Just wanted to throw this out there - do you think the NFD Guardian might be more effective if there was no way to see who’s already voted? I think it might be possible that people who are less familiar with the deletion policies are often swayed by how everyone else has voted - I know I frequently find myself voting to keep articles that have got maybe 3 delete votes already because they don’t actually violate the policies or can be saved by a very quick cleanup. I think it’s all too easy to see a badly formatted article with two delete votes on it and just click “delete” because it’s the easy option. Also, what are the current weightings for delete/keep? Does it always require an admin to “seal the deal” on a deletion? I think the Guardian is a really powerful tool which allows a much more streamlined and, in some ways, fair decision to be made on deletions, but I think its real power lies in the admins, who are, after all, the only people expected to be properly familiar with the deletion policies, using it as a labour-saving tool. All too often I think non-admins (not to discredit the amazing amount of work they put into using the tool) are too delete-happy with those buttons. Thoughts?
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To my knowledge, it does take at least 1 administrator to actually delete an article. There can be one booster to delete and the article will be deleted/merged when you as an admin agree… or there can be 4 boosters’ names on it and it’ll still be in the queue and deleted/merged when an admin agrees. What if the voting knowledge was kept as is for administrators? There was talk amongst a few of us at Wikimania about how we do tend to like how certain people vote (I’ll throw out Dave and Teresa as my favorites) and vote along with them.
I definitely find myself agreeing with Dave in particular, but only after I’ve looked over the article myself. Surely the fact that he’s voted should make no difference to my vote, however, in a system that works on a majority vote (ish)? The situation that I keep finding is, say, 3 votes for deletion from boosters, and one for keep by Dave, and I vote for keep, at which point the article is kept and the 3 other votes had no sway in it. Those votes are definitely helpful in other situations, but I can’t help feeling that a blind vote would be more fair. I suppose we could keep it as it is for admins, but I’m not sure I see the benefit. It all depends on whether we embrace the fact that this new tool is a completely different form of consensus to the old system. Personally, I think it’s much more effective because we’re actually getting some votes now, whereas, in most cases, it just used to come down to one admin’s judgement.
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That’s actually what I meant. I was just saying that certain people such as him tend to have the same opinions as me and knows the deletion policy better than a really new booster whom jumped on the NFD Guardian bandwagon and starts voting for deletion on articles that really just basically needs a touch-up/can be helped on without a straight deletion.
Oh I wasn’t accusing you of not looking!
I think we’re both on the same lines, just my last comment was a bit garbled now I read it back… do you think a “blind vote” is a good idea?
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I could see it as an advantage. It really boils down to how that specific booster/administrator feels about the article, the content, and any discussion page messages regarding the support/oppose of deletion anyways.
Are you sure you’ve got the right Dave?I’ll admit to disregarding current votes and only considering policy and Discussion Page votes. It might be useful for non-admins to see admin votes (when we get in first), but I’m not totally against some sort of blindness. Un-blind if an admin vote is sitting?
How vain is that? I assumed you were talking about me.
We definitely were talking about youPerhaps we should have tagged you @Davecrosby
in case your ears were burning! I’m not sure I’m keen on the whole one-way-only thing… I think it would work well if nobody knew who’d voted which way… I can’t really see the benefit of anybody being able to see.
We need to re-read the introductory forum thread, I’m sure it explained the visibility reasoning. I’ll dig it out later if someone else doesn’t.
This is the best thread I could find, and it doesn’t mention reasoning for this as far as I can see: http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/comment/17220/
Another issue I’ve just thought of, although this is widening the scope of this discussion a bit, is the number of articles that are “kept”, despite being in a bad way, without being tagged. These articles slip through NAB with an NFD, then get “kept” and completely lost in the system. It would be good if, when an article is “kept”, the reviewer is prompted to add a {{cleanup}} or similar, perhaps even with a nice simple tick-box?
Right, maybe we can have @Krystle
comment on visibility. I wondered if Edit to Save could be used to add tags before voting, but it always crashes for me. But yes, I’m guilty of thinking that a tag ought to be left then am taken away by the tool.
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Just in case you feel slighted, Dave, we were all talking about you at work today while we were placing a concrete sidewalk in 102 degree heat, but only in the context that you didn’t invite any of us to G.B. for the Olympics… I see the deletions, and really, it is a great improvement in managing a very difficult part of wikiHow’s process, but for whatever reason (bandwidth requirements, I think), I can seldom participate using the tool. There still appears to me less community involvement just using votes, as opposed to discussionpage posts, but I doubt Tom would ever be pursuaded to come back to manage the whole NFD load as he did for years.
@Davecrosby
Edit to save always crashes for me too… I’ve resorted to middle clicking the article title and opening it in a new tab if I can see the vote’s going to sway in a “keep” direction. I suppose that wouldn’t be possible if I couldn’t see the votes…
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On keeping the votes public, there wasn’t any specific reasoning for it as far as I can remember. It was an extension of the system that existed before, where people could read other people’s votes on the discussion page, so nothing really changed there. As was pointed out before, an admin vote is always required for deletion. Ultimately the premise for that is we trust admins to have the “final call” where deletion is involved, and that includes not voting with the herd, so to speak. Personally, I like being able to see others’ votes. Sometimes I get a bit jaded and veer towards the deletionist side (happens to the best of us!) then I see someone else whose judgement I respect vote for keeping, and it makes me pause and give the article some extra consideration. I’m worried, though, about “edit to save” not working properly. @Busbyhead
and @Davecrosby
what browser & version are you using?
Windows Vista, Chrome 20.0 I could paste the error message here tomorrow or start a Bug Report thread.
@Davecrosby
- I’ve created a thread here to keep it separate from this discussion. http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/4323/nfd-guardian-edit-to-save-not-working
@Krystle
I can see your point there -perhaps it’s a case of “if it’s not severely broken, don’t fix it”. But I do think that a way to add a tag easily or at least a link to the article after it’s been “kept” in the sidebar would be very useful - preferably in a pop-up box so people don’t get forgetful
