Talk:Federal Aid Highway Act of 1938

Another False Start Move, no activity for over a year, insufficient content or context to encourage editing by others, likely candidate for removal according to our article inclusion policy. David Finn 12:25, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

It seems that the Article Inclusion Policy, as written, is for use by editors. Russell D. Jones 17:28, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Tell that to the Editorial Council, it wouldn't be the only misleading policy page. Those were the criterea for what can be nominated. For who can nominate you have to go to a different page. David Finn 17:54, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

R-2011-032 (The resolution you just pointed to) is to nominate an article for removal. Under R-2011-032, "any citizen" can request that the article be moved to a different place in CZ (most likely to user space, or blanking the page or portions of it). So the content under -032 is still around, somewhere (in "history" or in a different NameSpace), it's just not in main-space. -032 specifically notes that deletion will be a rare option. However, under R-2010-011, I as an editor can request deletion of an article (a power not granted to authors in the resolution, although authors may argue for/against deletion once it has been proposed). -011 empowers editors to remove delete the rubbish permanently (and I know that "deletion" in the MW software isn't really permanent either). At least this seems to be the intention of the language... Both resolutions note who can nominate. Russell D. Jones 22:29, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Fun interpretation Russell, good luck with that!

I guess during your investigation into the removal process you discovered the real criterea for removing articles? It says that articles can be removed when they are substandard. Personally I find the word somewhat perjorative and incomprehensive, but I guess that is just me. If you and the EC want to use that terminology then who am I to argue?

This article appears to be substandard. It was definitely substandard a year ago when created, it has been obviously substandard during this last year of inactivity on the article, the addition of subpages has only slightly redressed the balance, and it would be great if we could harness that investigative zeal to reading CZ:Article mechanics as the list of similar articles is growing all the time! David Finn 07:28, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

This is what Peter Schmitt of the EC says about the above:

"Inclusion policy" was a replacement of "maintainability", and explicitly for use by Editors. "Removal" implements (an extended version of) this regulation -- something David uses to demand vehemently -- that can be used by any Citizen (and that has already been used by him).

Thus a deletion request according the inclusion policy would be a special case: An explicit deletion request made by an Editor. (Moreover, the discussion of "inclusion policy" shows that the techincal meaning of "deletion" was left undecided.)

Hayford Peirce 20:33, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Hayford, you are right except for the vehement part. Nobody was asking for deletion. Nobody was even asking for removal. My purpose in pointing Russell to the old deletion page was purely to show the criterea for what Citizendium calls substandard articles as they are not defined by the resolution covering removals. David Finn 21:48, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

So your only purpose was provocation, David?

Please note that the word "substndard" is not used in the two Regulations you cite. Please note further that "insufficient" is defined by EC:R-2011-001. Of course, any quality classification includes -- to a certain degree -- a subjective factor. --Peter Schmitt 23:44, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

The article content/inclusion issue generated a great deal of discussion; there were amendments, and we recognised at the time that further refining would be necessary. You can read Martin Baldwin-Edwards's comments at EC:PR-2010-008. The concept of 'maintainability' alone was not serving us well enough; there were always questions about its definition, and about what to do with work that didn't come up to scratch in any reasonable way.

CZ desperately needed a better understanding; and we thought it best to start *somewhere*.

Aleta Curry 01:32, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

p.s. I don't think it was the idea (at least it wasn't mine) to use any of this to simply troll the wiki looking for incomplete or unformatted articles to chuck out, (would we have anything left on the wiki if we discarded everything that was incomplete?) and it certainly wasn't to be used to embarass people. It was a point of departure for deciding how to handle work that Editors (and Writers) thought was really, really poor. Aleta Curry 01:39, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

As usual, Aleta, a very nice analysis and summary. Thanks! Hayford Peirce 02:39, 17 December 2011 (UTC)