Forum:Revenge of the Encyclopedic Standards - man your battle stations

Some of us have been thinking recently. Yes, I know. Thinking? Here? On SWF? That’s unheard of in the realm of super cool mega Grievous Mary Sue spinoffs and uber cool Jedi savior and Sith destroyer awesome bad guy people! Nevertheless, we have been thinking quite a bit about something. That something has to do with the fact that this wiki is, for lack of a better terminology, filled with suck and fail. You know it. I know it. Even knows it! The fact is, this wiki is littered with garbage. And no, you can’t cite me for personal attacks there, because I’m not citing anyone specific.

At this point in the great span of time that I’m taking up from your day, you’re proposal wondering something – uh, what’s he going on about? Is this just another rant about how certain things are “@#$% horseshit”? No, it’s not. My longwinded introduction is actually leading to something important. This something has been nearly four years in the making. This something is going to be blow your mind away.

This something is the epic mass deletion of our garbage articles. - Brandon Rhea (talk) (contribs) 00:41, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

The idea
Now what do I mean by this? Well, I’m not talking about deleting articles with stupid storylines. That just wouldn’t be fair or objective. After all, canon has some  too, but Leeland Chee and Wookieepedia, regrettably, aren’t blasting that information from existence. If an author writes a storyline that we all deem to be terrible, but has perfect grammar, perfect spelling, perfect everything else, etc. then it would stay. It’s the unfortunate reality of “imagination is more important than knowledge” and “write what you want because you want to”.

So how do we determine if an article gets bahleeted? Basically, it needs to fail a significant amount of our policies. If an article just has a few spelling errors here and there, then it wouldn’t be deleted. That’s just absurd. I’m talking things like, well, this. No offense to the author, but it’s rattled with POV errors, grammar errors, spelling errors and every error you can possibly think of. It comes down to spelling, grammar, POV, structure, formatting, etc. Basically, take storyline out of the mix, and what you have left is whether or not something fits encyclopedic standards and the standards of the Manual of Style and other relevant policies.

The execution
Alright, so here’s what I’m proposing. Over the next few weeks (I’d say about four weeks/one month would be good), any user who is interested will use the Special:Random feature (also shown as the “Random page” button) to look for articles that meet the “fail” criteria. Depending on what the issue(s) is/are, they will tag the article with a template that I have created here. This template would likely be called something like MassDelete if this whole thing is approved. HOWEVER, other tags would need to be added as well. Tags would be things such as:


 * CleanUp
 * Fanonify
 * NPOV
 * Intro
 * Onlyinfobox
 * Tense

I’m sure there are more that I’m forgetting, since those are just off the top of my head, but I trust that you get the idea. Anyway, once MassDelete and one or more of those tags is put onto an article, it’s subject to deletion. If someone objects to the tagging of the article, they can contact the person who tagged it and they can work it out together. They can call in a neutral administrator to help them decide whether it remains tagged or if it becomes untagged.

After this one month process is over, we would put out a general wiki-wide announcement saying that authors of all tagged articles have TWO MONTHS to correct the issues in their articles. Once they correct the issues (assuming they do), they need to present their corrections to the person who tagged their article. If that person and AT LEAST TWO OTHER USERS are satisfied with the corrections, the article will be untagged and will NOT be deleted. However, if the satisfactory corrections are not made at the end of those two months, the article will be deleted. No ifs, ands or buts about it. I also strongly suggest that we don’t have a restoration page like we did with the category deletions in the summer of 2007 – adding a category after an article is restored is a hell of a lot different than rewriting an entire article after it’s restored.

I would very much like for a few thousand articles to be deleted in this mass deletion. We all know that there are thousands upon thousands of articles out there that would qualify for deletion under this proposal, so let’s just get rid of them. This will put the quality of our wiki leaps and bounds above the quality of today. Look at what we accomplished with bringing some credibility to the good articles and featured articles. We don’t let garbage through there anymore, so garbage shouldn’t be allowed to remain anywhere on SWF in general. It’s time to take a stand. Not only that, but while some people will always be opposed to the idea of fanon in general, it’ll also go a long way in terms of PR, perception and credibility for our wiki.

The future
One of the questions I would ask were someone else proposing this was how we would work to make sure these same types of articles don’t just get recreated, or new articles with the same problems get created. In terms of the former, if an article is recreated and no changes have been made, that’s an automatic deletion. That’s just gaming the system and disrupting the wiki to make a point. Now, in terms of making sure it doesn’t happen with newer articles, that’s actually really easy.

Considering we’re going to basically be clearing out maintenance categories like Articles to be cleaned up, Articles to be fanonified, Articles with the wrong tense, etc., those categories will have a blank slate. This affords us the opportunity to clear all of those categories out every month or every two months on a regular basis. Everything in there is already in violation of the Manual of Style, so why not enforce our policies by regularly deleting the stuff in there? Makes sense to me. We just need to be a tad more liberal in our tagging of these articles, aka. tag them more and do something about them more so than we are now.

The epilogue
Yes, this is a radical new idea, but it’s a necessary one. If a step like this isn’t taken, we’re never going to be able to improve the quality of this wiki. As I said, “write what you want because you want to” only covers stories – ideas like that don’t translate to “write with crappy spelling, poor formatting, lots of POV and general encyclopedic failures because you want to”. We need to be a little more strict about this.

Look, it’s all well and good that we want to be as inclusive as possible. Some members of this wiki have, for quite some time, wanted to include as much as possible, but that unfortunately has led to a neglect in the quality of the encyclopedic nature of this wiki. Sure, we can never actually be an encyclopedia since the point of this wiki is basically to come here and make up whatever you want, but we can, must and should enforce basic encyclopedic guidelines such as spelling, grammar, NPOV, structure, formatting, etc. Write a terrible storyline if you want, just make sure that it’s up to snuff in terms of standard encyclopedic conventions. If you don’t like that, Wikia has decided to be much more lenient in their wiki creation process, aka. go make your own wiki where this sort of thing is enforced. We’ll look forward to welcoming you back when it crashes and burns.

So that’s my proposal. - Brandon Rhea (talk) (contribs) 00:41, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

P.S. Do NOT turn this into a giant forum thread with twelve different discussion headings. That is NOT what this is for. If you want to do that, start another forum. If you do it, I’ll remove everything from here and put it in another forum. I’m just getting sick of topics turning into these giant consensus discussions that solve nothing and serve no purpose other than to derail a discussion and produce no results due to the entire thing being one confusing mess.

Vote to approve
Users might meet the requirements of the voting policy to cast a vote in this section.

Support

 * IMO, this doesn’t really need a vote to approve since this is all routed in policies (aka, if you’re opposed to this, you’re basically opposed to the enforcement of our policies and had better come up with an alternate solution and/or new policy proposals), but since this is such a radical new idea I’ve decided to propose it just to be on the safe side and because I know there will be discussion. I know many other users are behind me with this, so this isn’t just my crazy out-there idea. Tl;dr version: “As the proposer.” - Brandon Rhea (talk) (contribs) 00:41, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Sign-up
If you’re interested in helping with the tagging of these articles, sign up here. Bear in mind that just because you sign up here doesn’t guarantee that anything will happen, as whether this moves forward depends upon the Vote to approve section. Should this be approved, please bear in mind the responsibility that putting your name here entails. If you haven't read the proposal thoroughly, I suggest you don't yet sign your name.


 * 1) Brandon Rhea (talk) (contribs) 00:41, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Discussion
Please keep all discussion in this section. Please remember to be civil. - Brandon Rhea (talk) (contribs) 00:41, 14 April 2009 (UTC)