On 11/29/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/29/06, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
I'm mildly sorry for taking the shortcut of asking the list about things I could figure out by wading through the insanely complicated policy pages, but here goes-- if you think a page that went through the AfD process was wrongly deleted, what is the proper action?
How wrong is it for an admin to undelete a page?
It is a cardinal sin. If a page is deleted as a result of *fD it MUST go through DRV - despite the fact that "Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy", undeletion can only be done if the correct forms are filled out in triplicate, lost, found again... (I can't remember the rest of how that goes, but you end up having your house bulldozed).
In addition, DRV is the place where people comment, not on the merits of the deletion, but on whether the deletion was "in process" or "out of process". It doesn't matter if the article was about [[World War II]] and the discussion only involved three people would voted delete on the grounds of "never heard of it", DRV is supposed to comment on process, not merits of deletion (you'll be told "that's what *fD is for, and you should have commented when you had the chance).
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Wait... I went and read our policy on undeletion ([[WP:UNDEL]]) , and it definitely lists "If the article has been wrongly deleted (i.e. that Wikipedia would be a better encyclopedia with the article restored). " as a valid reason for undeletion (in fact, as the first reason). Given that we 'know' that DRV is only for process auditing, I looked farther down... behold! there is a section entitled "To request that a page (or image) be restored", except that this section only tells you to list the page on DRV... Catch -22 anyone?
Either we need to change WP:UNDEL to conform to current practice, or we need to give quite a few people a cluebat beating.
Sincerely, Silas Snider