Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-11-29/Deletion report

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"But what do we really know about it? Statistical analysis is rather hard to come by." - Not to diminish the value of the author's work, but there have been quite a few academic papers that have studied AfD discussions, often producing detailed state. See for example the June Signpost issue: "Analysis of two million AfD (Article for Deletions) discussions". Regards, HaeB (talk) 02:22, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'll have to take a look at those when I get home. That one about analyzing 2 million AfDs is very strange if true (there have been a little under 500,000 from 2005 to 2021, and even if you assume that some pre-2005 discussions were held without their own separate pages, I don't think there should be 1.5 million of them). Were they using multiple projects? jp×g 03:43, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Good point - the headline there was relying on the paper's abstract ("an analysis of 1,967,768 AfD discussions between 2005 and 2018"), but in the "Data Collection" they explain more precisely that this means "1,967,768 recommendations" in the sense of "votes"...

Anyway, the underlying corpus was published (by other authors) here: https://github.com/emayfield/AFD_Decision_Corpus . It might be interesting to compare the metadata they extracted with your own.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:57, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The Oracle data is very cool, thank you for putting that and this report together. Levivich 03:48, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Another rather nice visualisation is http://notabilia.net with left spiralling lies indicating 'keep' votes and right spiralling lines indicating 'delete'. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 04:15, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I remember the Michael Z. Williamson afd, I see it got an honorable 22:d place.
working your ass off on an article only to see it flushed down the drain is close to an official rite of passage around these parts Is that really the case? I've created around 120 articles and never had one deleted and only once or twice had to defend one at AfD. Is that unusual? Am I naïve to believe that if you pick a notable subject, make sure you've got enough material to write a few hundred words, and cite your sources, that your new article will be largely immune from AfD? HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 21:21, 1 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- I'm at about 30 articles but my experience is the same. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:39, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

- Only one of my 156 articles has been deleted, which was probably me flying too close to the sun on a current-events BLP (I was banking on continued coverage which never materialized). Sure, it deserved to go, but I'll be damned if I didn't feel a little regretful about the whole thing. I remember hearing a maxim once along the lines of "if you've never missed the bus before, you're showing up to the bus stop too early" -- maybe the same is true here. Well, I've missed the WP:GNG bus once, so now I know how long to wait :) jp×g 03:51, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  Old Swedish saying, translated: Better to hear the sound of a bowstring breaking, than to never attempt to draw a bow. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:42, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]