[Wikimediaindia-l] Deletion (aka genocide) of articles

[Ravishankar]

HI Nikhil,

A request first:

When you address specific issues based on your experience from a particular
Wikipedia, please be candid about the details. Because, it will help to see
the issue clearly and won't annoy Wikipedians from other languages.

Some practices in Tamil Wikipedia regarding deletion:

* There is no automatic deletion by bots or filters.

* Only clear cases of vandalism / spam / machine generated content gets
deleted ASAP as a cleanup measure.

* In cases of non-wiki / disputable stuff, we leave a template saying "This
article is not suitable for Wikipedia and it may get deleted. Please improve
the article or discuss in Talk page". Usually, we provide a month's time
before deletion. All these articles are put in one category.

* On cases of many such articles by the same user, we leave messages in his
/ her talk page and try to reach him / her by all means. (Email user, phone
wherever info is available)

* In case of dispute or mass deletion, we nominate the article for deletion
and proceed based on voting / feedback.

* We also try to improve  the stubs, re-organize under single page.
Therefore, the information is not lost.

* We encourage users to write articles with at least 3 sentences.

* There is no single / group of users doing deletion but any elected sysop
can do this when the action is necessary. Tamil Wikipedia has 19 admins with
diverse background till date.

I wouldn't say you should never delete an article. Quality is important and
there should be some minimum standard enforced by community discussion. At
the same time, I have heard from people who got discouraged after their
article got deleted and they couldn't understand why. Not many follow recent
changes regularly and have no clue why their article got deleted. So, it may
be a good idea to auto generate a mail to the user explaining the reasons
when his article gets deleted. She may opt out of such notices.

Ravi

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 7:15 AM, Nikhil Sheth <nikhil.js at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I'm not fully sure where the community is going on this topic, but here's
> my two cents on deletion of articles in Indian /any language wikipedias:
>
> *It should not happen. Period.*
>
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