I'm going through my watchlist now, and I found some talk pages about [[AIDS Kills Fags Dead]] and all its many variations. These pages were deleted sometime, and they were deleted long enough ago that even though I'm an admin on [[en:]], I can't view the deleted revisions anymore.
I hopped around links for a while, until discovering that old talk is at [[Talk:AKFD]] and its subpages.
From the edit history, I see that Martin reorganised the subpages,
although I'd have to look through all of his edits in order to discover ''where'' my watched material ended up.
Fortunately, my plans are to remove all of this stuff from my watchlist, and nothing more, so I'm OK. But what if I'd wanted to track down changes? With some work, I think that I could straighten it out -- but if I were inexperienced with Wikipedia, then I might have never found [[Talk:AKFD]] in the first place.
If another person, following our advice at [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]] had linked back to the edit histories of these pages in lieu of determining 5 significant authors, then this other user would be in violation of the GFDL.
All of this is why, when we change the title of pages, we should turn them into redirects instead of deleting them. I almost left out the word "should" in the line above, and a year ago I would have been able to do that.
-- Toby
Toby Bartels wrote:
All of this is why, when we change the title of
pages,
we should turn them into redirects instead of
deleting
them. I almost left out the word "should" in the line
above, and a year ago I would have been able to do that.
Normally I would agree with you, but in this case the talk pages were retitled because people wanted that phrase to stop appearing so much in Wikipedia, and renaming the talk pages AKFD was one suggested solution to this without having to lose the content itself. Leaving a redirect to the renamed page would not have solved the problem which was apparently that there were too many pages with this title. Normally redirects themselves don't cause any issues, so it is better to keep them than delete them, but as the discussions on [[Talk:AKFD/redirect]] and [[Talk:AKFD/November 2003]] show, it was decided that the redirects themselves were causing harm which is why I deleted them.
Deleting redirects is a problem, but sometimes keeping them is more of a problem. For example where it makes it unreasonably difficult to find similarly named articles, where the redirect might cause confusion, the redirect is offensive or the redirect makes no sense. There are more details and discussion of the policy at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion]] and [[Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy/redirects]].
Angela.
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Angela wrote in small part:
Deleting redirects is a problem, but sometimes keeping them is more of a problem. For example where it makes it unreasonably difficult to find similarly named articles, where the redirect might cause confusion, the redirect is offensive or the redirect makes no sense. There are more details and discussion of the policy at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion]] and [[Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy/redirects]].
I was going to reply on a couple of points, but since discussion on just this matter exists there, then I'll look at those pages instead for now.
-- Toby