I have been working with Wikipedia for a very long time and something that has disturbed me very much is the lack of transparency after an article has been deleted. I think the following issues should be resolved:
1) [Logged in] users should be able to view the deleted article, if it was not deleted due to copyright or legal issues. I believe there are many articles that are being deleted that are still very educational to the public, and I don't think it is in the educational best interest of our public to ban someone's right to view a deleted article.
2) There should be direct links on the deleted page to the discussion (and previous discussion if it was put up for AfD before), so people can more easily understand why an article was deleted. Today, if a newbie to Wikipedia comes to a deleted article, they are basically told that the article went through a process and was deleted. I imagine it would be very shocking for someone to return after a two week vacation and discover that one of their beloved articles has been put to the AfD without them even being notified.
3) Email auto-notification of articles on someone's watchlist of being proposed for AfD. Many people do not visit Wikipedia for a week, but still care very deeply about articles on their watchlist and may have put a lot of work into the article at hand and would like to have a say in the debate about whether an article should be deleted. These users should at least be notified by email when an article is put up for AfD review.
I think with these three reforms in place, Wikipedia will become a much better place. I know a few people who don't edit Wikipedia in English anymore, because they are afraid that their work will just be removed by a delete-happy admin, even if a vote has more Keep votes than Remove (which I have seen in the past).
Best wishes, Chuck Smith Eo Wikipedia founder
On 6/21/07, Chuck Smith chuckssmith@gmail.com wrote:
- [Logged in] users should be able to view the deleted article, if it
was not deleted due to copyright or legal issues. I believe there are many articles that are being deleted that are still very educational to the public, and I don't think it is in the educational best interest of our public to ban someone's right to view a deleted article.
That brings up the question of what exactly the point of deletion is, then. Users can already get the text articles deleted for innocuous reasons from any number of friendly administrators, and if they don't know where to ask, that's something that the English Wikipedia should solve itself by editing the appropriate message.
- There should be direct links on the deleted page to the discussion
(and previous discussion if it was put up for AfD before), so people can more easily understand why an article was deleted.
Posting deletion logs was tried just now and changed, because it's ugly and because it partly defeats the point of deletion when it quotes the content right on the very page it was supposed to have been deleted from.
Possibly it would be interesting to allow a custom message to be added to a deleted article by admins, without actually recreating the article.
- Email auto-notification of articles on someone's watchlist of being
proposed for AfD.
Hard to see how this would be implemented without a fair amount of special-case code being written specifically for the English Wikipedia or whatever.
On 21/06/07, Simetrical Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
That brings up the question of what exactly the point of deletion is, then. Users can already get the text articles deleted for innocuous reasons from any number of friendly administrators, and if they don't know where to ask, that's something that the English Wikipedia should solve itself by editing the appropriate message.
[[WP:DRV]] already notes this. Userfying uncontroversial deletions for further work (e.g. not copyvios or living biographies) is a matter of asking.
- Email auto-notification of articles on someone's watchlist of being
proposed for AfD.
Hard to see how this would be implemented without a fair amount of special-case code being written specifically for the English Wikipedia or whatever.
Nominators are supposed to let people know an article they wrote (or substantially wrote) is being nominated, but they rarely bother.
- d.
On 21/06/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Nominators are supposed to let people know an article they wrote (or substantially wrote) is being nominated, but they rarely bother.
Our resident Californian had one of his ideas some time ago...it had something to do with deletion work queues; informing users their images/pages/etc. were up for deletion, queuing pages and files for deletion, all manner of like goodies.
Perhaps he can be prompted to elaborate.
Rob Church
On 6/21/07, Chuck Smith chuckssmith@gmail.com wrote:
I have been working with Wikipedia for a very long time and something that has disturbed me very much is the lack of transparency after an article has been deleted. I think the following issues should be resolved:
- [Logged in] users should be able to view the deleted article, if it
was not deleted due to copyright or legal issues. I believe there are many articles that are being deleted that are still very educational to the public, and I don't think it is in the educational best interest of our public to ban someone's right to view a deleted article.
Yes.
2) There should be direct links on the deleted page to the discussion
(and previous discussion if it was put up for AfD before), so people can more easily understand why an article was deleted. Today, if a newbie to Wikipedia comes to a deleted article, they are basically told that the article went through a process and was deleted. I imagine it would be very shocking for someone to return after a two week vacation and discover that one of their beloved articles has been put to the AfD without them even being notified.
Yes.
3) Email auto-notification of articles on someone's watchlist of being
proposed for AfD. Many people do not visit Wikipedia for a week, but still care very deeply about articles on their watchlist and may have put a lot of work into the article at hand and would like to have a say in the debate about whether an article should be deleted. These users should at least be notified by email when an article is put up for AfD review.
That is not an unreasonable option.
I think with these three reforms in place, Wikipedia will become a
much better place. I know a few people who don't edit Wikipedia in English anymore, because they are afraid that their work will just be removed by a delete-happy admin, even if a vote has more Keep votes than Remove (which I have seen in the past).
Yes. Note that reform #1 is equivalent to greatly increasing the percentage of admins, which I believe would be beneficial.
On 6/22/07, Chuck Smith chuckssmith@gmail.com wrote:
- [Logged in] users should be able to view the deleted article, if it
was not deleted due to copyright or legal issues. I believe there are many articles that are being deleted that are still very educational to the public, and I don't think it is in the educational best interest of our public to ban someone's right to view a deleted article.
The software would then need to be able to distinguish between all the various reasons that pages get deleted; this would end up being very project specific, since each project has standards for deletion that are different, even if only slightly.
Most projects have methods for the recovery of deleted content in uncontroversial cases, and I think it is preferable to have sysops decide what is or is not controversial rather than having the software decide.
- There should be direct links on the deleted page to the discussion
(and previous discussion if it was put up for AfD before), so people can more easily understand why an article was deleted. Today, if a newbie to Wikipedia comes to a deleted article, they are basically told that the article went through a process and was deleted. I imagine it would be very shocking for someone to return after a two week vacation and discover that one of their beloved articles has been put to the AfD without them even being notified.
This is a matter of customising the interface. Enwiki does this, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Noarticletext
- Email auto-notification of articles on someone's watchlist of being
proposed for AfD. Many people do not visit Wikipedia for a week, but still care very deeply about articles on their watchlist and may have put a lot of work into the article at hand and would like to have a say in the debate about whether an article should be deleted. These users should at least be notified by email when an article is put up for AfD review.
I believe that email notification was disabled on the larger projects for performance reasons; I would expect that there would be comparable performance issues for notification for only certain events. There would be far less emails going out, but instead it would be necessary to parse every edit for something matching an AfD template or similar.
Again, there is a social rather than a technical solution that achieves the same end: encouraging people to email major contributors to articles they nominate for deletion using [[Special:Emailuser]].
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