[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Ryan Delaney]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 3:05 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> 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.
>
> 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?)
>

Not that I know of. Lomax made some interesting points though, and I
want to carry that reasoning forward. I think there are two compelling
reasons to adopt PWD: (1) we have substantial evidence that a
wiki-style content editing process is a successful way to build an
encyclopedia because every other content decision we make uses that
basic format... and look at all the wild success we've had with it.
(2) The current deletion system is a failure, as it creates
intractable problems like this one.

Because of the terrific success we've had with making all /other/
kinds of content edits subject to the Wiki model (and our almost
religious faith in the dispute resolution process), I think the burden
ought to be on everyone else to explain why pure wiki deletion
/wouldn't/ work. It doesn't introduce any new problems that we don't
already have extensive experience and process in place to solve, since
deletion would be treated as any other kind of edit (and so edit wars
over deletion could be treated like any other edit war) -- it
increases transparency and makes it easier to restore content in cases
like this one, so that we ALSO wouldn't feel so bad about temporarily
deleting marginal BLPs until they can be improved (and by anyone, not
just admins) -- and it massively simplifies deletion process in the
case of 99% of deletions which are absolutely uncontroversial.

The only software changes we would need would be that blanked pages
should show up as redlinks and should not be indexed by search engines
or show up when someone hits Random Page. That's pretty much it. The
software changes are easy and minimal, but the cultural change would
be massive.

I appreciate everyone's trepidation over this, really-- big changes
are scary. But I really wonder how many of these catastrophic snafu's
we'll have to go through before people get fed up with the problems
that inevitably result from this deletion system and look for some
kind of major overhaul. That's not pie in the sky -- it's in order. We
ought to get started now.

- causa sui