Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2006 August 9

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was no votes, no consensus RyanGerbil10(The people rejoice!) 05:24, 17 August 2006 (UTC) Was a single-use template that duplicated the table at List of numbered highways in Ohio. Single-use templates are to be substed. --SPUI (T - C) 05:01, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Incorrect. I had seperated the very lengthy list, that was both unorganized, cluttered, and resembles basic HTML knowledge, with a clean and refreshed page that is similar to the West Virginia State Highways page. Interstates, U.S. Highways, and State Highways were seperated into distinct pages to reduce page clutter and page size.

Instead, SPUI reverts a days worth of work on three pages, a template, and a main article page. I find this very unfair and unbecoming of a user who is still fighting his charges. The reasons I cited above should be sufficent enough to keep the state highway template, as it is used on other state highway pages, as it is compact, concice, and easy to read. The current mash of routes is not.

To add, List of numbered highways in Ohio was redirected to List of Ohio State Highways which conforms with many other state highway projects. I'm trying for some conformity here, much as what SPUI is asking for the route/highway designations. Instead of seeing this, he reverted it, undid all of my work and other user contributions, and is taking all of this one big step back for the sake of having "his way" once again. Seicer (talk) (contribs) 05:23, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Your poisoning the well does not change the fact that single-use templates are to be substed and deleted. --SPUI (T - C) 05:37, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

The original intent is to use it for multiple state highway pages. The comment is left on, because with a "preview" done of 500 state highways (copied and pasted a bunch over and over to get desired effect), the page length and load is not that much greater - its very small if it is noticeable at all. It would actually be useful to have it, since it would conform with how the West Virginia State Highways state route log is organised. Seicer (talk) (contribs) 05:54, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

IMHO I think those big templates are ... too big but oh well. VA's and OR's got deleted. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 18:29, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was deletion RyanGerbil10(The people rejoice!) 05:26, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Template:British heritage railways (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

This template has now been replaced by separate ones for England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Islands (e.g. Template:Heritage railways in Wales). It is no longer used on any relevant pages. Our Phellap 22:37, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

• Delete Per nom. --Ssbohio 01:45, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

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The result of the debate was Delete. —Centrx→talk • 02:40, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Template:Legend of Zelda characters (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Currently out of use, replaced by the newer templates {{Zelda characters}} and {{Zelda enemies}}. Tryforceful 20:45, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

• Delete Per nom. --Ssbohio 01:45, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per norm. ~Zythe^{Talk to me!} 15:20, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Speedy Delete per nom. — Ian Moody ^(talk) 18:06, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was to keep. RyanGerbil10(The people rejoice!) 05:28, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Template:Wr (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Template:Wr2 (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Template:Wr3 (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Template:Wr4 (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Templates are unnescesary/redundant, as we already have guidelines on how to act in this kind of situation. If a warning is removed, we can be pretty sure it has been read.

Using this set of templates typically escalates a conflict and hurts prospects of cooling it down again. So they don't help but do hurt.

Kim Bruning 05:21, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree, they should be deleted. Considering it is not presently part of our vandalism policy to block for such actions, these templates are in fact incorrect in warning a user that they might be blocked. - Mark 05:50, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Keep, but only for historical purposes and noinclude the {{Rejected}} template, that way everyone's satisfied. --TheM62Manchester 22:33, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Change to say that their talk page will be protected, as that is what we really do. --Chris (talk) 23:09, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Keep one of them Prefer to see at least one of them kept. Instantly blanking talk pages and removing recent warnings is how vandals *LOVE* to confuse rc patrollers into thinking noones noticed their spree of blatant vandalism in the last half hour. If there's no warning, not even a simple way to caution them, well heck, why have *ANY* warning templates at all, when the vandals can just remove them 10 seconds after they get them, and it takes twice as long to get them blocked for replacing pages with graffiti text. Kevin_b_er 00:00, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Speedy Keep These warnings are useful for IP users who have and will blank warnings. It's Wikipedia policy that warnings are not removed, but archived, (and I think that you had mistakenly not substituted the TFD warnings in the process of listing). Ryūlóng 00:07, 10 August 2006 (UTC) _{This was apparently inadvertently included in the archiving of the TfD below. Moved up here in the interest of clarity & to ensure its inclusion in this discussion --Ssbohio 01:45, 10 August 2006 (UTC)}

This is in fact not the wikipedia policy. The policy is that clearing a warning counts as the user having read it. If they do it again, you can immediately take action. Kim Bruning 19:38, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Keep The templates have as much usefulness to the project as any of the other warning templates. With all of them, I feel they should be used sparingly, and more use should be made of non-canned messages to go with them and explain the situation. That said, these templates are, unfortunately, necessary in some cases. Perhaps the wording could be tweaked to be more positive and less punitive. --Ssbohio 01:45, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Keep very important in anti vandal work. American Patriot 1776 06:07, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Keep; if vandals remove warnings, they should get a notice saying that removing warnings is vandalism (my most common use). Ian Manka Talk to me! 18:14, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Which is not very wise. If they remove the warning, and then act again, just block them or get them blocked. If you can't block them, then what the heck are you doing? Kim Bruning 19:40, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't have a big opinion about keep or delete wrt the templates. Note that I've found that if you're caught using them, you can be blocked for 24 hours, since you're basically editwarring when you use them. (someone recently almost did get blocked). To be consistent, I've also marked the proposed guidelines to do with this as rejected, since they conflict with several other wikipedia rules (including 3RR). It's just a bad idea. It's much much wiser to check a vandals' page history to see if they've been warned and they've read it. Kim Bruning 19:37, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

• Keep The statement "Using this set of templates typically escalates a conflict and hurts prospects of cooling it down again" implies that the templates are being used in a conflict between legitimate users. However, these templates are not intended for use in situations that arise out of content disputes -- the purpose of the templates is to warn IPs and vandalism only accounts that are removing warnings from their talk pages in efforts to conceal the evidence of their vandalism. Users participating in RC patrol often rely on the existence of prior vandalism warnings on the current version of the vandal's talk page to indicate whether and how the vandal should be warned again, or whether the vandal should be listed on Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism. Allowing vandals to hide the warnings in the history of their talk page frustrates countervandalism efforts. While the fact that removing legitimate vandalism warnings constitutes vandalism was recently removed from Wikipedia:Vandalism in this edit, there is supermajority support for the belief that removing legitimate vandalism warnings either constitutes vandalism or a non-vandalism policy violation -- see Wikipedia talk:Removing warnings. Consequently, removing legitimate vandalism warnings is still a policy violation, unless the current version of the policy page is considered dispositive with respect to actions taken during its existence. In which case, when I reinsert the language removed with this edit into Wikipedia:Vandalism, the policy will, for some non-zero interval of time hereafter, define removing legitimate vandalism warnings as vandalism. John254 04:19, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I have recently observed a situation where a user placed warning tags, the other user removed them, and the person placing these warnings got blocked or almost blocked. You can't hide anything in your talk page history at all actually. There's no really polite way to put this (sorry), but well, if you can't read page histories, what are you doing on vandalism patrol? Isn't that where you're supposed to be looking all along? Do be sure to mark warnings clearly in your edit summaries! perhaps in some standardised way (eg WARN1, WARN2 , etc ). Once again, if you aren't able to use edit summaries to your advantage like that, I'd suggest you edit wikipedia some more before you go on vandalism patrol. I am terribly sorry I can't think of a way to put it less bluntly, and I apologise for that. :-(Kim Bruning 16:00, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Comment - In response to Kim Bruning's claims that "if you can't read page histories, what are you doing on vandalism patrol?" and "I'd suggest you edit wikipedia some more before you go on vandalism patrol", I would like to clarify that I am perfectly capable of combing through talk page histories to discover vandalism warnings that a user has removed. Furthermore, I have nearly 3000 edits on Wikipedia, a substantial portion of which involve the reversion of vandalism or applying warnings to vandals' talk pages. From my personal experience in countervandalism efforts, I am able to state that RC patrol is a highly time-pressured activity. Every minute that must be spent on combing through a vandal's talk page history is a minute during which a vandalism warning or a report to Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism must be delayed, an additional minute during which the vandal will remain unblocked and may commit further acts of vandalism. Furthermore, while I identify the placement of vandalism warnings in my edit summaries, some users who place vandalism warnings do not supply such edit summaries. Thus, identifying such "no-summary" warnings in a talk page history would involve viewing every diff between edits, a particularly time consuming process. As a practical matter, the time-critical nature of countervandalism efforts demands that the integrity of talk pages as an quick reference to legitimate vandalism warnings be maintained. Finally, if we are to designate the talk page history rather than the current version of the talk page as an archive of vandalism warnings, such warnings will be effectively irremovable, even where they are mistaken, or completely frivolous. Even ordinary administrators would be unable to remove improper vandalism warnings -- only administrators with Oversight permissions, of whom there are relatively few, would be permitted to perform such removals. Such an inability to remove illegitimate vandalism warnings would effectively invite vandals to fill the talk pages of users who participate in RC patrol with vandalism warnings, and would otherwise encourage the use of frivolous vandalism warnings as a form of disruption.

Effective countervandalism efforts require a quickly accessible archive of all legitimate vandalism warnings that a user has received. Preventing the removal of legitimate vandalism warnings from talk pages is essential to this goal, and these templates assist in such efforts. I will modify these templates, however, to reflect the fact that only the removal of legitimate vandalism warnings contravenes Wikipedia policy. John254 02:06, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, so would you like vandalism checking tools to be able to check history for you? Kim Bruning 03:17, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Using countervandalism tools to parse talk page histories and extract a listing of warning templates would make illegitimate vandalism warnings effectively irremovable, thereby encouraging the use of frivolous vandalism warnings for the purpose of trolling. We don't need a listing of every warning template applied to a user's talk page, even if the templates were complete unjustified. What we need is a listing of all legitimate vandalism warnings that a user has received. The best way that has been developed to achieve this goal is to prohibit users from removing legitimate vandalism warnings, and to block them and protect their talk pages if they persist in this activity. John254 21:04, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

How did they suddenly become irremovable, when they were already irremovable before? I think that perhaps your premise does not hold. <scratches head> Kim Bruning 10:54, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

• Keep - It is a handy way to show excalating vandalism. No need to go to history to see whether they were deleted as they are on the page. --Tbeatty 23:25, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Well seen. My argument to delete was that they escalate a vandalism situation. A better action would be to just block immediately. Kim Bruning 10:58, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. These templates are often used to further harass legitimate users who are removing unwanted content from their talk pages — as is their right. The existence of these templates serves to give legitimacy to the mistaken notion that people are not allowed to remove pestering messages from their talk pages. These templates are sometimes sent to admins who have removed vandalism templates they were sent after rolling back trollish edits to articles or spam message to user pages. In the case of real vandals removing (or altering) legitimate warnings, they can simply be reverted with a one-line message (how long does that take to type?) telling them that they are not allowed to remove warnings. I imagine my vote isn't going to have any effect, as there are so many "keep" votes, but I find {{Wr0}} to be the most objectionable of all, as it doesn't even relate to the removal of warnings, but simply to unwanted messages. It tells users that they're "welcome to archive [their] talk page, but be sure to provide a link to any deleted comments." That one should definitely go. There is no obligation to have produce archives if you don't want to, even though I'm in favour of it myself. (See this and the six edits that follow it, or this and the nine edits that follow it.) AnnH ♫ 23:39, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I have edited Template:Wr0 (which was not actually included in this TFD nomination) to reflect the fact that only the removal of legitimate comments is considered to be objectionable. I have previously edited the other warning removal templates to clarify that only the removal of legitimate vandalism warnings is considered to be disruptive behavior. The mere fact that some vandals might continue to misuse these templates for disruption does not justify deleting the templates, any more than the improper use of Template:Test4 in content disputes justifies deleting this template. Instead of deleting our countervandalism tools, we should focus on preventing the misuse of these and other warning templates. In almost all cases, an administrator who recieves a frivolous vandalism warning or warning removal template from a non-administrator should block the offending user for disruption. John254 02:16, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Keep However, it seems most of the time I use these templates is after the user is already blocked, and is blanking their talk page. --Porqin 14:28, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Keep, this is not redundant; Template:TestTemplates lists the wr templates and only the wr templates as the appropriate template to use for "Removing warnings on own user talk page." --M@rēino 22:55, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was DELETE. The thread on ANI is very clear that this is a bad idea, and the creator has agreed with that. -Splash - tk 00:00, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Template:ChemicalVandal (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Not necessary to create a template for some vandal seeking attention. Naconkantari 22:17, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.