[WikiEN-l] deletionism in popular culture

[Ian Woollard]

On 07/11/2009, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 2:28 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 07/11/2009, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > That's usually a worthwhile suggestion. The reason that won't work here,
>> > though, is that PWD requires edits to the software to work. In other
>> words,
>> > this is an all-or-nothing enterprise-- we'd probably have to get the
>> whole
>> > project behind the complete overhaul before anything could be done.
>> > Obviously, this is a major barrier to implementation.
>>
>> I don't see any changes to the software are necessary, just the
>> creation of some templates and some policy. What change is supposed to
>> be needed?
>>
>>
> The main changes, as explained on [[WP:PWD]] are: blank pages should show up
> as redlinks, blanked pages should not show up in search results, blanked
> pages must have noindex so they aren't caught by search engines. PWD doesn't
> function otherwise: without these changes, it would be more confusing than
> beneficial.

'Blank pages' can be noindexed by using a blank page template, and
will not show up in search results in most cases because they are
blank. Redlinks you could deal with by having a bot fiddle with the
links:

blzh blah [[deletedArticle (deleted)|deletedArticle]] blah blah

This has the unfortunate side-effect that clicking on the redlink to
create the article will tend to create [[deletedArticle (delete)]] but
you could always bot-move it back if that got created and deal with
the links at the same time.

Or you could just ignore red links for the time being since other
processes also fill them in, like wiktionary softlinks.

> - causa sui

-- 
-Ian Woollard