> From: Daniel Ehrenberg littledanehren@yahoo.com

> Why not just contact the author

Interesting idea. One problem, though - what do you do for pages that were created by someone who wasn't logged in? Email's not an option there.

Another problem, for some pages - who's the author? The person who first created the page? The person who made the last edit? Everyone who ever made an edit? Everyone who ever made an edit that wasn't a Minor edit?

> instead of a boilerplate thing on the article

Well, if we can solve the author problem, and we automate listing for deletion, email might not be a bad idea (although obviously skipped if you're the one doing the listing). In fact, we could make it an option on your preferences page (do you want email if a page of yours is listed on VfD), maybe even with sub-options (not if all your edits are Minor).

We could make adding a notice to the page an option too! :-)

Noel

PS: One problem with adding a notice is that if the page is *not* deleted, the notice has to be removed. Again, if deletion was automated, a lot of this scutwork could be completely automated.

Still, this argues against adding the notice by editing the text of the article, as an edit might alter it to the point where it couldn't be recognized. Better would be a "listed for deletion" bit associated with the page, that causes the notice to be displayed when the page is looked at. Having the bit set would update the modify time so that Watchlists still work.