Wikipedia talk:Countdown deletion

WARNING: this talk page is a refactoring zone, as per Wikipedia:Edit this proposal. Before you post here, be aware that people will be mercilessly editing your comments. If you don't like this, then post your comments as a personal subpage, but be aware that this is much less useful to readers.

Old discussion

The following is a list of old discussions removed from the page to keep it lean. "Old" here means that one person thought further input was not likely, not that the discussion is truly over. To continue a discussion on one of these pages, add {{/foo}} to the bottom of this page, where foo is the header of the discussion. Do not copy and paste it in here.

/JRM's preemptive rebuttals to obvious objections

Self-explanatory. Not really a discussion; quote it if you disagree with it.

/The single-author requirement

Should an article edited only by the original author be considered unimproved? Current opinion: no.

/Should countdown deletion be independent or a filter for VfD?

Current opinion: it should be independent.

/What constitutes significant improvement?

Current opinion: we don't lay this down in rules, every contributor decides this for themselves in the vote. There are some guidelines, however. And the improvement is called "material".

What edits should invalidate the Countdown?

I frequently fix minor spelling/grammatical errors, wikify, categorise etc articles that I find on Special:Newpages. That shouldn't disqualify an article from being placed on Countdown; only substantive edits by a different user should do so.-gadfium 02:13, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I can see where you're coming from, but allowing "insubstantive" edits is problematic. What's insubstantive? Do we have to vote on it? :-) OTOH, a fixed time period won't work that well either (which is why I put in the single-user-edit thing in the first place): I'd like countdown to be usable on articles that have slipped through the net of speedy deletion and are now languishing in obscurity because nobody's watching them. But on the third hand, perhaps I'm not getting my priorities straight: how often does it happen that such articles linger? Is this worth adjusting the policy to? Maybe those articles should just be VfD'ed, as always. If that's the case, we could institute a time limit: only articles edited less than so-and-so hours ago are eligible for countdown.

Or maybe I'm just blowing this all out of proportion and we should allow insubstantive edits: we lay down in policy exactly what's insubstantive (it's probably very similar to the policy for what constitutes significant improvement) and trust people to make the right judgment when putting things on countdown. (The process must be as little abusable as possible or we will get people who grow principally opposed to it, just because a few misfits abuse it). JRM 08:57, 2004 Nov 8 (UTC)

Does countdown deletion delete already good articles if they aren't improved?

This idea has potential, but also some problems. For example: A fine article could apparently be listed for countdown and it's not improved because it's already in good shape, and it automatically is deleted. For instance, someone once listed on VfD an article on the founder of the U.S. Libertarian party. Maurreen 06:32, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

There would be restrictions to prevent this, but I'm not exactly sure what they would have to be. Ideally, such articles should of course not be countdowned at all; that's not what it's for. If such articles appear on VfD, the nominations get hooted down, and there will be no consensus for deleting—but of course countdown works by not needing consensus in the first place if no improvement is made at all. You also run the risk of vandals listing everything and the kitchen sink for countdown in the hope that we are overwhelmed (this is of course as much an abuse as spamming VfD, but unfortunately easier because only the article needs to be edited).

A possible idea is to have countdown work on stubs only, i.e. articles that are (legitimately) tagged as stubs. Removing the countdown notice on non-stubs would be allowed. Stubs are, after all, in the most dire need of improval, and listing an article as a stub does not in any way indicate legitimacy. Regarding the spamming problem: aside from hunting vandals wherever they appear, there could be a flexible upper limit to the number of articles on countdown, to prevent articles from being deleted for a true lack of contributor time (though somehow, I think Wikipedia has not scaled quite that much for it to be a problem). JRM 08:31, 2004 Nov 10 (UTC)

This is a very important question, IMHO the main unresolved CD issue, but special disfavor to stubs isn't the answer. There's not enough agreement about what a stub is. I think a stub is "a short article which needs expansion", but lots of editors clearly think a stub is "a short article", and that all short articles by definition need expansion (=that adding a stub template to them is by definition legitimate tagging). WP:STUB doesn't even recognize the existence of short articles that don't need expansion. Yet such aren't especially rare, and are quite capable of being "already in good shape" and difficult to improve. Example: I've created a posse of 150—200-word biographical pages about non-famous 17th-century actors who performed at a particular play premiere in London in 1675. The length of these biography pages is adequate to the importance of the actors, and to what is known about them, maybe even excessive. I don't think they're in any need of expansion. But they're not in need of being proposed for deletion either, historycruft though they are: they give sources, and it's not inconceivable that somebody would some day want to look up one of these people (at least so I tell myself, a little shrilly). There's got to be plenty of short pages of similar character, maybe especially biographies of old, dead, non-vanity-suspect people, and we have little reason to want to delete their information. Bishonen|Talk 13:19, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

First, in order to make CD especially "dangerous" in this case it would be required that people tag non-stubs (in your opinion) as stubs (in their opinion). This matter could be resolved on the talk page ("I know this topic very well and I don't think more can reasonably be written on it; can you prove me wrong by suggesting what is missing or are you just tagging it because it's short?"). Second, good-faith editors would need to feel compelled to tag these stubs for deletion. This is possible but not likely. CD may be like RfE in some ways, but at the end it's still deletion. Don't put up articles for CD unless you not only think nobody could ever improve them, but think they're rubbish in the current form as well. I don't see that happening to legitimate short articles, mistagged or not. JRM 18:01, 2005 Apr 7 (UTC)

I agree that to for CD to stay a slick procedure, a CD vote should never turn into a discussion ("Should votes have reasons?" below), but the only workable and simple-ish restriction I can think of is for voters to have the third option of voting "improvement wasn't needed", "article was already good". I have edited the proposal to show how I mean, please take a look. Sheesh, creep. But I don't see how we can manage without restrictions on this point, and it's basically impossible to add them without getting a bit of creep. There are probably intricacies I've missed, I've made a start rather than proposed a fully-fledged alternative. Bishonen|Talk 13:19, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Distrustful bastard that I am, I can't help but think that the original author would almost always put {{alreadygood}} on the page... but perhaps this is as common (or rather uncommon) as the author coming to VfD and raising a stink (due apologies to those authors who actually engage in sensible discussion, of course). It fills a real need, and I see no obvious deficiencies or angles for improvement. JRM 18:01, 2005 Apr 7 (UTC)

Countdown deletion is unnecessary and harmful

The VfD process works fine just the way it is. This is just another level of interference being created by people who don't want anything deleted. RickK 23:30, Apr 3, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. I disagree, but I do agree there needs to be more justification. Oh, and I do want things deleted. In fact, I want them deleted with less hassle than now. Keep in mind that nobody would be forced to use this, and this would not supplant VfD. If you think VfD works fine, then by all means just use that. I take it your argument is that it would just slow down the deletion process? I've tried to address those concerns, but apparently not well enough. I'll work on it. JRM 23:42, 2005 Apr 3 (UTC)

One of the benefits of VfD is that it is simple. An article's nominated. It's reviewed, edited, voted on. A consensus is formed, and action is taken.

This proposal is far too complex. How are people going to find the articles with this template applied? Peruse another list, just like VfD, except you can't vote until a week later? Why make users track an article for a week if they're already sure it needs to go? If it's a good policy, why restrict it to new articles? Why make anyone wait to nominate something VfD if they want to?

There's too much instruction about how, when and why to nominate and vote. Two deletion processes are enough to keep track of. --Unfocused 05:02, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Balancing immediatism and eventualism

I think this idea has some merit. This practice is already (somewhat) used on Requested Translations (if a page isn't translated in a week's time, it gets put on VfD). The question lies in how exactly it should be used. It is a strange fact that listing an article on VfD gets it improved a lot faster than listing it on {expand} or something similar. That's probably because of time pressure. So arguably, adding some pressure would cause some articles to be expanded. On the other hand we don't want to discourage creation of new articles, so I doubt a policy like "a new article gets deleted if below a certain size and a certain #edits after a certain time" would work. Complex issue, let's brainstorm some more. Radiant_* 09:34, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)

I've conjured up a new title for this section; I think it's quite apt.

I fully agree that specific limits to edit numbers and byte counts doesn't work. In fact, I'm wary of proposals that have X of anything, because such things are inherently arbitrary (and in case of prohibited things, gameable). I could easily pad a bad article with a completely redundant paragraph that doesn't improve it at all to meet some size requirement, or make teeny tiny edits to get around edit count requirements. Of course others could police this, but then we're back to square one and might as well have a VfD vote. Likewise, on the flip side, just because an article is smaller than some size or has less edits than some number doesn't mean it's bad or useless to start from, and it's no basis for comparing articles. Again, you'd need to watch this manually, and then there's no point in fixing the arbitrary limits.

The only thing the proposal has, as it stands, is the time requirement (which is an entirely arbitrary seven days). Then an arbitrary three-day vote, during which the article could still be improved. Expansion is not the main issue: improvement is. Improvement is measured by voters; there's no point trying to pin that down in policy.

Regarding discouraging new articles: I don't think that will be a problem, at least no more than it is now. There is no shortage of people who will slap VfD tags on anything they don't like ASAP, starting a five day process of arguing and voting (and if the article is lucky, rewriting). CD would be a way of getting that without the arguing, and with the voting delayed to when it actually matters. CD could be a lot friendlier on newbies than VfD: you don't have to edit much to get an article to survive CD, you get a week to do it and others can chip in.

CD is really a lot like WP:RFE, but with the provision that if nothing at all happens to the article (including improvement by the original author), it goes. That's a pretty strong condition to fail on. JRM 10:22, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)

---

One thing I dislike about the current vfd as well as countdown deletion is that they don't support wikipeida eventualism. Perhaps this could be used as an additional constraint by the folks who do the cool math :-) Kim Bruning 16:45, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Deletion inherently opposes eventualism. Nothing will ever change that. A deletion process that "supports" eventualism is no deletion process at all: indeed, the ultimate improvement process that supports eventualism is the wiki itself!

To me it looks like you want to have your cake and eat it too—but you'd have to come with a simply amazing proposal to support that. (One option is a versioning system in which "deletion" means "banished to the lowest level of visibility"—like Slashdot but without moderation points.)

All that is a bit beyond the scope of this proposal, though. JRM 17:32, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)

I disagree that "Deletion inherently opposes eventualism." Some subjects are not encyclopedic--they can be deleted.Demi ^T/_C 19:50, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)

Yes. I see I made a mistake in my reasoning, because it only applies if you're willing to accept a priori any page on any topic at all as belonging to Wikipedia. Then deletion would oppose eventualism, because pages we have already agreed on should be there should be improved, not removed—that contradicts the belief of eventualism, which holds that eventually, given enough time, anything will be improved to meet our standards (or indeed exceed them!)

But there is no need to assume eventualism also implies this form of straw man ludicrous inclusionism. While there is some overlap when you get to topics that are "borderline notable" (since inclusionism holds those should be there in any case, while eventualism holds the article's improvement might establish notability of the topic more firmly) this doesn't mean they meet at the bottom. My statement is the result of overgeneralization. This is independent of whatever any one person considers "encyclopedic". JRM 18:27, 2005 Apr 7 (UTC)

To me the criterion is not "is this article good?" but "can this article be good?" On the other hand, this proposal might support eventualism because it provides an outlet for improvable articles that might otherwise get listed on VfD. Demi ^T/_C 19:50, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)

"Can this article be good?" is eventualism. "Can this article be made good enough in seven days?" is immediatistic, but as you observe, with a strong focus on eventualism because it encourages edits, rather than encouraging discussion. We might well call the prevalent attitude on VfD towards misguided but salvageable articles indicatism—instead of improving the article, pointing out what might possibly be improved and leaving it at that. JRM 18:27, 2005 Apr 7 (UTC)

A newbie's 2 cents, if you don't mind; I think "seven days" might be a bit optimistic for expecting an article to expand/improve/develop. 30, 60 or 90 days might be more realistic and, um, consensual. Keeping the good faith guideline in mind, an editor who creates a stub or substub may fully intend to create a good article, but, you know, real life gets in the way. Or they're actually doing some research. Even if the original "author" was just being a goofball, I think it's entirely possible that another editor(s) may be able to create a real article, given enough time to find and fix the original "bad" version. I just doubt that a week is a reasonable time frame to expect things to happen. If "nothing" happens after a longer time, it's probably safer to assume that the subject is unencyclopedic, or that nobody currently on Wikipedia has enough knowledge on the subject to create a real article. Then put the 1-week time crunch on and see if anyone bites. Soundguy99 05:47, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

But if you go for a period in terms of months, there's no point to applying CD to the article to begin with. Leaving an article "scheduled for deletion" for that long is counterproductive in two ways: first of all, it encourages nobody ("oh no! This article will be deleted in two months if I don't do anything! Oh well, maybe next month.") and second, CD would be so non-committing that you could stick the tag on every article ever created. But then CD should be part of core Wikipedia policy, not a separate deletion procedure—that many tagged articles are impossible to manage.

CD heavily relies on good faith. If you think an article could be improved in two or three months because the potential is there, then don't tag it for CD, and vote "already good" if it does get tagged for CD. Better yet, expand it a little yourself. CD is not for legitimate stubs; it is not a stick with which to punish people who haven't written enough on a subject. I'd be disappointed if that's what it would be used for, though I see no way to prevent it without making it useless. CD is for those "articles" that will not be expanded even in months, because they're so bad that they offer no clue at all as to how they should be expanded. Things that are not candidates for CSD, but consistently rack up delete votes on VfD (a procedure that takes considerably less time than months, mind you). Finally, if the only way to improve the article is to completely replace it, it might as well not be there. JRM 07:54, 2005 Apr 13 (UTC)

Um, not to be combative, but if I were to vote "already good" on a CD vote for an article that I think has "potential" but has not actually improved, isn't that a bit dishonest?  :-)

It seems to me the catch to this whole thing is that it is easy for any of us to look at an article and legitimately say, "I really doubt that this will turn into anything", while at the same time not having enough knowledge of the subject (either specifically or generally) to be 100% sure that it's unexpandable or to actually do any of the work ourselves. The more users we have, the more likely it is that somebody out there knows enough to create a real article out of a "nothing" article (i.e. me, for example -- I've already got a dozen articles I know I can do something with as soon as I can get to the library and snag some references, plus I keep getting distracted (darn it) by reading articles like this (sheepish grin)); OTOH, the more articles we have, the longer it's gonna take that "somebody" to find that article. Thus my suggestion that perhaps 7-10 days swings the balance more towards immediatism than eventualism, and perhaps a longer countdown would be more appropriate and more agreeable for consensus. I think the longer an article sits without significant work is greater "proof" that the article is vanity or pointless cruft, and can be deleted without clogging VfD. (I'm guessing that the proliferation of vanity and pointless cruft articles was the impetus behind this policy suggestion.) Not, mind you, that I mean that "longer" should be a year or two, or anything like that.  ;-)

For a more generalized discussion of some of the points being brought up on this page, check out meta:Strengths and weaknesses of the current deletion system and meta:Pure wiki deletion system (proposal). Thanks for listening. Soundguy99 19:53, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

What is an "overwhelming" vote?

When is a vote "overwhelming"? 66%? 75%? 90%? 100% less one? -- ALoan (Talk) 12:06, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This is a tricky one, and I've deliberately deferred it. I see a number of clear alternatives, but not which one would be best.

1. Simple majority (i.e., not "overwhelming" at all). This won't work, as deletions would become contentious. CD isn't for contentious deletions—that's VfD, working towards consensus by argument, where you can at least know the reasoning of those who disagree with you.
2. Significant to supermajority (60-90%). Exactly which percentage I'd leave up to a straw poll, as I don't suppose anyone of us knows what would work best. This still runs the risk of contentious deleting, but if dissenters are vastly outnumbered, they're probably wrong. Improvement is what's being voted on, and that can hardly be so debatable as to fool the majority.
3. Lone dissenter: 100% less one. Obviously, we'd expect the dissenter to be the author only, as he/she could easily be biased to preserve their article "no matter what". However, the lone dissenter could also be an inclusionist nut who votes "improved" on everything. As I've stated, this is dishonest and abusive, but how are you really going to handle it? Claim their opinion is invalid?

That's not all, of course. Do we need a quorum? If one heckler visits all nearly-expired votes to go vote "not improved", is that "overwhelming" or abusing the system? What measures could be taken to prevent this? Well, I don't have all the answers either. Thank you for raising the questions. :-) JRM 14:33, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)

Something like the standard used on RFA should be fine (80% or so). The vote of one lone nut and the author (including socks) should be ignored. No votes should mean that the article is notimporved. This link is Broken 30 June 2005 03:45 (UTC)

A central page for CD

The pages says that there is to be no central page (WP:CD is taken...) where articles subject to CD are listed (presumably the "what links here" from the template, {{countdown}} or whatever, will produce a list of the articles facing the chop anyway), but would it be worth using the process adopted by the reorganised Wikipedia:Requested moves: while {{move}} is added to the relevant articles' talk pages and all of the discussion occurs there, WP:RM includes a list of links to all of the articles and their talk pages, as a central repository, so it is possible to see all of the articles that are being discussed, rather than having to hop disjointedly from talk page to talk page. -- ALoan (Talk) 16:56, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I believe that this process will stand or fail on its visibility. It needs a focus to which interested editors can go, and that provides a single link point for promotional links on Community Portal and suchlike. To avoid increasing the admin load, this central point could be a category built into the template. Perhaps the date can be built in as a sub-category. --Theo (Talk) 19:40, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Visibility is indeed important, but scalability is likewise. We might simply include a category with the template, as Template:VfD and Template:Delete do—this category can be edited to include all the information needed to understand the process, and its talk page can be used to comment on the general pattern of nominations if so desired. This would offer central coordination without the burden of manually maintaining lists of CD pages, which should not be underestimated—this is a large part of the burden VfD is suffering. Of course, we would also have a separate page explaining everything, but this would be static. JRM 22:24, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)

There is no listing for CD. Only new articles and recent changes patrollers will see the addition (as well as using what links here on the template; maybe a link could be put directly to that on the main VFD page). --SPUI (talk) 00:51, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Also see the suggestions above. We could have a central page for CD that would not necessarily list every article itself, but it would provide the means for doing that. JRM 13:24, 2005 Apr 9 (UTC)

I'm confused as to how people are supposed to find an article with a countdown tag on it without a central page. Obviously, the article author and the poster of the message know about it, but everyone else would have to follow the "What links here" list, which doesn't seem very managable or convenient.
Why doesn't the template simply add the article to Category:Countdown? Then there would be a central repository for everyone to find out what articles are being looked at, without the need for anyone going through the process of listing the page. This would seem to combine the advantages of both systems. — Asbestos | Talk 23:43, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

A math-based approach

For every system we're going to propose for deletion, we should consider:

• how does this new system scale?
• how much work does it cost to maintain?
• At what kind of numbers do we expect it to break?

Perhaps what might be better to solve vfd problems on the long run is to actually first do some maths that gets us where we want, and then to convert that maths into a "vfd-alike" ruleset.

It might also hbe handy to use actual graphs of actual wikipedia traffic, and empirically derive actual numbers, rather than estimates. Unfortunately I'm not quite good enough at mathematics to go for that, but I'm sure there's some decent mathematician wikipedians around that could give that a shot. Kim Bruning 16:45, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Applying math to CD

I'm figuring it scales linearly alongside VFD, so that it's really only a quick emergency patch, rather than an actual solution. We might expect it to be rather less work to maintain than vfd, so that perhaps it could perhaps deal with ten times as many articls as does vfd. Let's check.

Now as to how many articles then "fall through" to vfd. That'd be the key point to look at. If 90% of the articles fall through to VFD, then obviously countdown deletion would be failing. If only 10% fall through, then it would be working superbly. I'm not sure as to how to figure an exact point , but I suspect that even a 70-80% fallthrough rate would be ok, assuming that we get the same amount of nominations as vfd does currently.

What happens if people start feeling that countdown deletion is much easier than vfd, and flock to it in droves? Then perhaps the number of nominations would rise a lot. If the number of nominations on Countdown deletions doubles relative to what vfd is right now (not unreasonable to suppose), our fallthrough rate would only be allowed to be at most for instance (using the 80% from earlier) 80%/2=40%.

Well hmm, okay, that's actually not a bad guesstimate for now. Do you think that 100%-40%=60% of all articles nominated here will actually be improved within 7 days? If not, then Countdown deletion will actually increase rather than decrease our workload. (Note that this is an optimistic estimate).

Ok, but let's say that those numbers are acceptable. It looks like we can only get a 2 times improvement over our current vfd at very best, rather than 10 times like we thought above. That might still sound like a lot now, but as wikipedia is growing very rapidly (assume exponential?), it's only going to slow our problem by a couple of months at best. Kim Bruning 16:45, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You're making a critical mistake here, and that is assuming that articles "fall through" to VfD. They do not. They only do that if, after seven days of improving, when a vote has failed and people do not agree the article has not been improved, someone still feels it should be axed, and that there is a chance VfD would axe it—good luck, because you'll have all those people from the previous vote voting against you, most likely! You need a percentage for that too, and factor it in, and I don't believe it will be very big.

That also means removing the assumption that "do you think that 100%-40%=60% of all articles nominated here will actually be improved within 7 days? If not, then Countdown deletion will actually increase rather than decrease our workload." No! All articles not improved are deleted, in a process that is much less time-consuming than VfD:

VfD

Close the nomination by editing it. Determine consensus. Update the article talk page if no consensus to delete; delete article if consensus to delete. Update VfD pages to remove nomination.

CD

Count votes. Delete vote from talk page if "not improved" gets no majority. Delete article otherwise.

Perhaps the proposal doesn't make it clear enough that VfD is not involved at all. Feel free to edit it if that's the case. JRM 17:45, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)

Ok, fair deal. In any case my number play was more an example of how you could quantify to some degree. Applying your correction, could you give a rough guesstimate as to what the improvement by countdown deletion quantifies to? Kim Bruning 18:47, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm working on it, so don't think I'm ignoring you in the interim. I think I can do a little better than guesstimation, but that will take some time. I should point out rightaway though that I do not see the main virtue of CD as "will improve efficiency by X%". CD is simply different from VfD, and more appropriate to some articles. How many deletes have you seen that were either so clear that putting in "delete" votes was a waste of time, or conversely that could have been saved is someone just put in a little effort? CD is for those kinds of articles. Of course CD shouldn't worsen efficiency either, but I think we're pretty safe on that. JRM 14:59, 2005 Apr 7 (UTC)

Ugh. After having worked on it (and talked to others), the only conclusion I draw so far is that it's really hard to squeeze useful statistics on deletion out of Wikipedia. Does Wikipedia grow exponentially? Yes. Does the number of articles listed for VfD grow exponentially? Yes. How many of these articles could be taken to CD instead, i.e., how many are clear keeps or deletes? Estimate: lots, maybe 85%, looking at what VfD handles on average. Could the CD process handle the load? I can't see how to tell yet, as I don't know how people would use it. Does CD scale by orders of magnitude, so that it could solve deletion problems once and for all? Yes and no. Yes, if you consider CD distributes over individual articles, whereas VfD does not. No, if you consider that articles on CD will have to attract independent attention, which must be coordinated from somewhere. Can this problem be solved and is it important that it should be solved? I don't know. JRM · Talk 02:09, 2005 May 7 (UTC)

Should votes have reasons?

One version said that people "do not have to supply a reason" but that it's "appreciated".

I would in fact reverse this and say it's discouraged.

Why? Because CD is not VfD. Unlike VfD, the CD vote really is a vote. A tally. No consensus is built. Administrators are not required to agonize over why users think something has (not) been improved and possibly even override the majority. We have VfD for that, and it works quite well there.

It's possible for someone to be misguided in their vote because they misinterpret the procedure, of course, and you can't forbid people from influencing each other, but a CD vote should never turn into a discussion—if that happens, many of the advantages fly straight out the window.

Even if they were encouraged, what reasons could there be? "This article has been improved because..." Other than a diff that anyone can generate, what could follow?

I've tried editing the proposal to match this train of thought better. Comments encouraged, of course, I might be missing some fundamental need that isn't being addressed. JRM 18:06, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)

I'm ritually opposed to voting actually :-P . Wikipedia is not a democracy, it's a consensusocracy(?) perhaps, which is hopefully (cross fingers) an improved evolution of democracy ;-). There's too many reasons for why this is so to go into here. To choose a voting system at the heart to countdown deletion may well doom the proposal. Perhaps a different, more consensus based mechanism might be substituted? Kim Bruning 10:02, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

What would be it be, then? A mini-VfD? A page were editors convince other editors the page has really (not) been improved? And since this will be consensus and not a vote, we should not have the "improved/not improved" votes except as expressions of opinion, which will supposedly have to be evaluated by an admin... Horror scenario: an article is put on CD, is edited lightly but not significantly for 7 days because nobody really cares, and then people flock to the 3-day vote to have arguments over how the article looks, how it might look, how people who are voting "not improved" are evil immediatists and what this vote could mean for other articles of its kind—in short, VfD all over again. Consensus is a marvelous thing, but sometimes, talk really is cheap.

Consider this: an admin who speedily deletes an article is acting unilaterally, and yet according to consensus, because consensus has laid down the policy which states when the admin is allowed to do this. Likewise, if there is a consensus that CD would work best with simple voting, that would not be a contradiction in terms.

This proposal itself should make it clear I am a big fan of consensus (in fact, I think it's the only workable tool for effectively implementing article-spanning changes), but that doesn't mean I think it's the best tool for all possible jobs. I'm not saying making CD "more consensus based" wouldn't be possible or worth it, but I would like to see some arguments on why the proposal would benefit from it other than that you think it may "doom" the proposal (because I don't see that happening, frankly) and also ideas for why or how a consensus-based mechanism would not fall prey to the dangers I've outlined above. JRM 17:39, 2005 Apr 7 (UTC)

Dry run?

Would some people be interested in a dry run? We could run it here or on a subpage. Perhaps for dry-run reasons we could reduce the time to 2 or 3 days, so that the dry run runs a bit faster than reality so that we get quicker results. We'd need a template something along the lines of "this page is being dry run on Countdown Deletion, please contribute to the discussion there if you have time". :-)

Because it would be a dry run, we would put a "this page would/would not have been deleted by CD if this had not been a dry run", and those messages can be picked up later. This would allow people to either renominate certain pages for CD, or to send them to VFD.

Kim Bruning 15:40, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Great idea! --Theo (Talk) 15:49, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Concur. Radiant_* 21:57, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

This proposal interests me. Why not give it a try? BrokenSegue 01:15, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

Great idea! I'll probably suggest this in HuWiki

I just wanted to say, that I think this is a great idea. In the much younger and smaller Hungarian Wikipedia, this could take over 50-70% of our VfD traffic. If it works out here, I'll be more than glad to suggest it in HuWiki. Heck, I may not even wait that long. nyenyec ☎ 18:51, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

If you do, you will of course be sure to let us know how it goes, right? Be sure in particular to look to the cares of eventualists: if the wiki is much smaller, it will also be much harder to get people to improve the article in the alotted time. You don't want to swamp CD with articles when there's no time to improve them, because they would get deleted for no good reason. JRM · Talk 22:05, 2005 May 4 (UTC)

Au contraire! Actually our traffic is so small, that usually what happens in HuWiki (stats here) is that sometimes more than 50 percent of the articles put on VfD are "adopted" by an experienced Wikipedia editor, who usually writes a short article discarding the previously unacceptable content. The original candidates are usually low-quality or sub-stub articles on important topics. (E.g. atheism, Krakow, The Prince, SuSE) Same thing happens with our copyvio candidates. Our VfD time window is 5 days, so in theory, it's even faster than this CD suggestion. I think the only reason this would be rejected in HuWiki, is that basically this is what we already do (only with more overhead, like the En VfD). nyenyec ☎ 22:37, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Yes, it does seem you plain just don't need CD, or deletion "procedures" of any kind for that matter, as your VFD is CSD + PNA. Yours is a blessed wiki indeed. :-) JRM · Talk 23:07, 2005 May 4 (UTC)

• I've found that the Dutch Wikipedia uses this as their main VfD process (mark articles as "work in progress", and unless improved within two weeks, they are deleted). Radiant_* 09:08, May 20, 2005 (UTC)

  Interesting... Have they always done it like this? JRM · Talk 09:21, 2005 May 20 (UTC)

  • I don't know, maybe you should ask them. Radiant_* 12:35, May 20, 2005 (UTC)

  Eek! As in, go over there? Mingle with my compatriots? Speak Dutch? What a daring concept...

  Seriously, though, I will; I'm especially interested in how it works out for them. JRM · Talk 14:10, 2005 May 20 (UTC)

Are all new articles going to go to CD?

I read the proposal, and it seemed unclear to me. Are all new articles going to go to CD? If so, then CD would have even worse of a load than VfD has. I don't see how CD can be useful. The WP:CSD doesn't allow speedy deletion of vanity pages, so we'd have vanity pages posted for two weeks instead of five days. Also, we have quite a few articles on interesting, useful topics, that have only had one editor doing most of the work, but nobody calling for its deletion (see, for example, my article on Nightingale Island. I had all of the edits on it for more than a month, and nobody called for it to be deleted.). Clearly, VfD needs to have less of a load, but I would think that expanding CSD would be a better remedy in most cases. Something like countdown deletion would work for some of the articles on VfD, say, those that require more expansion to assert that they are notable/encyclopedic/etc. But just putting all new articles through CD would just give us more trouble. --Idont Havaname 20:15, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The proposal doesn't say all new articles. It says "To invoke CD, a template ({{countdown}}) is added to the top of the article page". If no one thinks that a new page should be deleted, no one will put that template on it. That aspect is just like VfD - if no one thinks an article should be deleted, no one puts a VfD template onto it, and it doesn't go under VfD process, and it doesn't get deleted. -R. S. Shaw 00:11, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Possible solution in the next version of MediaWiki?

Maybe we can use the upcoming article rating system to establish an "automatic deletion of poorly rated articles" system.

Each article could be rated positive, negative, or neutral by each editor. The valences are summed, and if the article's rating is below negative 2, then it's automatically listed on a "Poorly rated" list on a "Cleanup" page. If an article stays below negative 10 for 5 consecutive days, then any admin can review the votes and delete immediately. (Scores and time frame are arbitrary and open for debate; I just picked three numbers.)

I think some kind of "score reset" facility should be available, too, perhaps by asking an admin after a major edit, or by posting to VfD and surviving it, or a request to the community at large for consensus to do so?

Any article could still be tagged "speedy delete" or nominated to VfD by anyone at any time.

Is this worth setting up a project page for this early? Having a proposed use for the ratings system ready could help guide the programmers. --Unfocused 05:18, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• There might be a problem here if people 'gang up' on an article in an attempt to give it an unreasonably high (or low) ranking. Thus an article on a webforum could be kept from being deleted by a horde of socks (the obvious fix would be to require e.g. minimum of 250 edits before you can rank). Or an article on a pokemon could be voted into the ground to get it deleted. Radiant_>|< July 4, 2005 21:50 (UTC)