On 15/06/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
We have been doing it, on an ad-hoc basis, for a year or so - generally after a complaint. It tends to be low-profile, because no-one ever watches archived deletion discussion pages so no-one notices...
[Low-profile here is "the reason people don't hear about it unless they go looking", not "our cunning plan to keep it secret", I hastily clarify...]
And nobody thought that it might be controversial and should be discussed by the wider policy community...?
(...)
I don't think this was appropriate to do in more than a corner case handful of special cases without airing it as a policy question to this group.
It was aired on wikien-l, in January 2006, when first proposed.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-January/037246.html
There's a thread of maybe fifty replies there discussing it, and it may well have also been discussed in some of the related AFD-is-a-PR-nightmare threads that month.
I would also feel better if you took the arguments above and created at least an essay on this on-wiki so that the policy discussion is public and the result openly available.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Courtesy_blanking has been on the wiki since September 2006, though it seems to have been merged and redirected to the main deletion policy page a few days ago.