[WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism

[Bryan Derksen]

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> You know what I find annoying? People who 'vote' to merge or delete on xFD.
> If you think something is mergeable, deletion shouldn't even enter your
> mind. Also, merging keeps information, deletion destroys it, they're two
> entirely different beasts. Votes like that are entirely meaningless, but
> especially annoying when the delete part is bolded and put in front.
> Why can't people just say '''Merge''' to article X.

As far as I understand it we're _legally required_ to preserve the
article history if we merge the contents somewhere else. The GFDL
requires us to maintain an author list and the way Wikipedia does that
is via the edit history.

I just hit a case like this a few days back over on [[Talk:Otherkin]],
where someone pasted the most recent version of the deleted article
[[Draconity]] for potential merging. As it currently stands this looks
legally no different than cutting and pasting the entire text of an
Encyclopedia Britannica article into a talk page and suggesting it be
merged.

And since [[Draconity]] itself has already been recreated as a redirect,
what is the point of keeping the history deleted anyway? The article's
inaccessible to readers either way. As long as an article isn't deleted
for copyright or libel reasons, if we've got a redirect sitting there we
might as well preserve the article history in case something salvageable
is discovered in there one day.

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