I used the verb "warrant" twice in this message. For stylistic purposes,
imagine that one of those times I actually used "merit".
David Friedland wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Or maybe Nohat, like the vast majority of
en.Wikipedians,
is not an administrator on [[en:]] and can't do any of this.
To be sure, Nohat's comment does seem a bit facetious,
since he can ask to see the page on [[Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion]].
And I believe that it was in fact undeleted so that people could see it.
Yes, I admit I was being (ever-so-slightly) facetious when I wrote the
message. I was mildly annoyed when I heard that the page had been
deleted because the insatiably curious part of me me wanted to see what
was so horrible as to warrant summary deletion. And being level-headed
and straightforward when posting to the list requires so much effort and
extra words that I though I would let my barbed wit show through. I hope
I didn't offend anyone, I was just making my point, tersely.
Nevertheless, I think that there's an
important point here.
It was good of the deleter (I forget now who they were)
to report the deletion to the mailing list,
since they were unsure as to whether it would be regarded
(at least by those most concerned with fairness in deletions)
as justified by en.Wikipedia policy.
But, having brought it to the list's attention,
some list readers -- such as Nohat -- now find themselves
unable to look at the situation being discussed.
The solution? I don't see a clear one, outside of software changes.
(And which software changes is not entirely obvious either!)
The deleter might have mentioned it on the list /before/ deleting,
but then why not just put it on [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]]?
Yet the whole point was to test the policy on deletion
to see if all agreed that there was good reason
that it ought to be deleted immediately /without/ being listed.
The bottleneck, it seems to me, is that there are
dedicated Wikipedians,
such as Nohat, that read the mailing lists and participate in policy
but nevertheless are not administrators (for any of various reasons).
And we decided some time ago not to force users to become admins. ^_^
I think the best solution would be to allow regular logged-in users to
view deleted pages. Of course only admins should be able to delete and
undelete, but I don't really see any good reason why the contents of
deleted pages should be not viewable by regular users. Of course,
deleted pages should stay invisible to anons, so e.g. spiders don't
index deleted stuff.
Cheers!
- Nohat (David Friedland)
P.S. If there is a very good reason regular users aren't allowed to
view deleted pages, I'd like to know what it is. There may be one; I
just can't think of any.
P.P.S. Feel free to nominate me for adminship if you believe my
contributions to Wikipedia and the lists warrant it. It's not in my
character to be so temerarious as to nominate myself. :-)