At 06:05 PM 1/23/2010, David Gerard wrote: >On 23 January 2010 23:00, Ryan Delaney <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Repeat after me: Pure Wiki Deletion. > >Last time the subject came up, I believe the advocates were asked for >any examples, anywhere, of wikis that use Pure Wiki Deletion. I don't >think they came up with any at all.
Uh, Wikipedia? For information in articles, and using redirects for articles. Also, in effect, Wikipedia was this way with articles too, at the beginning, but then, if I've heard the history correctly, certain privileges became restricted to administrators. WP:PWD was perhaps not well-expressed because it implied a software change was necessary. That change is optional, it was a proposal that blanked pages would show up as redlinks when linked. It might be better if a particular category were dedicated to that. (I.e., if an article has the category, it would be redlinked just as if it did not exist.) In this way, the page might not be totally blanked, but might contain bot-generated text on why the article was blanked, and a link to a page that covers, for the uninitiated, how to see the blanked article, how to restore it, etc. The redlink would then encourage actual article improvement through making the deficiency noticeable again. (This is an improvement over the present situation, where the existence of the article suppresses the redlink, even if the article is really inadequate even as a stub.) But that's optional, simply a further improvement, not a necessity. >Are there any? > >(Is it possible that the biggest and most popular wiki in the world >might not be the best place to make the very first one?) Mmmmm. The biggest wiki probably needs to figure some things out for the first time, because only the biggest has the severe problems of scale that are the difficulty here, but PWD is actually, in essence, the way it was at the beginning, roughly. If everyone is an administrator and can read deleted articles, isn't PWD and non-oversight deletion the same thing? Both require an extra step to read the allegedly inadequate text. Both are easy to fix, for administrators. PWD, however, makes fixing a problem blanking available to every editor, and, most importantly, every editor can, by looking at the history, read what was deleted and may then be more easily able to find references. (Or to complain about illegal text, which might then call for revision deletion, requiring an administrator.) If the proposal involved some new risk or hazard, sure, caution would be entirely in order. But blanking and replacement with a neutral and informative page that invites improvement? This is very close, only one step further, than stubbing, which is done all the time, and which can also be done by anyone. Doing this by bot would be simple, and would quickly resolve the BLP problem with all those unreferenced articles, while doing no harm. If it turned out to be a problem, each of those articles would have a category on it that would make identification and bot-reversion easy. Any editor -- or any registered editor if semiprotected -- could, in a flash, restore the article the way it was. But then this editor would be responsible for restoring BLP information without sourcing. And the editor, as well, would now, by default, be a watcher of the article. What, exactly, is not to like? Perhaps administrators would rather fight over this? _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
