[Wikipedia-l] Page deletion policy

[Fred Bauder]

At 02:25 PM 8/24/02 -0700, Toby Bartels wrote:
>One of the guidelines on [[Wikipedia:Policy on permanent deletion of pages]]
>(currently #6) says for the most part:
>
>  Generally speaking, delete pages that simply will
>  never become encyclopedia articles, e.g.,
>  with titles that will never be misspellings,
>  that represent completely idiosyncratic non-topics, etc.
>
>I've interpreted this differently from most of the other guidelines,
>in that it says to delete a page, while most say to *not* delete.
>But others have interpreted it to say to *not* delete pages
>that have titles that might become the titles of articles.
>(For examples, see the listings that The Cunctator has removed
>from [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]].)
>
>I think that this needs to be straightened out,
>and the language on the page may need to be clarified.
>IMO, pages with no content but with reasonable titles
>are the worst of all, when they are linked from other articles.
>The reader wastes time following links to useless pages;
>the writer doesn't write an article that might be sorely needed.
>[[Special:Mostwanted]], in particular, becomes skewed.
>
>What is the opinion of the list?

I would rather the policy was not changed. Most people can see that a short
but important article could be expanded. I think the articles show up on
the stub list anyway for folks to work on. Basically the change means that
other peoples work is to be thrown away.

Fred Bauder