Wikipedia talk:Deletion requests

Eloquence & Angela, thanks for working on this! And forgive me if nobody's supposed to be commenting on this page yet; I couldn't figure out where to put this suggestion.

Re: requests for undeletion -- it seems to me that many of the problems with deletion (unavailability of someone's work without asking a sysop; difficulty in viewing old content for considering undeletion, apparent finality and unpleasantness) could be remedied in a tangential way:

Have separate ways to mark an article "removed/non-archived" and "deleted"; the former would be used for all but the most legally and associatively bad cases -- copyvio, slander, grossly offensive content running afoul of policy. Any logged-in user [but not a spider or google-bot] could see all non-archived history for a given page. For instance, say

Jan: Alex creates a "Cher" page that says "kjdkfjasdkf" which is removed

Feb: Bo creates a new "Cher" page that defames Cher the star, which is deleted

March: Ciprian crates a "Cher" page which is all about his kitten by that name, which is first somehow redirected to "User:Ciprian/Cher" and then removed

April: Dario creats a page about the 19c French drinking song "Cher", redirected to "Cher (song)"

June: Fleur pastes a long segment from the American popstars latest autobio into a new article about Cher, which is deleted.

July: Jomo puts up a suitable page on Cher, which stays.

Then it should be possible for any logged-in user to see everything but Bo's and Fleur's entries, by date, as long as they were associated with the page title "Cher"... as a stopgap, before this is implemented, the last revision of a deleted article can at least be made available to logged-in users this way.

+sj+ 00:44, 2004 Feb 22 (UTC)

Have you seen Deletion management redesign on Meta? Perhaps there or the feature suggestions page might be better places to discuss that? Angela. 00:53, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)

I'd seen the first; my update from a few weeks back is the last one on the page (before that it had been over a month). The MW feature/bug discussion page looks more active; thanks! BV's todo list is down for the nonce, so I wasn't sure where to post. Moving this there...

Looks great. As soon as this is flying I hope we'll look seriously at the process of speedy deletion. As many well know, I'd like to make both obvious pranks and commercial abuse of the site candidates for this. But make haste slowly I think. Andrewa 17:09, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Two developments. Firstly, I'm moving more rapidly than I expected on speedy deletions, although still patiently I hope, see Wikipedia_talk:Speedy_deletions#Be_careful_on_speedy_deletions. Secondly, there's another move to make VfD date-based, see Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion. Andrewa 22:29, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Related issues

Gathering arguments and then having an admin evaluate them is inherently subjective, and potentially worsens the problem that a deletion outcome depends on which admin closes it.

Basically, however, I think this is a good idea; and I believe many users think so, as variants of this have been proposed one way or another for months, e.g. Wikipedia:Expeditious deletion, Wikipedia:Countdown deletion etc. Some of those are a bit more m:instruction creepish than others.

I believe the simplest variant would be this: you may propose an article for deletion by putting on a template and specifying a reason. The template automatically adds the article to a category by day (which is technically possible). The cat makes the day easily searchable by title. After a number of days (3? 5?) anything in the cat can be speedily deleted except by the person who added the template (thus ensuring that two people, at least, have seen it).

Anyone who disagrees can counter the deletion by removing the template (preferably adding a reason in the edit summary). That's all. No debate. If after that the nominator still thinks the page should be deleted, it can be taken to a VFD'ish page reserved for controversial stuff (and note the reason why the template was removed, as a reason to keep). We should have a speedy-keep mechanism to remove 'obvious keeps' from there. A possible variation might be to not allow the person who put on the template to also nominate it on VFD (thus requiring a second opinion).

Advantages? It's about as simple as you can get. Deleting obvious junk is made easier, deleting controversial things is made harder. Less bureaucracy. Less room for violent factionalizing debate. And checking the daily category is far less work than checking the daily VFD log. Thoughts welcome.

Radiant_>|< 08:39, August 9, 2005 (UTC)