User talk:ShaneKing/vfd proposal

For a while I was going nuts evaluating VfD discussions, but quickly got burned out on it. Automating the repetitive parts of the process would be great. I've got to disagree with the no inline view though. There needs to be some way of getting a view of the discussion without clicking every single link separately. I don't have a better solution for the "page is just too big" problem, unfortunately. -- Cyrius|✎ 00:19, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'm just worried that vfd is already growing, and if we make it easier to list things, some things that were either being speedily deleted, or not listed will be listed, making things get even bigger. The page is already close to a megabyte of HTML on a typical day, and that's just unacceptable for dialup users.

Perhaps we can do some JavaScript tricks to load discussions on demand, although tht might be somewhat contrversial since the site doesn't make heavy use of javascript at the moment. Or perhaps we could have a summary listing page, then a page with discussions inline for each day, which would at least cut down the size to 20%. If anyone has any better ideas, I'd love to hear them. Shane King 00:36, Nov 24, 2004 (UTC)

Shane, finding a way to discourage borderline speedies is a good thing. Making it easier for deletionists to list articles they disapprove of is not such a good thing. I think you are in all good faith suggesting a technical solution for a policy problem. It would be nice if the listings were like this:

Page listed

Reason for listing

Link to discussion page and voting.

An interested editor could flick down the list quite quickly.Dr Zen 00:59, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

If I was to make an index listing (even as just an option), that would be the kind of thing I'd go for.

As far as a technical solution to a policy problem: people disagreeing about what should and shouldn't be included isn't something anyone is going to be able to make go away. I think the best we can do is make the process as painless as possible so as not to waste any more time than is necessary. The ease of listing cuts both ways: it will be easier to list things, but it will also be easier to unlist things. As it is, you can manually go through and add hundreds of pages, if you have the patience. Even if every single one is kept, someone still has to go through and clean up the mess. At least this way, cleaning up the mess will be easier. People listing things purely for the sake of listing them because it's easy is a social problem, I don't know how we can develop a technical solution to stop that. Shane King 01:37, Nov 25, 2004 (UTC)

I think that giving some people here a hair-trigger method of listing pages is a recipe for disaster, Shane. It is already quite controversial that some can speedy delete whatever they don't like. While I agree with just about everything you say in narrow terms, more broadly I fear that you are providing the technical means to exacerbate the social problem (the solution to war is not necessarily to build better tanks!). You ignore that there is an element among the community that believes that the process should be at least a little painful! Some of us want the listing of hundreds of pages to require patience. There are guys who have declared "crusades" on "fancruft". (Perhaps there could or should be limits on how many pages you can list in a given period, something like that. But at least I think you cannot pretend that the social and technical problems can easily be separated.) Making it easier to unlist things need not, in any case, necessarily sit hand-in-hand with making it easier to list them in the first place.Dr Zen 02:08, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I like the idea, Shane. However, like others, I have my doubts about removing the old inline style of debates. I favour meshing this with Categorized Deletion, although eventually that might not scale either (which is why we probably need the new-and-improved Preliminary Deletion). Johnleemk | Talk 16:41, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)