[WikiEN-l] When did RfD Become Toxic?

[SJ]

On 7/19/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can anyone quickly get me up to speed on when Redirects for
> Deletion... sorry. Redirects for "discussion" became a toxic hellhole
> of idiocy that makes the rest of our deletion procedures look sane?
>
> Seriously. People are nominating perfectly sane if misguided
> redirects for deletion because no articles use them. Things like
> [[Cammy (Street Fighter)]] are up because there's no other Cammy
> articles. Which is fine, but someone who doesn't know that and is
> trying to guess our naming conventions could type in. Similarly, we
> have people seriously suggesting that [[The Twilight Zone (pinball)]]
> is not a reasonable redirect for [[Twilight Zone (pinball)]].
>
> Seriously. When did we begin purging redirects, which are possibly
> the most harmless thing imaginable on Wikipedia. These are not
> offensive or POV redirects. They're sensible things that people might
> well guess when trying to type in an article name.

Not only harmless, but quite valuable.  Traditional encyclos are quite
close to the chest with their authority files -- of which the set of
redirects is an integral part.

SJ