Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

At 11:06 AM 1/28/2010, Samuel Klein wrote: Thanks. As far as I can see, blanking the article content, particularly with appropriate tags, would satisfy both approaches. It isn't something strange and new, it is how Wikipedia already deals with unsourced information in articles of all kinds, including biographies, it is simply deleted or possibly moved to Talk (by any editor). This is simply applying it the same principle to an article as a whole. "Satisfying for frustrated editors"? Sure. But deletion must be done by an administrator, and the dubious pleasure of deletion (take that, fancruft!) is not quite respectable for admins, and ordinary editors (or bad-hand accounts for "frustrated" administrators) tend to get themselves banned for indulging too much or too openly in this pleasure.... I'd think that blanking would be reasonably satisfying, while doing much less damage in terms of eventual growth of the project. If a deletionist wants to indulge his or her frustration at cruft and unsourced BLPs by blanking the articles, I'm not offended. It's actually much better and much simpler and much less disruptive than speedy tags and AfDs and all that. In fact, that was part of the point of WP:PWD, to eliminate the often silly contention over notability at AfD, and instead convert "deletion" into an ordinary editorial decision that can, if conflict arises, go through the gradual escalation of WP:DR, which can, in theory, resolve disputes less disruptively than holding a community discussion right at the outset. For sure, with BLPs with no reliable sources, the content should go, immediately, as long as it goes in a way that makes it easy to recover. And a bot can do it, very quickly and efficiently. The community is almost certainly not going to allow bots to delete articles! I'm a radical inclusionist, actually, but would have no trouble accepting mass blanking under decent conditions. Particularly conditions where the article, as-is, would not withstand AfD! That problem would not get worse with PWD as an approach. As unsourced BLPs, they are already totally vulnerable to speedy deletion. First of all, blanking would create an intermediate option that addresses the BLP issues as well as notability issues. I'd really encourage looking at how PWD could be made effective for all the legitimate purposes behind the various factions in the present flap. The article might not be blanked, it could be redirected to a page on the kind of blanking that was done, giving instructions for how to bring the article back. If problems developed with articles returning without sourcing, the page could be semiprotected and that could even be bot-assisted. Placing speedy tags should not be done by bot, at least not merely for lack of sourcing, and I see no harm in a blanked article remaining indefinitely; deletion would be requested by a blanked article reviewer who finds that the blanked material was actually of no use whatever, a hoax, or so radically incorrect that it will waste the time of someone who wants to recreate the article. In that case, deletion is exactly appropriate so that a new article starts fresh. But an article where it is easy to verify that the topic exists and some information can be found that is independent, though not necessarily of high quality? The only difference, really, between PWD and standard deletion is the reservation of the ability to read the history of the article to administrators only, which, in fact, increases the load on administrators without a corresponding benefit. Bots should only do things that are relatively harmless and that can be easily reversed. Deletion cannot be so easily reversed, and overwhelming the speedy deletion system with piles of speedy tags isn't a great idea. Blanking (or blanking with redirection as I'm suggesting) fixes the serious problem immediately, and opens the door to improvement and invites it at the same time. Those who work on improvement will notice useless versions and if they don't have time to improve the article, they can place a speedy tag on it, and a special speedy tag might be created for this situation. The purpose there of deletion is clear: to avoid other editors wasting time trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. Note, however, that someone who finds old content to be useless could remove the content, or if it was partly useless, but something might be salvaged, remove the useless part, save the article, then reblank pending further work. WP:PWD added an additional feature: redlink display of PWD'd articles. That would require a software change, and it might not be done exactly that way. But this is unnecessary, even if it is possibly desirable. I'm not actually sure which would be better, redlink display or something else, it's possible that redlink would be best. But a person following the redlink, inspired to fix it, would quickly find and be able to read the blanked article, and go from there.