[WikiEN-l] [Fwd: Re: Deletion of large pages]

[Mark Ryan]

Why was it so necessary to hack a protection against deletion of the
Main Page? If the Main Page gets deleted, all that happens (thanks to
cascade protection,  transclusion of the Main Page on other pages and
some javascript) is that people with Javascript enabled see a
"temporary technical issues" image in the place of the Main Page, and
the edit button is removed. Typically the Main Page gets restored
within a minute or two, and the perputrator blocked/desysopped. No
harm done, beyond a small number of people hitting the Main Page get
told to search for the articles they want directly.

With this ill-thought-through move, the Main Page could not be deleted
any more, even for legitimate purposes, and its history was flooded
with a hoarde of edits by BetaCommandBot, making perusing its history
and constructing diffs very difficult.

~Mark Ryan