I'd like clarification on the deletion policy. I just deleted a number of pages which contained nothing but "describe the new page here." That seemed reasonable to me, but on revisiting [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia policy on permanent deletion of pages]] I see it says "Do not delete anything that might in the future become an encyclopedia topic. Hence, just because someone has written a completely worthless article about John Doe, that doesn't mean we should permanently delete the topic, [[John Doe]], from the database."
The articles showed absolutely no attempt, even a biased or misinformed one, to write an article. I did keep the one that had a talk page. But perhaps I've acted in haste.
Does the above include pages which say nothing more than "describe the new page here"? Should we leave those or not?
kq 0
My suggestion: Pages *can* be deleted if * they have no valuable contents (blank/"Describe..."/weird text etc.) AND * if they don't have any valuable contents in their history AND * if they cannot be easily reditected If the article history is blank or nonsense, there's no reason to keep it by waiting for an advanced deletion mechanism anyway.
Magnus
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com [mailto:wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com]On Behalf Of koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com Sent: Saturday, April 06, 2002 11:56 PM To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Subject: [Wikipedia-l] deletion policy
I'd like clarification on the deletion policy. I just deleted a number of pages which contained nothing but "describe the new page here." That seemed reasonable to me, but on revisiting [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia policy on permanent deletion of pages]] I see it says "Do not delete anything that might in the future become an encyclopedia topic. Hence, just because someone has written a completely worthless article about John Doe, that doesn't mean we should permanently delete the topic, [[John Doe]], from the database."
The articles showed absolutely no attempt, even a biased or misinformed one, to write an article. I did keep the one that had a talk page. But perhaps I've acted in haste.
Does the above include pages which say nothing more than "describe the new page here"? Should we leave those or not?
kq 0
koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com wrote:
I'd like clarification on the deletion policy. I just deleted a number of pages which contained nothing but "describe the new page here." That seemed reasonable to me, but on revisiting [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia policy on permanent deletion of pages]] I see it says "Do not delete anything that might in the future become an encyclopedia topic. Hence, just because someone has written a completely worthless article about John Doe, that doesn't mean we should permanently delete the topic, [[John Doe]], from the database."
The articles showed absolutely no attempt, even a biased or misinformed one, to write an article. I did keep the one that had a talk page. But perhaps I've acted in haste.
Does the above include pages which say nothing more than "describe the new page here"? Should we leave those or not?
I think you did the right thing. I don't see how anyone could object. It's that the policy is poorly written on this particular point.
--Jimbo
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