I was always in favour of deletion of pages, and
disagreed with those who wanted to keep every
irrelevant, impossible-to-make-encyclopædic article.
But rampant deletionism has hit ridiculous levels on
WP now. I daren't even go near the article deletion
page because of what goes on there. Now the template
deletion page has become ridiculous.
While it is understandable to delete most single use
templates, it seems to have hit a stage where
perfectly valid, obviously usable templates are been
dumped.
It shouldn't be too hard to tell the difference
between a once-off template that is unlikely to have a
use on more than one page, and one that obviously has
widespread uses now and in the future, but simply
hasn't been put into all the articles they may be used
for 'yet'.
I created one as part of a wholescale rewriting of
articles on the government of Northern Ireland.
Because of problems saving stuff due to those
goddamned error messages I worked on two articles on
my desktop. I put the template into one (it already
was in the first one to be written) to find that it
had already been proposed for deletion. Anyone with
elementary cop-on would have realised from its
contents that it was going to be used in up to 10
articles.
Single use templates with massive amount of codes are
being deleted and substituted even though firstly that
makes them are easier to vandalise, secondly they make
an article difficult to edit if there are a lot of
codes all over the place, and thirdly it then means
that they cannot be used elsewhere even though their
contents make them ideal for multiple use as a
template.
We could no with a page of ''useful templates'' where
existing templates could be picked out for use in new
articles.
It seems to be the same 'greek chorus' of deleters who
do the blanket nominating and do blanket voting to
delete everything in sight. They seem all too often to
drown out protests from others that their deletionitis
is out of control.
Once it was the case that only crap was deleted. Now
it seems that crap survives while the delete gang
propose good articles, good templates and good
infoboxes for deletion.
Wikipedia needs to do something to reign in the delete
brigade. Deletion used to be used to keep up
standards. Now it is bringing down standards, doing
damage to content and design and seriously pissing off
users who are doing serious work and have to spend
their days fighting off attempts to delete things. The
final twist is that many of the most fanatical
deleters seem to be down damn all writing themselves,
simply proposing large numbers of things for deletion
all the time, irrespective of quality, usefulness or
benefit to Wikipedia.
Thom
___________________________________________________________
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday
snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos
http://uk.photos.yahoo.com