I've noticed a few times over the past weeks that a talk page of a deleted page has also been deleted, for no special reason.
This includes pages with an edit history that were prodded or speedied, or ones that were useful and informative but not notable, or ones that were the subject of a contentious AfD.
These discussions about an article -- including about its deletion and notability -- should be preserved just as deletion discussions are. They will be useful if the article returns later, if others try to determine whether it should have been deleted, and are a record of discussions about knowledge by people who cared about the topic.
Where should they be preserved? Right now deletion guidelines on en:wp allow for *speedy deletion* of any talk page that has no article page, unless "It contains deletion discussion that is not logged elsewhere"... I'm not sure where that guideline came from, since there are certainly pages that have gone through a "Delete and rewrite from scratch" where the intent is for an article to be written and the talk page [pre-deletion, related to article content, standards of research, interesting sources, and the like] is a part of that. If the original talk page isn't the right place to keep this non-deletion information, where should it go?
++SJ
I don't see any great need to keep the pages. They can be undeleted if anyone wants to know what they said (I'm sure most admins would be happy to oblige, barring the usual concerns about copyright and libel). I think the reasons why we delete articles even though they may contain interesting information apply just as well to talk pages.
Thomas Dalton wrote:
I don't see any great need to keep the pages. They can be undeleted if anyone wants to know what they said (I'm sure most admins would be happy to oblige, barring the usual concerns about copyright and libel). I think the reasons why we delete articles even though they may contain interesting information apply just as well to talk pages.
Keeping them carries the risk that they may contain useful information that may be helpful to someone wanting to recreate the page. ;-)
Ec
Thomas Dalton wrote:
Keeping them carries the risk that they may contain useful information that may be helpful to someone wanting to recreate the page. ;-)
The same can be said for the article itself.
Maybe the talk page should be to a separate AfD process. :-)
I'm not going to get into a debate about our entire deletion policy.
Make my day!
Ec
Thomas Dalton wrote:
I don't see any great need to keep the pages. They can be undeleted if anyone wants to know what they said (I'm sure most admins would be happy to oblige, barring the usual concerns about copyright and libel). I think the reasons why we delete articles even though they may contain interesting information apply just as well to talk pages.
How is anybody supposed to know that there was anything to ask an admin to delete?
Why are we obsessed with scuttling possibly-useful information just because we can't use it RIGHT NOW...and why do we then jump all over newbies when they ask questions to which they could have found the answers if the relevant pages had not been speedied by some crazed tagger wanting to "level up"?
On 7/8/07, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
These discussions about an article -- including about its deletion and notability -- should be preserved just as deletion discussions are. They will be useful if the article returns later, if others try to determine whether it should have been deleted, and are a record of discussions about knowledge by people who cared about the topic.
That's if the talk pages actually contain any relevant discussion; in my experience, a substantial proportion of the time the talk page contains nothing but templates.
On 7/7/07, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
That's if the talk pages actually contain any relevant discussion; in my experience, a substantial proportion of the time the talk page contains nothing but templates.
Or in the case of a speedied article, arguments against the speedy deletion - which rarely amount to much. (If they do account for anything, the page should probably be kept, of course).
If I delete a speedy after an author comments, I will generally copy the comments about speedy deletion to the author's talk page, and at least briefly say why I did not accept them. DGG
On 7/8/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/7/07, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
That's if the talk pages actually contain any relevant discussion; in my experience, a substantial proportion of the time the talk page contains nothing but templates.
Or in the case of a speedied article, arguments against the speedy deletion - which rarely amount to much. (If they do account for anything, the page should probably be kept, of course).
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