Wiktionary talk:Requests for deletion/Header

Discussions and votes

Discussions and votes that are directly related to RFD closures:

• Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2021/September § Policy on deletion consensus
• Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2022/January § Codifying certain rules for RFD
• Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2022-01/RFD voting policies
• Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2022/August § Consensus threshold in RFD discussions
• Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2022/September § Closing RFD discussions using the strength of the arguments
• Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2022/September § RFD header - abandoning text implying plain majority

Discussions and votes that are indirectly related, by pertaining to formal votes in WT:VOTES:

• Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2010/June § Vote Closure Rubric - thresholds for pass are proposed, 2/3 for policy vote; closure of RFD discussions is not being discussed, though
• Wiktionary:Votes/2019-03/Defining a supermajority for passing votes - not about RFD but about formal votes, for which it determined a fixed threshold of 2/3; before that, the threshold of 2/3 was nowhere specified and some votes were closed at a lower ratio, e.g. Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2014-12/Making simplified Chinese soft-redirect to traditional Chinese; Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2014-12/Making simplified Chinese soft-redirect to traditional Chinese shows opposition to that closure; Wiktionary:Votes/2010-04/Voting policy is another vote closed below 2/3

Some example past closures

• Talk:Xenocrates, 2010: the closure provides counting, the result is approximately 50:50 on pro-deletion reading
• Talk:accordion-player, 2016: the entry was deleted and the pro-deleters provided zero rationale for deletion other than "SOP" and sometimes just said "delete" with no further note
• Talk:less-than-stellar, 2018: the threshold 2/3 was used to keep an entry that would be deleted otherwise; it provides counting 5:3 for deletion
• Talk:opinions are like assholes, 2021: the closure said "all opinions considered valid", which from my experience is unusual for a closure; it also provides counting 5:3 for keeping.
• Talk:Joan of Arc, 2022: the closure provided no counting and retrospective counting reveals 4:3 for deletion at the time of closure

Dan Polansky (talk) 10:20, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Which supermajority threshold

Evidence shows votes are actually being tallied even if other considerations may play a role: 1) people post keep and delete in boldface; 2) people post "Delete per nom" without adding any arguments to the discussion, which only makes sense if tallying takes place; 3) some discussions contain tallies, practice used by multiple editors. The question of what overridable threshold defines consensus therefore remains, and there's no denying it.

To me, evidence suggests the best supported threshold is 2/3 (66.6%) of support / support + oppose. The supporting evidence is the following:

• Formal votes use 2/3 as the threshold per the vote. Formal votes are not RFDs, but they also historically spoke of "consensus", so "consensus" is defined for them in this way.
• In the RFD threshold vote, 2/3 threshold received many more votes than 3/5 threshold.
• In Talk:less-than-stellar, threshold 2/3 was explicitly mentioned, used and not contradicted.
• In Talk:dwagon, there was a tally and no threshold mentioned, but it was closed as kept near 2/3 for deletion.

This is not to say that there is actual consensus for 2/3 threshold. As for 1/2, it was mentioned by one editor in a discussion but no one has tried to put it as an option into a poll. As for 1/3 minority sufficient for deletion, one user supported that in a discussion but no one else added their support. Since no one has bothered to engage in polling or other consensus-detection method to determine other thresholds than 2/3 and 3/5, there is no way for us to think that 1/2 or even 1/3 is supported by consensus. Dan Polansky (talk) 13:12, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Expanded. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:10, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Are RFDs discussions or votes?

RFDs are neither pure votes nor pure discussions: they are a combination of votes with discussion.

RFDs are not pure votes since they contain discussions: pure votes would only include bare votes "keep", "delete", "abstain" and the like without a further comment, and people would not respond to each other. In RFD, the discussion sometimes leads people to change their stance and it influences subsequent participants.

RFDs are not pure discussions either. Evidence shows RFDs are being predominantly treated and closed as being not only discussions but also votes:

• People often post their keeps and deletes in boldface, which is useful to tallying. There is sometimes "Comment" in boldface.
• People make posts that add nothing to examination of arguments and evidence. Examples:
  • "Delete." Can be interpreted as "Delete per nom".
  • "Delete SOP" even when the SOP argument was already made.
  • "Delete per nom.": no argument or evidence added to what is already there.
  • "Delete per Joe Hoe." Drives the attention to reasons provided by a particular person.
  • "Delete per reasoning made by others": again, no addition to the arguments. Furthermore, this fails to properly identify the arguments. The poster is effectively barred from being refuted or discounted since it suffices for one previous argument being valid for the vote to be valid as well.
• Some RFD closures contain tallies, explicitly counting keeps and deletes.
• People often use the language "I vote keep" and the like, using the word "vote", as shown in RFD discussion archives.

The above does not preclude that some votes are ignored as poorly reasoned, but examination of past RFD discussions shows bare deletes are not being routinely discounted as featuring no reasons. Dan Polansky (talk) 07:48, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Expanded. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:12, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

History of the consensus requirement

The text from the header was originally in Wiktionary:Requests for deletion, making it hard to track changes to it; it was put into the header by me in 2010.

The requirement no consensus => entry is kept was introduced in diff from 13 September 2009:

"Entries and senses should not usually be deleted in less than seven days, unless in reality the article is a speedy deletion candidate. When there is no consensus, add the template {{look}} to the bottom of the discussion. If there is no consensus for a period of several months, the article maybe be kept as a 'no consensus'."

The period of several months was later changed to one month in diff from 9 October 2009. I changed "may" to "should" in diff from 5 February 2010, and then again in diff from 27 October 2010. Then the text survived in the header with almost no changes until diff from 24 October 2021. I changed the text back to the spirit of the discussed requirement in diff from 3 September 2022.

I don't understand the purpose of "may" instead of "should"; is it to suggest that this is just a hint to be freely overridable? Formally speaking, "should" is weak enough, although in Wiktionary policies such as WT:CFI, "should" is interpreted as "shall" and "must". WT:CFI uses a mixture of "should", "shall" and "must" with the same meaning, as far as I can tell; I don't believe the "should" parts are interpreted as mere recommendations. Dan Polansky (talk) 12:48, 7 September 2022 (UTC)