Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Omglolwtfbbq

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

The result was soft redirect. krimpet✽ 05:19, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Omglolwtfbbq

The article was speedy deleted during the AFD per CSD#A3. --Pixelface (talk) 18:08, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Omglolwtfbbq (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

Unnecessary blank (excluding a template) article. Should redirect to Internet slang or be deleted. Floaterfluss (talk) (contribs) 17:11, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

  • Speed delete. The article contains no information.147.175.98.213 (talk) 00:17, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep as is or turn into redirect. The page is currently, in a sense, a manual pointer to Wiktionary:Appendix:Internet slang, which I think is a more useful page than Internet slang. In any case, all that's needed is a redirect, not a deletion. --Dom (talk) 13:02, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep - A bit of history first. This is the current end-state of several dozen internet slang articles. At one point they were all individual dictionary definition articles. Then they all got redirected to the now deleted List of Internet slang phrases, which was Deleted at AFD here. It was deleted because it was all dictionary definitions, and was finally transwikied over to Wiktionary. So the List of Internet slang phrases article itself became a soft redirect, and to avoid double redirects, all the many articles redirected to it were also converted to soft redirects. Most of those are still soft redirects to the Wiktionary appendix article, but some now have their own separate articles on Wiktionary, and the WP soft redirects point to the proper WT articles. To see just what articles are in this situation, please check out this page where I track them, for easy reversion to soft redirects as they regularly get definitions put in place of the soft redirects.
    That all said, I have a number of problems with deleting them, and especially with deleting just the one. I know that it is shades of WP:OTHERSTUFF, but IMHO all of the soft redirects listed here are in the exact same situation that the subject of this AFD is in. Either all should go, or all should stay, at least when the AFD reasons are based on their current status alone. So I'm not saying that valid reasons to AFD specific ones could not be come up with, but IMHO the reasons here do not do so.
    Next, I wonder if this is the proper venue for this discussion. This article, and all the others, are soft redirects. Redirects fall under WP:RFD, not WP:AFD. Do soft redirects go to RFD as well? I would think so, but will need to check the policy a bit.
    As I often see stated on WP:RFD, redirects are cheep. These redirects point people to the proper place to find info on the subject, Wictionary. Even with them, we are constantly getting dictionary definitions edited into or over the soft redirects. (That's part of why I have the tracking page I've already linked to a couple of times, to watch for the dic defs to revert them out.) If these soft redirects were deleted, I suspect that the volume of attempts to create dic defs would rise sharply. As it is, we have a nice template that shows people where to go to get information, and requests no dic defs. This I suspect deters a lot of good intentioned dic defs. But once deleted, unless all the red names are protected, we will lose that deterrant, and the number of well intentioned editors recreating the dic defs over and over and over will skyrocket.
    So overall, I'm of the opinion that this soft redirect in particular, and the rest of the internet slang soft redirects in general, do very little harm as they are, and actually do much good. - TexasAndroid (talk) 20:49, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Question: Do these "soft redirects" show up as Special:Random pages and such? I'm not sure I support having an article that basically says "We don't have an article". Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 15:00, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
    • I really could not tell you of the consequences of soft redirects. I know that they are used a lot, though. Check out Category:Redirects to Wiktionary and Category:Wikipedia soft redirects, two of the tracking categories for these things. Between those two categories I see over 1200 of these soft redirects. If there are inherent problems with soft redirects, then all of these are effected, and the use should be examined. And I'm not saying that such a debate should not happen. But at that point I think we are way beyond the scope of this one single AFD. - TexasAndroid (talk) 15:35, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Speedy Delete per A3. There's nothing there, so there's nothing to keep. DarkAudit (talk) 16:15, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
    • I don't think it's advisable to tag an article for speedy deletion while there is an Articles for deletion discussion going on. --Pixelface (talk) 17:24, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
      • I'm not sure that AFD trumps Speedy in all cases. If a case properly fits a speedy criteria, then it fits, whether it is under AFD or not. That said, I don't think that Soft Redirects fit A3, and have protested the speedy deletion with the normal {{hangon}} tag.
        That aside, I'm more and more thinking that a general discussion on the use of Soft Redirects may be needed somewhere, but I really do not know where would be an appropriate place for such a discussion. An AFD on a single soft redirect is just not the right place to properly debate whether such a tool should in general be used, which appears to be the needed discussion. - TexasAndroid (talk) 17:40, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
        • This article was listed for deletion 38 days ago, it just never got closed after the usual 5 days. It appears like it was an viable candidate for speedy deletion. Perhaps a discussion on soft redirects could take place at the village pump or Wikipedia talk:Redirect. --Pixelface (talk) 18:05, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
          • Where was it listed? I see no sign in the article history of previous PROD, AFD, or Speedy listings, especially not something 38 days back. - TexasAndroid (talk) 18:50, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
            Had it been properly listed then, we would likely be having this same debate then. No debate happened then because nothing was listed, so I had no way of knowing what was happening. It is now listed, so it is now happening. - TexasAndroid (talk) 18:56, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
            • Yes, I meant this page was created 38 days ago. It was never listed in the log. I've explained below. And above I was reacting to the speedy deletion. So yes, the discussion is now ongoing. --Pixelface (talk) 19:22, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Close article has been deleted. JuJube (talk) 18:08, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
    • Speedy deletion has been reversed by the deleting admin, so this AFD is active again. And I have started a discussion of the broader issues of how to handle soft redirects at the village pump. - TexasAndroid (talk) 18:48, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment Here's what happened: Yesterday I was browsing through Category:AfD debates and came here and noticed it had been nominated on January 7 and was still open. I looked at the article and saw no AFD notice. I looked at the history of the article and saw no AFD tag added. So I added one on February 13, 2008. I looked at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2008_January_7 and could not find an entry in the log. I looked through Floaterfluss's contributions and noticed that on January 7, 2008, Floaterfluss created this page using Twinkle and notified the creator of the article, but that editor did not put an AFD notice on this article and did not add it to the deletion log for January 7, 2008. I asked an admin if it should be listed on the January 7, 2008 log. I saw that DumbBOT put it in the February 14, 2008 log. DarkAudit added a speedy deletion tag to the article (above the AFD tag) at 16:14 14 February 2008 and then made their comment here one minute later (although I no longer see that edit to the article in the edit history). TexasAndroid then put an {{hangon}} template in the article (although I no longer see that in the edit history). The Placebo Effect then deleted the article per WP:CSD#A3 but this AFD was still open, with a redlinked article. I've never closed an AFD before, so at the top I put "The article was speedy deleted during the AFD per CSD#A3." Then I added "Non-admin closure." Then EJF properly closed it. Then The Placebo Effect re-opened it. Then I struck out my comment at the top. Then I noticed that it was not in Category:AfD debates, so I re-added {{REMOVE THIS TEMPLATE WHEN CLOSING THIS AfD|}}) back to the top. I hope that clears things up. --Pixelface (talk) 19:11, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep (whether this is listed at RFD or AFD). TexasAndroid's explanation makes sense. I think this article should be a soft redirect to Wiktionary. If it's deleted, it's likely it will be recreated as a dictionary definition. --Pixelface (talk) 19:16, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment It's still empty. There's still nothing to keep. If an article meets the standards for a speedy, then an open AfD is not relevant. There's nothing there per A3, so it should be speedied. DarkAudit (talk) 19:37, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
    • That all depends, in good part, on whether Article or Redirect deletion rules apply to soft redirects. IMHO soft redirects are close enough to redirects in function that redirect rules should apply. And there is no A3/Empty speedy criteria for redirect, specifically because redirects are by nature almost empty. Soft redirects are similarly, by nature, almost enpty. Even if article rules applied, I do not think that A3 speedy should. Currently soft redirects are considered valid on the project. Subjecting them to A3 speedies would invalidate them without any sort of proper discussion of whether they should actually exist or not. either they are allowed or they are not. If they are allowed, A3 should not apply. If they are not allowed on the project, then they should all by systematically deleted, A3 or not. In neither case is it IMHO proper to be subjecting them one by one to A3 deletion. - TexasAndroid (talk) 19:58, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
      • That sounds like a WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument. This isn't really a redirect. This is a page that says this page doesn't exist. Why should we keep something that doesn't exist? DarkAudit (talk) 20:18, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
I was trying to avoid turning this into a general debate over the existance of soft redirects, as I think this is really not the right venue for such a debate. (The Village Pump page *is* the right venue, IMHO.) But it looks like I will need to make that debate here after all.
There is the fact that, if the information is not going to be present on the given WP page, but will be present on the given WT page, it is useful to visitors to direct them to the appropriate place for the information that they are looking for. And a lot of these are fairly high-demand internet slang pages.
Soft redirects, in particular the Wiktionary ones, give an alternative to red links. Even with the soft redirects we get a large number of well-meaning editors adding dictionary definitions to the soft redirects. Without the soft redirects to rechannel many of these editors to the place where the definitions really belong I truely beleive we would be getting a much larger number of such dic def edits. Soft redirects is one way to divert a goodly number of these well meaning but misdriected editors towards the more proper outcome. The only other options would be to red link the articles, and either constantly deal with well-meaning dic def recreations, or near-permenant protection of the red links. IMHO the latter is by far the worst solution. In the current, if someone can actually come up with a good non-dic def article, the soft redirect allows them to do so. Protected red links would not.
And I will in general have to disagree with you about it's article/redirect nature. They may not be redirects in a technical sense, but they serve functionally the same purpose, to redirect a user to the true location of the information that they seek.
So, in general, I think that soft redirects have a number of helpful aspects to them, few negatives, and are much better than the alternatives. So I think that soft redirects should continue to be used, and that they should not be subject to A3 speedy deletion. - TexasAndroid (talk) 20:42, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
A side note on why I am arguing so strongly about this. I see soft redirects as a very useful tool. But by their very nature, like redirects, they are almost empty. To allow the precedent to be set that soft redirects can be deleted for being short basically threatens to make them useless. If Soft Redirects are subject to deletion at any time, under requirements that they cannot by nature meet, then what's the point in using them? So we lose IMHO a very useful tool. And we lose that tool without ever having a proper debate on whether we should have that tool. If we have that debate, and it is decided that soft redirects have more negatives than positives, and should not be used, then so be it. But such a descision should be made in discussion about soft redirects overall, they should not be arbitrarily deleted because they do not meet, and never will meet, some minimum article length requirement.
Let me also state that I have very little personal weight for or against this particular soft redirect. If someone had reasons for it's deletion that had nothing to do with it's nature as a soft redirect, then I would not be fighting this fight. But the reasons given pro-deletion arguments are all about it's short nature, and those arguments apply to all soft redirects, so it is those arguments against which I debate, in order to preseve an (IMHO) very useful tool. - TexasAndroid (talk) 21:04, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep. Soft-redirects using the {{wi}} template are a fairly effective deterrent which prevent new users from endlessly recreating these mere dictionary definitions. Our history has taught us that if you delete it, we will be having deletion discussions on the page about monthly. And everytime that you have to delete the page, you inevitably bite the newbie who created the page in good faith but who didn't know about WP:WINAD. Rossami (talk) 20:29, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment If you are looking to set a precedent, fine. But there are far better soft redirects to take a stand with than this one. DarkAudit (talk) 22:11, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Sorry about the delay in replying. In response to Pixelface's comment to my talk page: at this time there is no consensus either way, so I'm considering this "relisted" on the February 14 page, and it will be closed in due course. I hope that's OK with everyone else. Cheers, Daniel (talk) 04:16, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so that consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Daniel (talk)
  • Keep That was one of the more confusing Afd histories I've ever read through, but I think I understand now. I agree that this isn't the place to argue over the existence of soft redirects, and that if they do exist, that this is an appropriate situation in which to use one. Xymmax (talk) 14:23, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep. The value of soft redirects may need to be discussed in general, but if they're appropriate anywhere then this one belongs. This particular acronym isn't treated at Internet slang and probably shouldn't be, making a redirect there inappropriate. EALacey (talk) 19:26, 25 February 2008 (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 article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.