User blog comment:EtherBot/Let's Talk Deletion!!!/@comment-27838637-20170211153622

It seems we have hit a crossroads.

We have users who want to change the way deletions are made, which in all honesty, is a very fair and reasonable request.

Then we have the admins who are reluctant to change much at all. I'm sure with all their experience, they are reluctant for good reason.

You see, I think there needs to be some changes around here too. But I don't think the wiki is suffering because these changes aren't happenning.

Let's take this whole deletion discussion for example. Let me point out issues on both sides because I'm on the fence about this discussion.

Etherbot is a pretty active user and his (sorry for assuming your gender)  reviews of random users are always fun to read. He knows how to judge a story, and as we can see by his above argument, he is quite intellectual. Whether you agree with him or not, this argument is alot more well-founded and well thought-out than others in the same vain.

Here's the thing that pisses me off. I have the utmost respect for everybody on this site but the below comment section has turned pretty nasty just because Etherbot had a difference of opinion. Whether you agree with his point of view or not, he is not just another random user who has had their unreadable stories deleted and tried to rant about it. He has contributed to this site quite a bit recently, and he has actually sought multiple times to better his writing ability. Just because you don't agree doesn't mean you have to pick apart everything he has said like it's a fucking murder case in court.

YES, it's a discussion, but in my opinion it's not exactly right to be so condescending towards each other.

But we can also see by reading this blog is that Etherbot is not the best writer here. Neitherr were many of us when we first joined. This isn't exactly helping him get better.

And you are all fucking kidding yourself if you think you have never thought that the wiki needed changes before. Just because they might not be the changes we need right now, doesn't mean we don't have the right to discuss in a civil manner why or why not we can't have them.

Anyway... my evaluation is turning into a rant so I'll just voice my opinion on the OP and be done with it.

Etherbot, you make some good points, and I too think the deletion process could be handled better. I'm also going to assume you felt there was an issue and didn't exactly know how to pinpoint it, so you wrote an entire blog post criticizing the deletion process as a whole and it kind of garnered some negative attention.

I'll tell you right now that half the time it is we the people who are the ones to mark the subpar stories for deletion. Alot of them are shit, and there isn't much more to it than that.

However, the automated message could use some tweaking. When a story is deleted, the admins give a message more vague than the description in the stories they are deleting. It's hard to decipher why exactly the story was really deleted until they ask an admin to review it.

So, a simple fix for that vagueness would be for the admins to give a straight up review. Keep it brief if you have to; a few sentences will do.

But then we have a problem in the Deletion Appeal. Someone writes a story only to have it deleted by an admin. Then they post it to the deletion appeal only to have it deleted by the same admin yet again. The Deletion Appeal needs to work more like a request for rollback or admin, where we vote on whether the story really passes the Quality Standards or not.

Anyway, that's my three cents worth. Obviously I'm going to upset people with my opinion on this comment section, but I've had a long hard week and that's the least of my worries right now.

inb4 dix makes a joke about the 'long hard week'