1

The NFD guardian list is getting awfully high. There are currently 922 articles on it. Down from about ~950 this morning. http://www.wikihow.com/Special:NFDGuardian I think we’d all be happier knowing that the hundreds of articles that deserve deletion get it sooner rather than later.:slight_smile:Would be great if some Admins and NABers went on a NFD guardian spree.:slight_smile:

2

Yeah, I just discovered that bug too. Maybe that explains why this list is so high. I was able to workaround that bug by changing my options on NFD from “all” to “dup”. And there are plenty of articles in “dup” to keep on working through.:slight_smile:I’ll look into getting a more permanent fix here too.

3

Oh, I had that bug too, so I thought that was one area where everything is all caught up. Oopsie.

4

I’m pretty sure that not putting duplicates in “all” was intentional, it was definitely mentioned that that was the case when they were first put in the NFD guardian, but I don’t remember if a reason was given. The policy regarding duplicates is currently far too lenient to actually get rid of the stuff that needs getting rid of. This leaves people with the choice to bend the rules to get rid of the rubbish, or follow them strictly and keep it. Could we perhaps review our deletion policy regarding duplicates and come up with something that would make it easier to get rid of the many articles that are obviously duplicates but can’t be deleted as such under our currently fairly narrow guidelines?

5

This may be completely incorrect, but this is the way I’m looking at it. If it’s total rubbish and in nfd/dup but not strictly dup by policy: 1. Someone thought it was total rubbish and tagged it. 2. It went through RC patrol with zero changes to improve it. 3. It went through NAB with zero changes to improve it. 4. The author never made any post in the discussion about it or improved it. Then I assume the nfd tag was just incorrect and I’m looking at it more like nfd|inc. Should I change it to nfd|inc and wait a week for the same outcome? (serious question) I just voted against someone else to keep one that actually is technically a dup because both are good, both are old, and both have good discussions and good readership. All of those made me not want to merge tag it either. I’m a REBEL! (Don’t ban me):wink:

6

I don’t like to NFD|dup things that aren’t true dupes, because doing so creates redirects that we will be stuck with forever. But I like to NFD|inc things that are low quality. However, I would be in favor of loosening our NFD policy (ie making it easier to delete stuff), but with a slightly different twist: I would think we could lower our standard for what should get the NFD|inc. If we did that we could delete many low quality / embarrassingly bad articles which currently can’t get deleted. As wikiHow’s quality standard has improved over the years, it makes sense that our standard for what stays on the site should grow higher too. I think we can do that with NFD|inc. WDYT?

7

I think it’s a great idea. We need some way of just getting rid of garbage, so |inc would be good if it were more lenient. It’s also far more polite than nfd|crap. Then we could |inc anything we see in the dup that’s not policy-strict dup but really not worth keeping. Thumb up from me.

8

The NFD guardian could perhaps give three options for duplicates rather than two, so instead of keep and delete, we could have keep, redirect, delete. The redirect could be used for articles that are exactly the same, delete for the slightly looser interpretation and “bad” titles (spelling mistakes, smiley faces, excessive punctuation etc).

I could definitely see that working (and it would certainly be nice to have a better way of getting rid of bad quality articles!) but how easy would it be to get people out of the habit of putting stub or nfd|dup tags on bad articles?

9

I think that could be fairly effective. A small group of people mostly the super NABers like @Ttrimm and mega admins like @DaveCrosby do the majority of our NFD nominations. If we can encourage them to NFD|inc low quality articles more often, we can make a good amount of progress.

10

BTW, I looked into the bug reported above. Turns out it isn’t a bug! We have around 600 articles currently stuck in NFD|dup! ANd you can’t vote on the NFD|dup listings unless you make your settings in NFD|Guardian explicitly on NFD dup. So to work this list down, we are all going to need to turn that setting on.

11

Oooohhhh… Been busted !!!

12

Busted? You mean worshiped!

13

There are two more guardian problems. 1. One user seems to have voted the exact opposite of another user on most everything, making it so we need 5 (or 6?) votes to delete something and more than two to keep.:frowning:So it’s not something a few of us can whip through. One or both may have had the purest of intentions, but doing that creates a problem. 2. Changing a dup to an inc does not remove it from the dup queue. That should be a bug but may be “working as intended.” There are titles that show up with the recommendation to merge them with the article “inc.” Since one user has marked a number of them to delete, it would take a lot more keeps to push them back out and re-tag them so they don’t leave redirects.

14

@JackHerrick , would we be able to “officially” widen the speedy delete policy for advertising spam as well? It seems like wikiHow gets a lot of pure advertisement articles that sit on the website for a long time. Every once in a while I will go through the New Pages list and find 5 or 6 just on the first page. Whenever I see an advertisement that could never become a true article (for instance, a “vacation to ___” article which is just full of hotel promotion links) I speedy delete it, but I know that most people just NFD it for advertising. Most of these articles may have titles that could make a true article, but the content could not be saved in its original state in any way. Here’s a few examples of what I mean. Nothing against the people who NFD’d them, as I know most people do NFD articles like these for advertising, rather than speedying them: http://www.wikihow.com/Electronic-Waste-Recycling-Services-in-Massachusetts http://www.wikihow.com/Visit-Nice-Beaches-in-Skopelos http://www.wikihow.com/Digital-Camera-Shutter-Control

15

Well, stop giving it drugs! Anyway yeah, I had to. But yeah let’s knock out the NFD’s.

16

I speedy them, and have no qualms about it. If you have a doubt, shoot me a message.

17

I deleted the first two, right off. The 3rd one is ‘less spammish’, but is an advertisement. Any thoughts?

18

That battery website has really been spamming up the place. If it isn’t already, it should be blacklisted. The article is unintelligible. I’ll speedy from now on. I was nfd|adv’ing (blanking the website) for a long time because I wasn’t sure if I should save speedy for emergencies.

19

I do as well – not in a way that deprecates {{nfd|not|adv}}, but for things that look like botspam (as opposed to clueless, but otherwise well-intentioned newbies) and have no reasonable prospects of being saved. This is why when photography to maintain the stability of the fuselage, it is also why the shutter speed too slow more easily to make images of the fuzzy reasons. – I would’ve speedied this one too. Translating that from botspam English into people English is no easier than starting it from scratch, at a title starting with a verb.

20

Exactly. I should have pointed out that difference. Thank you.