[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Andrew Gray]

2010/1/21 Emily Monroe <bluecaliocean at me.com>:
>> We're historically prone to having people (especially at CSD) assume
>> that an earlier deletion is itself a strong black mark - if an
>> article was deleted earlier, there must have been a good reason for
>> it, they figure.
>
> If, on NPP, I find that an article has been recreated, it's usually
> either a newbie or a troll (usually an incredibly persistent newbie)
> copy and pasting *the exact same article* and hitting publish. It's
> usually a speedily-deleted article. Just a possible explanation for
> that assumption.

I'm not saying it's not often warranted - I've done
delete-then-delete-then-delete-again a few times myself - but I have
had conversations like this in the past:

* Hi, you deleted X decent article, why?
* It was a recreation of a previously deleted article
* ...but that article shouldn't have been CSDed in the first place
* yes, but it was a recreation, and ...

[lather, rinse, repeat]

Getting rid of bad, problematic articles is, on balance, probably a
limited good. Making it less daunting to replace them with improved
articles - making the end result an *unarguable* good - is something
we should be actively looking out for.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk