When I wrote this I was thinking of a very mechanical, precisely defined, rules oriented way for revotes to happen. It is also possible for revotes to happen in a loose, guideline-oriented, "lets just do what makes sense" way. That is the preferred method.
This is when that method doesn't work.
Maybe this isn't necessary. Maybe the existing guidelines can be rewritten or simply enforced to ensure intelligent, sensible revoting when appropriate. I don't know. But this is here anyway as a think tank proposal.
I do think this is useful. Vfd pages can get cluttered up, especially when the article is rewritten over the course of the Vfd. And people tend to stick with their original impressions and their original opinions, thus evaluating the rewritten article in terms of it's old state in stead of it's new state. A fresh page gives the rewritten article the fresh start it deserves.
- Pioneer-12 20:13, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
This is a bad idea for several reasons. For one, the VfD notice explicitly states that the nominated article is not to be moved while the discussion is ongoing. Secondly, most VfD voters will return to change their votes if the article is changed substantially and if they feel the changes warrant a change in vote. The revote process would just make for m:instruction creep and overly complicate an already complicated process. android↔talk 15:17, Apr 24, 2005 (UTC)
Oppose. The VfD process is (properly) already weighted in favor of keeping articles whenever possible. The combination of requiring rough consensus, making the guideline that 1/3 keeps = no consensus, and allowing the acting sysop to exercise judgement makes it reasonable hard to delete articles unless they're really stinkers, and reasonably easy to keep them.
The proper thing to do when an article is improved is simply to make a conspicuous comment to that effect and urge people to change their votes. The five-day VfD discussion period allows plenty of time for this, not even accounting for the current backlog, and experience shows that many, many discussions conclude with a string of "keep as revised" or "keep improved version" and a judgement that there is no consensus to delete. Most VfD voters keep the discussion page on their watchlists, and if the page has been truly improved a) it's not at all hard to get a handful of changed votes, b) a handful is usually enough to get a total of 1/3 keeps, and c) acting sysops are sympathetic to improved articles.
We do not need to add a mechanism for parliamentary maneuvering. One "delete" vote on a VfD should stick; it should not be necessary to keep voting "delete" over and over again in successive VfD re-votes.
A particularly poisonous aspect is that there is unlikely to be any universal agreement on how much improvement is needed for a re-vote and this will introduce fresh arenas for controversy and fresh opportunity to game the system. Dpbsmith (talk) 22:56, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)