[WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

Fri Oct 24 22:46:32 UTC 2003

Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Thanks for pointing out some of the flaws in [[Votes for Deletion]].
>
>I pretty much ignore that page completely. Except a few cases where
>someone called my attention to a doomed article they thought I might
>care about.
>
>Instead, once or twice a month I glance at the article deletion log and
>resurrect anything that was thrown out too hastily (it's the Ent in me,
>I guess: no such thing as dead wood, hoom, hoom).
>
>The voting process is silly, and there's no consensus. 
>
>Whatever happened to [[Wikipedia:be bold]]?
>
>Anyway, I hardly ever want to delete anything; I'd rather fix it. I can
>followe Ahoermeister (spelling?) around and un-delete half the stuff he
>throws out and make a perfectly good stub out of it...
>  
>
While that's often true, it's also often not.  If some grad student puts 
his resume up, what are you supposed to do with it?  Do we really need a 
stub saying "so and so is a first-year graduate student at the 
university of idaho; he has not yet published any papers or done any 
noteworthy research"?  What about the case a few months ago where 
someone was making up characters supposedly from books that as far as 
anyone can discern don't actually exist?  Malicious or just plain 
useless stuff like that really needs to go, and there's not much else 
you can do with it.  And putting it on VfD is better than assuming it's 
crap and deleting on sight, because sometimes you turn out to be wrong 
and it actually wasn't crap, so it's nice to run it by people first to 
make sure.

As far as stubbing things goes as well, I'm not that sure it makes much 
difference either way.  If the submission was about a legitimate topic 
but a content-free submission, nothing's really lost by deleting it.  
Sure, you can undelete and stub it, but if it was content-free anyway, 
you could just as easily stub it from scratch without undeleting.  It 
doesn't take too much research to write two sentences from scratch on 
most topics (a google search usually suffices).  I'd personally rather 
just delete crap, and readd it later when someone has something 
contentful to write about it; there's thousands of potential articles to 
be written, so there's no reason we should be forced to write a 
particular one right now just because someone submitted nonsense with 
its title.  Just delete it, and write it later if anyone feels like it 
(or write a different article instead; doesn't matter much either way).

The main problem I see with not deleting crap is that it won't all get 
fixed for a while, and then the links will be blue instead of red.  
Instead of a source text, I'd much rather have a red link.  The source 
text adds no content (it's easy to google for), so there's no advantage 
to having it on Wikipedia in the meantime until a real article gets 
written, and some disadvantage.

-Mark