http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_tal...sions_to_7_days

Doesn't anyone else see the significance?

I missed it Shame no-one brought is up anywhere else much on wiki for most people to see. This will be evil, if someone is having a deletion debate over an article they're attached to, wanting the outcome to be one way or the other, waiting for it to end is a type of agony.

It's already seven days or far more on the French WP though, I think. Unpleasant.

I put it on CENT, Village Pump and WT:Deletion policy. For a relatively minor change, that should be sufficient.

"Evil"??? Please. Although it is unpleasant to see your baby suffer through an AfD, that's life on the wiki.

I think the major argument in favor was that people who might only see the discussion on the weekend would have a chance to save an article. More time = more likely to find an editor with time to save it I thought I was going to vote against, but once I looked at some of the arguments, I agreed with it. Nice to see that at least some decisions can be made on WP.

Oh ok not 'evil' just not very nice lol. The weekend thing is a good point.

It was my principal argument! Not sure why this is in the BLP subforum, unless there was some significance to particular individual?

where should it be? The general Articles forum?

It's damaging to BLPs to leave their deletion debates open longer.

Seems pointless to me. AFDs don't get much attention as it is, frequently getting relisted. The ones that do get attention are the ones that people advertise, and additional days aren't needed for those.

Of course, seven days allows everyone to participate, including those who only edit one day a week (if any such people really exist).

So, I guess it really doesn't matter. I lean toward waste of time, but I don't really care.

If a BLP is so damaging that an extra two days of existence can cause significant harm... blank it, and say why you did, as part of the nomination process. Or just delete it outright rather than nominating.

I have blanked prodded articles with a link to the contributions history for BLPvios before, and no one objected. Perhaps we should make that standard practice for BLPs?

I had a friend recently who tried to write a Wikipedia article only for it to be deleted under "CSD#A7". By the time he got the message about the deletion and needing to put a "hold on" tag on the doggone thing, an administrator deleted the article. He didn't even get two hours, let alone five or seven days.

Needless to say, he was disappointed. Had it been a BLP article, an immediate deletion would have been understandable, but for an obscure website? Can't you guys give new articles a few days of gestation before "baleeting" them if they have no BLP concerns?

And before people start telling me about "AFD" and "DRV", Wikipedians need to realize that 99% of people and new editors do not understand Wiki-speak. I tried to explain "notability" (in Wiki-terms) and "reliable sources" and such, but that didn't go down too well. Too much frustration and too much bureaucracy for him to fight for the article. Then again, it has happened before.



Returning to BLP concerns, I told my friend that if his website does get on Wikipedia, then he'll lose control of its content. In fact, he'll be dissuaded (if not banned) from editing the article about his site. Eventually, a section on the "site owners" would be written and goodness knows what BLP nightmares he could get into.

The best advice I had for him was to stay away from Wikipedia.

The Joy on his soapbox

This forum was created to be protected from Google to protect the victims of BLPs. Threads such as this should really be in the General Discussion forum, because if they stay here they don't get anywhere near as many viewers.

Okey dokey!

Going from 5 days to 7 probably won't make much difference in the number of articles kept vs. deleted, will it? It'll just allow more time for canvassing, which of course can go either way.

Probably not a bad idea overall, though, again assuming that clearly defamatory stuff is blanked in advance. (Or they could always enable _NOINDEX_ for mainspace article pages... )

I could be wrong, but wouldn't it increase the possibility of the article being kept? Seems to me that the longer you wait the more likely it is that someone will start claiming it deserves an article.

I also think that the longer an RfA stays open the more likely it is it will fail.

I think AfDs tend towards deletion and RfAs tend towards promotion, but the longer they are left open, the greater the possibility that someone will show up and either make a convincing argument against or discover it and canvass like mad.

BLP AfDs in my experience lean heavily towards keeping the article - the effect I anticipate on BLP articles specifically is a shift towards "no consensus" rather than keep by increased participation.

Might have no effect at all, of course, but in that case, it doesn't matter.

Best Advice Of The Day.

(Ignored by all and sundry, as usual.)

Interesting proposal. My articles typically get deleted much faster, and it doesn't take any kind of consensus to delete them either.

I've been on the fence about this in the past, and I think I've come to the conclusion that they did make the right call here. This, more than anything, would establish the "please whisper..." approach (as GBG calls it) as common practice. Discussion pages are something of a necessary evil (and, like this forum, individual statements are attributed to particular - even if pseudonymous - individuals, rather than appearing as part of a collaboratively, semi-opaquely edited "article"; and a talk page is hard to mistake for an encyclopedia)

But an article - if it shouldn't be on search engines, it shouldn't exist, full stop. I think that if noindex were enabled for articles it would even cause articles to be kept that would otherwise be deleted, on the grounds that "oh, we can just noindex it" - consider also that a BLP is likely to be found by someone looking for information on the subject even if it's not found via search engines - some people look in Wikipedia before they look on a search engine.

As for putting it in the CSD tag (it may still be there) - well, that looks like a nice idea on paper, but google will likely not be any quicker in picking up the added tag than in picking up the deletion itself.

I generally don't accept this Out of Sight, Out of Mind philosophy either, certainly not as a long-term solution to anything.

However we can reverse this statement too. If we aren't sure whether it should exist (i.e it is currently listed on AFD to decide this question) perhaps it shouldn't be on search engines?

There would be some practical benefit and no real downside to adding the "noindex" code to the AFD template so that articles aren't indexed while nominated for AFD.

Just thinking out loud here but maybe a big bold-lettered message saying "This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy." can reflect just as poorly on the subject as the article content, more so except in the worst cases.


Yes, and that would include me—except when I'm, you know, looking for Reliable Sources (to work on an article which I've found already does exist). Of course if the other sites I'm looking for have applied "noindex" willy-nilly I'm screwed.