I just got a note from a user who was upset that we had deleted an article that he had recreated. We even salted it after this deletion, because it had been recreated repeatedly. However, he didn't know that he was recreating something that failed an AfD; it just looks like [[Desktop Tower Defense]] was a favorite game and he was excited nobody had written about it yet.
He's absolutely right that it was rude not to tell him that we had deleted the article before. He wasted a lot of time and we could have saved his goodwill for something else. Plus, we had to clean up the mess. A bad situation all around.
What if we change the article creation page to explicitly say that a page has been deleted before, either including the deletion logs directly or giving them a link for it? Right now the fact that an article might be have been previously deleted is buried in the second sentence of the sixth bullet point. Instead I'm thinking a pretty warning box would be more appropriate, one that only appears when the article has actually been deleted in the past.
Thanks,
William
On 01/06/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
What if we change the article creation page to explicitly say that a page has been deleted before, either including the deletion logs directly or giving them a link for it? Right now the fact that an article might be have been previously deleted is buried in the second sentence of the sixth bullet point. Instead I'm thinking a pretty warning box would be more appropriate, one that only appears when the article has actually been deleted in the past.
Excellent idea - can we do this with a CSS hack, or will it require a patch?
On 6/1/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 01/06/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
What if we change the article creation page to explicitly say that a page has been deleted before, either including the deletion logs directly or giving them a link for it? Right now the fact that an article might be have been previously deleted is buried in the second sentence of the sixth bullet point. Instead I'm thinking a pretty warning box would be more appropriate, one that only appears when the article has actually been deleted in the past.
Excellent idea - can we do this with a CSS hack, or will it require a patch?
I suspect that at the barest minimum, some skullduggery with the wikitext will be required. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to identify whether an article has been deleted before, ATM.
Johnleemk
On 01/06/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Excellent idea - can we do this with a CSS hack, or will it require a
patch?
I suspect that at the barest minimum, some skullduggery with the wikitext will be required. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to identify whether an article has been deleted before, ATM.
Clicking on a deleted image redlink currently takes you to special:upload, but manages to display a link to the log for the deleted image... so there's presumably something repurposable there.
On 6/1/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
I just got a note from a user who was upset that we had deleted an article that he had recreated. We even salted it after this deletion, because it had been recreated repeatedly. However, he didn't know that he was recreating something that failed an AfD; it just looks like [[Desktop Tower Defense]] was a favorite game and he was excited nobody had written about it yet.
He's absolutely right that it was rude not to tell him that we had deleted the article before. He wasted a lot of time and we could have saved his goodwill for something else. Plus, we had to clean up the mess. A bad situation all around.
What if we change the article creation page to explicitly say that a page has been deleted before, either including the deletion logs directly or giving them a link for it? Right now the fact that an article might be have been previously deleted is buried in the second sentence of the sixth bullet point. Instead I'm thinking a pretty warning box would be more appropriate, one that only appears when the article has actually been deleted in the past.
Thanks,
William
Well, it might have to distinguish between speedy and AFD deletions. ~~~~
On Fri, 1 Jun 2007 08:59:01 -0400, "Gabe Johnson" gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
it might have to distinguish between speedy and AFD deletions
Deletion summary should be sufficient.
Guy (JzG)
On 6/3/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Fri, 1 Jun 2007 08:59:01 -0400, "Gabe Johnson" gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
it might have to distinguish between speedy and AFD deletions
Deletion summary should be sufficient.
Guy (JzG)
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
You're right. It's up. Go developers! ~~~~
Gabe Johnson wrote:
You're right. It's up. Go developers! ~~~~
Wow, that's fast! A good example is, entertainingly, at [[Deletion log]]. It could perhaps use a little more text explaining that the page has indeed been deleted. And it looks like we'll have to start giving better deletion comments, as newbies will see them much more now. But overall, I love it.
Thanks, Amidaniel for doing this and David for passing it along to the right people. I've let the user who grumbled about this know.
William