I was always in favour of deletion of pages, and disagreed with those who wanted to keep every irrelevant, impossible-to-make-encyclopædic article. But rampant deletionism has hit ridiculous levels on WP now. I daren't even go near the article deletion page because of what goes on there. Now the template deletion page has become ridiculous.
While it is understandable to delete most single use templates, it seems to have hit a stage where perfectly valid, obviously usable templates are been dumped.
It shouldn't be too hard to tell the difference between a once-off template that is unlikely to have a use on more than one page, and one that obviously has widespread uses now and in the future, but simply hasn't been put into all the articles they may be used for 'yet'.
I created one as part of a wholescale rewriting of articles on the government of Northern Ireland. Because of problems saving stuff due to those goddamned error messages I worked on two articles on my desktop. I put the template into one (it already was in the first one to be written) to find that it had already been proposed for deletion. Anyone with elementary cop-on would have realised from its contents that it was going to be used in up to 10 articles.
Single use templates with massive amount of codes are being deleted and substituted even though firstly that makes them are easier to vandalise, secondly they make an article difficult to edit if there are a lot of codes all over the place, and thirdly it then means that they cannot be used elsewhere even though their contents make them ideal for multiple use as a template.
We could no with a page of ''useful templates'' where existing templates could be picked out for use in new articles.
It seems to be the same 'greek chorus' of deleters who do the blanket nominating and do blanket voting to delete everything in sight. They seem all too often to drown out protests from others that their deletionitis is out of control.
Once it was the case that only crap was deleted. Now it seems that crap survives while the delete gang propose good articles, good templates and good infoboxes for deletion.
Wikipedia needs to do something to reign in the delete brigade. Deletion used to be used to keep up standards. Now it is bringing down standards, doing damage to content and design and seriously pissing off users who are doing serious work and have to spend their days fighting off attempts to delete things. The final twist is that many of the most fanatical deleters seem to be down damn all writing themselves, simply proposing large numbers of things for deletion all the time, irrespective of quality, usefulness or benefit to Wikipedia.
Thom
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