The Deletion Process at Wikipedia Options

[timbo]

I found an interesting article buried in the footnotes of the Oct. 31, 2011 edition of The Wikipedia Signpost, an academic study dealing with the deletion process at Wikipedia. The pdf for the piece, entitled "Participation in Wikipedia's Article Deletion Processes," by R. Stuart Geiger and Heather Ford of UC Berkeley, is published under a Creative Commons license and is freely available:

http://www.wikisym.org/ws2011/_media/proce...p201-geiger.pdf

Takeaways are that approximately 60% of all deletions at WP over the past 4 years have been done by Administrators as speedy deletions and that "A7: No indication of importance" is overwhelmingly the most commonly-cited reason for the speedy — indicating that such deletions are of generally encyclopedic material.

With respect to the "Articles for Deletion" process, the authors found that AfD debates were dominated by a relatively small number of long-time WP participants and more or less echoed anecdotal evidence that "the deletion process is plagued by highly-nuanced standards and norms, substantial use of jargon and categorization, compartmentalization of related processes, and a significant imbalance between the number of procedurally-oriented administrators and procedurally- unaware newcomers."

The discussion question I have: how big of a problem is this? Is the "A7 Speedy Deletion Criterion" being abused by administrators?

Further: Does the makeup at AfD of experienced editors, apt to spout jargon and sometimes obscure policies and standards, negatively impact the project — or does it add an aspect of quality control that would be lacking if these debates were dominated by newcomers driven by narrow single interests separate from established policy?

t

This post has been edited by timbo:

[Detective]

In an ideal world, the best way to deal with deletions would be to have an expert review panel that could draw on specialists in the subject. You might argue that AfD regulars are sort of an expert panel, though of course like anything to do with WP the experts aren't very expert and specialists get short shrift. It would be nice to debar POV warriors from such discussions, but how could that be done?