[Wikipedia-l] De-linking; the recycle bin alternative to deletion

[Daniel Mayer]

On Monday 23 September 2002 07:55 pm, Fred wrote:
> No misunderstanding and no apology. But I do think putting deleted material
> in history should solve the problem. As to evalating exactly what you have
> done, that is your responsibility, Life is just too short to follow someone
> around.
>
> Fred

Do you ever have anything positive to say here or do you just enjoy insulting 
people you don't like (mostly me)? Name calling is a childish game played by 
children and those with weak minds in an atempt to cheaply "win" an arguement 
they feel they would otherwise lose.

With that said, I wouldn't at all mind the replacement of the deletion 
function with a de-linking from the database function; When a page is 
de-linked from database then all links to it would be replaced by an empty 
link and the de-linked page would be listed on a log page (this would be 
similar to Microsoft's Recycle Bin).

Then all the micro-stub lovers could pick and choose at their leisure the 
micro-stubs they wish to turn into stubs and the history of who first typed 
the epic prose of "fill in", or "Pete Rose was a ball player. Jesus rules!" 
or my favorite "I am the bomb and you all know that i am the bomb and you all 
know that i will always be the bomb regardless of what anyy of you have to 
say about the fact that i am the bomb and about the fact that i will always 
be the bomb"  will be preserved.   

But then there is the problem of badly named pages that resulted from 
typos or vandalism, such as the hypothetical [[DON QUIOTE LIKES CARROTS]] or 
[[When Derams May COme]]. It would be silly to keep a page history, even one 
hidden under an edit link, for a page title that will never become an article 
or even a redirect. 

There is also the problem of copyright violations that need to be removed for 
legal reasons. 

So unless the developers or the software itself periodically clears-out the 
recycle bin by permanently deleting old de-linked pages, then there are  
significant draw-backs to this plan. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)