I never like the creation of a central page to list prospective deletions. Admins have deletion power, they should simply use it.
If we need a "guidelines" page, fine. Make a guidelines page, so that if 50 articles a day fail to meet the "worthiness criteria" an Admin knows to delete them. For example:
* Nothing but a URL to a foreign language website. * Nothing but graffiti about some school chum of yours: Jack is a prat, or loves Mary (or maybe even Sam ;-)
Oh, yes, we have that already, don't we? It's called speedy delete ...
I propose something radically different: * If an article is off to a good start, let it remain a stub. Even help it along by expanding it. * If a TOPIC is inappropriate for Wikipedia, tag it and bag it (more about this below) * If content is hopelessly poor, but it's a good topic (like graffiti about a notable person, place or thing) - then blank the page. I believe this makes it fall below the threshold for "red linking"; stubs under a certain minimum number of characters appear as "non-existent", right?
Tag and bag:
We should be able to label or "move" articles out of the main namespace, so that they do not appear to the ordinary reading public. Let's find a way to do this other than ACTUALLY DELETING each version of the page from a database table and copying those versions into a "deleted page" table. That is too much server overhead, I guess.
Just make it "hidden" or something. But let it be visible on some page (like a category page?) which lists "bad articles" in various categories and sorted in various convenient ways.
One more thing: voting
Don't say that "voting is astonishingly rare" at Wikipedia, and then turn around and insist that no page can be deleted (or RETAINED) without first counting and abiding by the Votes For Deletion. This is breathtakingly stupid, and we deserve all the bad press we get for it - and for what it does to the deletion process.
Timing
There is tension between the Process of creating an encyclopedia and the hurry to present the Product.
* Process => development of new articles, along with continuous revision (i.e., improvement) of old articles * Product => the display of finished articles
We also insist on displaying "works in progress", which provides the tension. I think this is what provides the vector which spreads the poison which David Gerard was talking about (like mosquitoes carrying malaria).
Uncle Ed
Poor, Edmund W (Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com) [050805 01:01]:
We also insist on displaying "works in progress", which provides the tension. I think this is what provides the vector which spreads the poison which David Gerard was talking about (like mosquitoes carrying malaria).
I think that is a lot of the essential problem. That's one reason I'm keen on the article rating scheme (if someone can write code Brion can live with), as it'll greatly reduce the pressure to make the work-in-progress presentable to the outside world as finished product.
(User:Geogre also came up with an idea that uses article rating as part of a deletion mechanism, which is something I feared, but I think his proposal is actually pretty good. See [[Wikipedia:Version System sketch]].)
- d.
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
- If content is hopelessly poor, but it's a good topic (like graffiti
about a notable person, place or thing) - then blank the page. I believe this makes it fall below the threshold for "red linking"; stubs under a certain minimum number of characters appear as "non-existent", right?
Not yet. Pure Wiki Deletion proposes this, however. ~[[en:User:Humblefool]]