On 6/25/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Already, you're making assumptions about process - you've assumed there will be some kind of discussion. Not all deletions involve discussion. Even for just the English Wikipedia, there is AFD, PROD and CSD, all of which need to be supported despite having very different processes behind them.
Multiple queues might be useful. Perhaps a more general queue system would be good. For each queue, we could store
1) Who can add stuff to the queue 2) Who can remove stuff from the queue with no further effect 3) Who can remove stuff from the queue with effects, and what effects those would be 4) Who gets notified on addition to the queue and various removals from the queue 5) How long the items would stay in the queue, and what if anything would happen when their time expired 6) Whether there was a discussion page, and if so where
as well as, obviously, the actual items in the queue and their status.
Maybe I'll write up a counterproposal. Of course, something this broad would be best as an extension, I'm thinking, but it could be used for all sorts of things: deletion, protection, blocking, oversight, even sysopping, replacing the confusing mishmash of alphabet soup and special categories that currently handle all this on larger wikis. Needless to say, it would have to be suitably general to handle all this, but I think it could be done. It seems silly to pick out one particular type of queue (deletion) when all the others are so extremely similar in terms of how they work.