User:SysRq/Vote Good

I feel that most good essays have some sort of barely relevant first image at the top.

I don't know if I would call this an "urgent" issue, but it's been apparent to me for some time now that some of us have different standards of voting than others. We vote to delete articles more often than we vote to keep them, sometimes based purely on the fact that it's even up for VFD at all. Sometimes we vote against an article for VFH because we don't know the author, or because the joke is too British/American for us. Sometimes we don't vote at all because we're too frustrated by people at VFP shouting "text-based image" at every single nomination, regardless of whether or not said image even had any text at all.

And so, I feel some strange compulsion to write a brief manifesto of how I think voting should go down.

VFD

The way voting has been going at VFD lately has bothered me. I'm something of a deletionist myself and use the same principals at VFD as I do when cleaning out the back of my fridge: when it doubt, throw it out.

By this, I mean that we should use our keep votes sparingly and only in select situations. Why? Several reasons.

First, if an article is on VFD in the first place, someone put it there. This means someone thought it was shit and wanted it gone. You cannot just come through and vote to keep it for no good reason. It's on VFD because there is no apparent reason for it to remain on the wiki, please at least enlighten the nominator as to what reason you see that they may not see. Something like "it maed me lol" is unacceptable. If there is some satirical value, some inside joke that was missed, that needs to be stated. Even if it's just stupid humor, that needs to be stated.

It's all garbage.

Secondly, I feel that some people are forgetting that it's not a huge deal to actually delete an article. Even if there is a bit of redeeming humor in an article, it's not the end of the world to lose it in order to get rid of the rest of the shit. I feel that Uncyc articles should always be moving toward a common goal, and a consistent feel. Granted, we have articles in all sorts of different styles. That's great, that's why I love this wiki. But at the very least, let's try to make them good. And if we have articles that are just irredeemable cruft, let's not be afraid to pull the trigger for the sake of the rest of the wiki.

Lastly, I have to address the people who like to give out Conditional Keeps. Usually, the "condition" is that the article be rewritten, or drastically improved. This kinda goes back to the second point, in that it's not a huge deal to just delete it and start from scratch. Unless there's some major literary masterpiece within the cruft, it's safest to just delete and then rewrite again. It doesn't hurt anything to just do that instead of hanging on to the cruft while you do the rewrite. Oh, and one last thing: if you say it needs to be rewritten, either be ready to do the rewrite yourself or vote Delete.

VFH

For now, this is really the only other area I feel needs addressing. I don't even really need to go as into it as I did with VFD, because the problem with VFH is more voter participation than anything else. But let me just mention a few things that bother me before I save this and post it godknowswhere.

When I go to vote for VFH, I'm generally pretty easy to woo. If your article looks nice and professional, if it's got a good opening line and a nice zinger at the end, you're gonna get my  For. I usually don't vote against unless there's something blatantly wrong with it, something that very much needs fixing, or something that's just not funny or well written at all. I like to see effort over anything else, followed by funny.

I don't appreciate seeing  Againsts with no comment. It's sort of lazy, and rather rude to the author. As a writer, I really don't mind people voting against my articles as long as they have something constructive to say about it. If the joke is being repeated too much, vote against and tell me. If the formatting sucks and you didn't even try to read it because it was unreadable, vote against and tell me. If it just didn't grab you, vote against and tell me. But don't just vote against. Because then you leave me to assume that you just couldn't be bothered to read the entire thing or let the concept develop, and because of that, it was lost on you and you voted against just to get back to watching your own article on VFH.

I also don't appreciate seeing  Againsts based on things like "it's UnNews so it was already on the front page" or "too British for my tastes" or "ED already did this". I shouldn't have to even mention namespace prejudice, so I won't. It's actually against the rules, meaning I have every right to strike that vote. I also try to keep ED out of things, no one really cares about them anyways. They're a different brand of humor and they like what they do and we like what we do and it's okay to like both. I personally don't like both, I like us. But I don't vote against articles based solely on what ED/4chan has done.

Finally, when it comes to humor versus humour, I try to Abstain on those. If I just don't get it, if I just don't watch tennis, or if I just don't know much about British television, then I just stay out of it. I think that's generally polite, it's okay to have a day where we feature an article that Brits may not get or that Americans may not get. This is an international site, and things like that are just bound to happen.

In Closing

Eh, I'd like a better way to close this admittedly longer-than-I-had-hoped essay, but I can think of none other than summarizing the above in the form of the nutshell template:

This page in a nutshell: Vote exactly the way that I do.

Thank you, and happy voting!
—Sir SysRq (talk) 21:19, 4 March 2009 (UTC)