[WikiEN-l] Fidning out why an article is deleted

Mon Apr 25 06:31:37 UTC 2005

Michael P. Hopcroft wrote

> Pardon me for the newbie question.

Not at all.

> I have just had an article on Con suites apparently deleted.

No idea what has happened to this. [[Consuite]] from 2004 exists. There are 
deletion logs but without the exact title I'm not able to help further.

It is actually quite possible that, at times when the servers are 
overloaded, some submissions are lost and never even added to the database. 
I would always keep a text copy until I knew the particular edit had been 
successful.

>Another article on the band Uffington Horse is in danger of deletion, but 
>at least in this case it was stated why.

[[Uffington Horse (band)]] has had one of our more polite tags added.  You 
need to establish notability of the band by expanding this.

>What i would like to know is if there was a way to find out why specific 
>articles were deleted so that corrections can possibly be made.

> Thsi is especially useful as far as articles on fandom topics (such as the 
> article on con suites, which are rooms at science fiction conventions 
> where free food and drink is served to participants) could easily be 
> viewed as irrelevant by non-fans and deleted needlessly or reflexively.

There are two classes of formalised deletions: speedy deletions handled by 
admins, and deletions through [[WP:VfD]], our sanitary arrangement. VfD 
(votes for deletion) is a formalised process allowing for full debate and 
reply. Speedies are supposed to be tightly constrained; in practice the 
criteria get pushed quite hard, but any admin should be willing to 
reconsider a speedy deletion.  Other than that, a few categories get deleted 
on sight (graffiti, teenager prattle, that kind of thing).

With 1000 new pages a day we have to delete a fair number of pages.  Things 
do go wrong in a few cases.

Charles 