Wikipedia talk:Preliminary Deletion/Vote2

If no option manages to grab more than 70% of the vote, the votes for choices two until four shall be added to the tally for the first choice. This is sneaky and objectionable. Eclecticology 20:11, 2004 Dec 9 (UTC)

How so? I'm not very sure, as nobody brought this up the first time (when we had exactly the same kind of clause), and you haven't elaborated on it yourself. Isn't acceptance of the basic proposal itself implicit if a voter selects one of those options? Johnleemk | Talk 12:07, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

No. The unclear voting practice used to offer these options shows the amateurishness of Wikipedia policy voting conventions. The preferred way to do this in assemblies is as follows:

Open the floor on the main issue (i.e. should we have preliminary deletion)
Invite, and vote upon, amendments to the main issue (i.e. should we only allow keep votes, etc.)
Apply passed amendments to the issue
Then, vote on the issue as amended

Why? Because people may decide that they ONLY want the issue to pass if and only if certain amendments are made. The passing of those amendments may make or break their support of the issue.

This is why now you have people adding their own options, such as "Yes, but only if you do X and/or Y."

As a result, in order to determine consensus, the proposer has decided to make assumptions as to the wishes of those who support amended versions of the question. Those assumptions are invalid and unfounded -- they are made with the belief that those who want amended versions of the policy enacted will be OK with the policy if those amendments aren't accepted. As a result, votes may actually be tallied incorrectly.

That's a big part of "how so". - [[User:KeithTyler|Keith D. Tyler [flame]]] 20:13, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

Agree with Keith. This vote is broken. I can still vote because my answer is an unqualified "no", but the sub-options are suspect. And observations like these should become part of a policy or how-to somewhere. We need more professional voting. JRM 15:50, 2004 Dec 12 (UTC)

Untimeliness of the vote?

Given the relatively high proportion of the previous vote, and the unexpectedness with which this second vote came about, given that nothing happened after the first vote, I worry about the sudden failure of this proposal due to insufficient advance notice of this second vote. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk, automation script)]] 19:19, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

I posted a notice on the mailing list one week in advance. Johnleemk | Talk 19:44, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Where was the effort to attain greater consensus? It was not a hugely popular proposal and here it is again, shortly after! I'm not sure that repeatedly introducing proposals (with tinkering) for voting goes any way to convincing those who opposed it last time. If opposition to a policy is sufficiently heavy, surely no size of majority is sufficient and more effort needs to be found to find consensual solutions to problems? Dr Zen 01:41, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I was ready to discuss the problems with the proposal. I placed notices on the pump and community portal requesting comments (the one on the community portal is still there after more than a month). I posted to the mailing list two or three times requesting comments on what was wrong. Are you suggesitng that's not effort? Anyway, try guessing how many responses I got. Two (both on Wikipedia talk:Preliminary Deletion. One of them, after a bit of discussion, ended up being convinced. The other never got back to me after I responded. How the f*** does anyone expect major changes when nobody's interested in commenting on what's wrong with it? Votes generally aren't very informative about the reasoning behind them. Not to mention I'd say at least 60% of them either provided no logical reason for opposition (try looking at some probable sockpuppet votes in the first round) or gave a reason that cannot be addressed at all by this proposal (i.e. expanding speedy criteria, or, making it even harder to delete articles). I think that's quite unfair, especially since as Keith has pointed out, expanding speedy deletion criteria isn't probably the answer to our problems. In addition, the current proposal to "expand" the criteria would only be making formal what is already done informally, as quite a few of its proponents have admitted. Thusly, it would not reduce the scope of our problems at all. Johnleemk | Talk 17:39, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

If you want discussion with the vote, it's probably not a good idea to say "You should not make comments with your vote; use the talk page instead". I notice most people have ignored it this time around, but last time it's the reason I just voted no without explaining why.

You could also guess that last time it didn't pass, and nobody seems interrested in discussing it as meaning that it's very unlikely to pass this time. The vote so far has shown that scenario to be true. I'm not sure what the rush is. Under your scenario, vfd is only going to get worse, and hence just letting this wait for 3 months makes it more likely to pass then than now. Shane King 23:41, Dec 13, 2004 (UTC)

I didn't add that comment this time. I don't know who did. But I should note that a reason for voting and discussion generally aren't the same thing. I'm toying with the idea of pseudovote, however — making it look like a poll, but in actual fact, it's a discussion that just looks like a poll. :-p It's just that I'm terribly desperate for actual answers to why people are voting no, and nobody's interested in discussing it unless there's a vote. Johnleemk | Talk 03:43, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

An Argument Against Expanding Speedy

I added this at Wikipedia talk:Preliminary Deletion, where it has gotten no response, so I'm reposting here.

Speedy Deletion, as I've now learned to understand it, is a request for "summary judgement" on a page where the content is undeniably and objectively inappropriate.

This "inappropriateness" is not one that is supposed to be defined in a POV way. It is not based on agreement or disagreement with content, or distaste over content's presentation, or like or dislike of the topic, or like or dislike of the contributor. It is one that, in theory, could probably be automated.

What are the current reasons for speedying?

1. No meaningful content or history (e.g. random characters). See patent nonsense.

The definition of "nonsense" that is intended here is admittedly a hard one to recognize (I made incorrect inferences myself at first), but "patent nonsense" is not defined as "imaginary topics" or "theories that will never work" or some other value judgement or prediction. Rather it is, strictly speaking, content that is not intelligible. Random characters, "greeking", etc. are what applies here.

This is pretty easy to define. If it can't be read, or can't be converted to something with some meaning, it's nonsense.

2. Test pages (e.g., "Can I really create a page here?").

In other words, pages that have absolutely no informative content. This is not the same as "pages that only include content that everyone already knows". It includes pages that do not include any information on their topic, on other topics, etc.

3. Pure vandalism (see also dealing with vandalism). 4. Very short articles with little or no context (e.g., "He is a funny man that has created Factory and the Hacienda. And, by the way, his wife is great.")

This one is not fully defined. I think that it is a bit controversial, because a value judgement on "very short" and "little content" has to be made. Perhaps that really is all there is to say about Mr. Hacienda. To illustrate this, the CSD page goes on to urge that the page should try to be saved:

5. Reposted content that was deleted according to Wikipedia deletion policy.

Nice and clear cut, and again, automatable. If it failed VfD before, it can be speedied for all eternity. Again, CSD includes caveats here.

6. Articles created and edited solely by a banned user after they were banned, unless the user has been unbanned. This is slightly controversial! 7. Foreign language articles that already exist on another Wikimedia project, as a result of having been copied and pasted in to Wikipedia after their creation elsewhere, or as a result of having been moved via the transwiki system. 8. Temporarily deleting a page in order to merge page histories after a cut and paste move.

CSD is very specific and narrow, because it is intended to be fast and unchallenged. As a result, it has to be clearly and specifically defined beyond any shred of POV. Just as with summary judgement in a court of law, the reason for summary deletion must be undeniable and unarguable.

Expanding CSD is an idea on the side of deletionism to codify a particular POV of what is allowable on Wikipedia into a process where there is no room for objection, no audit trail (at least not as there is with VfD), and therefore little room for appeal.

Preliminary deletion, most importantly above all, retains the consensual process, but attempts to expedite it for cases where a consensus is expected. Currently such cases must go to VfD, where unnecessary effort is wasted on subjectively obvious deletions, as opposed to objectively obvious deletions (what Speedy is for). If the cause for deletion of an article is subjective, then there needs to be room for an oppositely subjective opinion on the article to be introduced into the process. There is no room for this in speedy.

Expanding CSD removes the consensual process for a class of deletion cases which are not objectively inappropriate. Therefore, it is not an appropriate Wikian solution to the problem that Preliminary Deletion is trying to solve.

[[User:KeithTyler|Keith D. Tyler [flame]]] 20:16, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

You might be interested in expressing your views at Wikipedia:Proposal to expand WP:CSD - SimonP 07:21, Dec 12, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip. - [[User:KeithTyler|Keith D. Tyler [flame]]]

If you don't think we need this

then you need to go and visit Wikipedia:Deadend pages and see the mass of material, mostly hopeless, that simmers there.

Seriously. You don't even have to go past A. Look for yourself. It's swimming with preemptive-deletion candidates. - [[User:KeithTyler|Keith D. Tyler [flame]]] 18:28, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC)

Other posibilities

IMO, in most cases suitable for preliminary deletion consensus on deletion can be reached even with the page author. Many vanities are created not because the contributor is utterly insane, but from lack of knowledge of vanity & auto-biography policy. (assume good faith). In this case any "forced deletion" process is evil, because usualy biting the newbie (yet another completely unnotable highschools student vanity, delete!!).

The better possibility - "friendly deletion". If we are able to communicate to the author the important part of Wikipedia policy, in many cases even he would agree with deletion. Than, page can be safely speedy-deleted.

How to do that? A proposal can be found here. I think this can be expanded to other cases and made into recommentadion.

Some objections against preliminary deletion proposal

It's too fast.
If we won't communicate with the page author, it will frequently fail on his disagreement.
Instruction creep.
It's too similar to VfD. Has potential to become as big as VfD & harder to follow, because of higher speed.

--Wikimol 23:41, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I heartily agree. I feel this worked into the proposal. I don't feel too bad that this vote is obviously going to fail, because I've worked out a lot of ideas about how to write a third draft of the proposal based on opposition from fellow Wikipedians like you. I'm quite at a loss as to what to do to handle concerns about instruction creep/VFD-alikeness and making deletion too easy/trivial, though. On one hand, people don't want one or two people to decide about an article's deletion (i.e. Managed Deletion). On the other, they want it to be simple and non-bureaucratic. You have to have one or the other. You can't have your cake and eat it. Either you restrict deletion somehow, or you don't. I'm really surprised there are people who think this proposal is a deletionist conspiracy, because as you can see, a lot of people find it overly restrictive. Must be one of those things like snopes.com (where the site owners have received mail from both conservatives and liberals accusing them of being one or the other). Johnleemk | Talk 10:15, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Overly restrictive voting requirements? (moved from main page)

What in heaven's name is the reason for this requirement? This goes well beyond the usual sock-puppet filter, and introduces an artificial wall between "real" Wikipedians and the hoi polloi. Notably, it also was not part of the first vote. Why 250 edits? Why two weeks? I'm pretty sure I've had this account for that long, but it shouldn't matter. In particular, the edit count requirement is just silly; on Wikipedia a single edit might be the contribution of a full-length, finished article, embodying a week or more of work. This provision appears to demonstrate a serious lack of Wikilove, and that leads me to feel even more that the proposers are trying to divorce the Wikipedia from its fundamentally open nature. -- Visviva 17:43, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

If you've only worked on one article, there's a good chance you don't know enough about Wikipedian policies/guidelines. 250 edits is half the requirement for the ratifying of amendments to the arbcom policy, so I think it's quite okay. Two weeks also seems fair to me, especially seeing how there was a similar requirement for the arbcom policy amendment ratification poll, and the voting for new arbitrators requires that a user be here for three months. There is indeed a history of trying to ensure that all voters at least know something about what they're voting to approve/amend, etc. Johnleemk | Talk 13:17, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This vote was a complete and utter bloody screwup

Someone who had minimal experience running any kind of vote for any kind of official organization should have maintained and run the vote on this process. It is a complete mess, and this is a damn shame as I think this policy proposal has a lot of merit.

First off, yes, "Question 2 Is A Dumb Question". Question 2 is entirely pointless if Question 1 does not pass.

Secondly, yes, it is completely invalid to presume that votes for amended versions of the policy are also votes for non-amended versions of the policy. That cannot be foreseen, inferred, or presumed. The lack of objectiveness on the part of the proposer (who was also the vote organizer) coupled with his inexperience in voting on amended issues led to this being a complete mess of a vote where people were forced to invent their own voting options (after the voting had already begun, which is invalid.)

Thirdly, clearly the ending time of the vote was indicated without a basic understanding of 24-hour time, or else the person really did intend to run this vote for fourteen and a half days, which I doubt. But SimonP is right. 11:59 UTC was about ten hours ago. The page has stated since the beginning that the voting would close at "11:59 UTC". Not "23:59 UTC" (even "11:59 PM UTC" would have been clear, if technically invalid), which I'm pretty sure is what the vote coordinator actually intended.

Sigh, big sigh. - Keith D. Tyler [flame] 21:59, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)

In my defense, this vote was based on the first vote, which received extensive vetting from those on the mailing list. Two or three users far more experienced than I am (at least one of them is, as of this writing, an arbitrator-elect) made some minor changes to the voting structure when it was first proposed, but nobody has bothered explaining the real problem until now, which I think is a shame considering that another notice was made about this vote on the mailing list a week in advance. And the time issue was an honest mistake; IIRC I wrote 23:59 on Wikipedia:Preliminary Deletion, but somehow managed to screw it up and turn it into 11:59 on this page. All issues with this vote were my own fault, and I take full responsibility for them. Johnleemk | Talk 09:56, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)