Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Article Rescue Squadron

For form's sake

Typically when something is developed in User space, it is moved to the project space when necessary. TDA didn't move it, but rather copied it. For those who are interested in the evolution of this RfC, it can be found: here---Balloonman ^{Poppa Balloon} 20:43, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Productivity

Out of curiousity, and to help me form a valid opinion of ARS, can anyone provide a rough estimate of how many deletion discussions ARS becomes involved with in a given month? Also, of those, what percentage is met with noticable improvement to the articles themselves as a direct result of ARS members edits? Any examples of such? Resolute 23:13, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Oy vey, not askin' much there, are you?

1. What's "ARS" in this context? Since it's not nice committing the pathetic fallacy, we'd need to start with a list of editors.
   • The most obvious thing would be for this list to be scraped from the members page history without complexity, but an ardous job that it. I'm ~50% sure it could be done auto-magically.
   • I'm pretty sure I signed up at one time to ARS, to attempt to "work from the inside" as is currently proposed on the target page. If you just scrape the member's list, things like my (and SW's) membership will skew your results.
   • If I were actually going to do this analysis, I'd have a count of the number of edits to ARS project pages as a measure of membership "strength."
2. Given that list of editors, you could probably use the toolserver to find both
   • Edits to deletion discussions by people on the memeber list, and
   • Matching edits to articles by those people.

   NB - I'm note sure how much access to SQL via the toolserver has been cut down, I've not used it in a long time.

While I do see that you've just asked for examples, in the context of a project like this any one example is not terribly meaningful. Even a small collection of examples is not useful. Large-scale data is useful.
Aaron Brenneman (talk) 00:54, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

• DGG had a very good summary of ARS' activity (with some rough numbers) maybe two years ago, I'll come back with a link if I can find it. The gist of it was that ARS tags maybe 2% of what's nominated at AfD on average, and saves a fair number of those. A 2% error rate in what's nominated for deletion is not surprising. Another point was that the large majority of AfD discussions are not contentious; by its nature, ARS gets involved in difficult cases such as where notability is marginal. Since ARS switched to the "rescue list" format on our page instead of the tag on the AfD'ed article itself, I'd say the number of listed articles has gone down and the percentage rescued has gone up.
• I'll also note that some ARS members like myself frequently rescue articles ny themselves without ever involving the ARS; I have have learned a lot about sourcing and policy by my participation in ARS, and if I can save an article myself from the regular AfD lists and have time, I just do it.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 03:01, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

  I would say my interest is limited to those which ARS as a project has become involved. If you often save articles independently, that does not serve as an argument for or against ARS' current structure as a project. As far as "saving" articles goes, I think there are three categories of saving: First, articles that were clearly nominated in error. Second, articles that were saved through direct intervention - sources added, article expanded, etc. Third is vote stacking with no improvement to the article. I would say that we are at this RFC because a perception exists that ARS operates in that third area (i.e.: canvassing accusations), when the ideal case is operating in the second. I am seeking to understand how closely perception and reality align. Resolute 16:10, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Why wasn't I told?

Shouldn't everyone named in this thing have been contacted? I see someone linking to a discussion about me almost three years old, and my name coming up at times. For the record I have voted delete at times, and don't comment in every single thing tagged for the ARS. Anyway, since this exact same argument has been had a few dozen times already, often with the same exact people showing up to complain about the ARS, can't we just link to the previous debates? These constant reruns are rather pointless. Dream Focus 00:31, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Time to close?

This RfC has been open nearly two months and discussion has pretty much completely dried up. Seems to me it is time to officially close this and move on. --ThaddeusB (talk) 23:42, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

• lol, no joke. The problem is no one wants to be bothered to close it; they know the ARS is no horrible thing, quite to the contrary. Oh sure its not perfect, but if it didn't exist, we'd be worse off. But like obama and gay marriage until last week, they're a bit afraid to say so.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 19:38, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
• I agree with closing it. It's long overdue and leaving it open is just escalating the drama level. I also think there's a few obvious areas of consensus to be found. Definitely a consensus that ARS should stick around, and a consensus that any problems with it are fixable. Shooterwalker (talk) 02:11, 3 June 2012 (UTC)