Set up a bot to download and archive all the deleted articles.

the note on their talkpage--I would email them instead,

On 5/8/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: From my experience at least *some* of it would be useful. Not enough that it's worth it to go through the hassle of requesting temporary undeletion, though. Anthony

On 5/9/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote: Not sure. I'd be interested in doing a study on how accurate that estimate is, but as I'm not an admin, I can't. Anthony _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On the notabilty ones alone, depending on who you talk to, between 10% and 40% of those could be poor judgement without any research, and one can easily figure that, truly, all spammy articles could be rewritten to be encyclopedic. That's a lot of articles.

doc wrote: Because there's an unfortunate scarlet letter of sorts that gets attached to previously-deleted material, and there's a vocal sect of editors who work very hard to make sure that, if they still don't like the article, it'll stay away. Furthermore, the cleanup issue, while necessary, is often overblown. Much of it is simple formatting issues that could be dealt with on an easier basis, some are citation issues for things that are completely uncontroversial and non-troublesome. Many are simply waiting for the right editors to come along and do the dirty work, and we get closer to that as our popularity grows. This entire mentality feeds into the next point... ...that when you continue to arbitrarily delete "crud," (whatever crud is) what's the incentive to clean up what's there? We've already alienated a large, potentially invaluable, group of possible editors because it was decided that most webcomic articles fall into this "crud" label. What next? How can we complain about the condition on one end when we do nothing to foster it on the other? -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

From what I saw, most of those the webcomic articles -were- crud, and

Of course, never mind that our reliable source guideline is irresponsibly tipped toward dead-tree media

Of course, never mind that our reliable source guideline is irresponsibly tipped toward dead-tree media, and because of this, it allows for arguments such as the one you've presented. As a result, we lose out on a significant number of worthwhile articles, look like idiots when we speedy an important webcomic, and lose a substantial amount of possible editors who could a) improve our coverage in that topic area, and b) do things in other subjects to improve things.

Stan Shebs wrote: Would this screed qualify?

On 5/9/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't really disagree with any of that. But an article can be full of original research, and be about a comic which isn't mentioned in any secondary reliable sources, but still be useful. It wouldn't be useful for Wikipedia, but still something I'd like to have access to. It's actually a good example of the reason I'd like to be able to access deleted articles. Useless in Wikipedia doesn't mean useless altogether. Anthony _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On Wed, 9 May 2007, Todd Allen wrote:

> >From what I saw, most of those the webcomic articles -were- crud, and > that includes many that got kept. Most of them were trivially, if at > all, mentioned in any secondary reliable sources, they were full of > original research (effectively unfixable, due to that lack of > secondary sources), and the main arguments for keeping were ILIKEIT > from fans. If some webcomic is genuinely going to be of long-lasting, > truly encyclopedic value, it'll get covered by secondary sources, and > we can have an article. Until then, we don't need articles about > passing web fads.

Web comics are on the web, and that also means they get *covered* on the web. Our policy on sources prohibits using most of the coverage that web comics receive. That is a flaw with our policy, not with the webcomic articles.

Jeff Raymond wrote: and Yeah, but Jeff we have tens of thousands of pathetic articles marked for cleanup at it stands - more than we can possibly cope with. So why are you so keen to to keep more spammy stubs that /could/ be cleaned up?

You could narrow it down by looking at all deleted articles over a certain size which don't have "copyvio" or "copyright" in the deletion reason. You should be able to narrow it down a fair bit that way - you then have to plough through the articles manually. A deleted article that might be almost an FAC is quite likely not formatted correctly yet, so you won't be able to automatically search for links and refs etc.

You could narrow it down by looking at all deleted articles over a certain size which don't have "copyvio" or "copyright" in the deletion reason. You should be able to narrow it down a fair bit that way - you then have to plough through the articles manually. A deleted article that might be almost an FAC is quite likely not formatted correctly yet, so you won't be able to automatically search for links and refs etc.

On 5/7/07, Ron Ritzman <ritzman(a)gmail.com> wrote: Mass delete images with a botnet to remind the developers how important backups are. My understanding is that image deletion cannot be reverted and the last backup was a long time ago.