[Wikimedia-l] speedydeletion.wika.com lauched

[Kirill Lokshin]

On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Richard Symonds <
richard.symonds at wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:

> Non-notable articles are arguably important to keep - they serve as a basis
> for recreating the articles in future, and for easy review by non-admins.
>

That's true to a point, but only for articles which are marginally
non-notable, or which have the potential to demonstrate notability if
rewritten.  An article about, for example, someone's pet goldfish is
unlikely to be of much value to anyone, regardless of where it's located.

If Mike wants to keep such articles around, of course, that's his business;
as far as I can tell, there's no real harm in it.


> Hoaxes are also important to keep publicy viewable - so that we can stop
> similar ones happening again, surely?


This is where I think things become slightly problematic.  There are, in
broad terms, two categories of hoaxes: those which are fundamentally
harmless (these typically being of the "did you know that 'gullible' isn't
in the dictionary" variety), and those which have the potential to be
harmful (including, but not limited to, false statements about drugs,
crimes, politically explosive issues, etc.).  The speedy deletion system
makes no real attempt to distinguish between these (with the exception of
blatant attacks on living people, which have their own deletion tag), but
retaining the second category in a publicly-viewable (and
publicly-searcheable?) form is probably not desirable.

Kirill