Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2006 September 7

Full reviews may be found in this page history. For a summary, see Wikipedia:Deletion review/Recently concluded (2006 September)

7 September 2006

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Esoteric programming languages

I do not think this "pseudo-AfD" was closed correctly, with all due respect to User:Yanksox who made a heroic effort. The AfD was arranged in a very peculiar fashion:

1. Descriptions of a large number of "esoteric programming languages", only some of which were actually nominated for deletion
2. Section for general comments on deletion or keeping these articles
3. Individual entries for some of the languages (about two dozen of them)

What happened was that a lot of editors—a majority, though not an overwhelming one—voted some variation of "keep most" in the "general comment" section. However, a small number of editors (i.e. four) voted "delete" in every individual entry, or in nearly every one (all of them also voted delete in the "general comments" area). A few individual entries had other votes, but basically it was this "block of four" for all of them.

On closing, it appears that Yanksox went through the individual entries, more-or-less ignoring the much larger number of editors who made general comments, and roughly counted votes in each entry. In most of them, that was 4/1 for delete (I cast a similar "procedural keep" in each entry, since I did not think "AfD en masse" was proper procedure). A small number of the entries had extra keep comments, and a couple of those general led to "keep" for the entry generally; but all the block-of-four entries were closed as "delete".

I don't particularly disagree with any specific result of all this, I just think the process is wholly and fundamentally wrong. Not least because a number of the programming language articles closed as "delete" had themselves survived AfD in the past... in fact, the nominator specifically stated that he did the mass nomination to avoid "interested" supporters of specific language articles. LotLE×talk 15:36, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

• Aarrgh, what a mess We need to find a way to deal with mass deletion nominations. The test case followed by list approach isn't good, as it is subject to biased selection of test cases. The mass nomination with single discussion approach sometimes ends up with trainwrecks, as it did at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Caridee English, and now people are grumbling about a mass nomination with split discussions. Since it is legitimate by process to do a mass nomination with a single dicussion, it is absolutely legitimate to do a mass nomination with individual discussions. I therefore disregard all of the "keep all" general comments based on process issues, as I don't see a process problem. (Some of these were second (and later) opinions by the same person, and hence should be struck anyway.) Keep/Delete Most with no specification of most should be interpreted as Keep/Delete All. I then have the following general opinions: Keep All: 5 Delete All: 3 Delete most (all non-bold): 2 Delete most (all without a non-procedure based keep vote below): 1 Delete most (all except where the same user opined keep below): 1. (The nominator opined individually, so is not included in the preceeding count.) As the K1:D4 nose-counts below all qualify for all three delete most types, I'll summarize the general discussion as K5:D7. Below, the K1 is a procedural complaint that was not legitimate, so should be disregarded also. The arguments are generally weak; in my eyes stronger for deletion but not enough so to be very significant, so I'll ignore that. We then have a K5:D11 outcome among those opining on the merits of the articles, legitimate consensus for deletion. That is enought for me to endorse the closures of the group with no prejudice against individual DRVs for individual closures. GRBerry 21:00, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
• What GRBerry said. Most were unequivocally delete-worthy, please list the ones you think were not. Guy 22:26, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
• Endorse general process, individual languages (especially those with prior "keep" AfD's) should be reviewed individually here. ~ trialsanderrors 22:43, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
• Endorse process. And I will support restoration of any individual languages brought to DRV with a decent argument. Themindset 22:46, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
• Endorse closure. The introduction above says it all - Yanksox undertook a heroic effort in what was a complexly organized AfD. I doubt any admin who tackled that one would come out unscathed for doing so. As for the AfD nomination itself, I feel for the nominator. There is no "good" way to do a nomination for a group of articles that are all closely related and are subject to the same considerations. It's stated at How to list multiple related pages for deletion, "However, for group nominations it is often a good idea to only list one article at afd and see how it goes, before listing an entire group." That is nice in theory, but it has happened where the "test" case goes through and then the follow up comes to a completely different and inconsistent result. That only encourages bulk nominations, so as to avoid inconsistent results. The downside to bulk listing is that there may always be a reason to oppose the AfD because of the bundling of nominations. Given those problems, and the task facing the closing admin, I don't see any problem with how this proceeded or how it was closed. No prejudice to anyone wanting to ask for a DRV on a specific article that was included in this lot. Agent 86 23:49, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
• Endorse. This was a heroic listing, and closing was always going to be difficult. I think the listing was excellent - just bundling them together is almost invariably problematic, and listing seperately would have been impractical. --kingboyk 08:29, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
• Endorse general closure, although I have listed Ook! separately above, and we should consider any other individual languages for review if there is a good argument for them. the wub "?!" 12:15, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
• argh! the problem in this case is that most of the language entries were to be merged into list of esoteric programming languages and then have their articles deleted. So the conclusion of delete is appropriate, yes. However the nature of the AfD placed an unusual time pressure on the attempts to merge, in a manner inappropriate for casual volunteer editors. I am looking the have the deleted articles restored to my namespace, so that I can continue the merging process. At the end of this process it will be apparent which languages truely deserve to have articles. LinaMishima 13:41, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
  • If an article is to be merged, it shouldn't be deleted - it should be replaced with a redirect. The edit history of the article being merged is the list of authors required for GFDL compliance. (Although a list of authors in the edit summary would probably suffice, as happens when a category is renamed and deleted). --kingboyk 13:44, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
  • clarification I'd like to clarify that I felt that the closing comment of 'argh' was entirely correct, and the majority of deletions were indeed correct. Any issues lie not with the closing, but with the unusual, special, and unique procedural element in the running of this AfD. The closure was probably valid and I ensdorse it, but not the unusual procedural nature of the AfD LinaMishima
• Overturn - severe procedural problems exist here. For one thing, the overall votes were 8 keep, 7 delete, which means that almost all of the individual languages failed to have a 2/3 margin. For another, the AfD included votes from six months ago when the idea of deleting was being circulated semi-privately. This essentially meant that those in favor of deletion were organized for months, whereas those opposed had a five day window to notice the debate - astonishingly unfair. As for the proper way to handle mass deletion of articles, may I politely suggest "not" is a good start, and "by consulting carefully with the people who contributed them" as a second. AfD is a bad place to try to eliminate substantial parts of a topic's coverage on Wikipedia. Phil Sandifer 17:43, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
• Undelete. This wasn't organized in a way that was going to get a helpful result -- the articles were treated as a group in every way, except that reasons for keeping them (as a group) were seemingly ignored. Aside from that, it's unclear why merging these to a list, which seems like an obviously better solution, was not discussed or addressed. I also agree with LinaMishima's comments on the AFD. Christopher Parham (talk) 19:11, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
• Overturn. I said from the beginning that this was a screwed up AFD. --maru (talk) contribs 19:40, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
• Overturn - I disagree with group AFDs where not all the group are listed in any case. I even more disagree with the way this was done - where there were both general votes and specific votes for the test cases, and disagreement about how the general votes should apply to the specific cases. Matthew Brown (Morven) (T:C) 20:49, 9 September 2006 (UTC) (Don't respond to me that "AFD is not a vote". It is a vote; we shouldn't kid ourselves. It's a vote but with a "we can ignore certain votes" rider.
• Overturn and relist insufficient consensus on all/most. -24.237.22.168 21:59, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
• Overturn Good gravy, what a mess. The combination of group voting and individual voting has left this thing virtually impossible to interpret. Overturn, undelete everything, and then perhaps renominate each one for deletion individually - there are only 61 of these things, doing just two per day will work through the whole list in just one month. Bryan 03:28, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

• A proposal: I think there should be an RfC on "esoteric programming languages" to allow discussion of what may or may not be the criteria for inclusion of these languages, and at the end of that discussion there should be a list of unambiguous dletes, a list of unambiguous keeps, and hopefully a short list of those which require a wider discussion. There is no doubt that most of these languages have no currency, are simply intellectual exercises by a single individual, and many of the articles read like vanity. Guy 09:41, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Little need This is effectively happening already, actually. First step is the reformatting of list of esoteric programming languages into a style which allows more information to be given on each language. Once that's done, those languages which have been significant influences upon other languages (ie, appear in the "Based on" column a lot) should get articles, and we will be able to see which languages have a glut of good references (another reason to give them an article), and which languages actually only ever had the author's homepage and the esolang wiki entry. Most languages will end up either happily merged into the list, or deleted. No need to add any additional process, to be honest. LinaMishima 11:06, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
• Endorse per GRBerry. —Ruud 11:52, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
• Overturn Tlogmer ( talk / contributions ) 10:43, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
• Endorse Two points to make here: first, the closing of the AfD was probably correct; most were closed with consensus, and any that were mislisted can probably be DRVd, and second, this DRV looks to me at the moment like no consensus, default relist, which would be an incredibly bad result as the whole messed-up AfD process would probably be gone through again. I agree that a better process would have been to AfD them a few at a time than the mass nomination, however. --ais523 11:42, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
• Overturn and give Yanksox a beer for his headache, but per LinaMishima we need to just make these redirects if they're going to be merged, for GFDL purposes. Any that absolutely don't get merged in any way can be brought to prod/afd. This was too complex/unorthodox to represent a true consensus process, sorry. -- nae'blis 15:39, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
• Overturn. If I were in Yanksox's position, I would have had no patience for the blatantly inappropriate format of this AfD and simply closed the whole thing as badly-formed without a decision (and I've been there, it sucks, man!). The articles are not sufficiently identical to be included in one big debate, and are not sufficiently different that we can ignore the votes at the top. I say, just undelete all of this, cancel this AfD completely, and new ones can be started. Mangojuice^talk 16:06, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
• Endorse myself I have read this whole discussion, I followed it since it's birth on AfD, and I believe that I have acted in the best fashion that I could. At first, I was ready to speedy close as a possible train wreck, however, I stepped back and watched something real devoulp, I didn't just examine every little discussion, I looked at the whole AfD. The comments on the top regarding deleting or keeping all negatated each other in regards to strength or argument, therefore, the individual discussions helped tip how everything went out. I believe that I did the best thing that I could have done. I also closed this AfD in a somewhat timely fashion, when noone else was willing to take it on, I don't know how long it would have stayed up there if I didn't act. Consensus stretched out and brought the judgement for the whole discussion. It's time we closed this whole case, and move back on to making an encyclopedia. Yanksox 23:47, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
  • comment with regards to the individual discussions, several editors, myself included, did not feel that they had the time availible to properly consider each and every one, and so only commented on the general discussion. But as I've already said, I endorse the closure as being generally proper. That's the problem with this, there's too many here to not have to say 'generally'. I suggest we close this DRV, with an endorse, leaving the restoration of articles to the community itself as it feels the need to, and a recommendation against similar styled AfDs in the future.
• Overturn. The deletion discussion/review mechanisms we use do not give us the authority to violate the terms of our GFDL licensing agreement, and this AFD was a horrible, horrible mess. RFerreira 04:58, 12 September 2006 (UTC)