% AfD Discussions (draft)
% Michael Stone
% March 16, 2011

## Greetings

This is a short essay on some surprises that I recently unravelled on Wikipedia
that caused me considerable stress over the past two years until I figured out
what was going on.

You see, my main exposure to Wikipedia during this period of time came from
"[articles for deletion]" (AfD) discussions -- specifically, from AfD
discussions on obscure programming languages articles like Nemerle, Factor,
Alice, Cat, and Pure, which I was referred to by [programming.reddit.com],
which is a popular news site in my field.

[articles for deletion]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion
[programming.reddit.com]: http://programming.reddit.com

## What does an AfD Discussion look like?

Two years ago, when I looked at my first AfD discussion, here's what I saw:

I saw a [forest] of remarks, some short and some lengthy, most of which were
prefixed with a bolded word of the form "Keep", "Delete", or "Comment".

As I read further, I learned that these bolded words are commonly called
["votes"].

Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that these "votes" are not counted
and, worse, that (potentially partisan) efforts to raise "voter turnout" are
actively discouraged!

[forest]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(graph_theory)
["votes"]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:AfD_header

## How do people talk about AfD Discussions?

When I tried to learn more, I discovered that AfD discussions are closed
["based on community consensus"]["consensus"].

However, this left me even more confused than before!

You see, I'm passingly familiar with (Quaker-style) consensus-based
decision-making and, one of the things that I've learned about it is that it

  * considers all participant's views,
  * tries to accomodate minority views,
  * does not value some members' perspectives more than other members'
    perspectives,

Unfortunately, the AfD discussions seem to have none of these characteristics!
Instead, AfD discussions routinely discard participant's views when those views
are deemed to be ill-formed, uninformative, illogical, or when the views are
presented by users who are not editors-in-good-standing.

In any case, as a result of these contradictory pieces of evidence, I
concluded, in the gentle words of a dear friend, that Wikipedia governance (at
least so far as article deletion was concerned) "was some bizarre sham and that
[I] clearly was not going to be able to figure out what these crazies were
trying to achieve..."

["consensus"]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion

## How do people really talk about AfD discussions?

Next, if you read further into the [guidelines for deletion discussions]["rough
consensus"], you may eventually learn that AfD discussions are closed by an
IETF-style "rough consensus".

Unfortunately, as will surprise none of you by now, this claim is also deeply
misleading. You see, as it happens, I am passingly familiar with IETF-style
rough consensus and, unlike AfD discussions:

  * the consensus decisions made by IETF WGs are generated over long periods of
    time -- sometimes, months to years, 

  * IETF Working Groups are led by an "area director" (AD) who decides when
    consensus is reached, and these ADs are fairly static and well-known people
    to the participants in the working group,

  * for the most part, everyone participating in an IETF WG knows everyone else
    and they further know that, mostly, they're all going to be working
    together for years to come, and

  * finally, and perhaps most tellingly, the arguments that are advanced in
    IETF WGs are intended to be based on topical expertise!

["rough consensus"]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Deletion_discussion

## How should we explain AfD discussions?

So how should we explain AfD discussions?

*As lawsuits.*

Here's why. As with the law:

  * good arguments are those which are made with reference to pre-established
    Guidelines (viz. pleadings, motions) but this is not apparent from the
    outside and

  * non-lawyers often hurt themselves when they argue their
    own suits and

  * the decisions are handed down by a presiding Admin who personally weighs
    the presented arguments, evidence, and votes in order to decides the
    outcome of the discussion.

## Going forward...

Maybe someone actually *involved* in Wikipedia could help other people see
these things.  Dear reader, maybe that can be you?

Through my own exploration, there's one fewer confused Wikipedia reader in the
world; hopefully now that I've written this, there can be a few fewer.


<!--
## How do experienced Wikimedians talk about AfD Discussions?

Now, as some of you may know, I've lived with [SJ Klein] for the last several
years and, as 
I tried asking SJ, who patiently explained something I didn't quite understand.
Eventually I thought it would be courteous to try to understand it myself. So this
is what I've figured out:

As a result, I concluded that I had been misled!

[SJ Klein]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sj

## Other confusions...

While unraveling the process, I found that there were some words used in AfD
discussions that had surprising meanings. (Naively, I presumed these words
meant the first definition in the dictionary, or the meaning that I knew as a
native speaker of English.) (except that not all the examples here are
definition confusions, which is fine, but means that this paragraph needs to be
adjusted.)

  * Editors' opinions matter more than non-editors'.

  * "Notability" means "of lasting value to the world", not "worthy of note".

  * "Reliability" is only judged by the presence of edited secondary sources.
    The standards of reliability within your field are irrelevant.
    ^
    |
    v
  * Original research is not topical expertise.

  * Wikipedia is not intended to be "the sum of human knowledge".

-->