On Sat, Dec 04, 2004 at 08:59:58AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
Please see existing discussion on this topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ShaneKing/vfd_proposal http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletion_management_redesign
Yup, I've seen, but neither are even close to what I'm suggesting. And they both add needless complexity imho.
The chief reason to be deleting something (as opposed to redirecting it to a more appropriate article or replacing it with a better one) is that it includes copyrighted material that we don't have permission to distribute. This necessitates not being able to have _just anybody_ come along and view or undelete it.
This is a problem, however my proposed system is in no way different than it currently is for existing articles/pages: If I paste copyrighted material into an article, it'll just get reverted, and only removed if the copyright holder complains (That's how it's done at Wikimedia anyway; I don't care too much about other people running mediawiki for this proposal), which currently needs a devel I think. If that's going to be a problem we'll need to change how we handle it in valid articles with copyrighted material in them anyway, so we might as well use the same mechanism for "virtual deletions" as we use for them.
Anyway, I intend to preempt all these obvious comments in a proper proposal if it turns out to be technically viable. I'm posting to wikitech-l to find out if there are _technical_ problems to the setup. After that we can fight out the legal, philosophical, interface-practical and what have you stuff on wikipedia or meta.
So, again: Does anybody foresee any major technical problems with this?