[WikiEN-l] Why we redirect instead of deleting

[Toby Bartels]

I'm going through my watchlist now, and I found some talk pages
about [[AIDS Kills Fags Dead]] and all its many variations.
These pages were deleted sometime, and they were deleted long enough ago
that even though I'm an admin on [[en:]],
I can't view the deleted revisions anymore.

I hopped around links for a while,
until discovering that old talk is at [[Talk:AKFD]] and its subpages.
>From the edit history, I see that Martin reorganised the subpages,
although I'd have to look through all of his edits in order
to discover ''where'' my watched material ended up.

Fortunately, my plans are to remove all of this stuff
from my watchlist, and nothing more, so I'm OK.
But what if I'd wanted to track down changes?
With some work, I think that I could straighten it out --
but if I were inexperienced with Wikipedia,
then I might have never found [[Talk:AKFD]] in the first place.

If another person, following our advice at [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]
had linked back to the edit histories of these pages
in lieu of determining 5 significant authors,
then this other user would be in violation of the GFDL.

All of this is why, when we change the title of pages,
we should turn them into redirects instead of deleting them.
I almost left out the word "should" in the line above,
and a year ago I would have been able to do that.


-- Toby