[Wikipedia-l] Re: Page deletion policy

[Larry Sanger]

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.
[...]

Bear in mind that when we settled on the above point (as part of a general
"hands off" deletion policy--*still* a good idea, by the way), it was at a
time when one couldn't delete an article without deleting its history as
well.  Perhaps that's changed.  Occasionally, a "complete" article (but
egregiously biased, or so factually incorrect in so many places it's
non-rescuable)  with a more or less useful history ends up being wiped
clean.  So I think part of the reasoning behind the "don't delete the ones
with plausible titles" rule is simply that the item might have a useful
history.

In cases where that's not so, or generally, if the history could be saved
while links to the article are rendered as "?" if the article has zero
content, then I'd be all in favor of scrapping this rule.

In fact, the last I recall of this issue, I think there were several
people on board the idea of rendering links to contentless articles with
"?", but (I might have this wrong) I think a programmer said that that
would be a system strain somehow.  Would be a good idea to have the issue
re-examined.  That would require the least amount of effort for content
developers.

Larry
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