Wikipedia talk:Deletions and Openness

good points

Good points. I hate to be so negative but I want to give you a realistic view of what you are up against. We can start with #1 in section one.

"Rename "Articles for Deletion" to the title of "Articles For Discussion"." This is a Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals of sorts. Look through the 64 archived pages of Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_deletion and you will see this come up again, and again and again. One is: Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_deletion/Archive_53#Renaming_this_process_Articles_for_Discussion

So, after years of talking about naming the word "Deletion" to "Discussion" no one has agreed to change it, what chances does a newbie with no connections and networks have in changing it? none. I just don't think you are willing to commit the months it would take to even make this one small cosmetic change a reality. I don't think it is important enough to you to study all the arguments, and stroke all the egos, and build all the networks first, before even posting the proposal.

And that is the resistance you will have for just cosmetic change #1.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote "No man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age and country, and however powerful a man may be, it is hard for him to make his contemporaries share feelings and ideas which run counter to the general run of their hopes and desires."

Social Scientists have stated in research papers that Wikipedia is a bureaucracy. It is becoming more and more bureaucratic and closed everyday. One newbie with great ideas is not going to change this. Igottheconch (talk) 04:40, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Bummer, but thank you anyway, Igottheconch!. WP will change when User: Jimmy Wales wants it to change, or when the WP Foundation wants it to change, but in the meantime perhaps some incremental improvements can be made. I will look over the discussions you referenced. Sincerely, your friend, GeorgeLouis (talk) 05:15, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We don't want people nominating things just to have a discussion, as sometimes happens anyway, wasting everyone's time. They should discuss it on the talk page. Sending something to AFD should be the last option, never the first. And people that do drive-by tagging usually don't bother to explain what they see as the problem, or actually helping with the article, they just wasting everyone's time. You see tags that have been around for years, and simply ignored, they right up top, just messing up what the article looks like. The Wikipedia Foundation isn't likely to change things, since they haven't done so yet. And Wales actually makes more money when people give up on Wikipedia and start editing over at his Wikia instead. Dream Focus 15:23, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Several people point the finger at a founder or the foundation-- but is this really the answer? My instinct is that the foundation has been very attentive to the editor retention issue.

"And Wales actually makes more money when people give up on Wikipedia and start editing over at his Wikia instead." If this is true, then I'm sure the board takes appropriate steps to 'firewall' Jimmy from the decision if he really does have a conflict of interest. --HectorMoffet (talk) 19:43, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

After he created Wikia a very large number of articles started being deleted on Wikipedia for character pages and other things called "fancruft" by some. People who seek this information will find their way to the wikia. I created several wikis over there to preserve information being mindlessly destroyed from Wikipedia, as have others. You can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export and export pages and their entire histories and easily import them over to Wikia. Plus editors who enjoy working on such articles, will be working at Wikia now. They drove them away from Wikipedia to the Wikia and elsewhere by mass destroying all the content they found interesting, not just deleting articles, but taking the ones that remained and removing all the "fancruft" from them to make them as short and boring and pointless as possible. How many people formerly came to Wikipedia to read content that is no longer there, that now go to Wikia instead? They previously had 2 million registered editors over there. User:Dream_Focus#Wikia_is_now_insanely_popular.21 Dream Focus 20:06, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

thank you for the invitation to post here. I don't have the desire to look up all the links, but if you are really interested in the history you can find it.

Last year, a group of four or five long term established administrators decided to delete hundreds of biographical articles just to make biography of living people stricker.

The response was Jim Wales publicly personally thanking one of these administrators, Scott Macdonald for deleting these articles.

On the other hand, read through Jim Wales talk page. When the question arises, he continues to support bitey bulling veteran editors. He fosters these editors.

The long term trend is clear, you will see it if you stick around. Okip 23:25, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]