Wikiquote talk:Votes for deletion/Archive/2

Trial update of WQ:SD now live

The long-delayed overhaul of Wikiquote:Speedy deletions is now live, for a 1-month trial period. Please read the new policy page before nominating any pages for either speedy or standard deletion, and discuss the new policy at Wikiquote talk:Speedy deletions. Thank you. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:44, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

We've now had a couple of months' experience with this new policy, and it seems to be doing the job. I suggest it's time to make it permanent. 121a0012 15:45, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Seconded. Seems to have caused no new problems while solving many old ones. Fys. “Ta fys aym”. 17:20, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

A better place to point this out is Wikiquote talk:Speedy deletions#Trial period results, so I'll copy the above responses there. I recommend further discussion take place there, too. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:49, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Some thoughts about a recurring issue

One of the most commonly deleted sorts of articles are those with only a small number of quotes none of which are sourced. We should somehow make it clearer to contributors (especially those who aren't one of the six of us who regularly participate in VFD discussions) that a stub with no sourced quotes is very likely to be deleted, even if the subject is notable. In order to stand, a stub really needs to have at least one sourced quote (and preferably two or three) in order to establish quoteworthiness and potential verifiability. (It's way past my bedtime so forgive me if this doesn't make much sense.) 121a0012 08:04, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

"Speedy keep"

In one recent vote, where a page was created with no quotes and nominated for deleted in that condition, but quotes were later added, I have tried out changing my vote to "speedy keep" instead of a plain "keep". I think that this is a reasonable vote when the problems cited in the nomination have been resolved, and the page is virtually certain to be kept. (This might also be useful if ever we have the case of bad-faith nominations.) Does anyone have any objections to this? —LrdChaos (talk) 14:22, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

• I think it's probably a good idea, especially in cases like this one (Viktor schauberger). I've seen this happen before, and even though it was obvious that the page would be kept, we had to wait for the process to complete. I would support a speedy keep, for use with VFD nominations that are either obviously going to be kept, or for bad-faith nominations. ~ UDScott 14:30, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

• • Certainly bad faith nominations (we don't get a lot of those), but quite often VfD is used as a way of raising problems with a page which is clearly for a notable subject with a lot of possible quotes. For example Haile Selassie was recently nominated. As written it was deletable, but because it was cleaned up and replaced with a perfectly good page during the VfD, it became a clear keep vote. I think in such cases a speedy keep would be appropriate. It would best not being applied to things like Warcraft where an alternative, slimmed version was produced during VfD, though. Fys. “Ta fys aym”. 15:24, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

VfD closers are expected to use good judgment in closing, so "obvious" improvements to an article or bad-faith nominations certainly rate a speedy keep. The main reason we don't have some of these Wikipedia conveniences, I think, is that we have so very few folks who participate in VfDs and fewer sysops who close them that we tend to err on the side of rigid policy, which is infrequently updated. But I don't see having a speedy-keep practice being a controversy, except perhaps for apparent POV articles, and I believe our sysops will tread carefully with those. I support adding this to WQ:DP post-haste. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:25, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Deletion of Quotations for Wikiquote

I had a question about deleting quotes. I had submitted one by Sami Beg but it was marked as one that should be deleted unless proof was submitted the he has been quoted by the media. Dr. Beg writes articles for ABCNews and here are some links:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Flu/story?id=2744696&page=1

http://cms.clevelandclinic.org/urology/body.cfm?id=6&action=detail&ref=542

Please let me know if these are sufficient to prove the authors credibility.

Thanks

—The preceding unsigned comment was added to WQ:VFD by 68.160.32.154 (talk · contributions) 14:46, 24 December 2006 (UTC), and transferred here by Jeff Q (talk) 21:16, 24 December 2006 (UTC).

The article in question was actually Sami Bég, created by Freedomskr (talk · contributions), and its deletion discussion is at Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive/Sami Bég. I'll take some space to describe what went wrong with this article, and how to fix it.

1. The subject line said merely: "Quotations by Sami Bég, MD". VfD researchers were unable to uniquely identify this person, and the quote gave no hints to distinguish the possibilities, so they drew the conclusion that this person wasn't especially notable.
2. The sole quote was: "It is our similarities that should make us want to be different and our differences that should make us want to be alike." It had no source, which further prevented any identification of the quotee or verification of the quote and its origin. Furthermore, such sentiments are routinely posted to articles every day by what we call "vanity" editors — people without demonstrated notability who are quoting themselves. These quotes are deleted upon discovery unless there is at least a reasonable hope the quotee is actually notable.
3. The article was nominated for deletion, with a notice prominently displayed at the top of the article, including links to the discussion. The original editor never attempted to comment there or add information to the article that would help the community determine whether the article was worth keeping.

In short, the article was indistinguishable from a garden-variety vanity-quote article. With the citations given above, it now seems that this person is at least arguably notable. It's not a sure thing, because Bég seems to be an M.D., possibly a very new one (not likely notable) who writes for ABC News (most reporters do not rise to clear notability by Wikimedia standards, which means they are often the source of quotes by others but not necessarily quoted themselves). The way to create a Wikiquote article that gives the subject the best chance of passing a deletion review is:

1. Make sure the subject is clearly and uniquely identified. If they have a Wikipedia article, include a link to it in the introductory paragraph. If they don't, creating one will not only help make the case, but will give Wikipedians, a vastly larger group of editors, a chance to review, expand, and discuss the article. If the subject is insufficiently notable, the article may be deleted there, but if not, it can help Wikiquotians consider notability. In any case, we must know who the subject is.
2. Assemble several quotes with proper sources before you try to create the article. Quoteless articles are often speedily deleted. (That happened to another, quoteless version of this article, Sami Beg [without the accent].) People with only a single notable quote don't make for good Wikiquote articles. Sourcing quotes (i.e., providing citations as you did above) not only make it easier to verify the quote, a critical part of information in any Wikimedia article, but also help to identify the quotee and demonstrate notability.
3. Create the article using the proper boilerplate template. (In this case, it's Wikiquote:Templates/People.) The easiest way to do this is to use the "Add new person" input box at Help:Starting a new page, under "Using input box". (It's a very good idea to read this entire help page first.) The input box will create an article with the name you enter in the input field, with all the text from the People template pre-added. You only need to replace the boilerplate text with the details for your subject, preview it to ensure it looks just as you expect, and then save it.

These steps will help considerably in making a decent quote article. In this case, they won't guarantee it will be kept, as this doctor-reporter is not obviously notable, but they should at least justify a second consideration of the subject. (Do the job well, and the overworked maintenance editors may just give you and the article the benefit of the doubt. Many of us are inclusionists at heart, not wanting to delete any article that shows real potential.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:19, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Discussion extensions

I'm sure I remember setting some policy about extending VfD discussions as part of the overhaul that changed the term from 14 days to 7 days, but I can't find the discussions here or at Wikiquote talk:Deletion policy at the moment. As I recall, we'd talked about restricting extensions to sysops and requiring a justification for them, so we could avoid unhappy editors merely extending VfDs to avoid deletions and arguing about arbitrary extensions or failures to extend.

With non-sysop 121a0012 reasonably extending a close vote, and several frequent VfD sysop participants noticeably absent from some or all of recent VfDs, I believe we not only should firmly establish a policy, but also possibly reconsider our practice (or what I thought was our policy). Opinions? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 15:38, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

So far, I've found some discussion of this back in June/July 2005, archived at "Term of votes" and "Interlim" [sic] under the larger topic "Improvement of Votes for deletion" in WQt:VfD archive 1. Aphaia and I talked about how to formalize this, but it never made it into either the Summer 2005 changes or last year's overhaul. Let's talk about this now. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 15:59, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Proposal:

Any editor may extend discussion from seven to fourteen days by updating the close date and adding an explanation of why the extension was made and by whom. Any admin may extend discussion for an additional week if warranted. A discussion may warrant extension if no consensus is reached on the article's disposition, if the article is significantly updated or restructured, or in other circumstances where some VfD participants may be uncertain or new information arises. A discussion may be extended by a shorter time period without comment by any editor in order to align close times of requests submitted the same day, or when related articles are added to an existing nomination (so that all articles included in the nomination are given the full seven days). When a discussion is extended, the nomination and discussion should be re-sorted within WQ:VFD to keep the close dates in chronological order.

I think that essentialy restates our current unwritten practice. 121a0012 05:52, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

I happen to disagree with the idea that it should be OK for non-sysops, however well-meaning or in the right they may be, to extend a VFD discussion. I think that anything relating to the close of a VFD, whether it be actually closing the vote (as scheduled or early) or extending it, should be left only for sysops, just to ensure that there's some reasonable measure in place to ensure that the behavior is not ripe for abuse. The wording given by 121a0012 doesn't account for that, and it seems like it could allow for one editor to keep a vote open indefinitely by repeatedly extending it; even the wording were changed to disallow multiple extensions from the same non-sysop user, it's easy enough to get around with an array of sockpuppets.

I'm not sure where you get that idea, since my proposal only allows the vote to be extended twice, and only one by a non-admin, for a maximum time of three weeks from the original nomination. What part was unclear? 121a0012 20:49, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

We've seen cases where people who have come to VFD and expected it to be a "one man, one vote" sort of thing where the outcome with the most votes is automatically the case. There have been cases where a lot of anon editors have come to vote to keep articles that have ended up deleted, and the raw number of delete votes was less than or equal to the number of keep votes. Despite our policy saying as much, many people don't grasp that (especially those who are "single page" participants in Wikiquote) and so they might decide that it's OK to extend a vote where the community consensus is in favor of one outcome, but the overall number of votes (including anons & sockpuppets) is roughly even.

WQ:VFD#Voting on deletions states (in regard to closing votes):

Sysops have the responsibility of judging the results based on a variety of factors, including (besides the votes) policies, practices, precedents, arguments, compromises between conflicting positions, and seriousness of the participants.

I think that the choice about whether to extend a vote involves the same factors; I'd think it somewhat odd to have one set of standards for closing a vote, and another for keeping it open beyond the appointed time.

In short, while I know that there are well-meaning and understanding editors without sysop status, like 121a0012, these people are by far the exception rather than the rule (as most of these editors end up becoming sysops). We still have sysops around at VFD, and from my experience, the ones who do most of the VFD-closing work (myself and Jeff, primarily) are still active there, so I don't think there's much need to worry about a vote being closed when it perhaps shouldn't have been, as we both seem to be pretty good at extending votes when it seems necessary (either through an inconclusive week of voting, or several key absences from voting and a not-entirely-clear consensus. —LrdChaos (talk) 15:37, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree with keeping it for sysops. Otherwise it's leaving it open for potential chaos... Tyrenius 18:10, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

New VfD nomination method, trial

Moved from WQ:VP Cbrown1023 talk 18:46, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I've set things up so that we can give a trial run to a WP-like VFD nomination process. I've given instructions at User:LrdChaos/Nominating a page for deletion, but the short version is this:

1. Use {{vfd-new}} instead of {{vfd}}.
2. Click the "this page's entry" link to create a subpage.
3. Paste {{subst:vfd-new2| pg=PAGENAME| text=REASON}}, replacing PAGENAME with the page's name and REASON with the explanation (signing with ~~~~).
4. Edit WQ:VFD and add {{subst:vfd-new3|PAGENAME}} at the bottom.

In just writing up these steps, I realized one thing I need to account for (adding a section-level header), so I might move vfd-new2 to vfd-new3 and create a new vfd-new2. I'd like a couple of people to try it out and let me know if they run into any problems or see a better way to do things. —LrdChaos (talk) 17:18, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I've just revised this with a WP-like step 2. —LrdChaos (talk) 17:25, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

It seems to be working well, there are 2 examples of it currently on WQ:VFD. Cbrown1023 19:12, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I'll second Cbrown1023's statement. I hope everyone who uses VfD will consider nominating some problem articles and/or commenting on the discussions so we can get some good feedback on this new system. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:30, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I have one comment already: I don't like the way votes don't show up in the history of WQ:VFD. I use the history extensively to figure out what activity has taken place in the VFD discussions, and it doesn't make sense to me to have to add every single subpage to my watchlist just to find out when people people comment on an entry I'm only peripherally interested in. 121a0012 05:02, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

121a0012 makes a good point. I'll throw in a counterpoint I'm running into as I clean up our archived VfD discussions in preparation to log them all using the new system. When all the discussions are editable on a single page, even experienced editors, while commenting on or closing multiple discussions, have a tendency to forget some of their signatures. This causes problems figuring out who said what, and who's responsible for the closures. Checking the page history, which is supposed to be better this way, is also rendered much more difficult when one edits several discussions at once. The lesser convenience of having separate pages per discussion also provides fewer opportunities for mistakes and makes it far easier to correct them when they're made. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 10:34, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I have another comment after using the new process for the first time. I like the way this works, but I found one quirk (unless I did something wrong). I had to go back in and edit the nomination after I created it just so that I could add a close date and register my vote, whereas in the old process I did this at the same time I created the nomination on the VFD page. Not a big deal, but not quite as smooth a process as I had hoped. ~ UDScott 14:01, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

You can still add the close time/initial vote at the same time as the initial nomination. The way I've done is to put the nomination (explanation) as the "text" parameter of the vfd-new2 template, and then put the close time and initial vote outside the template as normal. —LrdChaos (talk) 15:40, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

That's what I've been doing, too. There's more on this and related issues at Template talk:Vfd-new2#Adding closures and nominator votes. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:15, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

I happen to disagree, and think that it's actually easier to keep track of what's going on in a particular VFD discussion with the new method. I know it doesn't happen often, but occasionally we'll get a VFD that attracts all sorts of people, who add comments with no signatures and who sometimes change or remove other people's votes. With the old method (edit histories for everything listed together), it can be a little hard to wade through what's going on, especially when other users are interacting with the page (new nominations, comments in other discussions, etc.). With the new method, it's easy to keep track of how people are affecting that vote in particular. What I like most about this is that, even if people use a blank edit summary, it's still easy to tell which discussion they were editing. At present, the only way to tell is to look at the diff, and then figure out which discussion it corresponded to (most often by seeing the title of the next discussion at the bottom of the diff).

I know there are a couple of people who, in the past, have just edited the whole "Deletion candidates" section and added several votes in one go. The new system will be more inconvenient for them, but it'll make it more clear which discussions they're voting on (an edit summary of "+votes" isn't very helpful for figuring that out when they've voted on 5-6 nominations in one go).

I suppose it really comes down to differences in the way that people use VFD (and the History); it seems that you, 121a0012, prefer to have it all in one place. That has the advantage that you're able to look through the last 50/100/whatever edits to VFD in one shot. I, on the other hand, don't really use it that way; I'm usually looking for an edit to a specific section (usually to add a missing signature) and to me there's a lot of unnecessary clutter in having every other VFD edit listed on that same page. I'm not sure that there's really anything we can do that'll make both methodologies happy, though. —LrdChaos (talk) 18:03, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

I've created my first VfD under the new method. Seems fine to me. - InvisibleSun 18:10, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I've just tried the new system for the first time, and seem only to have created a new page called Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Leana Benson. Where did I go wrong? Antiquary 21:32, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

You just forgot the last step, adding it to the WQ:VFD page with {{subst:vfd-new-3|pg=Leana Benson}}. Cbrown1023 talk 22:10, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Silly me. Thanks. Antiquary 22:47, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

VfD-new2 "Vote closes" time

I've added a new feature using parser functions that automatically addes a vote closing time 7 days and the exact hour from the nomination time. I'd like to get feedback on this. Cbrown1023 talk 01:20, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I'll check it out soon, but I would recommend you post this information at Template talk:Vfd-new2, where a technical discussion would be more appropriate. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:56, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I was thinking about that, but I thought that it would get more notice here (because, as you have said, WQ:VFD and WQ:VP are where most of the action occurs). Posted there as well. Cbrown1023 talk 03:58, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Or we are better to move to Wikiquote talk:Votes for deletion? Anyway discussions related to VfD may be best to be archived to it at last. Aphaia 04:06, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually, Aphaia is right. We should have a general discussion of any significant change to the VfD process at Wikiquote talk:Votes for deletion, with a pointer from here to there. Usually I make a point of ensuring this coverage, but I've been admittedly sloppy of late as I stumble through a backlog of work. I suggested somewhere else (my fogged brain isn't pulling up the location) that we should make an announcement once we feel we have a general consensus about using the new system officially, to allow a final 2 weeks or so of comments, complaints, and suggestions before a decision. I would recommend starting a discussion at WQt:VfD that would (A) mention the transfer of discussion from here; (B) describe the new VfD system; (C) link to the pertinent templates and pages; (D) propose the end result if accepted by the community; and (E) establish a timeframe for a decision. At that point, the discussion here should be pointed there, and only announcements of status would take place here. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:19, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I haven't given this a live trial, but looking at the code it seems an excellent idea.--Cato 22:01, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

This new feature is one of great improvements we've seen recently. Thanks, Cbrown1023! --Aphaia 05:44, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Where to put subpages?

Having just closed a VFD and added {{vfd-kept}} to the appropriate talk page, I noticed one thing that's different with the new system vs. the old: the location of discussion subpages. Previously, these had been subpages of Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive; under the new system they're subpages of Wikiquote:Votes for deletion, and since the template was written for the old it doesn't work with the new. So, I started wondering if we should aim for some standardization. On the one hand, there are lots of old discussions under WQ:VFDArchive, and it would be a huge task to move them all and update the appropriate links. On the other hand, it doesn't make much sense for active discussions to be conducted under Archive, nor to move them there after the discussion has concluded. Any thoughts? —LrdChaos (talk) 17:07, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Why don't we just create a new template? Or we can subst all the previous ones and then update the template. Cbrown1023 talk 17:26, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

We should have one place to find all discussions. It makes it easier to find discussions given the article title (a fact I use many times a week on Wikipedia).

I've thought about this shift in subpage location since we first talked about it last year at Wikiquote talk:Deletion policy#Major deletion revision. It won't be that hard to do a mass move of the old discussions and simply leave the redirects in place, like Wikipedia did when they switched from "VfD" to "Xfd" (at least for some discussions). I volunteer to execute the moves.

One unanswered question is whether we want to change "Votes" to "Pages" or something similar, but I'm thinking at the moment that, with all the textual references to "VfD" strewn around Wikiquote, inertia may be best, at least for now.

Incidentally, I should have all the old discussions logged under the new Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Log system within a few days. Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive (which usually is unable to display even the complete older set of discussions because of technical problems) should be rendered totally obsolete shortly. We also need to ratify the new log system as official policy. (So much cleanup work to do!) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:41, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, there's more than you think. We still have a lot of draft policies that we need to make official. That's not even mentioning all the cleanup we should do. :) Cbrown1023 talk 18:09, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Deletion review

The template for closed discussions says "Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review", however the DRV link goes to Wikipedia, not a Wikiquote page. Also, the link is to w:Deletion review, not w:Wikipedia:Deletion review. Do we even have a Deletion Review, and if not should we? In any case the link should be fixed. Koweja 18:10, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

The template should be fixed, but we don't yet have a Wikiquote:Deletion review. I had originally intended on writing a draft of this as part of the change from 14 days to 7 days for VfD discussion — see "Decrease of voting period" and "Major deletion revision" in WQt:VFD archive 1. (There are also policy pages and discussions that mention Wikiquote:Votes for undeletion, but we don't have quite the plethora of related pages Wikipedia does. We often pick a single title to collect the related concepts and go with that, and "WQ:DRV" has been the most recent focus, as much as a non-existent page title can be considered a focus.)

Unfortunately, I've been suffering from an extended bout of wiki weariness, and have not tackled this challenge, nor has anyone else attempted it. This is but one of many unaddressed tasks hinted at in Cbrown1023 and my discussion above in "Where to put subpages?".

To date, we've been recommending that complaints about deletions be posted to Wikiquote:Administrators' noticeboard. We've had perhaps only one or two of these, but one must suspect that the lack of a specific forum tends to discourage complaints, especially for Wikipedians. (I've often found myself half-hoping someone would just create a page with a complaint that would force us to deal with it. When people are overworked, the tyranny of urgency can be a powerful goad.)

This deficit in policy is why I keep applying breaks to enthusiastic attempts to start new projects or major changes at Wikiquote. We have so many basic needs that we have yet to address, I fear stealing precious attention and effort away from dealing with these matters. And it's not just the work of any single person that's needed, although most big changes start with such an effort. Something arguably resembling a community consensus must be assembled to review, critique, amend, and approve anything a single person creates. This itself can be a major challenge. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 20:11, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

In layman's terms, we are currently working a policy, but have a lot on our plates right now... also we don't have a great need for that policy particularly as of yet. Compared to our other large amount of items needing to be done, this is slightly down on the list. But don't worry, we will work on it and you are welcome to help out with the creation and critiquing. Cbrown1023 talk 21:16, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

New system template nominations

I've created a new template, {{vfd-template-new}}, that handles nominating a template under the new, in-trial VFD system. Documentation is at User:LrdChaos/Nominating a template for deletion, and is basically the same as nominating any other page. —LrdChaos (talk) 17:14, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Deferring official VfD change

I plan to remove the deadline for the discussion of changing to the new three-step VfD system from the current banner at the top of WQ:VFD because I do not believe we have sufficiently dealt with the questions and consequences of this system yet. Some outstanding issues:

• We do not yet have documentation, even preliminary, on the new process.
• Some of the templates have bugs in them.
• Issues have been raised on user talk pages that have not made it into general discussion.

Unless there are equally compelling reasons to defer such matters until an official change in policy, I will remove the date shortly and recommend we continue to operate informally until these matters are addressed. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:56, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Fine with me. Cbrown1023 talk 00:00, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

By the way, Cbrown1023, I should have mentioned that I appreciate your attempt to follow my recommendation to set a date, and I apologize for doing an apparent 180-degree turn. I'm just concerned that our current date has turned out to be too soon, given all the stuff we're trying to process right now. I'm working on a list of issues I've seen pop up and hope to post them in some useful form here soon. But don't let that stop anyone from bringing up right away any problems or questions they've had. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:45, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I've announced a postponement on this decision, with a suggestion that we may hope to complete it before the end of March. I would suggest not setting a specific date until we have all the issues posted here and have some discussion, solutions, and/or explicit decisions to defer resolutions. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 06:59, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Removed links to VfD'd articles

I'd like to remind everyone who deletes articles that we should first check "What links here" so we can remove links to these articles before deleting them, at least for those subjects that don't appear to have general notability. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 12:18, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

I confess I forgot it ... your remark is also applied for speedy. Thanks for your notice! --Aphaia 13:01, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Vfd-kept

I've just noticed that {{vfd-kept}} links to the old form of [[Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive/PAGENAME]] rather than the new one of [[Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/PAGENAME]]. As this template isn't subst:ed, rather than breaking a whole load of links it was necessary to create {{vfd-kept-new}} for kept articles since the new procedure was introduced. I don't think there have been any other keeps under the new system but I will check their links are good. Fys. “Ta fys aym”. 08:53, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Concerns as we prepare to make the new system official

I'm going to post a series of observations I've made about questions and issues with the latest VfD system — including the 3-step nomination process, the separate discussion pages, and the log system that replaced the old WQ:VFDA system — and the process of changing from the old to the new. A quick status:

• Most everyone seems to be using the new system, with only occasional problems that are eventually fixed by others. Even without the issues addressed, we can probably make the switchover official if we have a consensus.

• I'm migrated most if not all of the discussions under "Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive/" to use the new banner closure system (using the {{vt}} and {{vb}} wrappers). I'm pretty sure there are a few loose ends, but I'll try to knock them off in the next two weeks, at which point we can safely delete Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive.

Now for the questions and problems. I present them in condensed form, with the hope that others with more time and energy can either fix them or consider how they can be addressed.

• Template issues
  • Bugs
    • {{vfd-new}} uses {{PAGENAME}} for "this page's dicussion" link, which eats namespace prefixes like Category:, Wikiquote:, Template:, and Image:. I believe this is easy to fix.
      • Fixed by changing PAGENAME to FULLPAGENAME
    • Some of the "vfd*" templates are not correctly working at least some of the time with either named or numbered parameters, an improvement in flexibility that LrdChaos added when porting the corresponding Wikipedia templates. The problem usually manifests itself as a step-2 discussion heading that looks like == [[{{{1|Jaswant Singh Khalra}}}]] ==. I've tried to fine-tune them, but have still seen occasional problems even after thoroughly testing at least one in the template sandbox. Someone with more patience and more template programming experience than I may need to take a look at this.
  • Improvement: We should implement WP's bold red warning message when someone fails to subst: the use of the vfd* templates.
    • I added it to Template:Vfd-new2, but it looks really weird when it is substituted... it isn't really needed at the other two. Cbrown1023 talk 02:09, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Documentation: Each template should have <noinclude>d "Usage" documentation.

• Conflicting practices
  • WQ:VFD is in forward-chronological order, mainly to take advantage of the former "Submit a new request" link. The new monthly logs of old discussions are in reverse-chronological order, mainly (if I recall correctly) to match Wikipedia's order. This means that anyone archiving multiple discussions for a day (very common) must manually reverse the order of discussions. This seems like needless work. We should probably change one of them so both work in the same direction. I recommend reversing the logs. (I can understand arguments for either direction of the active discussions, but the logs are mainly for historical review, and whoever heard of a history written from newest to oldest?) I was conscious of this issue when I meticulously ordered the converted old archived discussions in the new logs, so I'd be confident I could reverse the order of everything I did with less than an hour's work, in case we go this way.
  • We are now using HTML comments to group active discussions on WQ:VFD by nomination date. This arose from doing this for the logs, which begged for some division of as many as 80-100 entries per month. However, we also have a long-time practice of ordering active discussions by close date, including moving them to a new position when they are extended. One or the other of these practices must go because they are incompatible. We could: (A) stop moving discussions, which means long ones will remain at the top; (B) continue to order active discussions by close date, use HTML comments to group them that way, and force VFD closers to reorder them when archiving; (C) reorder the archived discussions by close date; or (D) something else someone might come up with. (A) is easy to execute and ordain as policy. (B) retains current ordering practices, but puts more of a burden on closers (not good, but better them than ordinary editors). (C) would be a large but one-time change. (I might be able to use my methods for the log conversion to help this, but I wouldn't look forward to it!) Anyone have any ideas for (D)? NOTE: The main problem occurs with vote extensions, not with speedy closures. We seem to be developing a practice of leaving speedy closures in place and archiving them with the other discussions of that close date. Since the new shading helps readers ignore closed discussions, that seems to be a non-problem.
  • The old closure system had us replace the unsigned "Vote closes" line with a signed "Vote closed" line. This had some problems, partly from closers sometimes forgetting to sign the closure, but also from how to deal with extensions, which ought to have some record of the original date. The new system avoids these changes by placing a closure banner wrapper around the discussion, but we don't seem to be certain of whether or not to still do the largely (but not always completely) redundant change to "Vote closes". We should decide how we want the new system to operate, and should try to make it as simple as we can without losing important information.

• Policy and other documentation updates
  • Wikiquote:Deletion policy, last time I checked, was so out-of-date it didn't even include some year-old innovations and other informal practices that would help new sysops if they were documented. It should be re-examined from to top to bottom for significant revisions.
  • We may now have enough sophistication in our deletion activity that we might want to split WQ:DP into "deletion policy", which would only say what and how to recommend for and discuss deletion, and "deletion process", to advise sysops on how to monitor and execute the process. (Or some similar split; I haven't thought it through yet.) We don't want to overburden casual VFD participants with anything more than the basic rules and how-tos, but our sysops need more detailed information that can't be found in the usual non-en-Wikiquote references.
    • One recurring problem that should be addressed (but currently isn't) is what to do with pages associated with to-be-deleted pages. We frequently fail to delete redirects, links from other pages (e.g., List of people by name, Television shows), and article talk pages. There are several circumstances where one must make judgment calls on whether to do this, so we need guidelines.
  • We still need a Wikiquote:Deletion review policy and page. I must apologize that I haven't started this as I'd hoped, but the need increases as we get more sysops with varying ideas about where to draw the inevitably blurry lines between VFD and speedy-deletion, and other judgment calls.
  • I believe we still have no stated policy, however informal, on how we should do vote extensions, and what limits we should have on them. There have been a few discussions in various places, but we should have a thread devoted to resolving this policy issue.

• Miscellaneous
  • At some point, we should move all the "Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive/*" discussions to "Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/*", so that all our archives are in one place. The main hold-up here was trying to decide if we wanted to change "Votes" to something else, perhaps like "Pages", to parallel Wikipedia's change of focus (but without the division between namespaces).
  • There are a number of places where the old VFDA forms may still be in use (as Fys points out above in "Vfd-kept"). We need to find and update all these to reflect current practices.
  • It's uncommon, but while I was converting the archives to log entries, I found several archived discussions that had been improperly edited. It is not practical for anyone to add every deletion discussion to their watchlist. I'd like to brainstorm a way to monitor these pages so that sysop(s) might be altered if this is done. Or I suppose we could just protect them. (I might be overthinking this one.)
    • It is not as overthought as you may think (even though that sounds really weird :)), we could utilize cascading protection. However, I would recommend we not do that, because that would be a large strain on the servers. I don't really think it mattes that much... people don't look at them much and when they do, the users know how to revert vandalism. Cbrown1023 talk 02:23, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

These are (most of) the deletion issues I've been musing about. I recommend that, instead of trying to insert discussions in-between the separate items, that folks who wish to tackle a particular issue excerpt or rephrase anything above that they find useful to kick off or otherwise add to new debates about resolving them or new notices to indicate that any particular problem has been resolved. But as I said above, we may just choose to make the new policy official before resolving any of them. We just need to be sure to deal with them (at least some of the most important ones) as well. (As for me, I know I'm more than 40 minutes late (or 7 weeks late, depending on which of my earlier statements you go by) delivering this list, but this finishes a 30-hour day for me, so I'll be snoozing for quite a while. ☺) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:44, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

I've given up on participating in the VFD process. The new system makes the revision history of WQ:VFD meaningless, and computing diffs by eyeball is a waste of time better spent doing something useful. It's been nice knowing you. 121a0012 02:31, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Unnecessary and badly done VfD nominations

We are, for some unknown reason, getting a number of deletion nominations from new editors for obvious speedy-deletion candidates, even though we have the very same {{delete}} and {{db}} templates and process that Wikipedia has. (I'm assuming these folks are coming from WP, because editors truly new to Wikimedia tend to take a while to find their way to VfD pages.) I'd like to have an formal "express" way to deal with this, because I don't want to have to backfill incomplete attempts (like Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Klu klux clan, which was also not properly closed, peesumably because it was an obvious speedy and not properly nominated, either). If we have a good-faith nomination, done by following the procedure listed at the top of WQ:VFD, I agree that we should keep and archive the deletion discussion even if it results in a speedy-deletion. But if it's bad faith or doesn't follow the process, can we justify a simple deletion of the discussion? In the latter case, as with "Klu klux clan" (the article just contained the word "hi"), we should be able to speedy-delete it and the discussion to avoid having to repair a poorly implemented nomination that should have just used the {{db}} tag in the first place. (By the way, we also still need to make our current operating process official.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 16:36, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

As I am one of the offenders... On Wikibooks I have closed VfDs speedily when they are so in my opinion. For those I do not usually archive them. They are available in the history anyway and so far no one there has said it was wrong - just my 0.02. (I certainly tagged a kkc page but I thought I had done it as a speedy?) --Herby ^{talk thyme} 16:51, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, you tagged Kkc as a speedy. Your action was completely proper. The problem was that someone else then redundantly tagged it with {{vfd-new}} (Step I), created a VfD discussion page (Step II), and then failed to add it to WQ:VFD (Step III, the omission of which seems to be a growing problem). I just don't want us to waste valuable editor time on fleshing out incomplete nominations for obvious SD candidates. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:28, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Aha - ok. That said the one I put in VfD today

1. Took me a while to work out what to do
2. I guess I should have speedied
3. But on WB I'd close it, speedy it and when I get around to archiving there merely delete it with a note in the edit summary to that effect

I'll certainly look a little more carefully in future --Herby ^{talk thyme} 18:33, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I think your nomination of Jeania Ehlinger was also proper. You certainly could have tagged it for speedy-deletion (after all, it's only a request to review for this possibility, quite likely in this case). But "when it doubt, nominate" is always a safe option for well-formed articles about subjects of questionable notability. I see Wikibooks is still using the easier one-step process. We went to a Wikipedia-like 3-step because we were getting huge numbers of nominations, making WQ:VFD management (and related problems) rather challenging. Since we still haven't ratified this as official policy, any feedback you can provide us, especially on how to help users not familiar with the 3-step, would be greatly appreciated. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:02, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Only to acknowledge this and say I am busy for the next few days but it will get my attention when I can & I will get back to you, regards --Herby ^{talk thyme} 11:30, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

Delete and notify on improper nominations

I highly recommend that we avoid encouraging badly done nominations by inexperienced users by deleting these nominations on sight and posting a notice to the nominating user's talk page that they are expected to read the instructions at the top of WQ:VFD if they wish to participate in discussions that may lead to the destruction of other editors' work.

I raise this point because we didn't do this for the recent nomination of Islam, and various attempts to deal with this improper nomination have made a real hash of the discussion (not to mention the GFDL-mandated edit histories of three separate pages). I am going to lock these pages for a short while (hopefully less than 30 minutes) and try to fix the problems in a way that doesn't interfere with the discussion(s) (and hopefully makes them less confusing). But this problem will predictably get worse, as more users with agendas come to Wikiquote to fight, and don't bother to try to work with the community in the process. And we already have enough problems trying to keep up with maintenance issues without accomodating these one-issue combatants. Let's please draw a line on allowing malformed nominations. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:25, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I think I've covered the merge histories and added notes that explain what happened for those who hadn't seen this 3-part discussion grow organically. (Remember that these discussions must make sense long after they're closed, since they are often referenced in future discussions.) For the record, I'm rather annoyed this situation occurred when a number of our experienced editors didn't chop it off before it got so confusing:

• Two of our esteemed admins chose to "discuss the discussion" improperly placed in the main WQ:VFD page rather than remove it and notify the nominator or to move it themselves.
• One of our valuable and prolific editors (from an ironic profession) decided to merge (copy & paste) a parallel improper nomination without following the GFDL-mandated merge guidelines, including the requirements to cite the original page in the edit summary and to redirect the original page to the new one. (The latter would eventually have been wrong, anyway, which demonstrates the limitations of this GFDL shortcut.)
• Yet another respected admin finally moved the discussion to the correct location, but also failed to cite the destination page in the edit summary.

I imagine many Wikiquotians couldn't care less about these issues; I'm sure most of us are far more concerned with getting the job done, which is completely understandable. But when we ignore the processes in place, not only do we cause the problems they're designed to avoid, we also fail to educate new community members on how things work here — an essential wiki practice, since many (most?) learn by doing and observing, not by reading reams of policy pages — and we encourage problematic editing among the more experienced editors. ("If they don't care, why should I?")

We no longer have the excuse of only 3 or 4 active admins sometimes covering a dozen nominations a day (along with the usual overload of other maintenance tasks), like we had a while back. Therefore, we should be able to be more conscientious in preventing mangled nominations and discussions like this one. Again, I urge everyone to hold all nominators to the requirement that they follow the guidelines at the top, and to be available to answer questions if they arise. To put my money where my mouth is, I've rejoined the Welcoming Committee to be more available for newbie (and "oldbie") questions. Feel free to direct people my way. ☺ ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:40, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

• I totally agree, and apologize for my contribution to the mess. I'll know what to do in the future. --Ubiquity 12:25, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
• Apology too. I could have given my comment on the talk ... --Aphaia 15:29, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
• No apology for the edit summary - I stated in the edit itself (as opposed to the edit summary) where the edit history could be found. The rationale for doing so in the edit summary is that pages to be merged are usually in mainspace, so there would not be an appropriate place on that page to make such a notation. However, I do regret that I lazily didn't just merge all into a single appropriately placed page in the first instance. Cheers! BD2412 T 17:46, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
  • I think possibly Jeff meant me. I moved the discussion from VfD into VfD/Islam and my edit summary said "Move discussion of Islam into separate file". I thought that that was clear enough; apologies if it wasn't.--Poetlister 23:39, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
    • No, I did this. Somewhat lazily. BD2412 T 23:56, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

• And I apologize for my obliqueness, which seems rather catty in retrospect. (For the record, I meant all of the above, though I could have handled it better by being clearer and talking to each party individually about my specific concerns.) My solution wasn't very pretty, either. Let's just try to avoid the whole situation in the future by discouraging malformed nominations (or at least fully fixing them before they get out of hand) and encouraging the nominating editors to follow the instructions and ask questions if necessary. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:24, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

  By the way, I just noticed that the article itself never had the {{vfd-new}} tag added during either of the messed-up nominations, and no one addressing the problems — myself included — thought to check for or fix that. (Not that my point needs any more emphasis, but….) I've fixed it now and moved the discussion closure to 1 week from now. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:34, 17 January 2008 (UTC)