On Monday 23 September 2002 07:55 pm, Fred wrote:
No misunderstanding and no apology. But I do think putting deleted material in history should solve the problem. As to evalating exactly what you have done, that is your responsibility, Life is just too short to follow someone around.
Fred
Do you ever have anything positive to say here or do you just enjoy insulting people you don't like (mostly me)? Name calling is a childish game played by children and those with weak minds in an atempt to cheaply "win" an arguement they feel they would otherwise lose.
With that said, I wouldn't at all mind the replacement of the deletion function with a de-linking from the database function; When a page is de-linked from database then all links to it would be replaced by an empty link and the de-linked page would be listed on a log page (this would be similar to Microsoft's Recycle Bin).
Then all the micro-stub lovers could pick and choose at their leisure the micro-stubs they wish to turn into stubs and the history of who first typed the epic prose of "fill in", or "Pete Rose was a ball player. Jesus rules!" or my favorite "I am the bomb and you all know that i am the bomb and you all know that i will always be the bomb regardless of what anyy of you have to say about the fact that i am the bomb and about the fact that i will always be the bomb" will be preserved.
But then there is the problem of badly named pages that resulted from typos or vandalism, such as the hypothetical [[DON QUIOTE LIKES CARROTS]] or [[When Derams May COme]]. It would be silly to keep a page history, even one hidden under an edit link, for a page title that will never become an article or even a redirect.
There is also the problem of copyright violations that need to be removed for legal reasons.
So unless the developers or the software itself periodically clears-out the recycle bin by permanently deleting old de-linked pages, then there are significant draw-backs to this plan.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)