Forum:NRVs please

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Alright. I was deleting NRVs last night like I do every Sunday night, and I'm finding more and more NRVd articles from looong agooo. This is not fair. When you first create an article, you go back and check it, to see if anyone has edited, to show all your friends what you've done, to check the page views when we still had that. But after a month... two... three... ELEVEN... you don't check anymore.

NRV is not for articles you want deleted. That is not its intent. I am very sorry it has become that way.

NRV is supposed to be a wakeup call to authors who have JUST CREATED an article. Articles that you want to save. They have a week to make it better, and they just made it so they'll be looking the next day. It's for articles that have potential.

So. Please do not NRV any article over a month old. The NRV will be invalidated. I check the history with every article I delete, and if it's over a month old and it sucks, I will save it. This is not the way to get articles you don't like deleted.

We've been around 17,000 articles for a month or two now. We have thinned the cruft. We are not looking to delete anymore.

If you have nothing better to do with your life than NRV, please do something else.

Thank you. --KATIE!! 13:19, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, my bad (at least for the ones that I tagged), I was unaware of the no NRVing old articles policy at the time. --Sir gwax (talk) 17:45, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Why? I mean, sure, no one is going to check them and revise them, but they still suck... As far as I'm concerned NRVing shouldn't have anything to do with age... it's a quality thing. Well, whatever... I'll hold off unless this err.. policy is changed.   t o m p k i n s  blah. ﺞوﻦ וףה ՃՄ ண்ஸ ފއހ วอฏม +տ trade websites 21:05, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I do believe I just devoted several paragraphs to why. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be deleted. NRV is just not the means. --Maj. Lady Katie (talk) (complain)

In anticipation of the next question ("what is the means?"), use {{fix}} for older crappy articles. --Algorithm (talk) 01:18, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

If {{NRV}} is to be for undisputed cases involving newly-created substubs (or created vandalism) only, perhaps the template or its associated usage notes should say so? As it stands, it is worded to appear that anyone can slap the template on anything, but whomever dares remove it is threatened with a ban. Oh, and reserve Template:SRV for those who "grow poisonous berries underneath front porches of decaying houses in antartica". :) --Carlb 23:01, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

I think for the policy to work (ie: "unfunny" stuff is deleted, funny stuff is kept and allowed to be developed), NRV is necessary, but I think that the reasoning behind the NRV, as noted on my user page, should be preserved as part of the NRV mark. This can be done as part of the policy, or just be strongly encouraged. I personally think admins should be very skeptical and circumspect about executing a deletion on NRVs where the NRV tagger didn't even bother to identify the reason for using NRV rather than a less punitive maintenance tag.

I took this position on the deletion policy forum awhile ago and the admins who commented on it disagreed, but even if it isn't incorporated into the official policy, I think that people who NRV and identify the reason for placing the template will find that adding a reason will encourage more of a dialogue with the page creator and accomplish the goals of the deletion/maintenance tag/NRV policy to begin with.

As for the SRV template, I'm tickled pink that someone bothered recoloring it; I created the template sort of as an utter n00b blunder, I didn't even realize that creating a template without permission was a "Bad Idea (tm)." If people want to put this on their user pages as a gag, it's fine, but I would recommend not putting it on actual uncyclopedia pages, since it's not recognized as an official uncyc template, and will just get deleted by admins. Of course, if anyone wants SRV to be an official template, they can take that discussion to the Village Dump and request that it become part of uncyc's maintenance templates.

Maybe one way it could work into the NRV policy is a person who believed their idea had potential could get extra time to "save" their idea could convert the NRV to an SRV? Or maybe no extra time, but this could allow a page to at least be marked as not abandoned. I know that we have other maintenance templates like under construction, etc, but once an NRV tag is placed, there's an issue that the tag can't be removed except at the discretion of the person who placed the tag, and their sense of what is appropriate to the site, which is debatable, and regardless of the new policy, inevitably will go into issues of people's individual and differing senses of humor. Someone who disagrees with the tag being placed maybe ought to have a way to express that they are working on improving the page without being put in a position of risking a ban if they add to the page, but are not sure that they've improved it enough in the eyes of the NRV placer to avoid a ban. SRV could be seen as having the same effect as an NRV, but just an easy way to seperate what NRV pages are abandoned and which ones aren't. It could make the admins' jobs easier, since if a person didn't convert their NRV to an SRV, that could be a mark in favor of deletion, as it could be presumed the page has been abandoned.

Just thinking out loud here as to a way the policy could possibly work better. I think NRV could encourage creativity as well as getting rid of ideas that are dead ends and/or otherwise not appropriate for uncyc.

--RudolfRadna 17:21, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

NRV vs. VFD

With VFD no longer accepting entries, I think that NRV is a valid tag for really crappy old articles. As an administrator, I think the intelligent thing to do would be to assess each NRV tag on it's own merit, rather than unformily dimiss tags because the article is more than a month old. --Bear 18:45, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

VFD is going to come back eventually though, isn't it? I personally think old and new articles should be subject to the same procedure in terms of maintenance, but there is some validity to the position that someone who created a page months ago could be blindsided by an NRV. Maybe if the policy subjects older pages to NRV people will do a better job of watching though. It's debatable what works best and I'm not sure right now what the right answer is. I'll have to think about it. --RudolfRadna 18:53, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

I guess I'd be more concerned about deletion if it were permanent.  :) However, for the handful of people whose half-decent article is unfairly deleted by NRV, it's simple enough to have the text restored by an admin. --Bear 19:05, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

I think it's important to treat old and new articles the same, because if you have a more "generous" policy for older pages it tends to discriminate against n00bs. All of their articles are "new" so they end up with a tighter maintenance policy by default. Everyone should be subject to the same standard for creating a new article. However, I think that right now NRV could be reworked, either in terms of the template language or usage, to be an engine to aid creation as well as destruction. I've made these views known before, so I won't go into detail. I just think in the interest of encouraging new ideas, which uncyc needs, since cliches have been identified as a problem (zillions of pages on kitten huffing gags, chuck norris gags, etc), the NRV process, as well as the entire new page deletion process, ought to be a little more n00b friendly. You can keep all the deadlines and policies in place, I just think that NRVers ought to try to indicate what the problem is and maybe offer some suggestions, where appropriate. It's hard not to take an NRV, paired with an unhelpful message like "stay of execution" as stand-offish and I don't see how this helps people, particularly n00bs, write a better article. --RudolfRadna 19:20, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

VFD is now back, which hopefully is good news. NRV, though, is an ugly template... start by defacing the article itself with a big red "this has no redeeming value" and finish by threatening to ban the user for removing it? A message that blunt should be used sparingly and only for its original intended purpose - dealing with the endless creation and recreation of unfunny one-liners. As soon as there's any dispute over whether a page should go, take it not to special:ipblocklist but to vfd. Too many click on the first red link they see and type one unfunny line, saving it as a test only to never look at it again. Or they leave us "mY classmate iS ghey" or something equally erudite. NRV does get rid of undisputed rubbish, fine. I do think that we need some way to indicate {{NRVdisputed}} as soon as someone objects and we need to be prepared to undelete whenever the need arises. Maybe the SRV logo could be reused for a template saying "I dispute this NRV, if you still want to delete this please take it to regular VFD" - I realise the logo is originally from a joke template, but that doesn't mean it will always be out of place in a serious encyclopædia such as this. --Carlb 02:14, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

From UN:NRV: "If you feel that your page is fine as it is and was improperly tagged, please leave a respectful note for the user who tagged the page or an admin asking for the tag to be removed." "Just the fact that someone cares enough to inquire about an NRV tagging is often enough to give them the benefit of the doubt in removing the tag." If an admin won't remove the tag "you may place the page on VFD where users may vote to keep or delete it."

If you can point to the mountains and mountains of pages where someone is disputing an NRV but either can't or doesn't just take it off, feel free to engage in template creep, but I know from personal experience that 95% of articles are never touched after being NRVed. Of those editors that do subsequently touch their pages, far more of them than not simply remove the tag, even if they do not improve the page in any substantial way. Pages where something substantial is added will have their tags removed when an admin processes the week's NRVs.

And do you want to know a secret? The banning thing basically never happens. I have only ever banned one IP for removing the NRV tag. After the 3rd or 4th edit that removes the tag and adds "you piss-fuckers are ghey" in its place I usually delete the article, but you still have to do something more dickish than that to be banned. In the last 1000 entries in the block log I count only 6 bans for NRV removal, and that goes back to February.

And you know what? After all is said and done, the NRV list is extremely public. If you know what you are doing and you feel that NRV is being abused, go through Category:Worthless Articles and remove entries that shouldn't be there. It will only make the job of the person processing expired tags easier if you do. If you feel like pages with potential are being huffed, then go through them and save some. But if you aren't putting in the work, your influence over those who are putting in the work is inevitably going to be small. ---Rev. Isra (talk) 07:32, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Wording

The wording of the NRV tag could use a rewrite if it's to respect the "don't bite the n00bs" concept, give the benefit of the doubt in disputed cases and place the onus on the person advocating deletion to make their case in the event of a dispute. As most of these are undisputed, this shouldn't need to add much in terms of "template creep" or overhead.

We need to keep some form of the tag, but lose the "This page is garbage. Remove this tag and we ban you." tone. Perhaps something closer to:

1. This page, as currently written, has been proposed for deletion for ((reason)) or because it contains too little content to stand on its own as an encyclopædia article.
2. If you disagree with its deletion, you may dispute this by (retagging it, moving it to regular vfd, whatever)
3. You may also try [rewriting] the page to expand it into an article of quality, and are encouraged to do so and replace this tag with one indicating the page has been {{rewritten}} to instill some redeeming value.
4. If there is content on this page that you'd like to keep, but not enough to stand on its own as a page, perhaps you should try merging the content into a related existing article, to an Undictionary entry or to userspace.
5. If nothing is done, this page will most likely be deleted after n days. Only you can prevent forest fires.

This would still end in the undisputed cases, which as you say are the vast majority, being taken to the kerb with the dustbins at the end of the week. It just changes the tone from "we ban you" to "we'll give you the benefit of the doubt if you make the effort to speak up and do something for a change". Comments? --Carlb 15:20, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I know I'm coming into the discussion late here, but I like the idea of re-writing NRV. NRV is not only a great concept, but has proven to be very effective in clearing out crap. I do think the tone feels quite unfriendly, however, and, since we're looking at growth, could possibly be re-worded. For all these reasons, I support Carl's suggested re-write of the tag.--<<>> 00:24, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Many of these concerns are addressed in UN:NRV to which the template links. For several attempts to make the template less harsh, see it's history. For the reason why these didn't stay around, see Algo. He has some very strong opinions on the wording. ---Rev. Isra (talk) 01:58, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

I also agree. Carlb has said it a lot better than I could. If the template is used the same way, I don't see what the problem is with making the language a little less intimidating, and giving the n00b who created the stub some options. This could make NRV more useful! --RudolfRadna 01:55, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

• I have written a more friendly version, located below. What do you think? --Hobelhouse 23:19, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I like the alternate a lot better... but then, I rarely use NRV, so that could be why.--<<>> 00:36, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Again, talk to Algo. I would change the wording to say it may have potential. I would also remove the space in the middle. ---Rev. Isra (talk) 00:41, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Also it should say on the template that you can remove it if you improve the article, since not everyone reads the links. ---Rev. Isra (talk) 00:42, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Okay, how's this? --Hobelhouse 01:53, 25 April 2006 (UTC)