Wikipedia

Wikipedia:Deletion review

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Tony Sidaway (talk | contribs) at 04:32, 15 February 2006 (→[[Dictator Appreciation Day]]: Anyone who sends an email to minorityreport@bluebottle.com with the title "dictator appreciation day" will receive a copy of the article.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Template loop detected: Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion/Vfu header This page is about articles, not about people. If you feel that a sysop is routinely deleting articles prematurely, or otherwise abusing their powers, please discuss the matter on the user's talk page, or at Wikipedia talk:Administrators. Similarly, if you are a sysop and an article you deleted is subsequently undeleted, please don't take it as an attack.

Content review

Editors who wish to see the content of a deleted article may place a request here. They may wish to use that content elsewhere, for example. Alternatively, they may suspect that an article has been wrongly deleted, but are unable to tell without seeing what exactly was deleted. As a subset of this, sometimes an article which is appropriate for a sister site is deleted without being properly transwikied. If the page is undeleted temporarily, it can be exported complete with history using Special:Export, and then redeleted. This will be especially useful once the import feature is completed.

Many administrators will honour requests to provide the content of a deleted article if asked politely. See Category:User undeletion.

Dictator Appreciation Day

I would like to request that the article "Dictator Appreciation Day be temporarily undeleted. If this is possible, I would greatly appreciate it.

Anyone who sends an email to minorityreport@bluebottle.com with the title "dictator appreciation day" will receive a copy of the article. --04:32, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Level 4 Productions

I would like to know why the article on Level 4 Productions ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Level_4_Productions ) was deleted. It would appear that the main criteria applied here, in the deletion, was the fact that Level 4 has an existing myspace.com page ( Delete as meeting the main non-notability criterion, a myspace page. Stifle 16:35, 28 January 2006 (UTC). I don't understand the logic behind this criteria. Dane Cook, a comedian, for example, has a myspace.com page and yet he still has an article about him here on wikipedia. Level 4 Productions is a grassroots DIY collective focusing on underground techno music, and as far as i know, the only one of its kind in montreal. It heavily promotes new and local talent and strives to bring an "old-school" feel to the events and music it produces. Level 4 Productions is also notable because of it's ability to survive through a number of failing trends in electronic music, such as electroclash. It has also been scribed and repeatedly mentioned in local Montreal media. While this may seem non-notable to those outside the circles of underground electronic music, at the same time, articles pertaining to gonzo porn stars, such as jenna haze( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenna_haze ) or aurora snow( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Snow ) , may seem non-notable to those outside of that interest group.

As such, i am requesting that the page be reinstated.

moshzilla

I would like to have this undeleted mometarely. I started the internet phenomena, moshzilla, and own moshzilla.com, I would like to move the contents of the moshzilla entry onto the moshzilla site if possible. User:joshhighland


History only undeletion

History only undeletions can be performed without needing a vote on this page. For example, suppose someone writes a biased article on Fred Flintstone, it is deleted, and subsequently someone else writes a decent article on Fred Flintstone. The original, biased article can be undeleted, in which case it will merely sit in the page history of the Fred Flintstone article, causing no harm. Please do not do this in the case of copyright violations.

Decisions to be reviewed

Template loop detected: Template:Vfu mechanics

Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_review#Temporary_undeletion

Advertisement - Please join the talk on if all articles brought to DRV should be fully restored and open for editing by default.

Important notice: all userbox undeletions are being discussed on a subpage: Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates. Please post all new such requests there (though you may link them from this page if you like)


13 February 2006

The Odin Brotherhood

A debacle of a discussion, Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/The_Odin_Brotherhood, with a deletionist attempt to browbeat the article out of existence, quite a bit of confusion over whether the article was about the book or the apparently apocryphal "brotherhood" named in the title, substantial changes in the article during the AfD discussions, and a small wave of sockpuppet supporters. Even discounting the sockpuppets, it's hard to conclude that (roughly) 35-40% Keep/merge/redirect, 60-65% delete constituted a consensus to delete, and the closing decision in a discussion this contentious clearly should not have been made by the editor who posted the original AFD nomination. Monicasdude 05:09, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep deleted. Certainly the editor who nominated the article should not have closed the discussion; give him a slap on the wrist for that (and threaten an RFC if it keeps happening), but I can't see any other real conclusion coming from this. Discounting socks/anons/newbies there were very few votes to do anything but delete, and the proposed redirect was a a bit of a streth, it seemed. The article was substantially rewritten during the debate, making it about a book rather than a brotherhood, but the book has a sales rank of something like 1.5 million on amazon, so I don't think it would make it anyway. I would almost support a procedural relisting based on the changes made to the article, but I hate to replay puppetshows, especially when I can't see the end result being any different. -R. fiend 05:33, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete/relist I support undeletion as the "slap on the wrist" that closer/nominator deserves. Such conduct is fairly egregious in cases where any keep votes are cast. (I don't mind if a nominator closes a unanimous delete, but otherwise, don't do it.) Xoloz 17:30, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'd almost agree, but relisting the debate isn't going to punish the closer; it's going to punish anyone at AFD who has to get involved in a pointless, overly verbose puppetshow in order to work for the proper conclusion, as well as the admin who closes that one (who will not be the same as last time). Though it is a valid reason to propose a DRV, changing an article from one unencyclopedic mess to another midway through an AFD does nto guarantee a relist. -R. fiend 07:01, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Just for clarity, I'll emphasize that, by using your phrase "slap on the wrist", I was hoping the overturn would prevent the same mistake by this closer and others in future. Punishment is, of course, not the wiki-way. :)
  • Endorse closure. Reviewing the deletion discussion, I count 16 arguing for deletion with three arguing for deletion after the rewrite and three explicitly returning to the discussion to endorse their earlier opinions (four if you count the nominator/closer). I count 9 to keep as is but 4 are patently excludable as sock/meatpuppets. 1 is a judgement call - a very new user who is not yet familiar with our standards. I would have given him/her the benefit of doubt in this case. 2 people argued for redirect without merger - both before the rewrite. Given the subsequent changes to the article, I would have tallied them as "ambiguous" in this case. 1 other person argued for redirect but based on subsequent actions and comments, I would have interpreted his/her opinion as another keep. Four people either offered ambiguous opinions or abstained. To me, that works out to 16-6 - sufficient to reach the threshold of "rough consensus". The comments illuminated the discussion but did not provide convincing argument or counter-argument to convince me that we should override the vote-count in this case. Given the interpretation necessary in this case, the nominator probably shouldn't have closed this discussion but the result is clear enough that I don't see a reason to rerun the discussion. The nominator also should have been much more explicit in explaining his/her reasoning during the closing. Closing a debate with nothing more than {{at}} del ~~~~ is an injustice to the decision process. Rossami (talk) 00:05, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure - the consensus was to delete, and the closer made a judgement call which I think was right. That being said, he shouldn't have been the one to make that call, and should be poked in the head until he promises to never do it again. Proto||type 12:45, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete/relist - Clearly bad process to close a judgement-call AfD started by oneself. And I definitely wouldn't be so eager to hang on to pre-editing "delete" recommendations while discounting the "redirect" recommendations. -- Jonel | Speak 21:26, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted, WP:SNOW. User:Zoe|(talk) 23:02, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • 'Endorse closure, slap on wrist for Mikka, and slap on wrist for Monicasdude for failing to WP:AGF in the case of everybody who voted delete. The article as deleted absolutely sucked, as numerous people said, and nobody even tried to fix it. We do not need this article back, thanks all the same. There is nothing preventing someone else from coming along and writing a much better article on the same subject, in the mean time it's not like we need to keep the subject's seat warm or anything. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   23:26, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

COMMENT. Let me say--in previous postings--I thought you chaps were a lynch mob. I WAS WRONG! I am impressed by your devotion to "fair play" and "due process." --146.85.127.124 00:27, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Offtopic.com

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Offtopic.com

You guys are gonna love this one, the AfD (or VfD rather) was almost a year ago. Anyway, it's the 6th largest forum on the entire web, and the largest generaral discussion forum, above even Something Awful. It seems to me that during the VfD, the article was so pitifully small and unreferenced that nobody actually knew how big it was. Subsequently, the article was recreated several times, and promptly speedied for being a repost. I seem to recall, however, that the very last one, the one deleted on Nov. 15, was actually a pretty good article that included facts like it being extremely large, so I think it should be undeleted to that version. --Rory096 20:38, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • The Deletion Log shows that most of the deletions were not as "recreated content" but as patent nonsense and/or obvious vandalism. I did not attempt to review all 186 deleted edits but a random sampling off the first page does show that this page is a vandalism-magnet.
    When the VfD discussion was held (May/June 2005), this website's Alexa ranking was so low that it wasn't even on the chart. Later in the summer, it spiked up briefly, then dropped again. It is now fluctuating around 10,000. That would still be well below the recommended thresholds of the Alexa test so the claims of traffic alone fail to convince me. Does this site meet any of the other recommended criteria at WP:WEB?
    Without some more concrete claims to notability/visibility, I'm not yet willing to set aside the previous decision. Especially given the extra load that this would appear to place on the people on vandalism patrol. Endorse closure pending other information. Rossami (talk) 21:39, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • While true that many of those were for nonsense, the very last one, which actually did have content (if I recall correctly, I obviously can't see it now), was deleted as reposted. It probably does not meet WP:WEB, mostly because the "Rule #1" of the site is not to talk about the site, though note that SA doesn't meet any Alexa test either, at 2402. Offtopic is where the O RLY? owl itself originated, in addition to many other notable internet memes. Xoloz: it's also much larger than SA in terms of members, at 138,954, especially considering SA doesn't prune members for inactivity. OT has had over 25,000 of those users on it in the past month alone, and almost never has less than 1500 logged in at any one point, though it's usually much higher. As for vandalism, we could semi-protect it, though, being a frequent figure in #wikipedia-en-vandalism, I can assure you that there is no possible way it could be more vandalism than Ebaumsworld, which we handle fine. --Rory096 03:46, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure for now. The provided evidence says that Offtopic is the 6th largest board in total number of posts. I'm not sure whether that indicates noteworthiness... it may just be a spam-magnet, for instance. Given this, I concur with Rossami unless more evidence is provided. Xoloz 22:18, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure. And if someone wants to write a different, much better and more compelling article on the same subject, I see no reason why tey should not do so. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   23:20, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure but would encourage a real article on the topic. JYolkowski // talk 03:41, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

12 February 2006

Userbox:Anti UN, Userbox:Anti ACLU, Template:User no Rand and Template:User-AmE-0

Discussion at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates.

Lowbrow.com

Nobody seems to like this article. Every time I come back here, it's gone. Why is this? What makes the likes of Ebaum's World or other sites any more special? Lowbrow.com is a large website with a pretty massive community. Why someone would want to keep information about it from this encyclopedia is beyond me, and it is very frustrating. I am requesting that this article be undeleted. Thank you.

--Spank fusion 00:13, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lowbrow.com for one thing, where a consensus to delete the article was first reached. It seems subsequent recreations of the article have all been deleted because they were deemed sufficiently similar to the original deleted version, which is allowed under the criteria for speedy deletion. It does look quite similar every time. You might also see the WP:WEB guidelines for website article inclusion. At any rate I think rather than deletion review you should talk to the admin who protected the page to see about recreating it. --W.marsh 00:46, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Hi. I'm that admin, and I sent User:Spank fusion here, as the appropriate place to contest a deletion, rather than than just recreating the article repeatedly. If there's a way to recreate the article so that it meets our inclusion guidelines, this is the place where that should be determined, if I understand correctly. -GTBacchus(talk) 01:07, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure. Unanimous decision to delete, entirely uncontroversial. If you propose recreating it, explain briefly what real-world circumstances have changed and how this website now meets our inclusion criteria. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 03:30, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure per MarkSweep. The most relevant difference between Lowbrow and "other sites" is that other sites haven't failed an AfD -- the community's judgment determines what is kept, and what is discarded. Xoloz 17:23, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I understand that this article has been fairly voted to be deleted in the past, but I recreated the article from scratch. I don't know who made the past one or what it looked like, but a new, legitimate article should not be judged on the decision made toward an article that might actually have deserved a deletion. I feel that this topic is genuine and should be allowed to reside on Wikipedia. Spank fusion 22:54, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

List of interesting or unusual place names

(now at Wikipedia:List of interesting or unusual place names)

IMPORTANT NOTICE: A new article on this subject has been created, citing sources and meeting verification requirements. The link in the heading now redirects there. That article is NOT the subject of this debate, and has NOT been proposed for deletion. It has been created as a compromise to settle this dispute, and is a work in progress. The subject of the DRV (in the "Wikipedia:" link above) is in the wikiepdia namespace where it has been proposed to live more or less indefinitely as a figurative salvage yard for verified entries in the new article.

This article, which has over 2200 edits and has been around for three years, could be nominated for adminship if it weren't so controversial this week. It was deleted out of process, then during the resulting debates, recreated and moved to the Wikipedia: namespace. It certainly does not belong there; all similar lists (List of city listings by country, List of misleading place names, &c) are in the article namespace. (The only parallel I saw someone mention in the Wikipedia: namespace is Wikipedia:Unusual articles which is clearly a meta-page about Wikipedia and therefore belongs in that namespace.) The article was then placed here for review, and the result was not handled by the book.

The article should be 'undeleted' and restored to its original title -- and then perhaps put up once more for AfD. A second AfD nomination ran for two days, generating over 30 votes, predominantly to keep it; but was closed early for process-lawyering reasons -- that is, because the same discussion should be had here. +sj +

NB: There were good debates raised about how to determine whether a name is unusual or interesting; these are useful to have, and hopefully good revisions of the list will come from them. Undeletion and restoration of the original title should in no way to minimize those debates. +sj + 00:05, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep deleted in article space (keep in WP space). Here's why. The first AFD was a perfectly valid delete. The user who brought it to DRV the first time used erroneous numbers to justify it (which shouldn't matter, as AFD is not a vote). The article was moved to the WP namespace (as suggested by several users, both in the AFD and the dRV), and the DRV was closed (by me) endorsing this move. It was then recreated in the article space out of process. Furthermore the article itseld is falwed beyond belief. Allow me to elaborate.
This article is downright ridiculous. Despite all these assertions I keep hearing that it is "easily verifiable", no one has cited sources for these (with very; few exceptions, and only very recently). When asked what exactly it is that makes these "interesting" or "unusual" it seems the only answer we ever hear is "Listen! This place is called fucking, Austria!!!!!! Get it??? FUCKING!!!! Isn’t that a hoot???" Um, maybe, but it’s not a source, and the article has this aura of having been partially written by Beavis and Butthead (huh-huh huh-huh "Dix Hills", huh-huh-. They said "Dicks", huh-huh-huh). Can hardly believe they missed Uruguay ("U-R-Gay", get it?), moronic? Absolutely, but, unlike almost every other name in the article, I can actually find a source for that one. I know we have some pre-pubescent editors here, but do we need to advertise that to the world? And as long as we’re loading up the article with juvenile humor, where's Johnson, Tennessee (FYI "Johnson" means "penis" (titter))?
And the problems go on. I mean, do we really want to include street names? Of all the millions and millions of streets in the world I’m sure we can find thousands that will get your average six-year-old in hysterics (which seems to be among the inclusion criteria here). Do you really want me to find a "Pu Street" somewhere on the planet? Because I bet I can. He same goes for informal names of neighborhoods. Alphabet City? It even actually makes sense for a neighborhood defined by lettered streets, so what’s so interesting or unusual about that anyway? And then there are those that just confound me.
Lolita: would that be interesting if it weren’t the name of a Nabokov novel? If someone publishes a book called “Meriden” do we get to include Meriden, Connecticut? Vader: let me guess, if we imagine the word "Darth" in front of it… Mashpee: sounds a little strange to anyone who doesn’t live in a part of the country where every other town is some Indian word, to those of us who do, utterly unremarkable. Sandwich: you do realize that the food item was indirectly named after the place, right? Ware, Massachusetts? Because it’s a homophone of "Where?" Well, get that spelling and that question mark at the end and you might be on the right track, but that is just retarded (how about Wareham (as in “where’s the ham?”)). Lough Neagh: is there anything even slightly interesting or unusual about that? Anything with the name of an animal is unusual? Guess what? That used to name things after animals all the time! Oxford? Oxen used to ford there. I can’t think of anything ‘’less’’ unusual. And, to top it off, what people try to pass off as a source is that another flawed Wikipedia article insists that these words are, by definition, downright ‘’hilarious’’! That’s not a source.
And there’s the opposites that make the list: words that are too much common English words (Beer, Commerce, Drain, Eagle) make the list, and those that don’t sound like English words at all make it too (Ouagadougou, Schenectady). Well guess what, there’s tons of places in foreign countries that sound odd to English speakers, they may even sound (get ready)….foreign. Let’s take out my trusty atlas and look at Sumatra as a somewhat random example. I see places named: Pasirpangarayan, Pulaupunjung, Talanglambangantir Kutacane (WHY do they insist on cutting their canes there. That’s just CRRRAZY!), Baganslapiapi, and so on and that’s without even really trying. Do some of those sound atypical to those of us who live in places like Carson City? Sure. Are we going to include half the continent of Asia? I sure hope not.
At least some of the worst offenders have been removed (Amarillo? Bagdad, Arizona (but not Moscow Idaho?)), but that they were ever included is pretty sad. And I bet some which are included actually could be verified by a third party source (Truth or Consequences comes to mind) but no one has bothered to. People seem to think "Oh yeah, we could so verify the shit out of these if we wanted to"; is the same as actual verification. It is not. Some people have compared this to articles such as Films considered the worst ever, but we must keep in mind that that article, imperfect as it is, really went out of its way to get verifiable sources. This one fails utterly in that regard. Trying to pass this off as an encyclopedia article is an insult to every encyclopedia on the planet; mostly this one. -R. fiend 00:16, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Restore to / Retain in Article namespace R. fiend has made a valiant attempt to defend deletion above. I am going to attempt to put the case for retention/restoration; hopefully I will do this justice but if not I apologise ... it's past midnight now here in the UK.
There seem to be two main things that are causing problems:
First, that the article title contains the word "interesting" and that this makes the article subjective. I have to say that this is a fair point. However, I would ask - why does this one word invalidate the whole article? I've been a Wikipedia editor for about a year now, and I notice a recurring pattern in deletion discussions, which is that often there is just one thing about an article that an editor takes a dislike to, and from this comes a recommendation to delete, without a pause to think whether there is anything worth salvaging in the article. Clearly, from the amount of support that retention of this article is getting (and yes, I agree that polls are evil too, but ...) there is a good case that the article has at least something in it of (encyclopaedic) merit. Instead of just going for the "nuke it" option, we should all be trying hard to see each other's point of view and identify what in the article is worthy of inclusion, and what isn't, and tidy it up accordingly. I have proposed, in each of these debates, that we try to agree some criteria for inclusion, and assess the list against that. I appear to be being told that that is impossible, but without any arguments as to why that is the case. I agree that is is difficult but in the interest of community harmony, it has to be worth a go?
Second, the arguments that the article lacks sources and is POV. Among the people who are espousing these arguments are some very experienced editors, and so I can't just dismiss this view out of hand, but I really do think that people have got into some quite muddled thinking on this. I think that the cause of this is that the article is presented as a list. Because of that, proponents of deletion are insisting on a higher standard of verifiability than they would for any other article. Specifically, not only are sources for the existence of the place names being asked for, sources to justify inclusion of the names in the article are being asked for. We DO NOT do this for any other kind of content. If an article is written as a piece of prose, not in list form, then the inclusion of content that is obviously relevant to the article's subject, without editors having to find a source which proves that it is relevant, is widely accepted. Sometimes there may be items of content that are perhaps peripheral and these are then debated by editors, but by and large we don't have a problem here i.e. we don't have those debates over EVERY sentence in EVERY article. Just because this article is presented as a list, I don't see why we have to treat it differently. The Wikipedia policy on citing sources exists, as I understand it, to ensure that Wikipedia doesn't end up full of errors (accidental or deliberate), and not as a means of imposing a rigid and bureaucratic editorial process when one isn't needed.
So in summary, if we drop the word interesting from this article's title, agree some inclusion criteria, and then assess the article's content against these, we have the basis for a perfectly valid article (with no need for factcheck notes on every line) in the article namespace. Parallels exist — English words with uncommon properties for instance (note: this one is written as prose) — I think that attempting a solution along these lines has to be a better way forward than continuing with the divisive mess we're currently in? SP-KP 01:14, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Of course we need sources to justify inclusion of each and every single entry, because inclusion in a list of things which are allegedly "interesting" or "unusual" requires that someone else call them "interesting" or "unusual." Wikipedia editors cannot just insert things in the list that they find "interesting" or "unusual" - that is prima facie original research, something which is specifically prohibited by policy. Please see Films considered the worst ever. "The movies listed have achieved a notable level of infamy, through critical and popular consensus." That is an acceptable way of doing things - each entry is sourced with reasons why it is among the worst ever - ratings from movie critics, box-office figures, fan votes on IMDb, etc. This list has none of the above - it's just a list of any name someone ever laughed at. That's not encyclopedically acceptable. FCYTravis 01:23, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Let me see if I can illustrate the argument above with an example. This does require you to be able to see a parallel between an article which has its content presented as a list, and an article which has its content presented as prose. Not everyone's brain is wired up the same, so that might be difficult for you to do, in which case this is perhaps not going to help, but I hope it might help at least some people to see where I am coming from. Let's take the article Kansas. What if, instead of creating an article entitled Kansas, someone had created exactly the same article, but had placed an asterisk at the start of each sentence, and entitled it List of facts about Kansas. Then, imagine that over time, other editors had come along and added a mixture of facts, some of which were undisputedly about Kansas, and others which, although the editors adding them believed to be about Kansas, were viewed by other editors not to be about Kansas, such that the article was a bit of a ragbag of facts of varying relevance to the subject. Now try to imagine that someone spots this article and thinks "what a pile of poo" and nominates it for deletion. Try to imagine the deletion discussion for this article. Although there would be a lot of commonality between that discussion and this one, I would hope that somewhere along the line, someone would make the common sense point that an article on Kansas is actually quite a useful thing for Wikipedia to have in it, and that while the article up for deletion needed to be tidied up, rationalised, and written as prose, it could still form the basis for the Kansas article. That proposal would, I think you would agree, probably carry the day on first pass. I doubt very much whether people would be insisting that every fact that was to be retained in the article not only had to be supported by an external source, but that there must also be an external source stating that the fact was sufficiently important to be included in an encyclopaedia article about Kansas. We'd use our judgment based on some agreed principles to decide which facts did and which didn't merit inclusion. I don't think anyone would say that using that judgment constituted original research, or that the resulting Kansas article, because it went through such an editorial process, was so blighted with POV that it had to be deleted. To convince me that an article entitled Unusual place names has no place in Wikipedia, you will need to try to explain why it is different from an article on Kansas. If this boils down to a difference of opinion on what sort of content Wikipedia should and shouldn't contain, then fine, we'll just have to agree to differ; if there is something more than that which marks these two articles out as different, I'd really like to understand what it is, but nowhere in the deluges of words written on this subject have I been able to detect what that difference is. SP-KP 02:21, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • The primary difference between the theoretical Kansas article and this article is that "The captial of Kansas is Topeka" is a fact, no one seriously disputes it; whether "Dix Hills" is interesting or unusual is an opinion. Whether someone has such an opinion is basically a fact, but not an easy one to establish. If our criteria is that someone, somewhere finds this place name to be interesting or unusual, then there is not a single place name that we could exclude. Furthermore, there is a fundamental difference between a list and an article, and wikipedia, being an encyclopedia, should concentrate more on articles. Lists too often (and this is certianly no exception) encourage readers too add anything that pops into their mind, especially when they're as subjective as this. A list of facts about Kansas article would also be a spectacularly bad idea. -R. fiend 03:02, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • This is a really helpful reply, as it is now obvious to me at which point our thought processes diverge. The divergence seems to come at the point where you are translating the logical entities involved in the hypothetical Kansas situation across to the Unusual names situation. To understand it, we need to talk ontology. I would categorise the statement "The capital of Kansas is Topeka" as a "piece of information having encyclopaedic merit" (these are pieces of information which we believe are valid to include in Wikipedia, facts which we think that readers ought to be able to learn from reading a Wikipedia article). This is a fundamental unit of categorisation relevant to any discussion of this nature; it sits in the space between "word" and "article". To ensure we are using our Kansas analogy correctly, we need to take care when we identify the corresponding thing in relation to the Unusual names article, and pick the correct thing. If I have understood you correctly, you have tranposed "The capital of Kansas is Topeka" to "Fucking, Austria is an unusual name". I believe this is incorrect - what logic theorists call a "category mistake" - and that the corresponding thing is actually a statement something like "There is a town called Fucking in Austria, which is spelt the same way as an English word with a sexual meaning". You would agree, I assume, that that is a fact which we should reasonably expect readers of Wikipedia to be able to find out? If you think about things in this way, then there is nothing wrong, or at least nothing against policy, about an article containing a set of such facts. To include these facts in the article is not POV-pushing, or original research, and as long as this fact itself is sourced it's not a breach of the verifiability policy — it's just the editorial process. If you're following the logic this far, then all we're left with to disagree on are the criteria for inclusion of entries (i.e. this is merely an argument about different methods of arranging facts into articles). I've said all along that arriving at an agreed set of criteria will be difficult, but it surely is not beyond our abilities to arrive at some kind of consensus? SP-KP 17:52, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
            • Okay, so we can agree that "There is a town called Fucking in Austria, which is spelt the same way as an English word with a sexual meaning". Is that a fact? Yes. Should that be found in an encycloepdia? Sure, and as such we have an article on Fucking, Austria which makes that clear. However, an article containing a list of such facts would have other comparable facts, like "Oxford is a place name that dervies from Oxen and ford." Or "Dallas, Texas is a city in Texas named for the Vice President under James Polk". You can find facts such as this all over the place, does that make them interesting? Almost every place name has a story behind it; being interesting or unusual is much more difficult to qualify than a statement of the captial of Kansas. And using "Fucking Austria" for further examples probably isn't the best way to go. It is one of the least controversial entries, and I beieve it now has a source. I mentioned that one originally because people seemed to be using it to justify all the others, which I considered a flawed approach. I really think we're getting somewhere with the new article, and that should be the focus of our efforts. -R. fiend 17:10, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Please, just {{sofixit}}. Until then, it should stay out of mainspace. I've deleted and protected the cross-namespace redirect and noted that at WP:ANI, while we're talking about it. - brenneman{T}{L} 01:32, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Whatever the decision about the article itself, this was uncalled for. All existing links from external sites, not to mention those on-wiki, take people to the old title; there should be an obvious way for them to get from there to where the long list is at present. Side discussion continued at AN/I. +sj + 05:16, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    I have now redirected the original title to Astrokey's new article. Problem solved. -R. fiend 06:06, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep in Wikispace and do not undelete in article space per FCYTravis. And perhaps some day, we might achieve a DRV with no daily "interesting place names" rehashing. Well, I can always dream... --W.marsh 03:06, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • comment. agree with sp-kp. I was being bold and followed sp-kp's redlink and started an article with only those names that are referenced (currently only 5 at the moment) at Unusual place names -- Astrokey44|talk 03:39, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's looking about a thousand times better than the previous article (although the introduction is pretty stiff). Perhaps those carrying the banner of the "List of" article could instead help Astrokey on this much more worthwhiel endeavor. -R. fiend 04:05, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      I think what Astrokey is doing is great. It should be done to the original article in place, however; even unto carving out huge sections of the article. But deleting and/or moving an article to a new namespace is just not the appropriate way to express an editorial opinion (like "this article needs a total rewrite!"). It is this misconstruction of process that we are voting on / discussing here. I am not carrying the banner of a particular version of the article; but it should be worked on where it has always been - or perhaps with a clarifying rename - and not in two places at once, as you seem to be suggesting. The extension to that would be, that any time you found an article you thought was POV, you could move it to a new namespace, delete, recreate, and protect the original title, and tell the authors to fix it at the new title and petition for it to be reinstated... +sj + 05:16, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • Well, no, moving an article to the WP namespace is not standard practice, and isn't intended to be. That was a compromise worked out after the article was already deleted from the mainspace. I consider it a decent compromise, as those editors who found it "interesting" can still get their chuckles, and it can be worked on without being the highly problematic article it was. The only real alternative I could see would be to simply remove all unsourced entries (which, at the time, was all of them, now it's all but maybe half a dozen or so). No one is saying you anyone can willy-nilly move any article they see as POV to the WP space, and that is not what happened here. -R. fiend 05:22, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, it was moved to WP namespace in the middle of the AfD debate and I moved it back. So that is exactly what happened here. SchmuckyTheCat 18:05, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, so it was moved during the AFD debate, moved back before the debate ended, deleted, and recreated in the WP space. The point is, no one is saying any article that someone thinks is POV can unilaterally be moved to the WP space, which seemed to be what Sj was worried about. He can rest easy now. -R. fiend 19:36, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong undelete as per Grue. Could User:R. fiend please refrain from exercising his admin powers on this article again - the failure of process seems in part to be attributable to this amendment of the AfD discussion as well as other actions taken by R. fiend. His storong views mean that he is seemingly unable to follow due process. This AfD seemed to have been properly set up by userr:docu in line with the process outlined on this page at Wikipedia:Deletion review#Decisions to be reviewed, which read at the time: "If there is neither a majority to endorse the decision nor a three-quarters supermajority to overturn and apply some other result, the article is relisted on the relevant deletion process.". If the process is wringly described, it eeds to be amended. If not wringly described, why are views being sought again, why don't the previous recently expressed views on exactly the same topic count?--A Y Arktos 23:03, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete per the consensus of opinion in the AfD to keep and the process problems noted above. Issues with respect to whether a particular entry should be added is part of the editing process for the article itself, not itself a justification for deletion of the article. Jtmichcock 14:11, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

  • Some people are particularly drawn to the curse words and homophones that make it onto the list. I appreciate that these are offensive to some; but that is not the source of 'unusualness' for the majority of list entries. Useful sections of the page could be : "one- and two-letter place names", "numeric placenames", &c. We should be focusing on improving the criteria for inclusion on the page, not beating around the bush re: verifiability. +sj +
    • It's not the fact that they're offensive that grinds my gears. It's the fact that they are all sophomoric, not interesting or unusual. Is "Beaver, Pennsylvania" really "interesting or unusual?" Not really. It has sophomoric sexual connotations, but that's neither interesting nor unusual. It's just stupid. So a list that has no criteria nor sourcing will inevitably become simply a list of every place name a random teenager ever laughed at. Which will become a very long list indeed. FCYTravis 07:40, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse deletion from articlespace, keep in projectspace as a resource for long enough to wring any useful content out of it, then delete. It's mostly junk, but there's probably some salvageable bits in here. -- nae'blis (talk) 23:53, 13 February 2006 (UT
  • I've actually not been paying attention to this article for some time. My attention was called to this debate by a message someone wrote me, which I received today after not logging into Wikipedia for over a month (I've generally been using it without logging in, lately, since I haven't been editing). That having been said, this is a good debate and some good points have been made. I agree that "interesting" and "unusual" are both subjective terms. The article had footnotes you could attach to the place name to indicate some reasons why people might find it "interesting" and/or "unusual," which I have tried to use. As to verifiability, for U.S. Place Names I have generally been using my trusty Rand McNally Road Atlas. I understand there is a movement on Wikipedia for people to cite their sources -- I think that is a good idea. With that taken into account, this article's encyclopedic qualities are questionable, however, the goal here is to have a comprehensive record of knowledge of all types. I credit this article with getting me interested in Wikipedia in the first place -- "Oh hey, they didn't put this town here, I can add it!" With respect to Native American town names -- I live in Massachusetts and I grew up on Long Island, so I am used to it, however, those from other areas of the country might not be. It is very POV-ish. I guess I agree with what was done to resolve the debate. Tckma 18:47, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Quasi-gummi

This article appears to have been deleted on 16 December 2005 by User:Snowspinner without due process of any sort. Its most recent version before deletion has references and appears to describe a valid type of confection. -Tim Rhymeless (Er...let's shimmy) 05:44, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Undelete and send to AFD. I have a feeling it's a neologism and should probably be deleted, but let's send it through the process. -R. fiend 06:55, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse deletion per WP:SNOW since on checking the supposed "references" neither actually supported the term and I can't find any English-language Googles which are not mirrors. From a process point of view this was wrong, but since actually the project is all about content I can't see a lot of point wasting any more time on this. Normally I would userfy and/or invite the creator to repairing these problems, but the creator is missing in action. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   10:44, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete and relist at AfD so a proper discussion can take place. ComputerJoe 13:45, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted Yes, it has been deleted out of process - 'bad Snowspinner, bad admin - slap!'. But it is obviously unreferenced crap, so there is nothing to be gained by undeleting it. If this is about repremanding the admin, then puting crap back into the encyclopedia, because a form wasn't filled in, is not the way to go about it--Doc ask? 18:07, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete and AFD - Hmm, well, I'll be an inclusionist here, seems like a term which could have some use in describing some sorts of candy. Worthy of a shot, at least. FCYTravis 19:00, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

11 February 2006

Heathian anarchism

This article's final AfD tally was 3 deletes, 2 merges closely edging on delete, and 1 keep, from the author of the page. The final decision made was to "keep", which I don't understand. Since the best merge suggestion offered is to an article that does not exist, and what is presently in this article would be insufficient for creating a new article, we're stuck in the meantime with what is a completely OR page. My suggestion would be either to delete it or move it to the creator's userspace. In the meantime we're legitimizing a topic that doesn't even exist. Sarge Baldy 19:45, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Relist - true, the only person asking for it to be kept as-is was the creator, and most others wanted it gone or gone, but there were not many contributors overall. I would have relisted for further debate rather than closing. - Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   20:36, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • This approach to relisting is becoming a little concerning to me. Having "no consensus" as an outcome (call it keep if you prefer) is absolutely fine. People seem to be relisting enthusiastically just because there was no Absolute Outcome in the hopes of generating one. If that is what an editor wants, then they should carry out the relisting as an editorial matter, and not in the manner used on DRV which implies a rejection of the earlier debate's closure. -Splashtalk 20:52, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Hmmm. I agree up to a point, but I don't think a couple of comments is sufficient to determine consensus, and I don't see why it should be a problem relisting where there are very few comments. Relisting because it's 20k/20m/20d is clearly nonsensical, but I don't recall that happening. I've seen several which have been kept after relisting when closing as delete would have been valid (a couple of deletes and nothing else). But I am becoming somewhat disillusioned with the whole process - nominate a web forum and every member will be along to vote keep, nominate a school at your peril, however bad the article and no matter that it is a commercial enterprise not a school, and so on. Ah well. I'm sure that once the Gastrich-induced cynicism has worn off I'll return to my usual sunny self, and maybe it'll improve with the Pareto effect of {PROD}. There is a slightly more pressing problem with this article: with zero Googles and no cited sources it appears to be unverifiable. Where's that list of templates? - Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   21:02, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • Getting 6 participants is more than substantially many debates (see WP:AFD100 for statistics on this). AfD is (still) overloaded, and sending minor articles back there just because we hope for 7 participants rather than 6 seems a little, well, pointless. -Splashtalk 21:05, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse close, clearly. This doesn't even shake a finger at a consensus to delete. There is no need to relist since there is clearly discussion to be had elsewhere about what, precisely, should be done. Having 6 people in an AfD is enough, and there is no quorum for AfD and there never has been. The only reason to relist would be a lack of participation or a supposition that relisting would produce a different result because of problems with the first listing. Noone cites any problems with this listing, apart from its outcome, and so I see neither a case to relist nor overturn. -Splashtalk 20:49, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Maybe if you're just looking at the numbers, and not reading what people have to say. There does appear to be a 5-1 consensus that this article should no longer exist. That it's divided by people who think it needs to be merged and to be deleted seems irrelevant. Sarge Baldy 21:03, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Irrelevant to what? To the question of deletion or not, no. To the question of exactly what state it should remain is as a result of the AfD? Largely, yes. People can decide whether to keep, merge or redirect for themselves in the case of an unclear AfD, and it is not the business of DRV to direct them on that. -Splashtalk 21:05, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not saying it needs to be deleted. I'm saying it shouldn't continue to exist where it does now. "Heathian anarchism" is a term coined by the creator of the article. And right now we're pretending it exists. Sarge Baldy 21:12, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • What's there to discuss? This article is about something that doesn't exist. He might as well have written at the top of the page that the term was coined by Hogeye of Wikipedia. If you think that's a stretch, he actually DID put his name as a source in the article on anarchist economics. Sarge Baldy 21:35, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • In that case, you might wait a short while in case something turns up and then make a fresh AfD nomination with a much more compelling nomination than last time. "Not notable", whilst shorthand for a number of things is much less likely to win favour than "doesn't exist", "unverifiable", "original research" etc. Also, you did not at any point return to that AfD during the debate — it's necessary to do so when things aren't going as you intended, in much the way that you have intervened here. However, DRV is unlikely to make a purely content based decision and is equally unlikely, if not more so, to overturn that AfD debate into a deletion. -Splashtalk 22:56, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well, it's not completely unreferenced, as it names the book from which this guy's philosophy is outlined: Citadel, Market and Altar. The problem I just discovered is that that book gets 101 unique googles (pretty small for a book that's allegedly the foundation of a notable philosophy) and doesn't seem to appear at Amazon. Is this guy just another self-published crank? I think we should move it (as proposed in the AFD), re-examine, and perhaps re-AFD, based on any new facts that come to life (such as "this guy is a self-published crank", if it turns out to be true). We shoudl also keep in mind that the anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, etc pages have been the scene of ongoing edit wars for eons, and POV, forking, and the like fly about all over the place. anythign connected to these topics deserves special scrutiny. -R. fiend 21:35, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • The content dispute, and under what name the article should end up residing, should be settled on the talk page, not AfD or here on DRV. There was clearly no consensus to delete... I said keep because of a few reasons, but ultimately does it make a difference here if I said "keep" or "no consensus"? --W.marsh 21:54, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Depends who you ask. Some folks don't like to see "result keep" when the result was no consensus and more people want rid of it than want it kept. Does it matter? Not to me, I guess. But I move this DRV be closed since R. Fiend has it absolutely right - this should be moved, cleaned up a bit and then re-assessed, which is in broadly line with what most people on the AfD seemed on the whole to want. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   10:48, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • You know it's my opinion that all AFDs should be kept open until there can be some sort of declared resolution, either a rough consensus to delete (ie 65-70%) or a simple majority to keep. Until that time, I think we can pretty well state the matter is unresolved, and shouldn't be closed. I'm sure people will see this as some sort of deletionist plot, but I think it makes perfect sense. As long as between 50% and 65% want an article deleted, its a bit silly to call the matter settled. We still have it weighted towards keeping, as it only require a simple majority, and we can avoid arbitrary and highly controversial closings much of the time. There is no reason we can't keep those AFDs that meet this criteria open almost indefinitely, after all, the article is still there while the debate goes on, so there's a default to keep anyway. And any time more than half the participants think an article should be deleted, it may not be a consensus, but it is an indication that the article has problems which will not automatically go away after 5 days and a "no consensus, default keep" result is given. Of course, this would largely mean AFD is a vote, but it nearly always comes down to the numbers anyway. -R. fiend 21:46, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Template:User Anti-UN and Template:User Anti-ACLU

Debate moved to Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates

10 February 2006

Montfort Realschule Zell

This article's AfD nomination had 3 delete comments and just one keep (User:Jcuk's only comment was "of course"). If we were going straight vote style that gives 75% delete. After weighting arguments and comments I'd say the deletes have it. I respect MarkGallagher's decision to keep (the article did change a bit mid-vote) and normally I'd just let it go, but I just don't like this article (admitably I am deletionist scum). BrokenSegue 21:35, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Which does not address the issue that articles which suck, suck. Whatever the subject. It's not like we have to keep their seats warm until a better one comes along, after all. Me, I'd merge the stubs and wait for more information, but that's against some people's religion. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   23:23, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Template:User against Iraq War Template:User USA Police State and Template:User admins ignoring policy

Debate moved to Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates

Hootenanny (store)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hootenanny (store). 6 delete, 5 merge and or keep votes. Closing admin seems to think that votes he disagrees with can be discounted because "AFD is a debate, not a vote". He also overlooked the argument that it has a notable corporate parent, so he can't have examined the debate very closely. Kappa 13:31, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There is nothing to stop someone creating a redirect right now. Endorse close, no reason given for keeping this.--Doc ask? 14:08, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I just did. Endorse close, we want to get to a million articles, but not like this. Physchim62 (talk) 14:15, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, we don't all want to get to a million articles. -R. fiend 07:30, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse status quo, which is currently merge and redirect by the looks of it, since I don't actually care that much what went on given that the result is a decent-sized article. - Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   14:31, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse status quo. -- Jonel | Speak 21:27, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Endorse closing Closing editor's action fine. A borderline-nn. Somebody has to do the closing on these borderline-nn. We're not drowning kittens! --FloNight 15:40, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Not as such, no. Looking at the deleted history, there is very little there. There might be a small amount of trivia missing from the main article, but arguably it is not Wikipedia's place to list the brands stocked by a local store, especially since that might change at any time. Do we list all the brands sold out of Macy's? If anyone actually does care that much I will get the additional text out of the deleted history for them, but in my view it's too crufty to be worth the effort. - Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   15:51, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Like Kappa, I found the AfD to be less than well closed. The case for merging was made and supported, but in the tiresome inclusionist-deletionist catfight, the keepers and deleters failed to raise any serious grounds against the suggestion. Closing admins have a responsibility to find the outcome that best fits the discussion, and there's a fine line between doing this and finding an interpretation of the AfD that best fits one's own opinion. Johnleemk may understand that, but this exceptional closing does not provide evidence of it. --- Charles Stewart(talk) 15:58, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Undelete per Kappa. The nomination was little more than a display of aggressive ignorance; the nominator used the same justification to nominate a well-known and well-established specialty retailer (SFFH bookstore) for deletion, claiming there were "two dozen" like it in his neighborhood. The discussion there [[1]] shows pretty clearly that the nominator didn't know what a specialty retailer was, and should have led the closing admin to discount his "vote" (and the "votes" that simply cited the nominator). Note also that the nominator, in that discussion, used the fact that he'd never heard of many of the notable authors who were associated with the retailer as support for his claim. Wikipedia should be guided by the knowledge of its editors, not the ignorance of its editors. I don't know whether this particular specialty retailer is Wikipedia-notable, but the parent business certainly is, and has something of a track record for creating distinctive/notable enterprises. Monicasdude 16:05, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete the history The closure was not perfectly in-process, but a redirect/merge is a satisfactory result as far as content-merit is concerned. Let the history be complete, however, as this does no harm, and satisfies those with a process grievance. Xoloz 16:32, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure per FloNight. --Kbdank71 19:02, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep redirected. No real need to undelete history, as there's hardly anything to undelete, though there's no harm in undeleting it either. The original closer maybe should have done the redirect himself, but there was certainly no call for a flat out keep. I don't think anyone takes Kurt Weber's comments in AFDs seriously (at least I hope they don't), and no one else gave a single reason for keeping it. -R. fiend 19:16, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete history - since it is harmless. Despite my reservations about the close, I am happy with the status quo. --- Charles Stewart(talk) 19:21, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete or just Recreate at will and back up off site after recurrent redeletions: You want the breakdown of policy, you've got it. This page is full of examples, this article being one of them. Karmafist 21:01, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete per Karmafist. --Aaron 22:43, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete. If you're just going to ignore the debate on AfD, including disregarding the tally, you might just as well change the name of AfD to Wikipedia:Does any admin feel like deleting this?. Having said that, that now seems to be our deletion policy. Grace Note 02:29, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Leave things alone - Tony's undeleted the history, it's back there, it's a suitable redirect; why waste time and clog AfD further? Proto||type 16:26, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]


4 February 2006

Template:Commonsgallery

Despite its TfD discussion attracting 3 votes for delete and 4 keeps, plus a keep from an anon who has a few non-project contributions, User:MarkSweep closed the discussion as a delete on the grounds that "The result of the debate was better arguments for deletion than for keeping it." I dispute this decision on two grounds:

  1. That is not the admin's call; the deletion discussions may not be votes, but closing admins are, as far as I've gathered from my experience on AfD, not court judges, there to decide which side 'won'; they are there to decide what the community thinks. It renders the whole 'discussion' thing slightly pointless otherwise.
  2. Even if I'm wrong on the above point, MarkSweep's decision that there were better arguments for deletion is still extremely shaky IMO. None of the delete voters ever tried to argue the counterpoints the keep voters made against their arguments. These arguments included the fact that the template supposedly advertised for Olympus (it had a picture of a camera, far too small to make out the model). --Malthusian (talk) 19:38, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • As the closing admin, let me explain my reasoning in more detail. First, we'll have to discount one keep "vote" from an anon. Second, Nickj is using his "vote" as a vehicle for something unrelated, namely improving or changing Template:Commons. Nickj wrote: "That's why my vote is "keep", and it will continue to be "keep" until such time as Template:commons is improved." That's not a reason to keep Template:Commonsgallery. You don't go about changing Template:Commons by forking it and then voting to keep when the fork is nominated for deletion. Third, "Keep, useful template" by Ryan Delaney is fine, but it's not a relevant argument: Template:Commonsgallery was nominated here because it was a fork of an already existing maintenance template: and precisely because it is a fork of a useful template, it is of course useful, but that's not what this debate was seeking to establish. Fourth, there were three delete votes (by Netoholic, Petaholmes, and Phil Boswell) arguing that template forks are bad. The two serious votes in favor of keeping never properly addressed why the forked templates is needed. I completely ignored the bit about the Olympus ad as tangential to the discussion. Fifth, even if we regard the outcome of this debate as "no consensus", it makes no sense to default to keep in the Template namespace: templates, unlike articles, are tools which facilitate and enable; they should only be kept when they are truly needed. As I've said in my comments when I closed this discussion, I was much more swayed by the arguments for deletion, and in the end this is a discussion, not a vote. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 19:59, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted - on the principle that forks are bad. FCYTravis 20:07, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Mark seems to be under the impression that the people behind the template have not bothered to explain what it is for, which is false: it has been extensively explained at Template_talk:Commons and the TfD. Briefly (I don't know why I'm bothering as I thought DRV was about process and not content, but FCYTravis has indicated otherwise): some of us believe the links to Commons galleries would look better if accompanied by a picture explaining what it was going to (e.g. a camera for a gallery of pictures). No-one's yet tried to claim otherwise, the only argument for deletion that's been put forward has been 'standardisation and maintenance'.
  • I don't see how this was a 'fork' any more than {{test-n}} is a fork of {{test}}. Both do the same thing, but {{test-n}} does it slightly better in a certain context. Same with this. I admit that the name of the template does scream 'fork', being a redundancy; that was a mistake on my part. I was expecting to move the template to {{commonsimage}} as soon as the TfD was closed. --Malthusian (talk) 20:27, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Moreover, I'm not going to reply to MarkSweep's responses to why he discounted most of the votes on one side one by one (I've already explained why the 'serious voters' had, in fact, "properly addressed why the forked templates is needed"). But I will say that I think that if the arguments of a certain 'side' in a discussion are weak, it should be explained why they are weak at the time, rather than the closing admin waiting for the discussion period to end, discounting them, then waiting for someone to bring the TfD to DRV to explain why they were weak enough for the editors' opinions to be ignored. If nothing else it would save time. --Malthusian (talk) 20:43, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • TfD is a debate about the merits of templates. Rather than talking about "sides" one should talk about the outcomes of that debate and the arguments advanced in favor of them. If I see a weak argument or an argument that does not even address the central question of the debate, I call it as I see it. As for commenting on the merits of the various arugments before closing the debate: what do you want me to do? I didn't even know of this particular debate until I started to do my share in trying to clear out the TfD backlog. And if I had been aware of it and commented on it earlier, I wouldn't be in a position to close it. And by the way, I wasn't waiting for someone to bring this here. If you're only interested in saving time, then let it go and work on changing Template:Commons through the customary channels. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 21:11, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • *sigh* I'm going to have to surrender on any further discussion - I tried to reply to Mark's last post but couldn't manage to string three separate counterpoints together in a way that made any sense. I'm just going to say that I used the word 'side' in the sense of 'those who voted one particular way', not 'side' in the sense of 'cabal'. I think it would be worthwhile to have more illustrative {{commons}} templates, but if it gets shot down, well, c'est la vie. If I die in my sleep tonight and St Peter asks me 'And how did you spend your life?' I don't want to have to tell him that my last night was spent fighting a rearguard action over diversifying a Wikipedia template. --Malthusian (talk) 23:44, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted — MarkSweep is surely right in both principle and detail. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 23:39, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have forked templates many times, as it is sometimes the only way to switch over from one design to another. I was not aware the cabal disapproved of it. --SPUI (talk - don't use sorted stub templates!) 02:17, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted per Mel Etitis. --Kbdank71 05:35, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete. The fact that {{commons}} is seemingly perma-protected pushed me over the edge. If one cannot edit the template without going through various bureaucracy (requesting unprotection and hoping that succeeds, or getting consensus on the talk page - so much for being bold!), then forking may be the best option. --SPUI (talk - don't use sorted stub templates!) 06:32, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Overturn. MarkSweep's repeated violations of deletion process are becoming more and more disruptive. Crotalus horridus (TALK • CONTRIBS) 19:36, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete. - How can you can get an result of 5 to keep, and 3 to delete, and decide that "delete" is the right outcome? It makes a complete and total mockery of the concept of consensus. Secondly, for Mark Sweep's "reasoning" that he can disregard my vote, and the votes of others: I wasn't aware that we had ceded complete dictatorial powers to Mark Sweep, so if someone could point to the relevant official wiki guideline outlining his new overlord status, that would be super, thanks. Third, I note that none of the votes to delete were disregarded, so it's good to see that the fine example of Florida lives on! Fourth, the reasons for changing this were outlined extensively on the Commons talk page, and have still not been addressed. Fifth, the commons template is still protected - so, given that anything related get deleted, and the originally seems to be permanently protected, how, exactly, is anything about these templates ever supposed to be improved? Frankly, this really is an appalling decision. If you're going to ignore what the community says, then why even have a deletion process? I mean, really, why bother? Just unilaterally delete whatever you like, irrespective of consensus - it'll give the same result, but without wasting everyone's time by giving the illusion of wanting community input and general agreement. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 23:04, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse deletion per Mark's justification here. However these exceptional closes should be explained when closing. Pace the squeals of outrage, please note that: (i) TfD does not have a clear numerical criteria for assessing when there is a concensus and (ii) the kind of carefully justified discounting Mark has undertaken here would, if done when closing the *fD dsicussion, be a good thing for the health of *fDs: if you object to these vote discounts, what discounts would you agree with? --- Charles Stewart(talk) 01:47, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Seconded with a pat on the back and a kiss on the cheek. A great many of the discussions that take place on DRV could be avoided if closers took more care with explaining their thinking when they close. Rossami, in particular, provides clear evidence that he has thought about the arguments presented, and I've seen closes of his run to two paragraphs. This is a good thing, and should be more widespread. - brenneman(t)(c) 02:48, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks very much for the feedback. You have a good point, and I've added my above comments to the TfD page. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 04:53, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Relist on TfD. Whilst Mark's arguments to delete are convincing, and convinced me that it should be deleted, there seems to be enough dissension to warrant a re-examination of the decision. 5 votes to keep against 3 to delete is not a decent consensus to keep, parituclarly given that the last two votes to keep were a) from an IP and b) two words, but I would have thought that this would be enough for the Template to remain pending further discussion. Deleting it was against the principle of consensus on deletion. If Mark makes the same excellently clear and cogent arguments to delete then I'm sure people will make the appropriate decision. And I think Nickj's reason for keeping is entirely valid - if he believes the template si necessary until the commons template itself is fixed, then that is a valid reason for him to believe the commonsgallery one should be kept. Proto||type 13:02, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reverse and Keep as per the consensus what was the point of the votes if the deciding admin was going to maket he call anyway? Some nerve.Gator (talk) 13:17, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Hey look, I lied, one more comment. MarkSweep's reasons for discounting most of the delete votes may make sense on the outside, but to me there seems to be equally good reasons for discounting the delete votes. One said "performs the same function as {{commons}}" (none of the counter-arguments to that here, on the TfD and on Template_talk:Commons have ever been addressed), another said (paraphrasing for brevity) 'template forks are evil, and advertises for Olympus'. Of that last post, the first argument is not an argument, the second rather nonsensical (maybe it was in jest, but Mark talks about "serious votes"). Why not discount those arguments too?
  • Now at this point I think we can agree that it becomes ridiculous, having unilaterally discarded almost the entire debate, which is why I disagree with vote discounting on principle in all but the most obvious cases (sockpuppetry/trolling), for two reasons: 1) If an argument is weak, someone should say so at the time so its proponent can respond to the criticism without having to do it at WP:DRV, and 2) If the overall case for one 'side' (ooer, used that word again) is weak, then people will read it, be unconvinced, vote delete and the article will be deleted by an actual consensus (not just a consensus of "serious voters"). If the reason for the *fD not getting enough delete 'votes' was because it didn't get enough attention, then relist it. --Malthusian (talk) 13:18, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse. Closing admin properly discounted "votes" which did not comply with policy directions; TFD page expressly says Please explain how, in your opinion, the template does not meet the criteria [for deletion] above. Comments such as "I like it," or "I find it useful," while potentially true, generally do not fulfill this requirement. Voting standards were clear, and closing admin quite properly followed them rather than disregarding them. Monicasdude 21:55, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yes, but my vote/comment/preference was discounted because of my mistake in pointing something out, not because of my reasons. My reasons are that the newer template is (in my opinion) clearer, easier to understand (both in language and visually), and more exact than the commons template. My conclusion therefore was keep. My mistake was apparently in saying that there would be no reason for commonsgallery if commons could be improved (but unfortunately, that seems to be impossible), and that in that situation I would most likely change my vote. Furthermore, it should be noted that this template doesn't even seem to pass the tests of whether it should be proposed for deletion: Is it helpful? Yes. Is it redundant? No, I don't think it is (see reasons above). Is it used? Yes. Is it NPOV? Yes. Was it a candidate for speed deletion? No. Therefore, it doesn't even seem to fulfil the basic criteria for being listed on TfD, let alone the criteria to actually be deleted. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 23:07, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted, I do not see the difficulty to simply construct an independent userbox in one's own userspace. Less controversial, and quite sensical. The same can be said for many other userbox tempaltes. -ZeroTalk 09:36, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Are articles in the main space allowed to use templates from a user's namespace? I thought I read somewhere that this was a no-no, but I could be wrong. If it's allowed, then that's exactly what I will do, and I thank for suggesting this. However, if it's not allowed, then I would please ask that you reconsider your position because it means the problem cannot be solved by the method you propose. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 23:36, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Recently concluded

  1. User:SPUI - consensus to undelete. restored to last non-controversial version (user can edit as desired when he's back). 03:54, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Wikipedia:WikiProject Pedophilia - restored, still at MfD. 02:08, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  3. Brian Peppers - endorsed and earth salted with {{deletedpage}}. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  4. Criticism of the Bible - endorsed as "no consensus", now a redirect. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  5. Inconsistencies in the Bible endorsed as "no consensus", now a redirect. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  6. Ted's_Kiddush reopened, now at afd again. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  7. Anti-vaccinationists endorsed "no consensus" closure, but closing admin subjected to public ridicule. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  8. Best blond joke ever and/or Best blonde joke ever kept deleted and now exist as redirects. 23:31, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  9. Template:User pedo: Kept deleted with {{deletedpage}}. 23:18, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  10. Sin (musician): Kept deleted with {{deletedpage}}. 23:18, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  11. Marianne Curan: Kept deleted, better re-written from scratch. 23:09, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  12. Christopher Howard: Kept deleted. 23:02, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  13. Armand Traoré: Kept deleted. 23:00, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  14. The Foxymorons: Withdrawn, new stub to be written. 22:56, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  15. Template:User Antiracist hitler: Speedy deletion endorsed. 17:40, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
  16. Template:GermanGov: Kept deleted. 17:33, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
  17. List of state-named Avenues in Washington, D.C.: Original keep closure endorsed. 17:29, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
  18. User:KJVTRUTH: kept undeleted, user subsequently blocked as sockpuppet. 17:21, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  19. Category:Ambiguous five-letter acronyms: Moot request, kept deleted. 17:16, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

This page is about articles, not about people. If you feel that a sysop is routinely deleting articles prematurely, or otherwise abusing their powers, please discuss the matter on the user's talk page, or at Wikipedia talk:Administrators. Similarly, if you are a sysop and an article you deleted is subsequently undeleted, please don't take it as an attack.

Content review

Editors who wish to see the content of a deleted article may place a request here. They may wish to use that content elsewhere, for example. Alternatively, they may suspect that an article has been wrongly deleted, but are unable to tell without seeing what exactly was deleted. As a subset of this, sometimes an article which is appropriate for a sister site is deleted without being properly transwikied. If the page is undeleted temporarily, it can be exported complete with history using Special:Export, and then redeleted. This will be especially useful once the import feature is completed.

Many administrators will honour requests to provide the content of a deleted article if asked politely. See Category:User undeletion.

Dictator Appreciation Day

I would like to request that the article "Dictator Appreciation Day be temporarily undeleted. If this is possible, I would greatly appreciate it.

Anyone who sends an email to minorityreport@bluebottle.com with the title "dictator appreciation day" will receive a copy of the article. --04:32, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Level 4 Productions

I would like to know why the article on Level 4 Productions ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Level_4_Productions ) was deleted. It would appear that the main criteria applied here, in the deletion, was the fact that Level 4 has an existing myspace.com page ( Delete as meeting the main non-notability criterion, a myspace page. Stifle 16:35, 28 January 2006 (UTC). I don't understand the logic behind this criteria. Dane Cook, a comedian, for example, has a myspace.com page and yet he still has an article about him here on wikipedia. Level 4 Productions is a grassroots DIY collective focusing on underground techno music, and as far as i know, the only one of its kind in montreal. It heavily promotes new and local talent and strives to bring an "old-school" feel to the events and music it produces. Level 4 Productions is also notable because of it's ability to survive through a number of failing trends in electronic music, such as electroclash. It has also been scribed and repeatedly mentioned in local Montreal media. While this may seem non-notable to those outside the circles of underground electronic music, at the same time, articles pertaining to gonzo porn stars, such as jenna haze( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenna_haze ) or aurora snow( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Snow ) , may seem non-notable to those outside of that interest group.

As such, i am requesting that the page be reinstated.

moshzilla

I would like to have this undeleted mometarely. I started the internet phenomena, moshzilla, and own moshzilla.com, I would like to move the contents of the moshzilla entry onto the moshzilla site if possible. User:joshhighland


History only undeletion

History only undeletions can be performed without needing a vote on this page. For example, suppose someone writes a biased article on Fred Flintstone, it is deleted, and subsequently someone else writes a decent article on Fred Flintstone. The original, biased article can be undeleted, in which case it will merely sit in the page history of the Fred Flintstone article, causing no harm. Please do not do this in the case of copyright violations.

Decisions to be reviewed

Template loop detected: Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion/Vfu header This page is about articles, not about people. If you feel that a sysop is routinely deleting articles prematurely, or otherwise abusing their powers, please discuss the matter on the user's talk page, or at Wikipedia talk:Administrators. Similarly, if you are a sysop and an article you deleted is subsequently undeleted, please don't take it as an attack.

Content review

Editors who wish to see the content of a deleted article may place a request here. They may wish to use that content elsewhere, for example. Alternatively, they may suspect that an article has been wrongly deleted, but are unable to tell without seeing what exactly was deleted. As a subset of this, sometimes an article which is appropriate for a sister site is deleted without being properly transwikied. If the page is undeleted temporarily, it can be exported complete with history using Special:Export, and then redeleted. This will be especially useful once the import feature is completed.

Many administrators will honour requests to provide the content of a deleted article if asked politely. See Category:User undeletion.

Dictator Appreciation Day

I would like to request that the article "Dictator Appreciation Day be temporarily undeleted. If this is possible, I would greatly appreciate it.

Anyone who sends an email to minorityreport@bluebottle.com with the title "dictator appreciation day" will receive a copy of the article. --04:32, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Level 4 Productions

I would like to know why the article on Level 4 Productions ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Level_4_Productions ) was deleted. It would appear that the main criteria applied here, in the deletion, was the fact that Level 4 has an existing myspace.com page ( Delete as meeting the main non-notability criterion, a myspace page. Stifle 16:35, 28 January 2006 (UTC). I don't understand the logic behind this criteria. Dane Cook, a comedian, for example, has a myspace.com page and yet he still has an article about him here on wikipedia. Level 4 Productions is a grassroots DIY collective focusing on underground techno music, and as far as i know, the only one of its kind in montreal. It heavily promotes new and local talent and strives to bring an "old-school" feel to the events and music it produces. Level 4 Productions is also notable because of it's ability to survive through a number of failing trends in electronic music, such as electroclash. It has also been scribed and repeatedly mentioned in local Montreal media. While this may seem non-notable to those outside the circles of underground electronic music, at the same time, articles pertaining to gonzo porn stars, such as jenna haze( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenna_haze ) or aurora snow( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Snow ) , may seem non-notable to those outside of that interest group.

As such, i am requesting that the page be reinstated.

moshzilla

I would like to have this undeleted mometarely. I started the internet phenomena, moshzilla, and own moshzilla.com, I would like to move the contents of the moshzilla entry onto the moshzilla site if possible. User:joshhighland


History only undeletion

History only undeletions can be performed without needing a vote on this page. For example, suppose someone writes a biased article on Fred Flintstone, it is deleted, and subsequently someone else writes a decent article on Fred Flintstone. The original, biased article can be undeleted, in which case it will merely sit in the page history of the Fred Flintstone article, causing no harm. Please do not do this in the case of copyright violations.

Decisions to be reviewed

Template loop detected: Template:Vfu mechanics

Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_review#Temporary_undeletion

Advertisement - Please join the talk on if all articles brought to DRV should be fully restored and open for editing by default.

Important notice: all userbox undeletions are being discussed on a subpage: Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates. Please post all new such requests there (though you may link them from this page if you like)


13 February 2006

The Odin Brotherhood

A debacle of a discussion, Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/The_Odin_Brotherhood, with a deletionist attempt to browbeat the article out of existence, quite a bit of confusion over whether the article was about the book or the apparently apocryphal "brotherhood" named in the title, substantial changes in the article during the AfD discussions, and a small wave of sockpuppet supporters. Even discounting the sockpuppets, it's hard to conclude that (roughly) 35-40% Keep/merge/redirect, 60-65% delete constituted a consensus to delete, and the closing decision in a discussion this contentious clearly should not have been made by the editor who posted the original AFD nomination. Monicasdude 05:09, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep deleted. Certainly the editor who nominated the article should not have closed the discussion; give him a slap on the wrist for that (and threaten an RFC if it keeps happening), but I can't see any other real conclusion coming from this. Discounting socks/anons/newbies there were very few votes to do anything but delete, and the proposed redirect was a a bit of a streth, it seemed. The article was substantially rewritten during the debate, making it about a book rather than a brotherhood, but the book has a sales rank of something like 1.5 million on amazon, so I don't think it would make it anyway. I would almost support a procedural relisting based on the changes made to the article, but I hate to replay puppetshows, especially when I can't see the end result being any different. -R. fiend 05:33, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete/relist I support undeletion as the "slap on the wrist" that closer/nominator deserves. Such conduct is fairly egregious in cases where any keep votes are cast. (I don't mind if a nominator closes a unanimous delete, but otherwise, don't do it.) Xoloz 17:30, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'd almost agree, but relisting the debate isn't going to punish the closer; it's going to punish anyone at AFD who has to get involved in a pointless, overly verbose puppetshow in order to work for the proper conclusion, as well as the admin who closes that one (who will not be the same as last time). Though it is a valid reason to propose a DRV, changing an article from one unencyclopedic mess to another midway through an AFD does nto guarantee a relist. -R. fiend 07:01, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Just for clarity, I'll emphasize that, by using your phrase "slap on the wrist", I was hoping the overturn would prevent the same mistake by this closer and others in future. Punishment is, of course, not the wiki-way. :)
  • Endorse closure. Reviewing the deletion discussion, I count 16 arguing for deletion with three arguing for deletion after the rewrite and three explicitly returning to the discussion to endorse their earlier opinions (four if you count the nominator/closer). I count 9 to keep as is but 4 are patently excludable as sock/meatpuppets. 1 is a judgement call - a very new user who is not yet familiar with our standards. I would have given him/her the benefit of doubt in this case. 2 people argued for redirect without merger - both before the rewrite. Given the subsequent changes to the article, I would have tallied them as "ambiguous" in this case. 1 other person argued for redirect but based on subsequent actions and comments, I would have interpreted his/her opinion as another keep. Four people either offered ambiguous opinions or abstained. To me, that works out to 16-6 - sufficient to reach the threshold of "rough consensus". The comments illuminated the discussion but did not provide convincing argument or counter-argument to convince me that we should override the vote-count in this case. Given the interpretation necessary in this case, the nominator probably shouldn't have closed this discussion but the result is clear enough that I don't see a reason to rerun the discussion. The nominator also should have been much more explicit in explaining his/her reasoning during the closing. Closing a debate with nothing more than {{at}} del ~~~~ is an injustice to the decision process. Rossami (talk) 00:05, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure - the consensus was to delete, and the closer made a judgement call which I think was right. That being said, he shouldn't have been the one to make that call, and should be poked in the head until he promises to never do it again. Proto||type 12:45, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete/relist - Clearly bad process to close a judgement-call AfD started by oneself. And I definitely wouldn't be so eager to hang on to pre-editing "delete" recommendations while discounting the "redirect" recommendations. -- Jonel | Speak 21:26, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted, WP:SNOW. User:Zoe|(talk) 23:02, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • 'Endorse closure, slap on wrist for Mikka, and slap on wrist for Monicasdude for failing to WP:AGF in the case of everybody who voted delete. The article as deleted absolutely sucked, as numerous people said, and nobody even tried to fix it. We do not need this article back, thanks all the same. There is nothing preventing someone else from coming along and writing a much better article on the same subject, in the mean time it's not like we need to keep the subject's seat warm or anything. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   23:26, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

COMMENT. Let me say--in previous postings--I thought you chaps were a lynch mob. I WAS WRONG! I am impressed by your devotion to "fair play" and "due process." --146.85.127.124 00:27, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Offtopic.com

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Offtopic.com

You guys are gonna love this one, the AfD (or VfD rather) was almost a year ago. Anyway, it's the 6th largest forum on the entire web, and the largest generaral discussion forum, above even Something Awful. It seems to me that during the VfD, the article was so pitifully small and unreferenced that nobody actually knew how big it was. Subsequently, the article was recreated several times, and promptly speedied for being a repost. I seem to recall, however, that the very last one, the one deleted on Nov. 15, was actually a pretty good article that included facts like it being extremely large, so I think it should be undeleted to that version. --Rory096 20:38, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • The Deletion Log shows that most of the deletions were not as "recreated content" but as patent nonsense and/or obvious vandalism. I did not attempt to review all 186 deleted edits but a random sampling off the first page does show that this page is a vandalism-magnet.
    When the VfD discussion was held (May/June 2005), this website's Alexa ranking was so low that it wasn't even on the chart. Later in the summer, it spiked up briefly, then dropped again. It is now fluctuating around 10,000. That would still be well below the recommended thresholds of the Alexa test so the claims of traffic alone fail to convince me. Does this site meet any of the other recommended criteria at WP:WEB?
    Without some more concrete claims to notability/visibility, I'm not yet willing to set aside the previous decision. Especially given the extra load that this would appear to place on the people on vandalism patrol. Endorse closure pending other information. Rossami (talk) 21:39, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • While true that many of those were for nonsense, the very last one, which actually did have content (if I recall correctly, I obviously can't see it now), was deleted as reposted. It probably does not meet WP:WEB, mostly because the "Rule #1" of the site is not to talk about the site, though note that SA doesn't meet any Alexa test either, at 2402. Offtopic is where the O RLY? owl itself originated, in addition to many other notable internet memes. Xoloz: it's also much larger than SA in terms of members, at 138,954, especially considering SA doesn't prune members for inactivity. OT has had over 25,000 of those users on it in the past month alone, and almost never has less than 1500 logged in at any one point, though it's usually much higher. As for vandalism, we could semi-protect it, though, being a frequent figure in #wikipedia-en-vandalism, I can assure you that there is no possible way it could be more vandalism than Ebaumsworld, which we handle fine. --Rory096 03:46, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure for now. The provided evidence says that Offtopic is the 6th largest board in total number of posts. I'm not sure whether that indicates noteworthiness... it may just be a spam-magnet, for instance. Given this, I concur with Rossami unless more evidence is provided. Xoloz 22:18, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure. And if someone wants to write a different, much better and more compelling article on the same subject, I see no reason why tey should not do so. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   23:20, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure but would encourage a real article on the topic. JYolkowski // talk 03:41, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

12 February 2006

Userbox:Anti UN, Userbox:Anti ACLU, Template:User no Rand and Template:User-AmE-0

Discussion at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates.

Lowbrow.com

Nobody seems to like this article. Every time I come back here, it's gone. Why is this? What makes the likes of Ebaum's World or other sites any more special? Lowbrow.com is a large website with a pretty massive community. Why someone would want to keep information about it from this encyclopedia is beyond me, and it is very frustrating. I am requesting that this article be undeleted. Thank you.

--Spank fusion 00:13, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lowbrow.com for one thing, where a consensus to delete the article was first reached. It seems subsequent recreations of the article have all been deleted because they were deemed sufficiently similar to the original deleted version, which is allowed under the criteria for speedy deletion. It does look quite similar every time. You might also see the WP:WEB guidelines for website article inclusion. At any rate I think rather than deletion review you should talk to the admin who protected the page to see about recreating it. --W.marsh 00:46, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Hi. I'm that admin, and I sent User:Spank fusion here, as the appropriate place to contest a deletion, rather than than just recreating the article repeatedly. If there's a way to recreate the article so that it meets our inclusion guidelines, this is the place where that should be determined, if I understand correctly. -GTBacchus(talk) 01:07, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure. Unanimous decision to delete, entirely uncontroversial. If you propose recreating it, explain briefly what real-world circumstances have changed and how this website now meets our inclusion criteria. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 03:30, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure per MarkSweep. The most relevant difference between Lowbrow and "other sites" is that other sites haven't failed an AfD -- the community's judgment determines what is kept, and what is discarded. Xoloz 17:23, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I understand that this article has been fairly voted to be deleted in the past, but I recreated the article from scratch. I don't know who made the past one or what it looked like, but a new, legitimate article should not be judged on the decision made toward an article that might actually have deserved a deletion. I feel that this topic is genuine and should be allowed to reside on Wikipedia. Spank fusion 22:54, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

List of interesting or unusual place names

(now at Wikipedia:List of interesting or unusual place names)

IMPORTANT NOTICE: A new article on this subject has been created, citing sources and meeting verification requirements. The link in the heading now redirects there. That article is NOT the subject of this debate, and has NOT been proposed for deletion. It has been created as a compromise to settle this dispute, and is a work in progress. The subject of the DRV (in the "Wikipedia:" link above) is in the wikiepdia namespace where it has been proposed to live more or less indefinitely as a figurative salvage yard for verified entries in the new article.

This article, which has over 2200 edits and has been around for three years, could be nominated for adminship if it weren't so controversial this week. It was deleted out of process, then during the resulting debates, recreated and moved to the Wikipedia: namespace. It certainly does not belong there; all similar lists (List of city listings by country, List of misleading place names, &c) are in the article namespace. (The only parallel I saw someone mention in the Wikipedia: namespace is Wikipedia:Unusual articles which is clearly a meta-page about Wikipedia and therefore belongs in that namespace.) The article was then placed here for review, and the result was not handled by the book.

The article should be 'undeleted' and restored to its original title -- and then perhaps put up once more for AfD. A second AfD nomination ran for two days, generating over 30 votes, predominantly to keep it; but was closed early for process-lawyering reasons -- that is, because the same discussion should be had here. +sj +

NB: There were good debates raised about how to determine whether a name is unusual or interesting; these are useful to have, and hopefully good revisions of the list will come from them. Undeletion and restoration of the original title should in no way to minimize those debates. +sj + 00:05, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep deleted in article space (keep in WP space). Here's why. The first AFD was a perfectly valid delete. The user who brought it to DRV the first time used erroneous numbers to justify it (which shouldn't matter, as AFD is not a vote). The article was moved to the WP namespace (as suggested by several users, both in the AFD and the dRV), and the DRV was closed (by me) endorsing this move. It was then recreated in the article space out of process. Furthermore the article itseld is falwed beyond belief. Allow me to elaborate.
This article is downright ridiculous. Despite all these assertions I keep hearing that it is "easily verifiable", no one has cited sources for these (with very; few exceptions, and only very recently). When asked what exactly it is that makes these "interesting" or "unusual" it seems the only answer we ever hear is "Listen! This place is called fucking, Austria!!!!!! Get it??? FUCKING!!!! Isn’t that a hoot???" Um, maybe, but it’s not a source, and the article has this aura of having been partially written by Beavis and Butthead (huh-huh huh-huh "Dix Hills", huh-huh-. They said "Dicks", huh-huh-huh). Can hardly believe they missed Uruguay ("U-R-Gay", get it?), moronic? Absolutely, but, unlike almost every other name in the article, I can actually find a source for that one. I know we have some pre-pubescent editors here, but do we need to advertise that to the world? And as long as we’re loading up the article with juvenile humor, where's Johnson, Tennessee (FYI "Johnson" means "penis" (titter))?
And the problems go on. I mean, do we really want to include street names? Of all the millions and millions of streets in the world I’m sure we can find thousands that will get your average six-year-old in hysterics (which seems to be among the inclusion criteria here). Do you really want me to find a "Pu Street" somewhere on the planet? Because I bet I can. He same goes for informal names of neighborhoods. Alphabet City? It even actually makes sense for a neighborhood defined by lettered streets, so what’s so interesting or unusual about that anyway? And then there are those that just confound me.
Lolita: would that be interesting if it weren’t the name of a Nabokov novel? If someone publishes a book called “Meriden” do we get to include Meriden, Connecticut? Vader: let me guess, if we imagine the word "Darth" in front of it… Mashpee: sounds a little strange to anyone who doesn’t live in a part of the country where every other town is some Indian word, to those of us who do, utterly unremarkable. Sandwich: you do realize that the food item was indirectly named after the place, right? Ware, Massachusetts? Because it’s a homophone of "Where?" Well, get that spelling and that question mark at the end and you might be on the right track, but that is just retarded (how about Wareham (as in “where’s the ham?”)). Lough Neagh: is there anything even slightly interesting or unusual about that? Anything with the name of an animal is unusual? Guess what? That used to name things after animals all the time! Oxford? Oxen used to ford there. I can’t think of anything ‘’less’’ unusual. And, to top it off, what people try to pass off as a source is that another flawed Wikipedia article insists that these words are, by definition, downright ‘’hilarious’’! That’s not a source.
And there’s the opposites that make the list: words that are too much common English words (Beer, Commerce, Drain, Eagle) make the list, and those that don’t sound like English words at all make it too (Ouagadougou, Schenectady). Well guess what, there’s tons of places in foreign countries that sound odd to English speakers, they may even sound (get ready)….foreign. Let’s take out my trusty atlas and look at Sumatra as a somewhat random example. I see places named: Pasirpangarayan, Pulaupunjung, Talanglambangantir Kutacane (WHY do they insist on cutting their canes there. That’s just CRRRAZY!), Baganslapiapi, and so on and that’s without even really trying. Do some of those sound atypical to those of us who live in places like Carson City? Sure. Are we going to include half the continent of Asia? I sure hope not.
At least some of the worst offenders have been removed (Amarillo? Bagdad, Arizona (but not Moscow Idaho?)), but that they were ever included is pretty sad. And I bet some which are included actually could be verified by a third party source (Truth or Consequences comes to mind) but no one has bothered to. People seem to think "Oh yeah, we could so verify the shit out of these if we wanted to"; is the same as actual verification. It is not. Some people have compared this to articles such as Films considered the worst ever, but we must keep in mind that that article, imperfect as it is, really went out of its way to get verifiable sources. This one fails utterly in that regard. Trying to pass this off as an encyclopedia article is an insult to every encyclopedia on the planet; mostly this one. -R. fiend 00:16, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Restore to / Retain in Article namespace R. fiend has made a valiant attempt to defend deletion above. I am going to attempt to put the case for retention/restoration; hopefully I will do this justice but if not I apologise ... it's past midnight now here in the UK.
There seem to be two main things that are causing problems:
First, that the article title contains the word "interesting" and that this makes the article subjective. I have to say that this is a fair point. However, I would ask - why does this one word invalidate the whole article? I've been a Wikipedia editor for about a year now, and I notice a recurring pattern in deletion discussions, which is that often there is just one thing about an article that an editor takes a dislike to, and from this comes a recommendation to delete, without a pause to think whether there is anything worth salvaging in the article. Clearly, from the amount of support that retention of this article is getting (and yes, I agree that polls are evil too, but ...) there is a good case that the article has at least something in it of (encyclopaedic) merit. Instead of just going for the "nuke it" option, we should all be trying hard to see each other's point of view and identify what in the article is worthy of inclusion, and what isn't, and tidy it up accordingly. I have proposed, in each of these debates, that we try to agree some criteria for inclusion, and assess the list against that. I appear to be being told that that is impossible, but without any arguments as to why that is the case. I agree that is is difficult but in the interest of community harmony, it has to be worth a go?
Second, the arguments that the article lacks sources and is POV. Among the people who are espousing these arguments are some very experienced editors, and so I can't just dismiss this view out of hand, but I really do think that people have got into some quite muddled thinking on this. I think that the cause of this is that the article is presented as a list. Because of that, proponents of deletion are insisting on a higher standard of verifiability than they would for any other article. Specifically, not only are sources for the existence of the place names being asked for, sources to justify inclusion of the names in the article are being asked for. We DO NOT do this for any other kind of content. If an article is written as a piece of prose, not in list form, then the inclusion of content that is obviously relevant to the article's subject, without editors having to find a source which proves that it is relevant, is widely accepted. Sometimes there may be items of content that are perhaps peripheral and these are then debated by editors, but by and large we don't have a problem here i.e. we don't have those debates over EVERY sentence in EVERY article. Just because this article is presented as a list, I don't see why we have to treat it differently. The Wikipedia policy on citing sources exists, as I understand it, to ensure that Wikipedia doesn't end up full of errors (accidental or deliberate), and not as a means of imposing a rigid and bureaucratic editorial process when one isn't needed.
So in summary, if we drop the word interesting from this article's title, agree some inclusion criteria, and then assess the article's content against these, we have the basis for a perfectly valid article (with no need for factcheck notes on every line) in the article namespace. Parallels exist — English words with uncommon properties for instance (note: this one is written as prose) — I think that attempting a solution along these lines has to be a better way forward than continuing with the divisive mess we're currently in? SP-KP 01:14, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Of course we need sources to justify inclusion of each and every single entry, because inclusion in a list of things which are allegedly "interesting" or "unusual" requires that someone else call them "interesting" or "unusual." Wikipedia editors cannot just insert things in the list that they find "interesting" or "unusual" - that is prima facie original research, something which is specifically prohibited by policy. Please see Films considered the worst ever. "The movies listed have achieved a notable level of infamy, through critical and popular consensus." That is an acceptable way of doing things - each entry is sourced with reasons why it is among the worst ever - ratings from movie critics, box-office figures, fan votes on IMDb, etc. This list has none of the above - it's just a list of any name someone ever laughed at. That's not encyclopedically acceptable. FCYTravis 01:23, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Let me see if I can illustrate the argument above with an example. This does require you to be able to see a parallel between an article which has its content presented as a list, and an article which has its content presented as prose. Not everyone's brain is wired up the same, so that might be difficult for you to do, in which case this is perhaps not going to help, but I hope it might help at least some people to see where I am coming from. Let's take the article Kansas. What if, instead of creating an article entitled Kansas, someone had created exactly the same article, but had placed an asterisk at the start of each sentence, and entitled it List of facts about Kansas. Then, imagine that over time, other editors had come along and added a mixture of facts, some of which were undisputedly about Kansas, and others which, although the editors adding them believed to be about Kansas, were viewed by other editors not to be about Kansas, such that the article was a bit of a ragbag of facts of varying relevance to the subject. Now try to imagine that someone spots this article and thinks "what a pile of poo" and nominates it for deletion. Try to imagine the deletion discussion for this article. Although there would be a lot of commonality between that discussion and this one, I would hope that somewhere along the line, someone would make the common sense point that an article on Kansas is actually quite a useful thing for Wikipedia to have in it, and that while the article up for deletion needed to be tidied up, rationalised, and written as prose, it could still form the basis for the Kansas article. That proposal would, I think you would agree, probably carry the day on first pass. I doubt very much whether people would be insisting that every fact that was to be retained in the article not only had to be supported by an external source, but that there must also be an external source stating that the fact was sufficiently important to be included in an encyclopaedia article about Kansas. We'd use our judgment based on some agreed principles to decide which facts did and which didn't merit inclusion. I don't think anyone would say that using that judgment constituted original research, or that the resulting Kansas article, because it went through such an editorial process, was so blighted with POV that it had to be deleted. To convince me that an article entitled Unusual place names has no place in Wikipedia, you will need to try to explain why it is different from an article on Kansas. If this boils down to a difference of opinion on what sort of content Wikipedia should and shouldn't contain, then fine, we'll just have to agree to differ; if there is something more than that which marks these two articles out as different, I'd really like to understand what it is, but nowhere in the deluges of words written on this subject have I been able to detect what that difference is. SP-KP 02:21, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • The primary difference between the theoretical Kansas article and this article is that "The captial of Kansas is Topeka" is a fact, no one seriously disputes it; whether "Dix Hills" is interesting or unusual is an opinion. Whether someone has such an opinion is basically a fact, but not an easy one to establish. If our criteria is that someone, somewhere finds this place name to be interesting or unusual, then there is not a single place name that we could exclude. Furthermore, there is a fundamental difference between a list and an article, and wikipedia, being an encyclopedia, should concentrate more on articles. Lists too often (and this is certianly no exception) encourage readers too add anything that pops into their mind, especially when they're as subjective as this. A list of facts about Kansas article would also be a spectacularly bad idea. -R. fiend 03:02, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • This is a really helpful reply, as it is now obvious to me at which point our thought processes diverge. The divergence seems to come at the point where you are translating the logical entities involved in the hypothetical Kansas situation across to the Unusual names situation. To understand it, we need to talk ontology. I would categorise the statement "The capital of Kansas is Topeka" as a "piece of information having encyclopaedic merit" (these are pieces of information which we believe are valid to include in Wikipedia, facts which we think that readers ought to be able to learn from reading a Wikipedia article). This is a fundamental unit of categorisation relevant to any discussion of this nature; it sits in the space between "word" and "article". To ensure we are using our Kansas analogy correctly, we need to take care when we identify the corresponding thing in relation to the Unusual names article, and pick the correct thing. If I have understood you correctly, you have tranposed "The capital of Kansas is Topeka" to "Fucking, Austria is an unusual name". I believe this is incorrect - what logic theorists call a "category mistake" - and that the corresponding thing is actually a statement something like "There is a town called Fucking in Austria, which is spelt the same way as an English word with a sexual meaning". You would agree, I assume, that that is a fact which we should reasonably expect readers of Wikipedia to be able to find out? If you think about things in this way, then there is nothing wrong, or at least nothing against policy, about an article containing a set of such facts. To include these facts in the article is not POV-pushing, or original research, and as long as this fact itself is sourced it's not a breach of the verifiability policy — it's just the editorial process. If you're following the logic this far, then all we're left with to disagree on are the criteria for inclusion of entries (i.e. this is merely an argument about different methods of arranging facts into articles). I've said all along that arriving at an agreed set of criteria will be difficult, but it surely is not beyond our abilities to arrive at some kind of consensus? SP-KP 17:52, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
            • Okay, so we can agree that "There is a town called Fucking in Austria, which is spelt the same way as an English word with a sexual meaning". Is that a fact? Yes. Should that be found in an encycloepdia? Sure, and as such we have an article on Fucking, Austria which makes that clear. However, an article containing a list of such facts would have other comparable facts, like "Oxford is a place name that dervies from Oxen and ford." Or "Dallas, Texas is a city in Texas named for the Vice President under James Polk". You can find facts such as this all over the place, does that make them interesting? Almost every place name has a story behind it; being interesting or unusual is much more difficult to qualify than a statement of the captial of Kansas. And using "Fucking Austria" for further examples probably isn't the best way to go. It is one of the least controversial entries, and I beieve it now has a source. I mentioned that one originally because people seemed to be using it to justify all the others, which I considered a flawed approach. I really think we're getting somewhere with the new article, and that should be the focus of our efforts. -R. fiend 17:10, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Please, just {{sofixit}}. Until then, it should stay out of mainspace. I've deleted and protected the cross-namespace redirect and noted that at WP:ANI, while we're talking about it. - brenneman{T}{L} 01:32, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Whatever the decision about the article itself, this was uncalled for. All existing links from external sites, not to mention those on-wiki, take people to the old title; there should be an obvious way for them to get from there to where the long list is at present. Side discussion continued at AN/I. +sj + 05:16, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    I have now redirected the original title to Astrokey's new article. Problem solved. -R. fiend 06:06, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep in Wikispace and do not undelete in article space per FCYTravis. And perhaps some day, we might achieve a DRV with no daily "interesting place names" rehashing. Well, I can always dream... --W.marsh 03:06, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • comment. agree with sp-kp. I was being bold and followed sp-kp's redlink and started an article with only those names that are referenced (currently only 5 at the moment) at Unusual place names -- Astrokey44|talk 03:39, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's looking about a thousand times better than the previous article (although the introduction is pretty stiff). Perhaps those carrying the banner of the "List of" article could instead help Astrokey on this much more worthwhiel endeavor. -R. fiend 04:05, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      I think what Astrokey is doing is great. It should be done to the original article in place, however; even unto carving out huge sections of the article. But deleting and/or moving an article to a new namespace is just not the appropriate way to express an editorial opinion (like "this article needs a total rewrite!"). It is this misconstruction of process that we are voting on / discussing here. I am not carrying the banner of a particular version of the article; but it should be worked on where it has always been - or perhaps with a clarifying rename - and not in two places at once, as you seem to be suggesting. The extension to that would be, that any time you found an article you thought was POV, you could move it to a new namespace, delete, recreate, and protect the original title, and tell the authors to fix it at the new title and petition for it to be reinstated... +sj + 05:16, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • Well, no, moving an article to the WP namespace is not standard practice, and isn't intended to be. That was a compromise worked out after the article was already deleted from the mainspace. I consider it a decent compromise, as those editors who found it "interesting" can still get their chuckles, and it can be worked on without being the highly problematic article it was. The only real alternative I could see would be to simply remove all unsourced entries (which, at the time, was all of them, now it's all but maybe half a dozen or so). No one is saying you anyone can willy-nilly move any article they see as POV to the WP space, and that is not what happened here. -R. fiend 05:22, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, it was moved to WP namespace in the middle of the AfD debate and I moved it back. So that is exactly what happened here. SchmuckyTheCat 18:05, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, so it was moved during the AFD debate, moved back before the debate ended, deleted, and recreated in the WP space. The point is, no one is saying any article that someone thinks is POV can unilaterally be moved to the WP space, which seemed to be what Sj was worried about. He can rest easy now. -R. fiend 19:36, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong undelete as per Grue. Could User:R. fiend please refrain from exercising his admin powers on this article again - the failure of process seems in part to be attributable to this amendment of the AfD discussion as well as other actions taken by R. fiend. His storong views mean that he is seemingly unable to follow due process. This AfD seemed to have been properly set up by userr:docu in line with the process outlined on this page at Wikipedia:Deletion review#Decisions to be reviewed, which read at the time: "If there is neither a majority to endorse the decision nor a three-quarters supermajority to overturn and apply some other result, the article is relisted on the relevant deletion process.". If the process is wringly described, it eeds to be amended. If not wringly described, why are views being sought again, why don't the previous recently expressed views on exactly the same topic count?--A Y Arktos 23:03, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete per the consensus of opinion in the AfD to keep and the process problems noted above. Issues with respect to whether a particular entry should be added is part of the editing process for the article itself, not itself a justification for deletion of the article. Jtmichcock 14:11, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

  • Some people are particularly drawn to the curse words and homophones that make it onto the list. I appreciate that these are offensive to some; but that is not the source of 'unusualness' for the majority of list entries. Useful sections of the page could be : "one- and two-letter place names", "numeric placenames", &c. We should be focusing on improving the criteria for inclusion on the page, not beating around the bush re: verifiability. +sj +
    • It's not the fact that they're offensive that grinds my gears. It's the fact that they are all sophomoric, not interesting or unusual. Is "Beaver, Pennsylvania" really "interesting or unusual?" Not really. It has sophomoric sexual connotations, but that's neither interesting nor unusual. It's just stupid. So a list that has no criteria nor sourcing will inevitably become simply a list of every place name a random teenager ever laughed at. Which will become a very long list indeed. FCYTravis 07:40, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse deletion from articlespace, keep in projectspace as a resource for long enough to wring any useful content out of it, then delete. It's mostly junk, but there's probably some salvageable bits in here. -- nae'blis (talk) 23:53, 13 February 2006 (UT
  • I've actually not been paying attention to this article for some time. My attention was called to this debate by a message someone wrote me, which I received today after not logging into Wikipedia for over a month (I've generally been using it without logging in, lately, since I haven't been editing). That having been said, this is a good debate and some good points have been made. I agree that "interesting" and "unusual" are both subjective terms. The article had footnotes you could attach to the place name to indicate some reasons why people might find it "interesting" and/or "unusual," which I have tried to use. As to verifiability, for U.S. Place Names I have generally been using my trusty Rand McNally Road Atlas. I understand there is a movement on Wikipedia for people to cite their sources -- I think that is a good idea. With that taken into account, this article's encyclopedic qualities are questionable, however, the goal here is to have a comprehensive record of knowledge of all types. I credit this article with getting me interested in Wikipedia in the first place -- "Oh hey, they didn't put this town here, I can add it!" With respect to Native American town names -- I live in Massachusetts and I grew up on Long Island, so I am used to it, however, those from other areas of the country might not be. It is very POV-ish. I guess I agree with what was done to resolve the debate. Tckma 18:47, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Quasi-gummi

This article appears to have been deleted on 16 December 2005 by User:Snowspinner without due process of any sort. Its most recent version before deletion has references and appears to describe a valid type of confection. -Tim Rhymeless (Er...let's shimmy) 05:44, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Undelete and send to AFD. I have a feeling it's a neologism and should probably be deleted, but let's send it through the process. -R. fiend 06:55, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse deletion per WP:SNOW since on checking the supposed "references" neither actually supported the term and I can't find any English-language Googles which are not mirrors. From a process point of view this was wrong, but since actually the project is all about content I can't see a lot of point wasting any more time on this. Normally I would userfy and/or invite the creator to repairing these problems, but the creator is missing in action. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   10:44, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete and relist at AfD so a proper discussion can take place. ComputerJoe 13:45, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted Yes, it has been deleted out of process - 'bad Snowspinner, bad admin - slap!'. But it is obviously unreferenced crap, so there is nothing to be gained by undeleting it. If this is about repremanding the admin, then puting crap back into the encyclopedia, because a form wasn't filled in, is not the way to go about it--Doc ask? 18:07, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete and AFD - Hmm, well, I'll be an inclusionist here, seems like a term which could have some use in describing some sorts of candy. Worthy of a shot, at least. FCYTravis 19:00, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

11 February 2006

Heathian anarchism

This article's final AfD tally was 3 deletes, 2 merges closely edging on delete, and 1 keep, from the author of the page. The final decision made was to "keep", which I don't understand. Since the best merge suggestion offered is to an article that does not exist, and what is presently in this article would be insufficient for creating a new article, we're stuck in the meantime with what is a completely OR page. My suggestion would be either to delete it or move it to the creator's userspace. In the meantime we're legitimizing a topic that doesn't even exist. Sarge Baldy 19:45, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Relist - true, the only person asking for it to be kept as-is was the creator, and most others wanted it gone or gone, but there were not many contributors overall. I would have relisted for further debate rather than closing. - Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   20:36, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • This approach to relisting is becoming a little concerning to me. Having "no consensus" as an outcome (call it keep if you prefer) is absolutely fine. People seem to be relisting enthusiastically just because there was no Absolute Outcome in the hopes of generating one. If that is what an editor wants, then they should carry out the relisting as an editorial matter, and not in the manner used on DRV which implies a rejection of the earlier debate's closure. -Splashtalk 20:52, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Hmmm. I agree up to a point, but I don't think a couple of comments is sufficient to determine consensus, and I don't see why it should be a problem relisting where there are very few comments. Relisting because it's 20k/20m/20d is clearly nonsensical, but I don't recall that happening. I've seen several which have been kept after relisting when closing as delete would have been valid (a couple of deletes and nothing else). But I am becoming somewhat disillusioned with the whole process - nominate a web forum and every member will be along to vote keep, nominate a school at your peril, however bad the article and no matter that it is a commercial enterprise not a school, and so on. Ah well. I'm sure that once the Gastrich-induced cynicism has worn off I'll return to my usual sunny self, and maybe it'll improve with the Pareto effect of {PROD}. There is a slightly more pressing problem with this article: with zero Googles and no cited sources it appears to be unverifiable. Where's that list of templates? - Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   21:02, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • Getting 6 participants is more than substantially many debates (see WP:AFD100 for statistics on this). AfD is (still) overloaded, and sending minor articles back there just because we hope for 7 participants rather than 6 seems a little, well, pointless. -Splashtalk 21:05, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse close, clearly. This doesn't even shake a finger at a consensus to delete. There is no need to relist since there is clearly discussion to be had elsewhere about what, precisely, should be done. Having 6 people in an AfD is enough, and there is no quorum for AfD and there never has been. The only reason to relist would be a lack of participation or a supposition that relisting would produce a different result because of problems with the first listing. Noone cites any problems with this listing, apart from its outcome, and so I see neither a case to relist nor overturn. -Splashtalk 20:49, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Maybe if you're just looking at the numbers, and not reading what people have to say. There does appear to be a 5-1 consensus that this article should no longer exist. That it's divided by people who think it needs to be merged and to be deleted seems irrelevant. Sarge Baldy 21:03, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Irrelevant to what? To the question of deletion or not, no. To the question of exactly what state it should remain is as a result of the AfD? Largely, yes. People can decide whether to keep, merge or redirect for themselves in the case of an unclear AfD, and it is not the business of DRV to direct them on that. -Splashtalk 21:05, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not saying it needs to be deleted. I'm saying it shouldn't continue to exist where it does now. "Heathian anarchism" is a term coined by the creator of the article. And right now we're pretending it exists. Sarge Baldy 21:12, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • What's there to discuss? This article is about something that doesn't exist. He might as well have written at the top of the page that the term was coined by Hogeye of Wikipedia. If you think that's a stretch, he actually DID put his name as a source in the article on anarchist economics. Sarge Baldy 21:35, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • In that case, you might wait a short while in case something turns up and then make a fresh AfD nomination with a much more compelling nomination than last time. "Not notable", whilst shorthand for a number of things is much less likely to win favour than "doesn't exist", "unverifiable", "original research" etc. Also, you did not at any point return to that AfD during the debate — it's necessary to do so when things aren't going as you intended, in much the way that you have intervened here. However, DRV is unlikely to make a purely content based decision and is equally unlikely, if not more so, to overturn that AfD debate into a deletion. -Splashtalk 22:56, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well, it's not completely unreferenced, as it names the book from which this guy's philosophy is outlined: Citadel, Market and Altar. The problem I just discovered is that that book gets 101 unique googles (pretty small for a book that's allegedly the foundation of a notable philosophy) and doesn't seem to appear at Amazon. Is this guy just another self-published crank? I think we should move it (as proposed in the AFD), re-examine, and perhaps re-AFD, based on any new facts that come to life (such as "this guy is a self-published crank", if it turns out to be true). We shoudl also keep in mind that the anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, etc pages have been the scene of ongoing edit wars for eons, and POV, forking, and the like fly about all over the place. anythign connected to these topics deserves special scrutiny. -R. fiend 21:35, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • The content dispute, and under what name the article should end up residing, should be settled on the talk page, not AfD or here on DRV. There was clearly no consensus to delete... I said keep because of a few reasons, but ultimately does it make a difference here if I said "keep" or "no consensus"? --W.marsh 21:54, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Depends who you ask. Some folks don't like to see "result keep" when the result was no consensus and more people want rid of it than want it kept. Does it matter? Not to me, I guess. But I move this DRV be closed since R. Fiend has it absolutely right - this should be moved, cleaned up a bit and then re-assessed, which is in broadly line with what most people on the AfD seemed on the whole to want. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   10:48, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • You know it's my opinion that all AFDs should be kept open until there can be some sort of declared resolution, either a rough consensus to delete (ie 65-70%) or a simple majority to keep. Until that time, I think we can pretty well state the matter is unresolved, and shouldn't be closed. I'm sure people will see this as some sort of deletionist plot, but I think it makes perfect sense. As long as between 50% and 65% want an article deleted, its a bit silly to call the matter settled. We still have it weighted towards keeping, as it only require a simple majority, and we can avoid arbitrary and highly controversial closings much of the time. There is no reason we can't keep those AFDs that meet this criteria open almost indefinitely, after all, the article is still there while the debate goes on, so there's a default to keep anyway. And any time more than half the participants think an article should be deleted, it may not be a consensus, but it is an indication that the article has problems which will not automatically go away after 5 days and a "no consensus, default keep" result is given. Of course, this would largely mean AFD is a vote, but it nearly always comes down to the numbers anyway. -R. fiend 21:46, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Template:User Anti-UN and Template:User Anti-ACLU

Debate moved to Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates

10 February 2006

Montfort Realschule Zell

This article's AfD nomination had 3 delete comments and just one keep (User:Jcuk's only comment was "of course"). If we were going straight vote style that gives 75% delete. After weighting arguments and comments I'd say the deletes have it. I respect MarkGallagher's decision to keep (the article did change a bit mid-vote) and normally I'd just let it go, but I just don't like this article (admitably I am deletionist scum). BrokenSegue 21:35, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Which does not address the issue that articles which suck, suck. Whatever the subject. It's not like we have to keep their seats warm until a better one comes along, after all. Me, I'd merge the stubs and wait for more information, but that's against some people's religion. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   23:23, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Template:User against Iraq War Template:User USA Police State and Template:User admins ignoring policy

Debate moved to Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates

Hootenanny (store)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hootenanny (store). 6 delete, 5 merge and or keep votes. Closing admin seems to think that votes he disagrees with can be discounted because "AFD is a debate, not a vote". He also overlooked the argument that it has a notable corporate parent, so he can't have examined the debate very closely. Kappa 13:31, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There is nothing to stop someone creating a redirect right now. Endorse close, no reason given for keeping this.--Doc ask? 14:08, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I just did. Endorse close, we want to get to a million articles, but not like this. Physchim62 (talk) 14:15, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, we don't all want to get to a million articles. -R. fiend 07:30, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse status quo, which is currently merge and redirect by the looks of it, since I don't actually care that much what went on given that the result is a decent-sized article. - Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   14:31, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse status quo. -- Jonel | Speak 21:27, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Endorse closing Closing editor's action fine. A borderline-nn. Somebody has to do the closing on these borderline-nn. We're not drowning kittens! --FloNight 15:40, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Not as such, no. Looking at the deleted history, there is very little there. There might be a small amount of trivia missing from the main article, but arguably it is not Wikipedia's place to list the brands stocked by a local store, especially since that might change at any time. Do we list all the brands sold out of Macy's? If anyone actually does care that much I will get the additional text out of the deleted history for them, but in my view it's too crufty to be worth the effort. - Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   15:51, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Like Kappa, I found the AfD to be less than well closed. The case for merging was made and supported, but in the tiresome inclusionist-deletionist catfight, the keepers and deleters failed to raise any serious grounds against the suggestion. Closing admins have a responsibility to find the outcome that best fits the discussion, and there's a fine line between doing this and finding an interpretation of the AfD that best fits one's own opinion. Johnleemk may understand that, but this exceptional closing does not provide evidence of it. --- Charles Stewart(talk) 15:58, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Undelete per Kappa. The nomination was little more than a display of aggressive ignorance; the nominator used the same justification to nominate a well-known and well-established specialty retailer (SFFH bookstore) for deletion, claiming there were "two dozen" like it in his neighborhood. The discussion there [[2]] shows pretty clearly that the nominator didn't know what a specialty retailer was, and should have led the closing admin to discount his "vote" (and the "votes" that simply cited the nominator). Note also that the nominator, in that discussion, used the fact that he'd never heard of many of the notable authors who were associated with the retailer as support for his claim. Wikipedia should be guided by the knowledge of its editors, not the ignorance of its editors. I don't know whether this particular specialty retailer is Wikipedia-notable, but the parent business certainly is, and has something of a track record for creating distinctive/notable enterprises. Monicasdude 16:05, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete the history The closure was not perfectly in-process, but a redirect/merge is a satisfactory result as far as content-merit is concerned. Let the history be complete, however, as this does no harm, and satisfies those with a process grievance. Xoloz 16:32, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure per FloNight. --Kbdank71 19:02, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep redirected. No real need to undelete history, as there's hardly anything to undelete, though there's no harm in undeleting it either. The original closer maybe should have done the redirect himself, but there was certainly no call for a flat out keep. I don't think anyone takes Kurt Weber's comments in AFDs seriously (at least I hope they don't), and no one else gave a single reason for keeping it. -R. fiend 19:16, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete history - since it is harmless. Despite my reservations about the close, I am happy with the status quo. --- Charles Stewart(talk) 19:21, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete or just Recreate at will and back up off site after recurrent redeletions: You want the breakdown of policy, you've got it. This page is full of examples, this article being one of them. Karmafist 21:01, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete per Karmafist. --Aaron 22:43, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete. If you're just going to ignore the debate on AfD, including disregarding the tally, you might just as well change the name of AfD to Wikipedia:Does any admin feel like deleting this?. Having said that, that now seems to be our deletion policy. Grace Note 02:29, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Leave things alone - Tony's undeleted the history, it's back there, it's a suitable redirect; why waste time and clog AfD further? Proto||type 16:26, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]


4 February 2006

Template:Commonsgallery

Despite its TfD discussion attracting 3 votes for delete and 4 keeps, plus a keep from an anon who has a few non-project contributions, User:MarkSweep closed the discussion as a delete on the grounds that "The result of the debate was better arguments for deletion than for keeping it." I dispute this decision on two grounds:

  1. That is not the admin's call; the deletion discussions may not be votes, but closing admins are, as far as I've gathered from my experience on AfD, not court judges, there to decide which side 'won'; they are there to decide what the community thinks. It renders the whole 'discussion' thing slightly pointless otherwise.
  2. Even if I'm wrong on the above point, MarkSweep's decision that there were better arguments for deletion is still extremely shaky IMO. None of the delete voters ever tried to argue the counterpoints the keep voters made against their arguments. These arguments included the fact that the template supposedly advertised for Olympus (it had a picture of a camera, far too small to make out the model). --Malthusian (talk) 19:38, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • As the closing admin, let me explain my reasoning in more detail. First, we'll have to discount one keep "vote" from an anon. Second, Nickj is using his "vote" as a vehicle for something unrelated, namely improving or changing Template:Commons. Nickj wrote: "That's why my vote is "keep", and it will continue to be "keep" until such time as Template:commons is improved." That's not a reason to keep Template:Commonsgallery. You don't go about changing Template:Commons by forking it and then voting to keep when the fork is nominated for deletion. Third, "Keep, useful template" by Ryan Delaney is fine, but it's not a relevant argument: Template:Commonsgallery was nominated here because it was a fork of an already existing maintenance template: and precisely because it is a fork of a useful template, it is of course useful, but that's not what this debate was seeking to establish. Fourth, there were three delete votes (by Netoholic, Petaholmes, and Phil Boswell) arguing that template forks are bad. The two serious votes in favor of keeping never properly addressed why the forked templates is needed. I completely ignored the bit about the Olympus ad as tangential to the discussion. Fifth, even if we regard the outcome of this debate as "no consensus", it makes no sense to default to keep in the Template namespace: templates, unlike articles, are tools which facilitate and enable; they should only be kept when they are truly needed. As I've said in my comments when I closed this discussion, I was much more swayed by the arguments for deletion, and in the end this is a discussion, not a vote. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 19:59, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted - on the principle that forks are bad. FCYTravis 20:07, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Mark seems to be under the impression that the people behind the template have not bothered to explain what it is for, which is false: it has been extensively explained at Template_talk:Commons and the TfD. Briefly (I don't know why I'm bothering as I thought DRV was about process and not content, but FCYTravis has indicated otherwise): some of us believe the links to Commons galleries would look better if accompanied by a picture explaining what it was going to (e.g. a camera for a gallery of pictures). No-one's yet tried to claim otherwise, the only argument for deletion that's been put forward has been 'standardisation and maintenance'.
  • I don't see how this was a 'fork' any more than {{test-n}} is a fork of {{test}}. Both do the same thing, but {{test-n}} does it slightly better in a certain context. Same with this. I admit that the name of the template does scream 'fork', being a redundancy; that was a mistake on my part. I was expecting to move the template to {{commonsimage}} as soon as the TfD was closed. --Malthusian (talk) 20:27, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Moreover, I'm not going to reply to MarkSweep's responses to why he discounted most of the votes on one side one by one (I've already explained why the 'serious voters' had, in fact, "properly addressed why the forked templates is needed"). But I will say that I think that if the arguments of a certain 'side' in a discussion are weak, it should be explained why they are weak at the time, rather than the closing admin waiting for the discussion period to end, discounting them, then waiting for someone to bring the TfD to DRV to explain why they were weak enough for the editors' opinions to be ignored. If nothing else it would save time. --Malthusian (talk) 20:43, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • TfD is a debate about the merits of templates. Rather than talking about "sides" one should talk about the outcomes of that debate and the arguments advanced in favor of them. If I see a weak argument or an argument that does not even address the central question of the debate, I call it as I see it. As for commenting on the merits of the various arugments before closing the debate: what do you want me to do? I didn't even know of this particular debate until I started to do my share in trying to clear out the TfD backlog. And if I had been aware of it and commented on it earlier, I wouldn't be in a position to close it. And by the way, I wasn't waiting for someone to bring this here. If you're only interested in saving time, then let it go and work on changing Template:Commons through the customary channels. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 21:11, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • *sigh* I'm going to have to surrender on any further discussion - I tried to reply to Mark's last post but couldn't manage to string three separate counterpoints together in a way that made any sense. I'm just going to say that I used the word 'side' in the sense of 'those who voted one particular way', not 'side' in the sense of 'cabal'. I think it would be worthwhile to have more illustrative {{commons}} templates, but if it gets shot down, well, c'est la vie. If I die in my sleep tonight and St Peter asks me 'And how did you spend your life?' I don't want to have to tell him that my last night was spent fighting a rearguard action over diversifying a Wikipedia template. --Malthusian (talk) 23:44, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted — MarkSweep is surely right in both principle and detail. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 23:39, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have forked templates many times, as it is sometimes the only way to switch over from one design to another. I was not aware the cabal disapproved of it. --SPUI (talk - don't use sorted stub templates!) 02:17, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted per Mel Etitis. --Kbdank71 05:35, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete. The fact that {{commons}} is seemingly perma-protected pushed me over the edge. If one cannot edit the template without going through various bureaucracy (requesting unprotection and hoping that succeeds, or getting consensus on the talk page - so much for being bold!), then forking may be the best option. --SPUI (talk - don't use sorted stub templates!) 06:32, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Overturn. MarkSweep's repeated violations of deletion process are becoming more and more disruptive. Crotalus horridus (TALK • CONTRIBS) 19:36, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete. - How can you can get an result of 5 to keep, and 3 to delete, and decide that "delete" is the right outcome? It makes a complete and total mockery of the concept of consensus. Secondly, for Mark Sweep's "reasoning" that he can disregard my vote, and the votes of others: I wasn't aware that we had ceded complete dictatorial powers to Mark Sweep, so if someone could point to the relevant official wiki guideline outlining his new overlord status, that would be super, thanks. Third, I note that none of the votes to delete were disregarded, so it's good to see that the fine example of Florida lives on! Fourth, the reasons for changing this were outlined extensively on the Commons talk page, and have still not been addressed. Fifth, the commons template is still protected - so, given that anything related get deleted, and the originally seems to be permanently protected, how, exactly, is anything about these templates ever supposed to be improved? Frankly, this really is an appalling decision. If you're going to ignore what the community says, then why even have a deletion process? I mean, really, why bother? Just unilaterally delete whatever you like, irrespective of consensus - it'll give the same result, but without wasting everyone's time by giving the illusion of wanting community input and general agreement. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 23:04, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse deletion per Mark's justification here. However these exceptional closes should be explained when closing. Pace the squeals of outrage, please note that: (i) TfD does not have a clear numerical criteria for assessing when there is a concensus and (ii) the kind of carefully justified discounting Mark has undertaken here would, if done when closing the *fD dsicussion, be a good thing for the health of *fDs: if you object to these vote discounts, what discounts would you agree with? --- Charles Stewart(talk) 01:47, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Seconded with a pat on the back and a kiss on the cheek. A great many of the discussions that take place on DRV could be avoided if closers took more care with explaining their thinking when they close. Rossami, in particular, provides clear evidence that he has thought about the arguments presented, and I've seen closes of his run to two paragraphs. This is a good thing, and should be more widespread. - brenneman(t)(c) 02:48, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks very much for the feedback. You have a good point, and I've added my above comments to the TfD page. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 04:53, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Relist on TfD. Whilst Mark's arguments to delete are convincing, and convinced me that it should be deleted, there seems to be enough dissension to warrant a re-examination of the decision. 5 votes to keep against 3 to delete is not a decent consensus to keep, parituclarly given that the last two votes to keep were a) from an IP and b) two words, but I would have thought that this would be enough for the Template to remain pending further discussion. Deleting it was against the principle of consensus on deletion. If Mark makes the same excellently clear and cogent arguments to delete then I'm sure people will make the appropriate decision. And I think Nickj's reason for keeping is entirely valid - if he believes the template si necessary until the commons template itself is fixed, then that is a valid reason for him to believe the commonsgallery one should be kept. Proto||type 13:02, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reverse and Keep as per the consensus what was the point of the votes if the deciding admin was going to maket he call anyway? Some nerve.Gator (talk) 13:17, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Hey look, I lied, one more comment. MarkSweep's reasons for discounting most of the delete votes may make sense on the outside, but to me there seems to be equally good reasons for discounting the delete votes. One said "performs the same function as {{commons}}" (none of the counter-arguments to that here, on the TfD and on Template_talk:Commons have ever been addressed), another said (paraphrasing for brevity) 'template forks are evil, and advertises for Olympus'. Of that last post, the first argument is not an argument, the second rather nonsensical (maybe it was in jest, but Mark talks about "serious votes"). Why not discount those arguments too?
  • Now at this point I think we can agree that it becomes ridiculous, having unilaterally discarded almost the entire debate, which is why I disagree with vote discounting on principle in all but the most obvious cases (sockpuppetry/trolling), for two reasons: 1) If an argument is weak, someone should say so at the time so its proponent can respond to the criticism without having to do it at WP:DRV, and 2) If the overall case for one 'side' (ooer, used that word again) is weak, then people will read it, be unconvinced, vote delete and the article will be deleted by an actual consensus (not just a consensus of "serious voters"). If the reason for the *fD not getting enough delete 'votes' was because it didn't get enough attention, then relist it. --Malthusian (talk) 13:18, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse. Closing admin properly discounted "votes" which did not comply with policy directions; TFD page expressly says Please explain how, in your opinion, the template does not meet the criteria [for deletion] above. Comments such as "I like it," or "I find it useful," while potentially true, generally do not fulfill this requirement. Voting standards were clear, and closing admin quite properly followed them rather than disregarding them. Monicasdude 21:55, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yes, but my vote/comment/preference was discounted because of my mistake in pointing something out, not because of my reasons. My reasons are that the newer template is (in my opinion) clearer, easier to understand (both in language and visually), and more exact than the commons template. My conclusion therefore was keep. My mistake was apparently in saying that there would be no reason for commonsgallery if commons could be improved (but unfortunately, that seems to be impossible), and that in that situation I would most likely change my vote. Furthermore, it should be noted that this template doesn't even seem to pass the tests of whether it should be proposed for deletion: Is it helpful? Yes. Is it redundant? No, I don't think it is (see reasons above). Is it used? Yes. Is it NPOV? Yes. Was it a candidate for speed deletion? No. Therefore, it doesn't even seem to fulfil the basic criteria for being listed on TfD, let alone the criteria to actually be deleted. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 23:07, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted, I do not see the difficulty to simply construct an independent userbox in one's own userspace. Less controversial, and quite sensical. The same can be said for many other userbox tempaltes. -ZeroTalk 09:36, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Are articles in the main space allowed to use templates from a user's namespace? I thought I read somewhere that this was a no-no, but I could be wrong. If it's allowed, then that's exactly what I will do, and I thank for suggesting this. However, if it's not allowed, then I would please ask that you reconsider your position because it means the problem cannot be solved by the method you propose. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 23:36, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Recently concluded

  1. User:SPUI - consensus to undelete. restored to last non-controversial version (user can edit as desired when he's back). 03:54, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Wikipedia:WikiProject Pedophilia - restored, still at MfD. 02:08, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  3. Brian Peppers - endorsed and earth salted with {{deletedpage}}. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  4. Criticism of the Bible - endorsed as "no consensus", now a redirect. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  5. Inconsistencies in the Bible endorsed as "no consensus", now a redirect. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  6. Ted's_Kiddush reopened, now at afd again. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  7. Anti-vaccinationists endorsed "no consensus" closure, but closing admin subjected to public ridicule. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  8. Best blond joke ever and/or Best blonde joke ever kept deleted and now exist as redirects. 23:31, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  9. Template:User pedo: Kept deleted with {{deletedpage}}. 23:18, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  10. Sin (musician): Kept deleted with {{deletedpage}}. 23:18, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  11. Marianne Curan: Kept deleted, better re-written from scratch. 23:09, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  12. Christopher Howard: Kept deleted. 23:02, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  13. Armand Traoré: Kept deleted. 23:00, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  14. The Foxymorons: Withdrawn, new stub to be written. 22:56, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  15. Template:User Antiracist hitler: Speedy deletion endorsed. 17:40, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
  16. Template:GermanGov: Kept deleted. 17:33, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
  17. List of state-named Avenues in Washington, D.C.: Original keep closure endorsed. 17:29, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
  18. User:KJVTRUTH: kept undeleted, user subsequently blocked as sockpuppet. 17:21, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  19. Category:Ambiguous five-letter acronyms: Moot request, kept deleted. 17:16, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_review#Temporary_undeletion

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Important notice: all userbox undeletions are being discussed on a subpage: Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates. Please post all new such requests there (though you may link them from this page if you like)


13 February 2006

The Odin Brotherhood

A debacle of a discussion, Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/The_Odin_Brotherhood, with a deletionist attempt to browbeat the article out of existence, quite a bit of confusion over whether the article was about the book or the apparently apocryphal "brotherhood" named in the title, substantial changes in the article during the AfD discussions, and a small wave of sockpuppet supporters. Even discounting the sockpuppets, it's hard to conclude that (roughly) 35-40% Keep/merge/redirect, 60-65% delete constituted a consensus to delete, and the closing decision in a discussion this contentious clearly should not have been made by the editor who posted the original AFD nomination. Monicasdude 05:09, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep deleted. Certainly the editor who nominated the article should not have closed the discussion; give him a slap on the wrist for that (and threaten an RFC if it keeps happening), but I can't see any other real conclusion coming from this. Discounting socks/anons/newbies there were very few votes to do anything but delete, and the proposed redirect was a a bit of a streth, it seemed. The article was substantially rewritten during the debate, making it about a book rather than a brotherhood, but the book has a sales rank of something like 1.5 million on amazon, so I don't think it would make it anyway. I would almost support a procedural relisting based on the changes made to the article, but I hate to replay puppetshows, especially when I can't see the end result being any different. -R. fiend 05:33, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete/relist I support undeletion as the "slap on the wrist" that closer/nominator deserves. Such conduct is fairly egregious in cases where any keep votes are cast. (I don't mind if a nominator closes a unanimous delete, but otherwise, don't do it.) Xoloz 17:30, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'd almost agree, but relisting the debate isn't going to punish the closer; it's going to punish anyone at AFD who has to get involved in a pointless, overly verbose puppetshow in order to work for the proper conclusion, as well as the admin who closes that one (who will not be the same as last time). Though it is a valid reason to propose a DRV, changing an article from one unencyclopedic mess to another midway through an AFD does nto guarantee a relist. -R. fiend 07:01, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Just for clarity, I'll emphasize that, by using your phrase "slap on the wrist", I was hoping the overturn would prevent the same mistake by this closer and others in future. Punishment is, of course, not the wiki-way. :)
  • Endorse closure. Reviewing the deletion discussion, I count 16 arguing for deletion with three arguing for deletion after the rewrite and three explicitly returning to the discussion to endorse their earlier opinions (four if you count the nominator/closer). I count 9 to keep as is but 4 are patently excludable as sock/meatpuppets. 1 is a judgement call - a very new user who is not yet familiar with our standards. I would have given him/her the benefit of doubt in this case. 2 people argued for redirect without merger - both before the rewrite. Given the subsequent changes to the article, I would have tallied them as "ambiguous" in this case. 1 other person argued for redirect but based on subsequent actions and comments, I would have interpreted his/her opinion as another keep. Four people either offered ambiguous opinions or abstained. To me, that works out to 16-6 - sufficient to reach the threshold of "rough consensus". The comments illuminated the discussion but did not provide convincing argument or counter-argument to convince me that we should override the vote-count in this case. Given the interpretation necessary in this case, the nominator probably shouldn't have closed this discussion but the result is clear enough that I don't see a reason to rerun the discussion. The nominator also should have been much more explicit in explaining his/her reasoning during the closing. Closing a debate with nothing more than {{at}} del ~~~~ is an injustice to the decision process. Rossami (talk) 00:05, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure - the consensus was to delete, and the closer made a judgement call which I think was right. That being said, he shouldn't have been the one to make that call, and should be poked in the head until he promises to never do it again. Proto||type 12:45, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete/relist - Clearly bad process to close a judgement-call AfD started by oneself. And I definitely wouldn't be so eager to hang on to pre-editing "delete" recommendations while discounting the "redirect" recommendations. -- Jonel | Speak 21:26, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted, WP:SNOW. User:Zoe|(talk) 23:02, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • 'Endorse closure, slap on wrist for Mikka, and slap on wrist for Monicasdude for failing to WP:AGF in the case of everybody who voted delete. The article as deleted absolutely sucked, as numerous people said, and nobody even tried to fix it. We do not need this article back, thanks all the same. There is nothing preventing someone else from coming along and writing a much better article on the same subject, in the mean time it's not like we need to keep the subject's seat warm or anything. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   23:26, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

COMMENT. Let me say--in previous postings--I thought you chaps were a lynch mob. I WAS WRONG! I am impressed by your devotion to "fair play" and "due process." --146.85.127.124 00:27, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Offtopic.com

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Offtopic.com

You guys are gonna love this one, the AfD (or VfD rather) was almost a year ago. Anyway, it's the 6th largest forum on the entire web, and the largest generaral discussion forum, above even Something Awful. It seems to me that during the VfD, the article was so pitifully small and unreferenced that nobody actually knew how big it was. Subsequently, the article was recreated several times, and promptly speedied for being a repost. I seem to recall, however, that the very last one, the one deleted on Nov. 15, was actually a pretty good article that included facts like it being extremely large, so I think it should be undeleted to that version. --Rory096 20:38, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • The Deletion Log shows that most of the deletions were not as "recreated content" but as patent nonsense and/or obvious vandalism. I did not attempt to review all 186 deleted edits but a random sampling off the first page does show that this page is a vandalism-magnet.
    When the VfD discussion was held (May/June 2005), this website's Alexa ranking was so low that it wasn't even on the chart. Later in the summer, it spiked up briefly, then dropped again. It is now fluctuating around 10,000. That would still be well below the recommended thresholds of the Alexa test so the claims of traffic alone fail to convince me. Does this site meet any of the other recommended criteria at WP:WEB?
    Without some more concrete claims to notability/visibility, I'm not yet willing to set aside the previous decision. Especially given the extra load that this would appear to place on the people on vandalism patrol. Endorse closure pending other information. Rossami (talk) 21:39, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • While true that many of those were for nonsense, the very last one, which actually did have content (if I recall correctly, I obviously can't see it now), was deleted as reposted. It probably does not meet WP:WEB, mostly because the "Rule #1" of the site is not to talk about the site, though note that SA doesn't meet any Alexa test either, at 2402. Offtopic is where the O RLY? owl itself originated, in addition to many other notable internet memes. Xoloz: it's also much larger than SA in terms of members, at 138,954, especially considering SA doesn't prune members for inactivity. OT has had over 25,000 of those users on it in the past month alone, and almost never has less than 1500 logged in at any one point, though it's usually much higher. As for vandalism, we could semi-protect it, though, being a frequent figure in #wikipedia-en-vandalism, I can assure you that there is no possible way it could be more vandalism than Ebaumsworld, which we handle fine. --Rory096 03:46, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure for now. The provided evidence says that Offtopic is the 6th largest board in total number of posts. I'm not sure whether that indicates noteworthiness... it may just be a spam-magnet, for instance. Given this, I concur with Rossami unless more evidence is provided. Xoloz 22:18, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure. And if someone wants to write a different, much better and more compelling article on the same subject, I see no reason why tey should not do so. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   23:20, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure but would encourage a real article on the topic. JYolkowski // talk 03:41, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

12 February 2006

Userbox:Anti UN, Userbox:Anti ACLU, Template:User no Rand and Template:User-AmE-0

Discussion at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates.

Lowbrow.com

Nobody seems to like this article. Every time I come back here, it's gone. Why is this? What makes the likes of Ebaum's World or other sites any more special? Lowbrow.com is a large website with a pretty massive community. Why someone would want to keep information about it from this encyclopedia is beyond me, and it is very frustrating. I am requesting that this article be undeleted. Thank you.

--Spank fusion 00:13, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lowbrow.com for one thing, where a consensus to delete the article was first reached. It seems subsequent recreations of the article have all been deleted because they were deemed sufficiently similar to the original deleted version, which is allowed under the criteria for speedy deletion. It does look quite similar every time. You might also see the WP:WEB guidelines for website article inclusion. At any rate I think rather than deletion review you should talk to the admin who protected the page to see about recreating it. --W.marsh 00:46, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Hi. I'm that admin, and I sent User:Spank fusion here, as the appropriate place to contest a deletion, rather than than just recreating the article repeatedly. If there's a way to recreate the article so that it meets our inclusion guidelines, this is the place where that should be determined, if I understand correctly. -GTBacchus(talk) 01:07, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure. Unanimous decision to delete, entirely uncontroversial. If you propose recreating it, explain briefly what real-world circumstances have changed and how this website now meets our inclusion criteria. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 03:30, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure per MarkSweep. The most relevant difference between Lowbrow and "other sites" is that other sites haven't failed an AfD -- the community's judgment determines what is kept, and what is discarded. Xoloz 17:23, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I understand that this article has been fairly voted to be deleted in the past, but I recreated the article from scratch. I don't know who made the past one or what it looked like, but a new, legitimate article should not be judged on the decision made toward an article that might actually have deserved a deletion. I feel that this topic is genuine and should be allowed to reside on Wikipedia. Spank fusion 22:54, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

List of interesting or unusual place names

(now at Wikipedia:List of interesting or unusual place names)

IMPORTANT NOTICE: A new article on this subject has been created, citing sources and meeting verification requirements. The link in the heading now redirects there. That article is NOT the subject of this debate, and has NOT been proposed for deletion. It has been created as a compromise to settle this dispute, and is a work in progress. The subject of the DRV (in the "Wikipedia:" link above) is in the wikiepdia namespace where it has been proposed to live more or less indefinitely as a figurative salvage yard for verified entries in the new article.

This article, which has over 2200 edits and has been around for three years, could be nominated for adminship if it weren't so controversial this week. It was deleted out of process, then during the resulting debates, recreated and moved to the Wikipedia: namespace. It certainly does not belong there; all similar lists (List of city listings by country, List of misleading place names, &c) are in the article namespace. (The only parallel I saw someone mention in the Wikipedia: namespace is Wikipedia:Unusual articles which is clearly a meta-page about Wikipedia and therefore belongs in that namespace.) The article was then placed here for review, and the result was not handled by the book.

The article should be 'undeleted' and restored to its original title -- and then perhaps put up once more for AfD. A second AfD nomination ran for two days, generating over 30 votes, predominantly to keep it; but was closed early for process-lawyering reasons -- that is, because the same discussion should be had here. +sj +

NB: There were good debates raised about how to determine whether a name is unusual or interesting; these are useful to have, and hopefully good revisions of the list will come from them. Undeletion and restoration of the original title should in no way to minimize those debates. +sj + 00:05, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep deleted in article space (keep in WP space). Here's why. The first AFD was a perfectly valid delete. The user who brought it to DRV the first time used erroneous numbers to justify it (which shouldn't matter, as AFD is not a vote). The article was moved to the WP namespace (as suggested by several users, both in the AFD and the dRV), and the DRV was closed (by me) endorsing this move. It was then recreated in the article space out of process. Furthermore the article itseld is falwed beyond belief. Allow me to elaborate.
This article is downright ridiculous. Despite all these assertions I keep hearing that it is "easily verifiable", no one has cited sources for these (with very; few exceptions, and only very recently). When asked what exactly it is that makes these "interesting" or "unusual" it seems the only answer we ever hear is "Listen! This place is called fucking, Austria!!!!!! Get it??? FUCKING!!!! Isn’t that a hoot???" Um, maybe, but it’s not a source, and the article has this aura of having been partially written by Beavis and Butthead (huh-huh huh-huh "Dix Hills", huh-huh-. They said "Dicks", huh-huh-huh). Can hardly believe they missed Uruguay ("U-R-Gay", get it?), moronic? Absolutely, but, unlike almost every other name in the article, I can actually find a source for that one. I know we have some pre-pubescent editors here, but do we need to advertise that to the world? And as long as we’re loading up the article with juvenile humor, where's Johnson, Tennessee (FYI "Johnson" means "penis" (titter))?
And the problems go on. I mean, do we really want to include street names? Of all the millions and millions of streets in the world I’m sure we can find thousands that will get your average six-year-old in hysterics (which seems to be among the inclusion criteria here). Do you really want me to find a "Pu Street" somewhere on the planet? Because I bet I can. He same goes for informal names of neighborhoods. Alphabet City? It even actually makes sense for a neighborhood defined by lettered streets, so what’s so interesting or unusual about that anyway? And then there are those that just confound me.
Lolita: would that be interesting if it weren’t the name of a Nabokov novel? If someone publishes a book called “Meriden” do we get to include Meriden, Connecticut? Vader: let me guess, if we imagine the word "Darth" in front of it… Mashpee: sounds a little strange to anyone who doesn’t live in a part of the country where every other town is some Indian word, to those of us who do, utterly unremarkable. Sandwich: you do realize that the food item was indirectly named after the place, right? Ware, Massachusetts? Because it’s a homophone of "Where?" Well, get that spelling and that question mark at the end and you might be on the right track, but that is just retarded (how about Wareham (as in “where’s the ham?”)). Lough Neagh: is there anything even slightly interesting or unusual about that? Anything with the name of an animal is unusual? Guess what? That used to name things after animals all the time! Oxford? Oxen used to ford there. I can’t think of anything ‘’less’’ unusual. And, to top it off, what people try to pass off as a source is that another flawed Wikipedia article insists that these words are, by definition, downright ‘’hilarious’’! That’s not a source.
And there’s the opposites that make the list: words that are too much common English words (Beer, Commerce, Drain, Eagle) make the list, and those that don’t sound like English words at all make it too (Ouagadougou, Schenectady). Well guess what, there’s tons of places in foreign countries that sound odd to English speakers, they may even sound (get ready)….foreign. Let’s take out my trusty atlas and look at Sumatra as a somewhat random example. I see places named: Pasirpangarayan, Pulaupunjung, Talanglambangantir Kutacane (WHY do they insist on cutting their canes there. That’s just CRRRAZY!), Baganslapiapi, and so on and that’s without even really trying. Do some of those sound atypical to those of us who live in places like Carson City? Sure. Are we going to include half the continent of Asia? I sure hope not.
At least some of the worst offenders have been removed (Amarillo? Bagdad, Arizona (but not Moscow Idaho?)), but that they were ever included is pretty sad. And I bet some which are included actually could be verified by a third party source (Truth or Consequences comes to mind) but no one has bothered to. People seem to think "Oh yeah, we could so verify the shit out of these if we wanted to"; is the same as actual verification. It is not. Some people have compared this to articles such as Films considered the worst ever, but we must keep in mind that that article, imperfect as it is, really went out of its way to get verifiable sources. This one fails utterly in that regard. Trying to pass this off as an encyclopedia article is an insult to every encyclopedia on the planet; mostly this one. -R. fiend 00:16, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Restore to / Retain in Article namespace R. fiend has made a valiant attempt to defend deletion above. I am going to attempt to put the case for retention/restoration; hopefully I will do this justice but if not I apologise ... it's past midnight now here in the UK.
There seem to be two main things that are causing problems:
First, that the article title contains the word "interesting" and that this makes the article subjective. I have to say that this is a fair point. However, I would ask - why does this one word invalidate the whole article? I've been a Wikipedia editor for about a year now, and I notice a recurring pattern in deletion discussions, which is that often there is just one thing about an article that an editor takes a dislike to, and from this comes a recommendation to delete, without a pause to think whether there is anything worth salvaging in the article. Clearly, from the amount of support that retention of this article is getting (and yes, I agree that polls are evil too, but ...) there is a good case that the article has at least something in it of (encyclopaedic) merit. Instead of just going for the "nuke it" option, we should all be trying hard to see each other's point of view and identify what in the article is worthy of inclusion, and what isn't, and tidy it up accordingly. I have proposed, in each of these debates, that we try to agree some criteria for inclusion, and assess the list against that. I appear to be being told that that is impossible, but without any arguments as to why that is the case. I agree that is is difficult but in the interest of community harmony, it has to be worth a go?
Second, the arguments that the article lacks sources and is POV. Among the people who are espousing these arguments are some very experienced editors, and so I can't just dismiss this view out of hand, but I really do think that people have got into some quite muddled thinking on this. I think that the cause of this is that the article is presented as a list. Because of that, proponents of deletion are insisting on a higher standard of verifiability than they would for any other article. Specifically, not only are sources for the existence of the place names being asked for, sources to justify inclusion of the names in the article are being asked for. We DO NOT do this for any other kind of content. If an article is written as a piece of prose, not in list form, then the inclusion of content that is obviously relevant to the article's subject, without editors having to find a source which proves that it is relevant, is widely accepted. Sometimes there may be items of content that are perhaps peripheral and these are then debated by editors, but by and large we don't have a problem here i.e. we don't have those debates over EVERY sentence in EVERY article. Just because this article is presented as a list, I don't see why we have to treat it differently. The Wikipedia policy on citing sources exists, as I understand it, to ensure that Wikipedia doesn't end up full of errors (accidental or deliberate), and not as a means of imposing a rigid and bureaucratic editorial process when one isn't needed.
So in summary, if we drop the word interesting from this article's title, agree some inclusion criteria, and then assess the article's content against these, we have the basis for a perfectly valid article (with no need for factcheck notes on every line) in the article namespace. Parallels exist — English words with uncommon properties for instance (note: this one is written as prose) — I think that attempting a solution along these lines has to be a better way forward than continuing with the divisive mess we're currently in? SP-KP 01:14, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Of course we need sources to justify inclusion of each and every single entry, because inclusion in a list of things which are allegedly "interesting" or "unusual" requires that someone else call them "interesting" or "unusual." Wikipedia editors cannot just insert things in the list that they find "interesting" or "unusual" - that is prima facie original research, something which is specifically prohibited by policy. Please see Films considered the worst ever. "The movies listed have achieved a notable level of infamy, through critical and popular consensus." That is an acceptable way of doing things - each entry is sourced with reasons why it is among the worst ever - ratings from movie critics, box-office figures, fan votes on IMDb, etc. This list has none of the above - it's just a list of any name someone ever laughed at. That's not encyclopedically acceptable. FCYTravis 01:23, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Let me see if I can illustrate the argument above with an example. This does require you to be able to see a parallel between an article which has its content presented as a list, and an article which has its content presented as prose. Not everyone's brain is wired up the same, so that might be difficult for you to do, in which case this is perhaps not going to help, but I hope it might help at least some people to see where I am coming from. Let's take the article Kansas. What if, instead of creating an article entitled Kansas, someone had created exactly the same article, but had placed an asterisk at the start of each sentence, and entitled it List of facts about Kansas. Then, imagine that over time, other editors had come along and added a mixture of facts, some of which were undisputedly about Kansas, and others which, although the editors adding them believed to be about Kansas, were viewed by other editors not to be about Kansas, such that the article was a bit of a ragbag of facts of varying relevance to the subject. Now try to imagine that someone spots this article and thinks "what a pile of poo" and nominates it for deletion. Try to imagine the deletion discussion for this article. Although there would be a lot of commonality between that discussion and this one, I would hope that somewhere along the line, someone would make the common sense point that an article on Kansas is actually quite a useful thing for Wikipedia to have in it, and that while the article up for deletion needed to be tidied up, rationalised, and written as prose, it could still form the basis for the Kansas article. That proposal would, I think you would agree, probably carry the day on first pass. I doubt very much whether people would be insisting that every fact that was to be retained in the article not only had to be supported by an external source, but that there must also be an external source stating that the fact was sufficiently important to be included in an encyclopaedia article about Kansas. We'd use our judgment based on some agreed principles to decide which facts did and which didn't merit inclusion. I don't think anyone would say that using that judgment constituted original research, or that the resulting Kansas article, because it went through such an editorial process, was so blighted with POV that it had to be deleted. To convince me that an article entitled Unusual place names has no place in Wikipedia, you will need to try to explain why it is different from an article on Kansas. If this boils down to a difference of opinion on what sort of content Wikipedia should and shouldn't contain, then fine, we'll just have to agree to differ; if there is something more than that which marks these two articles out as different, I'd really like to understand what it is, but nowhere in the deluges of words written on this subject have I been able to detect what that difference is. SP-KP 02:21, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • The primary difference between the theoretical Kansas article and this article is that "The captial of Kansas is Topeka" is a fact, no one seriously disputes it; whether "Dix Hills" is interesting or unusual is an opinion. Whether someone has such an opinion is basically a fact, but not an easy one to establish. If our criteria is that someone, somewhere finds this place name to be interesting or unusual, then there is not a single place name that we could exclude. Furthermore, there is a fundamental difference between a list and an article, and wikipedia, being an encyclopedia, should concentrate more on articles. Lists too often (and this is certianly no exception) encourage readers too add anything that pops into their mind, especially when they're as subjective as this. A list of facts about Kansas article would also be a spectacularly bad idea. -R. fiend 03:02, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • This is a really helpful reply, as it is now obvious to me at which point our thought processes diverge. The divergence seems to come at the point where you are translating the logical entities involved in the hypothetical Kansas situation across to the Unusual names situation. To understand it, we need to talk ontology. I would categorise the statement "The capital of Kansas is Topeka" as a "piece of information having encyclopaedic merit" (these are pieces of information which we believe are valid to include in Wikipedia, facts which we think that readers ought to be able to learn from reading a Wikipedia article). This is a fundamental unit of categorisation relevant to any discussion of this nature; it sits in the space between "word" and "article". To ensure we are using our Kansas analogy correctly, we need to take care when we identify the corresponding thing in relation to the Unusual names article, and pick the correct thing. If I have understood you correctly, you have tranposed "The capital of Kansas is Topeka" to "Fucking, Austria is an unusual name". I believe this is incorrect - what logic theorists call a "category mistake" - and that the corresponding thing is actually a statement something like "There is a town called Fucking in Austria, which is spelt the same way as an English word with a sexual meaning". You would agree, I assume, that that is a fact which we should reasonably expect readers of Wikipedia to be able to find out? If you think about things in this way, then there is nothing wrong, or at least nothing against policy, about an article containing a set of such facts. To include these facts in the article is not POV-pushing, or original research, and as long as this fact itself is sourced it's not a breach of the verifiability policy — it's just the editorial process. If you're following the logic this far, then all we're left with to disagree on are the criteria for inclusion of entries (i.e. this is merely an argument about different methods of arranging facts into articles). I've said all along that arriving at an agreed set of criteria will be difficult, but it surely is not beyond our abilities to arrive at some kind of consensus? SP-KP 17:52, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
            • Okay, so we can agree that "There is a town called Fucking in Austria, which is spelt the same way as an English word with a sexual meaning". Is that a fact? Yes. Should that be found in an encycloepdia? Sure, and as such we have an article on Fucking, Austria which makes that clear. However, an article containing a list of such facts would have other comparable facts, like "Oxford is a place name that dervies from Oxen and ford." Or "Dallas, Texas is a city in Texas named for the Vice President under James Polk". You can find facts such as this all over the place, does that make them interesting? Almost every place name has a story behind it; being interesting or unusual is much more difficult to qualify than a statement of the captial of Kansas. And using "Fucking Austria" for further examples probably isn't the best way to go. It is one of the least controversial entries, and I beieve it now has a source. I mentioned that one originally because people seemed to be using it to justify all the others, which I considered a flawed approach. I really think we're getting somewhere with the new article, and that should be the focus of our efforts. -R. fiend 17:10, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Please, just {{sofixit}}. Until then, it should stay out of mainspace. I've deleted and protected the cross-namespace redirect and noted that at WP:ANI, while we're talking about it. - brenneman{T}{L} 01:32, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Whatever the decision about the article itself, this was uncalled for. All existing links from external sites, not to mention those on-wiki, take people to the old title; there should be an obvious way for them to get from there to where the long list is at present. Side discussion continued at AN/I. +sj + 05:16, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    I have now redirected the original title to Astrokey's new article. Problem solved. -R. fiend 06:06, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep in Wikispace and do not undelete in article space per FCYTravis. And perhaps some day, we might achieve a DRV with no daily "interesting place names" rehashing. Well, I can always dream... --W.marsh 03:06, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • comment. agree with sp-kp. I was being bold and followed sp-kp's redlink and started an article with only those names that are referenced (currently only 5 at the moment) at Unusual place names -- Astrokey44|talk 03:39, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's looking about a thousand times better than the previous article (although the introduction is pretty stiff). Perhaps those carrying the banner of the "List of" article could instead help Astrokey on this much more worthwhiel endeavor. -R. fiend 04:05, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      I think what Astrokey is doing is great. It should be done to the original article in place, however; even unto carving out huge sections of the article. But deleting and/or moving an article to a new namespace is just not the appropriate way to express an editorial opinion (like "this article needs a total rewrite!"). It is this misconstruction of process that we are voting on / discussing here. I am not carrying the banner of a particular version of the article; but it should be worked on where it has always been - or perhaps with a clarifying rename - and not in two places at once, as you seem to be suggesting. The extension to that would be, that any time you found an article you thought was POV, you could move it to a new namespace, delete, recreate, and protect the original title, and tell the authors to fix it at the new title and petition for it to be reinstated... +sj + 05:16, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • Well, no, moving an article to the WP namespace is not standard practice, and isn't intended to be. That was a compromise worked out after the article was already deleted from the mainspace. I consider it a decent compromise, as those editors who found it "interesting" can still get their chuckles, and it can be worked on without being the highly problematic article it was. The only real alternative I could see would be to simply remove all unsourced entries (which, at the time, was all of them, now it's all but maybe half a dozen or so). No one is saying you anyone can willy-nilly move any article they see as POV to the WP space, and that is not what happened here. -R. fiend 05:22, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, it was moved to WP namespace in the middle of the AfD debate and I moved it back. So that is exactly what happened here. SchmuckyTheCat 18:05, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, so it was moved during the AFD debate, moved back before the debate ended, deleted, and recreated in the WP space. The point is, no one is saying any article that someone thinks is POV can unilaterally be moved to the WP space, which seemed to be what Sj was worried about. He can rest easy now. -R. fiend 19:36, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong undelete as per Grue. Could User:R. fiend please refrain from exercising his admin powers on this article again - the failure of process seems in part to be attributable to this amendment of the AfD discussion as well as other actions taken by R. fiend. His storong views mean that he is seemingly unable to follow due process. This AfD seemed to have been properly set up by userr:docu in line with the process outlined on this page at Wikipedia:Deletion review#Decisions to be reviewed, which read at the time: "If there is neither a majority to endorse the decision nor a three-quarters supermajority to overturn and apply some other result, the article is relisted on the relevant deletion process.". If the process is wringly described, it eeds to be amended. If not wringly described, why are views being sought again, why don't the previous recently expressed views on exactly the same topic count?--A Y Arktos 23:03, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete per the consensus of opinion in the AfD to keep and the process problems noted above. Issues with respect to whether a particular entry should be added is part of the editing process for the article itself, not itself a justification for deletion of the article. Jtmichcock 14:11, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

  • Some people are particularly drawn to the curse words and homophones that make it onto the list. I appreciate that these are offensive to some; but that is not the source of 'unusualness' for the majority of list entries. Useful sections of the page could be : "one- and two-letter place names", "numeric placenames", &c. We should be focusing on improving the criteria for inclusion on the page, not beating around the bush re: verifiability. +sj +
    • It's not the fact that they're offensive that grinds my gears. It's the fact that they are all sophomoric, not interesting or unusual. Is "Beaver, Pennsylvania" really "interesting or unusual?" Not really. It has sophomoric sexual connotations, but that's neither interesting nor unusual. It's just stupid. So a list that has no criteria nor sourcing will inevitably become simply a list of every place name a random teenager ever laughed at. Which will become a very long list indeed. FCYTravis 07:40, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse deletion from articlespace, keep in projectspace as a resource for long enough to wring any useful content out of it, then delete. It's mostly junk, but there's probably some salvageable bits in here. -- nae'blis (talk) 23:53, 13 February 2006 (UT
  • I've actually not been paying attention to this article for some time. My attention was called to this debate by a message someone wrote me, which I received today after not logging into Wikipedia for over a month (I've generally been using it without logging in, lately, since I haven't been editing). That having been said, this is a good debate and some good points have been made. I agree that "interesting" and "unusual" are both subjective terms. The article had footnotes you could attach to the place name to indicate some reasons why people might find it "interesting" and/or "unusual," which I have tried to use. As to verifiability, for U.S. Place Names I have generally been using my trusty Rand McNally Road Atlas. I understand there is a movement on Wikipedia for people to cite their sources -- I think that is a good idea. With that taken into account, this article's encyclopedic qualities are questionable, however, the goal here is to have a comprehensive record of knowledge of all types. I credit this article with getting me interested in Wikipedia in the first place -- "Oh hey, they didn't put this town here, I can add it!" With respect to Native American town names -- I live in Massachusetts and I grew up on Long Island, so I am used to it, however, those from other areas of the country might not be. It is very POV-ish. I guess I agree with what was done to resolve the debate. Tckma 18:47, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Quasi-gummi

This article appears to have been deleted on 16 December 2005 by User:Snowspinner without due process of any sort. Its most recent version before deletion has references and appears to describe a valid type of confection. -Tim Rhymeless (Er...let's shimmy) 05:44, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Undelete and send to AFD. I have a feeling it's a neologism and should probably be deleted, but let's send it through the process. -R. fiend 06:55, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse deletion per WP:SNOW since on checking the supposed "references" neither actually supported the term and I can't find any English-language Googles which are not mirrors. From a process point of view this was wrong, but since actually the project is all about content I can't see a lot of point wasting any more time on this. Normally I would userfy and/or invite the creator to repairing these problems, but the creator is missing in action. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   10:44, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete and relist at AfD so a proper discussion can take place. ComputerJoe 13:45, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted Yes, it has been deleted out of process - 'bad Snowspinner, bad admin - slap!'. But it is obviously unreferenced crap, so there is nothing to be gained by undeleting it. If this is about repremanding the admin, then puting crap back into the encyclopedia, because a form wasn't filled in, is not the way to go about it--Doc ask? 18:07, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete and AFD - Hmm, well, I'll be an inclusionist here, seems like a term which could have some use in describing some sorts of candy. Worthy of a shot, at least. FCYTravis 19:00, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

11 February 2006

Heathian anarchism

This article's final AfD tally was 3 deletes, 2 merges closely edging on delete, and 1 keep, from the author of the page. The final decision made was to "keep", which I don't understand. Since the best merge suggestion offered is to an article that does not exist, and what is presently in this article would be insufficient for creating a new article, we're stuck in the meantime with what is a completely OR page. My suggestion would be either to delete it or move it to the creator's userspace. In the meantime we're legitimizing a topic that doesn't even exist. Sarge Baldy 19:45, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Relist - true, the only person asking for it to be kept as-is was the creator, and most others wanted it gone or gone, but there were not many contributors overall. I would have relisted for further debate rather than closing. - Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   20:36, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • This approach to relisting is becoming a little concerning to me. Having "no consensus" as an outcome (call it keep if you prefer) is absolutely fine. People seem to be relisting enthusiastically just because there was no Absolute Outcome in the hopes of generating one. If that is what an editor wants, then they should carry out the relisting as an editorial matter, and not in the manner used on DRV which implies a rejection of the earlier debate's closure. -Splashtalk 20:52, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Hmmm. I agree up to a point, but I don't think a couple of comments is sufficient to determine consensus, and I don't see why it should be a problem relisting where there are very few comments. Relisting because it's 20k/20m/20d is clearly nonsensical, but I don't recall that happening. I've seen several which have been kept after relisting when closing as delete would have been valid (a couple of deletes and nothing else). But I am becoming somewhat disillusioned with the whole process - nominate a web forum and every member will be along to vote keep, nominate a school at your peril, however bad the article and no matter that it is a commercial enterprise not a school, and so on. Ah well. I'm sure that once the Gastrich-induced cynicism has worn off I'll return to my usual sunny self, and maybe it'll improve with the Pareto effect of {PROD}. There is a slightly more pressing problem with this article: with zero Googles and no cited sources it appears to be unverifiable. Where's that list of templates? - Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   21:02, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • Getting 6 participants is more than substantially many debates (see WP:AFD100 for statistics on this). AfD is (still) overloaded, and sending minor articles back there just because we hope for 7 participants rather than 6 seems a little, well, pointless. -Splashtalk 21:05, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse close, clearly. This doesn't even shake a finger at a consensus to delete. There is no need to relist since there is clearly discussion to be had elsewhere about what, precisely, should be done. Having 6 people in an AfD is enough, and there is no quorum for AfD and there never has been. The only reason to relist would be a lack of participation or a supposition that relisting would produce a different result because of problems with the first listing. Noone cites any problems with this listing, apart from its outcome, and so I see neither a case to relist nor overturn. -Splashtalk 20:49, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Maybe if you're just looking at the numbers, and not reading what people have to say. There does appear to be a 5-1 consensus that this article should no longer exist. That it's divided by people who think it needs to be merged and to be deleted seems irrelevant. Sarge Baldy 21:03, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Irrelevant to what? To the question of deletion or not, no. To the question of exactly what state it should remain is as a result of the AfD? Largely, yes. People can decide whether to keep, merge or redirect for themselves in the case of an unclear AfD, and it is not the business of DRV to direct them on that. -Splashtalk 21:05, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not saying it needs to be deleted. I'm saying it shouldn't continue to exist where it does now. "Heathian anarchism" is a term coined by the creator of the article. And right now we're pretending it exists. Sarge Baldy 21:12, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • What's there to discuss? This article is about something that doesn't exist. He might as well have written at the top of the page that the term was coined by Hogeye of Wikipedia. If you think that's a stretch, he actually DID put his name as a source in the article on anarchist economics. Sarge Baldy 21:35, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • In that case, you might wait a short while in case something turns up and then make a fresh AfD nomination with a much more compelling nomination than last time. "Not notable", whilst shorthand for a number of things is much less likely to win favour than "doesn't exist", "unverifiable", "original research" etc. Also, you did not at any point return to that AfD during the debate — it's necessary to do so when things aren't going as you intended, in much the way that you have intervened here. However, DRV is unlikely to make a purely content based decision and is equally unlikely, if not more so, to overturn that AfD debate into a deletion. -Splashtalk 22:56, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well, it's not completely unreferenced, as it names the book from which this guy's philosophy is outlined: Citadel, Market and Altar. The problem I just discovered is that that book gets 101 unique googles (pretty small for a book that's allegedly the foundation of a notable philosophy) and doesn't seem to appear at Amazon. Is this guy just another self-published crank? I think we should move it (as proposed in the AFD), re-examine, and perhaps re-AFD, based on any new facts that come to life (such as "this guy is a self-published crank", if it turns out to be true). We shoudl also keep in mind that the anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, etc pages have been the scene of ongoing edit wars for eons, and POV, forking, and the like fly about all over the place. anythign connected to these topics deserves special scrutiny. -R. fiend 21:35, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • The content dispute, and under what name the article should end up residing, should be settled on the talk page, not AfD or here on DRV. There was clearly no consensus to delete... I said keep because of a few reasons, but ultimately does it make a difference here if I said "keep" or "no consensus"? --W.marsh 21:54, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Depends who you ask. Some folks don't like to see "result keep" when the result was no consensus and more people want rid of it than want it kept. Does it matter? Not to me, I guess. But I move this DRV be closed since R. Fiend has it absolutely right - this should be moved, cleaned up a bit and then re-assessed, which is in broadly line with what most people on the AfD seemed on the whole to want. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   10:48, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • You know it's my opinion that all AFDs should be kept open until there can be some sort of declared resolution, either a rough consensus to delete (ie 65-70%) or a simple majority to keep. Until that time, I think we can pretty well state the matter is unresolved, and shouldn't be closed. I'm sure people will see this as some sort of deletionist plot, but I think it makes perfect sense. As long as between 50% and 65% want an article deleted, its a bit silly to call the matter settled. We still have it weighted towards keeping, as it only require a simple majority, and we can avoid arbitrary and highly controversial closings much of the time. There is no reason we can't keep those AFDs that meet this criteria open almost indefinitely, after all, the article is still there while the debate goes on, so there's a default to keep anyway. And any time more than half the participants think an article should be deleted, it may not be a consensus, but it is an indication that the article has problems which will not automatically go away after 5 days and a "no consensus, default keep" result is given. Of course, this would largely mean AFD is a vote, but it nearly always comes down to the numbers anyway. -R. fiend 21:46, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Template:User Anti-UN and Template:User Anti-ACLU

Debate moved to Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates

10 February 2006

Montfort Realschule Zell

This article's AfD nomination had 3 delete comments and just one keep (User:Jcuk's only comment was "of course"). If we were going straight vote style that gives 75% delete. After weighting arguments and comments I'd say the deletes have it. I respect MarkGallagher's decision to keep (the article did change a bit mid-vote) and normally I'd just let it go, but I just don't like this article (admitably I am deletionist scum). BrokenSegue 21:35, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Which does not address the issue that articles which suck, suck. Whatever the subject. It's not like we have to keep their seats warm until a better one comes along, after all. Me, I'd merge the stubs and wait for more information, but that's against some people's religion. Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   23:23, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Template:User against Iraq War Template:User USA Police State and Template:User admins ignoring policy

Debate moved to Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates

Hootenanny (store)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hootenanny (store). 6 delete, 5 merge and or keep votes. Closing admin seems to think that votes he disagrees with can be discounted because "AFD is a debate, not a vote". He also overlooked the argument that it has a notable corporate parent, so he can't have examined the debate very closely. Kappa 13:31, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There is nothing to stop someone creating a redirect right now. Endorse close, no reason given for keeping this.--Doc ask? 14:08, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I just did. Endorse close, we want to get to a million articles, but not like this. Physchim62 (talk) 14:15, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, we don't all want to get to a million articles. -R. fiend 07:30, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse status quo, which is currently merge and redirect by the looks of it, since I don't actually care that much what went on given that the result is a decent-sized article. - Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   14:31, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse status quo. -- Jonel | Speak 21:27, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Endorse closing Closing editor's action fine. A borderline-nn. Somebody has to do the closing on these borderline-nn. We're not drowning kittens! --FloNight 15:40, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Not as such, no. Looking at the deleted history, there is very little there. There might be a small amount of trivia missing from the main article, but arguably it is not Wikipedia's place to list the brands stocked by a local store, especially since that might change at any time. Do we list all the brands sold out of Macy's? If anyone actually does care that much I will get the additional text out of the deleted history for them, but in my view it's too crufty to be worth the effort. - Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C]   15:51, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Like Kappa, I found the AfD to be less than well closed. The case for merging was made and supported, but in the tiresome inclusionist-deletionist catfight, the keepers and deleters failed to raise any serious grounds against the suggestion. Closing admins have a responsibility to find the outcome that best fits the discussion, and there's a fine line between doing this and finding an interpretation of the AfD that best fits one's own opinion. Johnleemk may understand that, but this exceptional closing does not provide evidence of it. --- Charles Stewart(talk) 15:58, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Undelete per Kappa. The nomination was little more than a display of aggressive ignorance; the nominator used the same justification to nominate a well-known and well-established specialty retailer (SFFH bookstore) for deletion, claiming there were "two dozen" like it in his neighborhood. The discussion there [[3]] shows pretty clearly that the nominator didn't know what a specialty retailer was, and should have led the closing admin to discount his "vote" (and the "votes" that simply cited the nominator). Note also that the nominator, in that discussion, used the fact that he'd never heard of many of the notable authors who were associated with the retailer as support for his claim. Wikipedia should be guided by the knowledge of its editors, not the ignorance of its editors. I don't know whether this particular specialty retailer is Wikipedia-notable, but the parent business certainly is, and has something of a track record for creating distinctive/notable enterprises. Monicasdude 16:05, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete the history The closure was not perfectly in-process, but a redirect/merge is a satisfactory result as far as content-merit is concerned. Let the history be complete, however, as this does no harm, and satisfies those with a process grievance. Xoloz 16:32, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse closure per FloNight. --Kbdank71 19:02, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep redirected. No real need to undelete history, as there's hardly anything to undelete, though there's no harm in undeleting it either. The original closer maybe should have done the redirect himself, but there was certainly no call for a flat out keep. I don't think anyone takes Kurt Weber's comments in AFDs seriously (at least I hope they don't), and no one else gave a single reason for keeping it. -R. fiend 19:16, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete history - since it is harmless. Despite my reservations about the close, I am happy with the status quo. --- Charles Stewart(talk) 19:21, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete or just Recreate at will and back up off site after recurrent redeletions: You want the breakdown of policy, you've got it. This page is full of examples, this article being one of them. Karmafist 21:01, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete per Karmafist. --Aaron 22:43, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete. If you're just going to ignore the debate on AfD, including disregarding the tally, you might just as well change the name of AfD to Wikipedia:Does any admin feel like deleting this?. Having said that, that now seems to be our deletion policy. Grace Note 02:29, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Leave things alone - Tony's undeleted the history, it's back there, it's a suitable redirect; why waste time and clog AfD further? Proto||type 16:26, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]


4 February 2006

Template:Commonsgallery

Despite its TfD discussion attracting 3 votes for delete and 4 keeps, plus a keep from an anon who has a few non-project contributions, User:MarkSweep closed the discussion as a delete on the grounds that "The result of the debate was better arguments for deletion than for keeping it." I dispute this decision on two grounds:

  1. That is not the admin's call; the deletion discussions may not be votes, but closing admins are, as far as I've gathered from my experience on AfD, not court judges, there to decide which side 'won'; they are there to decide what the community thinks. It renders the whole 'discussion' thing slightly pointless otherwise.
  2. Even if I'm wrong on the above point, MarkSweep's decision that there were better arguments for deletion is still extremely shaky IMO. None of the delete voters ever tried to argue the counterpoints the keep voters made against their arguments. These arguments included the fact that the template supposedly advertised for Olympus (it had a picture of a camera, far too small to make out the model). --Malthusian (talk) 19:38, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • As the closing admin, let me explain my reasoning in more detail. First, we'll have to discount one keep "vote" from an anon. Second, Nickj is using his "vote" as a vehicle for something unrelated, namely improving or changing Template:Commons. Nickj wrote: "That's why my vote is "keep", and it will continue to be "keep" until such time as Template:commons is improved." That's not a reason to keep Template:Commonsgallery. You don't go about changing Template:Commons by forking it and then voting to keep when the fork is nominated for deletion. Third, "Keep, useful template" by Ryan Delaney is fine, but it's not a relevant argument: Template:Commonsgallery was nominated here because it was a fork of an already existing maintenance template: and precisely because it is a fork of a useful template, it is of course useful, but that's not what this debate was seeking to establish. Fourth, there were three delete votes (by Netoholic, Petaholmes, and Phil Boswell) arguing that template forks are bad. The two serious votes in favor of keeping never properly addressed why the forked templates is needed. I completely ignored the bit about the Olympus ad as tangential to the discussion. Fifth, even if we regard the outcome of this debate as "no consensus", it makes no sense to default to keep in the Template namespace: templates, unlike articles, are tools which facilitate and enable; they should only be kept when they are truly needed. As I've said in my comments when I closed this discussion, I was much more swayed by the arguments for deletion, and in the end this is a discussion, not a vote. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 19:59, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted - on the principle that forks are bad. FCYTravis 20:07, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Mark seems to be under the impression that the people behind the template have not bothered to explain what it is for, which is false: it has been extensively explained at Template_talk:Commons and the TfD. Briefly (I don't know why I'm bothering as I thought DRV was about process and not content, but FCYTravis has indicated otherwise): some of us believe the links to Commons galleries would look better if accompanied by a picture explaining what it was going to (e.g. a camera for a gallery of pictures). No-one's yet tried to claim otherwise, the only argument for deletion that's been put forward has been 'standardisation and maintenance'.
  • I don't see how this was a 'fork' any more than {{test-n}} is a fork of {{test}}. Both do the same thing, but {{test-n}} does it slightly better in a certain context. Same with this. I admit that the name of the template does scream 'fork', being a redundancy; that was a mistake on my part. I was expecting to move the template to {{commonsimage}} as soon as the TfD was closed. --Malthusian (talk) 20:27, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Moreover, I'm not going to reply to MarkSweep's responses to why he discounted most of the votes on one side one by one (I've already explained why the 'serious voters' had, in fact, "properly addressed why the forked templates is needed"). But I will say that I think that if the arguments of a certain 'side' in a discussion are weak, it should be explained why they are weak at the time, rather than the closing admin waiting for the discussion period to end, discounting them, then waiting for someone to bring the TfD to DRV to explain why they were weak enough for the editors' opinions to be ignored. If nothing else it would save time. --Malthusian (talk) 20:43, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • TfD is a debate about the merits of templates. Rather than talking about "sides" one should talk about the outcomes of that debate and the arguments advanced in favor of them. If I see a weak argument or an argument that does not even address the central question of the debate, I call it as I see it. As for commenting on the merits of the various arugments before closing the debate: what do you want me to do? I didn't even know of this particular debate until I started to do my share in trying to clear out the TfD backlog. And if I had been aware of it and commented on it earlier, I wouldn't be in a position to close it. And by the way, I wasn't waiting for someone to bring this here. If you're only interested in saving time, then let it go and work on changing Template:Commons through the customary channels. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 21:11, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • *sigh* I'm going to have to surrender on any further discussion - I tried to reply to Mark's last post but couldn't manage to string three separate counterpoints together in a way that made any sense. I'm just going to say that I used the word 'side' in the sense of 'those who voted one particular way', not 'side' in the sense of 'cabal'. I think it would be worthwhile to have more illustrative {{commons}} templates, but if it gets shot down, well, c'est la vie. If I die in my sleep tonight and St Peter asks me 'And how did you spend your life?' I don't want to have to tell him that my last night was spent fighting a rearguard action over diversifying a Wikipedia template. --Malthusian (talk) 23:44, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted — MarkSweep is surely right in both principle and detail. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 23:39, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have forked templates many times, as it is sometimes the only way to switch over from one design to another. I was not aware the cabal disapproved of it. --SPUI (talk - don't use sorted stub templates!) 02:17, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted per Mel Etitis. --Kbdank71 05:35, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete. The fact that {{commons}} is seemingly perma-protected pushed me over the edge. If one cannot edit the template without going through various bureaucracy (requesting unprotection and hoping that succeeds, or getting consensus on the talk page - so much for being bold!), then forking may be the best option. --SPUI (talk - don't use sorted stub templates!) 06:32, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Overturn. MarkSweep's repeated violations of deletion process are becoming more and more disruptive. Crotalus horridus (TALK • CONTRIBS) 19:36, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Undelete. - How can you can get an result of 5 to keep, and 3 to delete, and decide that "delete" is the right outcome? It makes a complete and total mockery of the concept of consensus. Secondly, for Mark Sweep's "reasoning" that he can disregard my vote, and the votes of others: I wasn't aware that we had ceded complete dictatorial powers to Mark Sweep, so if someone could point to the relevant official wiki guideline outlining his new overlord status, that would be super, thanks. Third, I note that none of the votes to delete were disregarded, so it's good to see that the fine example of Florida lives on! Fourth, the reasons for changing this were outlined extensively on the Commons talk page, and have still not been addressed. Fifth, the commons template is still protected - so, given that anything related get deleted, and the originally seems to be permanently protected, how, exactly, is anything about these templates ever supposed to be improved? Frankly, this really is an appalling decision. If you're going to ignore what the community says, then why even have a deletion process? I mean, really, why bother? Just unilaterally delete whatever you like, irrespective of consensus - it'll give the same result, but without wasting everyone's time by giving the illusion of wanting community input and general agreement. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 23:04, 5 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse deletion per Mark's justification here. However these exceptional closes should be explained when closing. Pace the squeals of outrage, please note that: (i) TfD does not have a clear numerical criteria for assessing when there is a concensus and (ii) the kind of carefully justified discounting Mark has undertaken here would, if done when closing the *fD dsicussion, be a good thing for the health of *fDs: if you object to these vote discounts, what discounts would you agree with? --- Charles Stewart(talk) 01:47, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Seconded with a pat on the back and a kiss on the cheek. A great many of the discussions that take place on DRV could be avoided if closers took more care with explaining their thinking when they close. Rossami, in particular, provides clear evidence that he has thought about the arguments presented, and I've seen closes of his run to two paragraphs. This is a good thing, and should be more widespread. - brenneman(t)(c) 02:48, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks very much for the feedback. You have a good point, and I've added my above comments to the TfD page. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 04:53, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Relist on TfD. Whilst Mark's arguments to delete are convincing, and convinced me that it should be deleted, there seems to be enough dissension to warrant a re-examination of the decision. 5 votes to keep against 3 to delete is not a decent consensus to keep, parituclarly given that the last two votes to keep were a) from an IP and b) two words, but I would have thought that this would be enough for the Template to remain pending further discussion. Deleting it was against the principle of consensus on deletion. If Mark makes the same excellently clear and cogent arguments to delete then I'm sure people will make the appropriate decision. And I think Nickj's reason for keeping is entirely valid - if he believes the template si necessary until the commons template itself is fixed, then that is a valid reason for him to believe the commonsgallery one should be kept. Proto||type 13:02, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reverse and Keep as per the consensus what was the point of the votes if the deciding admin was going to maket he call anyway? Some nerve.Gator (talk) 13:17, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Hey look, I lied, one more comment. MarkSweep's reasons for discounting most of the delete votes may make sense on the outside, but to me there seems to be equally good reasons for discounting the delete votes. One said "performs the same function as {{commons}}" (none of the counter-arguments to that here, on the TfD and on Template_talk:Commons have ever been addressed), another said (paraphrasing for brevity) 'template forks are evil, and advertises for Olympus'. Of that last post, the first argument is not an argument, the second rather nonsensical (maybe it was in jest, but Mark talks about "serious votes"). Why not discount those arguments too?
  • Now at this point I think we can agree that it becomes ridiculous, having unilaterally discarded almost the entire debate, which is why I disagree with vote discounting on principle in all but the most obvious cases (sockpuppetry/trolling), for two reasons: 1) If an argument is weak, someone should say so at the time so its proponent can respond to the criticism without having to do it at WP:DRV, and 2) If the overall case for one 'side' (ooer, used that word again) is weak, then people will read it, be unconvinced, vote delete and the article will be deleted by an actual consensus (not just a consensus of "serious voters"). If the reason for the *fD not getting enough delete 'votes' was because it didn't get enough attention, then relist it. --Malthusian (talk) 13:18, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Endorse. Closing admin properly discounted "votes" which did not comply with policy directions; TFD page expressly says Please explain how, in your opinion, the template does not meet the criteria [for deletion] above. Comments such as "I like it," or "I find it useful," while potentially true, generally do not fulfill this requirement. Voting standards were clear, and closing admin quite properly followed them rather than disregarding them. Monicasdude 21:55, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yes, but my vote/comment/preference was discounted because of my mistake in pointing something out, not because of my reasons. My reasons are that the newer template is (in my opinion) clearer, easier to understand (both in language and visually), and more exact than the commons template. My conclusion therefore was keep. My mistake was apparently in saying that there would be no reason for commonsgallery if commons could be improved (but unfortunately, that seems to be impossible), and that in that situation I would most likely change my vote. Furthermore, it should be noted that this template doesn't even seem to pass the tests of whether it should be proposed for deletion: Is it helpful? Yes. Is it redundant? No, I don't think it is (see reasons above). Is it used? Yes. Is it NPOV? Yes. Was it a candidate for speed deletion? No. Therefore, it doesn't even seem to fulfil the basic criteria for being listed on TfD, let alone the criteria to actually be deleted. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 23:07, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep deleted, I do not see the difficulty to simply construct an independent userbox in one's own userspace. Less controversial, and quite sensical. The same can be said for many other userbox tempaltes. -ZeroTalk 09:36, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Are articles in the main space allowed to use templates from a user's namespace? I thought I read somewhere that this was a no-no, but I could be wrong. If it's allowed, then that's exactly what I will do, and I thank for suggesting this. However, if it's not allowed, then I would please ask that you reconsider your position because it means the problem cannot be solved by the method you propose. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 23:36, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Recently concluded

  1. User:SPUI - consensus to undelete. restored to last non-controversial version (user can edit as desired when he's back). 03:54, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Wikipedia:WikiProject Pedophilia - restored, still at MfD. 02:08, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  3. Brian Peppers - endorsed and earth salted with {{deletedpage}}. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  4. Criticism of the Bible - endorsed as "no consensus", now a redirect. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  5. Inconsistencies in the Bible endorsed as "no consensus", now a redirect. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  6. Ted's_Kiddush reopened, now at afd again. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  7. Anti-vaccinationists endorsed "no consensus" closure, but closing admin subjected to public ridicule. 01:49, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  8. Best blond joke ever and/or Best blonde joke ever kept deleted and now exist as redirects. 23:31, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  9. Template:User pedo: Kept deleted with {{deletedpage}}. 23:18, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  10. Sin (musician): Kept deleted with {{deletedpage}}. 23:18, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  11. Marianne Curan: Kept deleted, better re-written from scratch. 23:09, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  12. Christopher Howard: Kept deleted. 23:02, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  13. Armand Traoré: Kept deleted. 23:00, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  14. The Foxymorons: Withdrawn, new stub to be written. 22:56, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
  15. Template:User Antiracist hitler: Speedy deletion endorsed. 17:40, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
  16. Template:GermanGov: Kept deleted. 17:33, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
  17. List of state-named Avenues in Washington, D.C.: Original keep closure endorsed. 17:29, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
  18. User:KJVTRUTH: kept undeleted, user subsequently blocked as sockpuppet. 17:21, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  19. Category:Ambiguous five-letter acronyms: Moot request, kept deleted. 17:16, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
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