[WikiEN-l] deletionism in popular culture

[Ryan Delaney]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Ryan Delaney wrote:
> > The main changes, as explained on [[WP:PWD]] are: blank pages should show
> up
> > as redlinks, blanked pages should not show up in search results, blanked
> > pages must have noindex so they aren't caught by search engines. PWD
> doesn't
> > function otherwise: without these changes, it would be more confusing
> than
> > beneficial.
> >
> Can you point to any wikipedia, or even any wiki, where this system is
> implemented?
>
> Charles
>

There are none of which I'm aware, though I only edit on en.wikipedia so I
might not be the best person to ask.

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 07/11/2009, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 2:28 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> On 07/11/2009, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > That's usually a worthwhile suggestion. The reason that won't work
> here,
> >> > though, is that PWD requires edits to the software to work. In other
> >> words,
> >> > this is an all-or-nothing enterprise-- we'd probably have to get the
> >> whole
> >> > project behind the complete overhaul before anything could be done.
> >> > Obviously, this is a major barrier to implementation.
> >>
> >> I don't see any changes to the software are necessary, just the
> >> creation of some templates and some policy. What change is supposed to
> >> be needed?
> >>
> >>
> > The main changes, as explained on [[WP:PWD]] are: blank pages should show
> up
> > as redlinks, blanked pages should not show up in search results, blanked
> > pages must have noindex so they aren't caught by search engines. PWD
> doesn't
> > function otherwise: without these changes, it would be more confusing
> than
> > beneficial.
>
> 'Blank pages' can be noindexed by using a blank page template, and
> will not show up in search results in most cases because they are
> blank. Redlinks you could deal with by having a bot fiddle with the
> links:
>
> blzh blah [[deletedArticle (deleted)|deletedArticle]] blah blah
>
> This has the unfortunate side-effect that clicking on the redlink to
> create the article will tend to create [[deletedArticle (delete)]] but
> you could always bot-move it back if that got created and deal with
> the links at the same time.
>
> Or you could just ignore red links for the time being since other
> processes also fill them in, like wiktionary softlinks.
>

Hmm, this is interesting. I like the idea of using a noindex template. The
idea with the bot altering the page names could be problematic in the event
of edit wars over deletion though. The idea of the original PWD proposal, as
I understand it, was that PWD would function for most deletions and AFD
would be the a kind of new RFC category where people comment on contested
deletions. That makes sense to me, since we will inevitably have contested
deletions where the parties aren't mature enough to talk it out. If you are
constantly changing the names of the pages, you will have to move them back
and forth, and I don't know if that's going to be feasible.

Still, these are interesting ideas... keep them coming.

- causa sui