Wikipedia:Early closure to avoid unnecessary confrontation

The Proposal

This policy is being proposed to greatly reduce the hurt in cases where an AfD which is clearly heading for one specified outcome causes friction and flaming between participants. The draft of the policy reads:

"If an AfD has been running for long enough to give a very clear idea of where the debate is headed, and that debate has been attacked, pushed significantly off-topic, seen newbies bitten, become excessively personal or otherwise disrupted to the point of becoming seriously incivil and / or downright nasty, that debate can be closed."

Why do we need this?

The main point is that such attacked / disrupted / off-topic / personal etc. AfDs become divisive and get people worked up over nothing, often concerning editors who would not even have crossed paths if they had not commented on an AfD related to a subject they knew little or nothing about, or between editors with existing bad relationships. They are also more likely to see newcomers bitten which can scare off new Wikipedians. The "very clear" is to minimize the risk of such closures going to deletion review - as admins would likely not want to get dragged into something controversial at DRV by closing a truly contentious debate, then this would be effectively self-regulating.

Again, it must be stressed that the eventual outcome of the debate must be in no doubt. While this will ultimately be down to the closing admin, I do not believe fears over the interpretation of this clause should cause concern. The community has trusted admins with their powers and we must give them freedom to exercise their judgement for the good of Wikipedia. Nobody is going to close an AfD which has been running for 36 hours and has 4 votes one way and 3 votes the other by citing this policy, but, for example, a debate which has only the article creator and perhaps one or two unknown allies or a lone dissenter sniping at a large group of established editors who believe the article and associated topic either falls a long way short of or clearly meets the standards required serves no purpose remaining on the board other than to cause friction and unnecessary argument.

One objection to this might be a lack of "due process". Notwithstanding the fact that becoming policy would mean AfDs closed under this rule would have received "due process", I for one have seen several debates where a dissident few have used the final days of a doomed or saved article to flame others with no chance or intention of changing the end result. AfD is a contentious enough area as it is without sockpuppets, trolls, flamers or users unfamiliar with Wikipedia space conduct getting ordinarily cool, calm Wikipedians stressed out for no reason. It is also not the place for editors with pre-existing serious differences of opinion, possibly compounded by bad-faith nominations, to hang out their dirty laundry.

Related pages

• Wikipedia:Snowball clause, on the early closure of discussions