[Wikimedia-l] speedydeletion.wika.com lauched

[Andrew Gray]

On 11 June 2012 08:40, Mike  Dupont <jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com> wrote:
> After rereading your question, it boils down to if the tags are wrong. If
> the tags are wrong we will have to deal with them on a case by case issue,
> and I see that we will have to do more finer tagging of articles to be
> deleted, I hope that this will be the outcome of my effort to see that
> articles that are properly tagged and deleted according to a fair and
> transparent set of rules. lets work on this together to make the wikipedia
> better.

There's a couple of problems here.

One is that speedy deletion tags don't often get stacked - if people
see something that fills two criteria, they'll often tag them with
just one, and usually prefer the "clearer" criteria, the one with less
subjectivity about interpretation. Usually, this is seen with "copyvio
+ not notable" = only tag for copyvio; but it also manifests itself in
the cases Brad mentions - not notable + negatively slanted = usually
tagged for notability rather than negativity. This is a problem,
because understandably most of the cases you want to *keep* are the
"not-notable" ones...

Secondly, some admins will delete abusive material on sight without
waiting to tag it (which is skirting around best practice, but widely
accepted for unambiguously "bad" content), and some people prefer to
use "hand-written" CSD reasons. Both of these may end up with
harder-to-interpret deletion logs (they don't contain the codes) - I'm
not sure how your system works with these.

> What is the current policy now? you have articles in dumps that contain
> these offending materials i presume if they are not that new. What is the
> difference between a dump on wikpedia and a dump on archive.org, and a dump
> on wikia?

The difference is that one is a hard-to-accidentally-stumble-across
dump, and one is a publicly readable website ;-)

I do not believe there are active moves to remove material from older
dumps. *However*, the damage from problematic material surviving in
dumps is relatively low, because most speedily deleted material tends
never to make it into a dump.

Let's assume dumps are twice-weekly. If every article tagged for
speedy deletion "on creation" lasts for six hours before being
removed, then there's approximately a 1/60 chance of it being around
to when the dump triggers. By contrast, around 50% of articles marked
with PROD just after creation will survive into the dump, even if
deleted, and substantially over 50% of articles put through AFD on
creation will be dumped even if deleted, because the frequency of
relisting means many of them are tagged for two weeks.

As a result, CSD material - which is where the worst content usually
is - is much less likely to get dumped than AFD material.

Some dumped abusive material does make it out onto reuse sites,
though, and it's an incredible pain to deal with - people find it a
year or two later, mirrored on an abandoned ad-farm website, and write
us distressed letters about trying to get it removed. We can't do
anything about it - these sites are usually completely uncontactable
and don't care anyway - and it's quite an unpleasant experience for
all concerned.

If you're going to expose these on wikia as well as making archive
files, I'd strongly recommend you give a clearly visible contact
address to have material removed if needed - it'll save everyone
involved lot of stress in future!

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