[Wikipedia-l] Deletion of "Articles" with No Content?

[Daniel Mayer]

On Sunday 25 August 2002 08:42 pm, you wrote:
> With this in mind, I think that the timing of a delete is critical.  If
> someone created an empty article a month ago and nothing has happened
> to it since, we need have no fear of deleting it.  Whoever made it is
> long gone.  They don't care about it, or they wouldn't have left it.
> They won't feel that we are undoing their hard work; they aren't coming
> back every week to admire their miniscule efforts.

Technical note: There is /no/ such thing as an "empty article" -- such a 
thing is just a page in the article namespace (please see 
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article). That goes for 
the title of this post too (BTW; I think Larry Sanger should take a look at 
that page). 

Another note is that creating a page is not any effort so the "effort" 
argument is not a reason to prevent a sysop from summarily deleting an empty 
page as soon as it is created. Several dozen and sometimes more of these 
empty pages at one time were filling the database and I deleted these without 
posting them on the deletion queue -- no history + no content = no article. 

Indexing these no content pages on another page would have been a Herculean 
effort and I would not have been able to keep up. Luckily the developers have 
since made it a bit more difficult to create no-content pages but several to 
a dozen or so still do pop up daily (and those are just the ones I see). 

If such a page looks to be just a harmless newbie experiment I will edit the 
page and say hi to the newbie then ask them to take a look at the help link 
at the top of the page. I then list that page on the deletion queue or place 
a stub on the page (depending on the amount of time or knowledge I have on 
the subject). But if the blank or gibberish  (aksdjfl;kajeoriu) page doesn't 
give me the impression that it was created simply by a curious newbie then I 
will summarily delete it (following our policy on this). 

So yes it is important to consider the feelings of the person who created the 
blank page but that should not prevent good housecleaning (esp. if we are 
deluded with these again in the future). 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)