all the worse because they have all the advantage of fresh perspective, but they have also benefitted from the policies and guidelines established by experienced users too.

Elephants don't make good gardeners

Elephants are wonderful animals. They can carry heavy loads, they can pull or walk for miles, and they are perfectly capable of defending themselves. That said, elephants in groups have a tendency to trample over smaller creatures or plants. Some of our more experienced editors are beginning to become like elephants without realising the destructive effect they're having on the public perception of Wikipedia.

The key thing about Elephants is, they don't make good gardeners, and Wikipedia is a lot like a garden. We have large, well-developed trees, and small undergrowth, when you consider our articles. Ideally, we want to arrange Wikipedia so that our small and underdeveloped articles are protected by and tightly integrated with our high-quality articles, especially because this gives them the attention they need. Any good gardener will tell you the same thing. In short, we should merge a lot of the times that our usually dependable elephants propose that we delete.

Because we lose the contribution history of articles when they're deleted, and the process itself is highly divisive, (drop the terms 'inclusionist' or 'deletionist' into an AfD and see what happens if you'd like an example) AfD should be a last resort for any article that for some reason we don't want to keep in its current form. Even when the subject lacks sufficient verifiable sources to construct a good article, there are other steps to take- including deliberately stubbing it if we know we have enough reliable, independant sources forecoming.

If an article is bad enough to need a rewrite, you should first attempt to tag it with {{Cleanup-rewrite}}, and see if this attracts a good first edit. This has an advantage over deleting an article that could be included in Wikipedia, as not only will people searching for the article be tempted to rewrite it, but also people looking for things to do can do will be able to find it in Category:Wikipedia articles needing rewrite. Rewrite templates also bring inclusionists into your effort to improve the quality of wikipedia, and the more help the better.

If an article is cruft or not in itself notable, you should first attempt to find a good article to merge any relevant content into. If you organise a successful merger, you can then redirect the original article to where it has been merged, and preserve the contribution history.

If an article covers a topic of minor importance that doesn't justify an independant, consider merging it into a subpage and making the article redirect to it. Articles on minor characters in a work of fiction can be merged into Imaginary Book/Minor Characters.

Likewise, for those who want to avoid deletions, it's our duty to help with executing these merges and rewrites, not just propose them and then leave the page orphaned. If you care enough to vote keep on an article, then you should also care enough to lend at least a minute to preserve its content.

In closing, postings on Articles for Deletion should immediately justify why all of these approaches have either failed or are inappropriate, and I'd consider any AfD that doesn't do this a complete waste of time for all involved, regardless of outcome.

Rant the first: Webcomic deletions

I've been noticing lately that there's a tendancy among some admins and editors to cavalierly ignore cases where webcomics meet WP:WEB requirements when reviewing delete and speedy delete proposals. Let's get a few things straight, shall we, and start living up to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines?

We need Webcomic articles

Wikipedia needs to have good coverage on websites and web-related topics more than those websites need advertising. Granted, we need to improve other areas to combat our systematic bias too, but one of the best ways to entice people to read Wikipedia is to cover notable webcontent. Being the primary trusted and encyclopaedic resource for webcontent is also one of the best ways to aid Wikipedia in its search for legitimacy among academic circles- sure, we start off as a niche this way, but if that exposes people to Wikipedia, that's fine.

(That's not to say there aren't some articles on non-notable webcomics. But they are far outweighed by unnecessary and arbitrary deletions where personal bias seems to be effecting the judgement of our editors.)

We're not following our own rules!

• The burden is on the delete camp to establish why a subject is not notable, not the keep camp. Articles that are clear candidates for deletion will generally have a clear consensus for deletion even with the burden of proof favouring the keep position.
• Quality of art or even writing does not determine notability. We have some articles on some terribly-produced "art" on Wikipedia covered in several other topics. We have articles on albums that have jumped the shark and even the act of jumping the shark itself. Stick figures can still be insightful and worth reading if their dialogue is good and the art is clear enough to be a visual aid. Even sprite comics, though I dislike them too, can have artistic merit... at least in the writing. Webcomics that are poorly produced in both senses can even be notable because they failed spectacularly, or were so terrible they were entertaining or worthy of coverage from nontrivial sources. Do not let the production quality of webcomics effect notability discussions. It's an irrelevant factor- Wikipedia covers pornography actors, it can afford to cover webcomics drawn with stick figures too.

I don't mention this without cause. Many delete votes directly attack the value of a webcomic as art instead of establishing its non-notability. That's not in line with the policy, and there's no clear consensus for considering the quality of comics when considering them for inclusion.

• Some users and admins are shifting the goalposts when web notability requirements are already ridiculously hard to meet for web-exclusive content. Major newspapers simply do not cover websites that are considered notable, and most websites become notable without qualifying for WP:WEB. The least we can do to combat this bias is to be reasonably inclusive with the web notability requirements we currently have.

• Disregarding a vote because "User only has 26 edits"? Come on! 26 is a respectable number for someone mildly dabbling in Wikipedia and is enough to justify that someone is either not a throwaway account or a reasonably dedicated throwaway account, especially if those edits were distributed over a long period of time. If almost all of those edits were marked as minor, I would understand. Also, "120 edits with 116 marked as minor" may be unacceptable too- large amounts of minor edits over a long period of time establish an account's legitimacy to vote as neither a sockpuppet nor a meatpuppet. WP:FAITH tears these to shreds- you need to obviously be involved in sockpuppetry, not just suspected, for your opinion to be discarded.

If it matters enough to these people that their opinion be heard, and they're not throwaway votes, then they should be heard. And even if they are throwaway votes/accounts, if they make a persuasive point there's still reason to listen to them.

• The third inclusion criteria should protect all Keenspot comics from deletion, but Keenspot comics are regularly deleted because people insist it "doesn't count" as an online publisher. Keenspot specifically operates a seperate service for free, unqualified hosting of webcomics. That pretty neatly clears up that they count as independantly published and nontrivial.

(Especially seeing the examples of trivial publishing refer to "free" hosting services where anyone can upload what they like)

• I'd seriously suggest that absent a clear decision, where notability criteria are arguably met by such things as coverage in local or minor newspapers, we heed the advice of notable experts on webcomics when they weigh in on talkpages, and declare close votes with expert opinions on the side of keeping a nonconsensus.
• Clarifying how notability is ridiculously hard to qualify for: Many legitimate and notable web phenomena are never even covered outside the web at all, yet our notability requirements have no web-specific provisions for inclusion. The web-specific part of our notability requirements are all exclusive. Again, many editors insist that no web-based awards count for notability criteria, even when they are well-established, when the awards themselves have quality cited articles, and when they are respected by major players.

• We should also eventually review WP:WEB so that it actually has a provision for viral notability of websites. That is to say, sites that have extremely high levels of credibility (such as Penny Arcade and XKCD, which have both been invited to lecture at MIT) should have some reasonably concrete means of establishing themselves as a source for notability requirements, so archived website links featuring discussion can be cited.

Now, I'll be the first to say webcomics don't need Wikipedia. They're more legitimate among serious comic readers than Wikipedia is ever likely to be among serious researchers. But the point remains- Wikipedia is not playing to its strengths as well as it could as per WP:NOTPAPER, and editors and admins are ignoring its rules and guidelines selectively. This is not acceptable in any topic if we want to be taken seriously. The thing Wikipedia can be best at is documenting the web, where it's notable, and we're deleting articles that I can tell merely by name we shouldn't be.