User blog comment:Thebabylonproject/Deletion Review System./@comment-4332975-20140505124536

It's not a bad idea, per se, but I think it might lead to some confusion. The "Pending Review" category was set up as a tag that any user (provided they explain why) can put on any page to flag it as something that we admins need to take a look at. Having it also used for community voting on deleted pages would get a little messy, as people try to figure out which are there to let admins know that action needs to be taken, and which are there to let the community vote on whether deleting them was warranted.

Similar problems in using "DO NOT DELETE". That category essentially indicates a page that has, for one reason or another, been declared exempt from moderation. Since the entire point of the "Pending Review" category is to get pages moderation in a timely manner, flagging them not to be moderated would be working at cross-purposes.

The last problems both come from the idea of instantly putting up every page that is contested for a full review and user voting. Pretty much nobody is going to say that their page did deserve to be deleted. More importantly, can we really expect our users to go sifting through the many contested pages every day? On top of getting lots of people who think that their pages didn't deserve deletion, there will be a fair number, I suspect, that sit there for weeks and months as no-one wants to review them. Add to that the concept of limiting voting to normal users, and you have an additional can of worms.

Admins here have been chosen because they are trusted. They have shown that they can be responsible, understand the rules, and care about quality on the site. While not all of us may be active all the time, eliminating admins from the process any time someone asks eliminates one of the biggest reasons for there to be admins (apologies if I am misunderstanding what is meant by a board of users). Not to mention, that as admins do go inactive from time to time, they could miss requests for review, causing tension...or for that matter, while I hate to think that any of us would abuse our authority, an admin might simply refuse to honour a request for review, and delete the request. On the other side of it, if we open voting on deletions to the public, then we have to worry about vote rigging, which requires additional time and effort spent on policing the votes.

All-in-all, while I do agree that there needs to be a process in place to deal with disputes, I do not believe this is the best way to go about it. First of all, I think that there needs to be a degree of "red tape" to go through, to ensure that only people who have good reason to ask for a review will want to do so. I also think that admins need to be kept in the process, and that, as the entire point of a review is that the admin deleting the page may have been wrong, that admin should be kept out of the process, so that there can be no questioning its fairness.