[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 06:05 PM 1/23/2010, David Gerard wrote:
>On 23 January 2010 23:00, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Repeat after me: Pure Wiki Deletion.
>
>Last time the subject came up, I believe the advocates were asked for
>any examples, anywhere, of wikis that use Pure Wiki Deletion. I don't
>think they came up with any at all.

Uh, Wikipedia? For information in articles, and using redirects for 
articles. Also, in effect, Wikipedia was this way with articles too, 
at the beginning, but then, if I've heard the history correctly, 
certain privileges became restricted to administrators.

WP:PWD was perhaps not well-expressed because it implied a software 
change was necessary. That change is optional, it was a proposal that 
blanked pages would show up as redlinks when linked. It might be 
better if a particular category were dedicated to that. (I.e., if an 
article has the category, it would be redlinked just as if it did not 
exist.) In this way, the page might not be totally blanked, but might 
contain bot-generated text on why the article was blanked, and a link 
to a page that covers, for the uninitiated, how to see the blanked 
article, how to restore it, etc. The redlink would then encourage 
actual article improvement through making the deficiency noticeable 
again. (This is an improvement over the present situation, where the 
existence of the article suppresses the redlink, even if the article 
is really inadequate even as a stub.)

But that's optional, simply a further improvement, not a necessity.

>Are there any?
>
>(Is it possible that the biggest and most popular wiki in the world
>might not be the best place to make the very first one?)

Mmmmm. The biggest wiki probably needs to figure some things out for 
the first time, because only the biggest has the severe problems of 
scale that are the difficulty here, but PWD is actually, in essence, 
the way it was at the beginning, roughly. If everyone is an 
administrator and can read deleted articles, isn't PWD and 
non-oversight deletion the same thing? Both require an extra step to 
read the allegedly inadequate text. Both are easy to fix, for 
administrators. PWD, however, makes fixing a problem blanking 
available to every editor, and, most importantly, every editor can, 
by looking at the history, read what was deleted and may then be more 
easily able to find references.

(Or to complain about illegal text, which might then call for 
revision deletion, requiring an administrator.)

If the proposal involved some new risk or hazard, sure, caution would 
be entirely in order. But blanking and replacement with a neutral and 
informative page that invites improvement? This is very close, only 
one step further, than stubbing, which is done all the time, and 
which can also be done by anyone.

Doing this by bot would be simple, and would quickly resolve the BLP 
problem with all those unreferenced articles, while doing no harm. If 
it turned out to be a problem, each of those articles would have a 
category on it that would make identification and bot-reversion easy.

Any editor -- or any registered editor if semiprotected -- could, in 
a flash, restore the article the way it was. But then this editor 
would be responsible for restoring BLP information without sourcing. 
And the editor, as well, would now, by default, be a watcher of the article.

What, exactly, is not to like? Perhaps administrators would rather 
fight over this?