[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Ryan Delaney]

All right, now it seems that we are getting somewhere. It sounds like
you're saying that PWD would make over-aggressive blanking of BLPs
less harmful, but not completely harmless. I think that's right, and
it's true of all bad edits that they damage the project. The error
that PWD corrects is that whereas bad edits are easily reversible, bad
deletions are not easily reversible. Most of the time we can easily
recover good content that was deleted simply by reverting or going
into the edit history and restoring it, but we can't do that with
deletion.

So yeah, we'll still have debates about how exactly to interpret the
BLP policy in the context of deletion, and we're bound to get it wrong
some of the time. The point is that when we do get it wrong, we'll be
able to put it right again more easily. I think that's something we
could all be on board with.

- causa sui

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 5:29 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> The proposed deletion, and tagging of articles asserted to be
> unsourced included a large number of articles that were in fact
> sourced. The most common reason was that suitable sources were put in
> the external references section, and merely had to be moved. Next most
> common was that they had been inserted in the text, but without using
> reference tags.
> And then there are the articles being prodded because the sources are
> not inline, even when they are adequate.
>
> Blanking does less harm than deletion, but it still does harm
> 1. the usual naïve viewer will not realise there;s an article in the
> history, no matter what notice is placed. Only the editors know about
> the page history, and almost nobody reads notices.
> 2. in the time spent to see if there are sources, a source could be
> added about half the time.
> 3. there is no reason to think the unsourced BLPs have more actual
> problems than the sourced ones, whether minimally sourced or even
> reasonably sourced. Apart from unsourced statements that are actual
> problems, many BLP violations (and NPOV violations generally) come
> from the   failure , sometimes the deliberate failure, to include
> relevant material. Therefore, concentrating on these distracts us from
> the actual problems here. We don't know how to deal with the demands
> of doing accurate work in any sort of article, and this project is an
> irrelevant anodyne.
>
>
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 4:43 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I would be uncomfortable with about blanking articles, if it couldnt
>>> do better in telling whether or not something is referenced than the
>>> last week or so of deletion nomination has done.
>>>
>>> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>>
>> I've read this five or six times and I can't figure out what you're
>> trying to say. Could you rephrase please?
>>
>> - causa sui
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>