Wikipedia talk:Guide to deletion

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[edit] Easing server load, shortening the notice, and consolidating the guides

  • I've seen the following concerns expressed in various quarters:
    • The {{vfd}} tag is too long, and is suffering from instruction creep.
    • The VFD notice directs users to WP:VFD, which is slow to load, and mainly comprises raw VFD discussions, with a few notes at the top and nomination instructions at the bottom. This places a load on the servers that is unnecessary, when in the main people looking at VFD notices will be more interested in each specific article's own discussion and a guide to the jargon and what it all means, and not all of the currently outstanding VFD discussions in toto.
    • The explanation of VFD is scattered across the VFD notice, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion phrases, the notes at the top of WP:VFD, and several talk pages. And there is some good advice and information that is simply VFD "oral tradition", that would benefit from being written down elsewhere than in various specific VFD discussions.
  • Therefore, as promised at the end of last week, here's my idea, which I will put in place in the absence of reasonable objections:
    • A short VFD notice, containing the bare minima of instructions, and hyperlinks pointing to three places:
      • The article's VFD discussion entry
      • The deletion policy
      • A guide to VFD
    • The elimination of much of the explanatory text from the top of WP:VFD, leaving just the navigational items. WP:VFD becomes "the page that you visit only if you want to see all of the outstanding discussions at once, navigate to a particular day's VFD log, or perform a nomination", and not "the page that you visit for anything to do with Votes for Deletion" nor "the page that novices first see when they try to find out more about a VFD notice applied to their article".
    • The aforementioned Wikipedia:Guide to Votes for Deletion (WP:GVFD), comprising a merger of the (secondary) instructions from the VFD notice, the instructions and warnings at the top of WP:VFD, various comments on various talk pages, and Wikipedia:Votes for deletion phrases.
  • Uncle G 18:06, 2005 Feb 23 (UTC)

[edit] Some thoughts

Wow! You have done some incredible work. I think this consolidation of our rules and traditions makes a great deal of sense. Thank you. I do have a couple of thoughts that I'd like to get a reaction on before I am bold. Rossami (talk) 05:31, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

  1. I can't find a single topic that I think can be dropped but we should work on tightening up the wording over time. It's a long read.
  2. I do not consider a merge of content during the discussion period to be inappropriate. An attempted merger of good content can make subsequent votes much easier since it has shown whether or not a successful merger was possible. The merger can always be reverted (by any editor) if it turns out to have been a bad idea.
  3. I would like to bold the sentence Votes without rationales may be discounted.
    • Done by UncleG
  4. Should we add a comment to this general effect? "Every so often, someone will refactor a vote into "keep", "delete" and "other" sections, thinking that they are helping the process. Please refrain. The context and the order of the comments are essential to understanding the voters' intent. Refactoring actually makes the deciding admin's job much harder."
  5. Even though the BEEFSTEW guideline on schools is still in Dpbsmith's user space, is it getting enough use to be considered a viable guideline to include in the list in Rationales?
  6. On a purely stylistic note, the Xe (pronoun) style isn't working for me. I'd rather have the traditional (and I think still grammatically preferred) he/she.
    • I've reworded the neologisms to avoid the issue entirely; see the rant on my user page. (And echo the "wow". I'd been considering something similar (the past few 14-hour days of mindless work leaves plenty of room for such mulling), though I hadn't much progressed past "link Template:VfD header inside Template:vfd". This works much better.) —Korath (Talk) 12:43, Feb 24, 2005 (UTC)
  • Yes, it's a long read. But I did try to put the information that novices were most likely to need, or at least strong pointers to it, at the top. I've approximated, although not slavishly followed, summary style in the relative positioning of the sections (i.e. the detailed lists of shorthands are at the bottom), and within the sections. Uncle G 15:37, 2005 Feb 24 (UTC)
  • The caution against merger was taken from a discussion on merger during deletion, and its effect on GFDL compliance, on one of the many talk pages. See the following section. Uncle G 15:37, 2005 Feb 24 (UTC)
  • Upon re-reading the article yesterday, I wasn't convinced myself that I'd been positive enough on the topic of rationales. I've improved the wording, and emphasized that very sentence. I've also added a note about the refactoring. See what you think. Uncle G 15:37, 2005 Feb 24 (UTC)
  • I looked at Dpbsmith/BEEFSTEW. I left it out because it doesn't yet appear to have the widespread support that the WikiProject Music, biography, and Web comics guidelines have. This is not to say that I wouldn't like to see guidelines on schools. Radiant! seems to be working on this. See User talk:Radiant!/Schools. Uncle G 15:37, 2005 Feb 24 (UTC)
  • I see that Korath and I disagree on xe. I use it because, having discovered it (as something that fills what I've long seen to be a hole in the language), that now is my grammatical preference. (I used to use "him/her" and, on occasion, "they".) I find it most amusing that Korath's edits aimed solely to eliminate "xe" and "xyr" have in fact altered the meaning in several places, and thus make a good case against the oft-propounded argument that this deficiency in the set of pronouns can be worked around by rephrasing. I'll try to fix this. Uncle G 15:37, 2005 Feb 24 (UTC)


[edit] Anons making nomination

The following text has a problem:

Anyone can make a nomination including anonymous users. The nomination, however, must be in good faith. Nominations that are clearly vandalism may be discarded.

Now that anons can't create a page, they can't complete a nomination. Either we should:

  • a) Tell anons they can't make a nomination (my preferred choice)
  • b) Explain how they can, which means telling them to put a tag, and have User:Crypticbot do it for them, or suggest some other approach, I might not be aware of.

Currently, the wording implies that anon nominations are no different from others, but this is clearly not the case. Regardless of how it should be reworded, it clearly does need rewording. --Rob 19:08, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

  • I prefer the first, personally. We shouldn't encourage people to make broken nominations. I did a quick correction on the guide itself [1]: , so it's at least accurate now; we could possibly put in the usual 'registration is free, do it here' line as well. --Malthusian (talk) 19:15, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Anons have been permitted to nominate pages for deletion since at least the very first version of this guide. I see no reason to prevent them merely because of a side effect of a largely irrelevant policy change elsewhere. (Inspection of Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Archives shows that I'm hardly alone in that.) Trying to speedy-keep autobiographies of bit-part actors merely because an anon found it first is putting process over product to an unacceptable extreme. —Cryptic (talk) 19:42, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
The policy is that anons can't make new articles, right? Why not just see if developers are willing to implement this more precisely? A project-space page is not, after all, an article. Friday (talk) 19:57, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
Or they can put their nomination on the article's talk page. (I have moved many such to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ subpages.) The restriction on anon page creation was to prevent low-quality material from being added to the encyclopedia, not from being removed. —Cryptic (talk) 20:02, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Redirect" option

Your opinion please in Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy#"Redirect" option. Mukadderat 23:47, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why does this have to be so complicated?

OK look I made a page within my user space that needs to be deleted. It's "User talk:Nerd42/talk", which was replaced by Talk:User:Nerd42. So I have looked at, like, seven different pages and none of them seem to have a simple way to tell admins to delete the page. They're all about "the deletion process" and full of irrelevent links to "be nice to newbies" policy pages and all have more templates for dofferent reasons for deletion than a swiss army knife has blades. I just want to get a page deleted quick - and the "speedy deletion process" looks like it takes longer than the regular one. It's like, way too many lawyers hang out on Wikipedia, you know? A simple task like this has to become so complicated! :( --NERD42  EMAIL  TALK  H2G2  UNCYC  NEWS  04:32, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Add the text "{{db|Mistakenly created by user}}" at the very top of the page and an admin will hopefully delete it within a day or so. --Rob 05:26, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] While Google section is absolutely necessary

The deletion template points specifically here to give me advice on deciding the fate of articles. Add to that the fact that a whole lot of people use google hits as their sole decision whether to vote delete or keep, and that signals me that a google section is absolutely necessary here. People are not adhering to this advice. Since the template points here, it should be here.

The arguments against the google section are all flawed. The only real argument that has been made is that google hits already has it's own article. But so does sockpuppets. So does assume good faith. Yet you are not deleting those sections. So, my question is, why is google hits less deserving of a section in this article? --MateoP 02:11, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Consistency and clarity

I understand the position we're in now resulted from the above 2005 discussion about instruction creep. As a new Admin and a user since 2004, I have found it massively unclear how to navigate the AfD process. A new user above mentions the same thing, visiting three or more pages about about about AfD but not really explaining what to do. I have been editing the instructions at WP:AFD for brevity and I have found an enormous amount of duplication here. I am trying to cut that down, hopefully making the whole process much more transparent and easy for the new user to understand. Kaisershatner 16:04, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] AFD notice removal

Can someone point me to the policy and proper action for an author removing the AFD notice? TIA. - Keith D. Tyler (AMA) 17:49, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

The proper action is to revert the removal and add a notice to the user's Talk page. The escalating templates {{drmafd}}, {{drmafd2}}, {{drmafd3}}, {{drmafd4}} and {{drmafd5}} can be helpful. They can be found at Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace along with an equivalent series for the inappropriate removal of speedy-deletion templates. I don't know of anyplace where the practice is formally documented. Wikipedia works as much through tradition and social controls as through formally documented procedures. Rossami (talk) 19:57, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why is deleting articles so hard?

Why is it that any fool can create an new article in 30 seconds, but to delete an article takes a week of discussion? I understand that erasing an article and it's entire edit history should be hard. But why isn't there a simpler delete process that would leave the edit history in place? For example, why don't we simple blank inappropriate articles, or replace them with a template that would say something like 'Wikipedia does not currently have any such article. Click here to add content."? The closet we currently have (So far as I can tell, the closest current procedure would be to replace the page with a redirect, but that's only useful for redundant pages.

I rant because I keep running into pointless, obscure pages, and the entire AfD process is a pain. (Add this template here, then that template there, create this page, add that text, wait a week...) Nonsuch 22:32, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Proposed deletion, Wikipedia:Transparent_deletion, Wikipedia:Pure wiki deletion system, and related discussions. There are many who wholeheartedly agree. ∴ here…♠ 20:33, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bullet re considerationof speed and prod before AfD nomination

I have added a bullet to the nomination section requesting people pleasee strongly consider if speedy or prod would be a better option. This is based on discussions raised on the AfD talk page about the ever increasing number of AfD that could/should have been done through one of the other processes. There are, on a regular basis, over 200 AfDs per day.--Gay Cdn (talk) (email) (Contr.) 12:58, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge Wikipedia:Help, my article got nominated for deletion! here?

On Wikipedia talk:Help, my article got nominated for deletion! there is a discussion about merging that page into this one. // Habj 08:48, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Informing the creators is being ignored

This was crossposted and has little to do with the specific workings of this page. Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy#Informing the creators is being ignored. The comments have already been moved. Please do not spam such complaints across multiple pages. Rossami (talk) 18:54, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Don't use the word "vanity"

I put in this edit per the discussion at WT:AFD and WT:BLP - in short, deletion discussions now get media attention, and despite robots.txt they seem to show up in searches anyway. Please rephrase less clunkily - David Gerard 11:42, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

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