User:Dpbsmith/articleage

For future use...

Comment on "age" of article. When a reponsible contributor posts an article, it is already ten minutes to a week old. Even my stubbiest stub has seen a couple of clicks of the Preview button. When I'm lazy, which is usually, I hit "save" as soon as it looks OK in preview, then see a few more typos, so, yes, there are often a couple of rapid-fire edits within a minute or two of first appearance. When a borderline article is posted, it doesn't get improved within minutes of posting. It sits around for months and, if we're lucky, someone else improves it later.

I have no doubt that there are some contributors who have every intention of posting a half-decent three-paragraph article, and in order get the psychological kick of creating an article type a couple of sloppy sentences and press save. And who, if left alone, would finish the article within a day or so. But there's no reason why people should do this. It's not a good practice and they should get a gentle slap on the wrist and told in future to get their article up to at least junior-high-school-homework standards in their user area, the sandbox, or elsewhere before putting it into the main namespace.

In the case where an author sees that the article is on VfD and says they are going to improve it, that's completely different and I see no reason not to give them the benefit of the doubt.

If someone wanted to create a technical fix, in the form of a flavor of Newpages and Recent Changes that would deliberately include a short delay, so that the people who "patrol" these pages were looking only at entries a half hour hold, that would be fine, too.

Articles should be judged on their merit. They should be judged on the basis of what's we can all see and read now, not on the basis of what might hypothetically happen later. I understand that the VfD notice itself is provocative. That has both good and bad effects. But if an article were going to be improved in the next half hour, what's the big problem? The improvement will take place within the VfD discussion period, and my experience so far is that even the most pigheaded, stubborn, diehard pitbull deletionists are more than happy to reverse their opinion to reflect actual changes in the article under discussion. That's actual changes, not hypothetic future changes. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 19:34, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)