MediaWiki talk:Deletereason-dropdown

I'd prefer to change "Not notable" to "Not famous" or even "Not yet famous" as less absolute statements about a person or work's notability. ~ Kalki 12:45, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

"Not yet notable" but feel free to change it again (famous may be a judgement too far?) --Herby ^{talk thyme} 12:48, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Someone may be "famous" but have said nothing worth reporting. Our criteria should be "quotable" not "notable", so I'd say "not notably quotable". BD2412 T 22:43, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I find that a tongue twister although I don't have to say it! "Not yet quotable"? And of course as an admin BD2412 you are very welcome to change it :) Cheers --Herby ^{talk thyme} 09:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

The requirement for a subject is both "notable" and "quotable". "Quotable" is highly subjective; a better approach to deletion is to describe specific deficiencies that we can justify (e.g., "not original", "not pithy", "inane"), but that's really for specific quotes, not typically used for deleting entire subjects. Any subject whose "quotes" aren't "quotable" ends up with a quoteless article, which needs no further justification for deletion.

"Notable", however imperfect, is the standard succinct expression of the concept that Wikimedia projects do not collect material from everyone who believes themselves to be worthy of inclusion in a global encyclopedia, quote compendium, document collection, newspaper, etc. — even if many believe them to be. If a subject has quoteworthy quotes that have been previously published in a reliable source, we can make a much less subjective case for "notability" and therefore for inclusion. (This doesn't avoid the need for quoteworthiness, but it's a critical first hurdle.)

Sorry to be a wet blanket here, but there are always people who will support just about anything as worthy of inclusion. One of the essential means by which we significantly reduce the acrimony of selective inclusion is to require reliable, published sources to demonstrate that the world has already judged the material significant. That is the essence of the wiki-meaning of "notable". We choose other terms only at the risk of generating even more misunderstandings and conflict than we already have. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 10:50, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

"Not sufficiently notable" seems to me to be the best phrase I can come up with for this. It sums up the situation succinctly, and indicates the general policies assumed to apply without making an implicitly absolute remark about a person or work, nor elaborating on all the variant criteria by which people or works are found to be "sufficiently notable." ~ Kalki 13:33, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

I like that suggestion and have changed it accordingly but this is a wiki.....:) --Herby ^{talk thyme} 13:50, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm, well what we could do is set up a project page with some basic notability guidelines, and then make the dropdown provide a link to that page. BD2412 T 16:38, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps Wikiquote:Notability is the best place to direct folks. We should probably work on making it a policy rather than an essay. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:33, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

I've linked to that for now (better than nothing at all), and have similarly linked to the appropriate policy pages on personal attacks, copyright violations, and vandalism. Cheers! BD2412 T 03:41, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks to all who worked on the creation and expansion of this MediaWiki page. I'm finding BD2412's VfD piped entry particularly useful. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:02, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Classification

How about introducing classification we have, SD, VFD (and PROD if appropriate), instead of general "common delete reasons"?

We can include these labels again ... like "SD: test".

I found Wikinews one useful. Please give a look to theirs n:MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown. --Aphaia 12:24, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

I like Wikinews's list very much, as it gives links to the policies. Theirs are basic policy links, but we can do better for speedy deletions. By using Deletereason entries like this:

• [[WQ:SD#G1|Nonsense]]

we would have terse, descriptive prefixes with very short links, minimizing the edit-summary space used. I concede that the "G1" and "A4" nomenclature is commonplace, and despite the (so far) theoretical problems of future renumbering, clearly has benefits in this situation. (In fact, if we use these automatically linked dropdown reasons, they eliminate much of my concern from 2006 that we admins might be too cryptic in our edit summaries.) I've just added the 2-character internal links to WQ:SD#The cases (leaving the descriptive links in place, too) to make this possible, should we choose to do it. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 13:08, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

[[WQ:SD#G1|Nonsense]] way looks nice. --Aphaia 17:17, 19 December 2007 (UTC)