Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Jeff Dahl/sandbox/Priestly

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

The result of the debate was . keep Yamamoto Ichiro 会話 23:50, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] User:Jeff Dahl/sandbox/Priestly

Delete per Wikipedia:User page#Copies of other pages: "Private copies of pages that are being used solely for long-term archival purposes may be subject to deletion." I contacted the creator of the page, and he doesn't seem to think it's a problem. No major edits have been done on this since October 2007. It's pretty clear Jeff (or anyone else) doesn't have plans to use this anymore. RobJ1981 (talk) 22:00, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

• Keep This isn't just a private copy of a page. This was a development ground for working on the article, including comments related to how to make the article flow better. It includes hidden comments in the prose and suggestions on the discussion page. The cited guideline's purpose is to prevent people from keeping their preferred version of a page in a content dispute or keeping non-notable articles in user space, which is not the case here. The page was created in response to a peer review request, which is clearly related to content development. Since the page contains comments from other users on actual article development and is linked to from the peer review page, other users, or me, may want to consult it if they want to continue working on the article, since it actually contains some useful suggestions. Jeff Dahl (Talk • contribs) 22:42, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Comment. The key words that Jeff said: was a development ground. It's not being used anymore, so there's no reason for it to exist anymore. RobJ1981 (talk) 03:57, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, AFAICT there remain two reasons: (a) even as Jeff, et al., are no longer actively working on the userspace copy or, one supposes, on the mainspace article, the page continues to be linked to from [article's peer review], such that someone might reasonably consider the discussion in making subsequent edits to the article; and (b) it documents parts of a broader consideration of the article's merits and deficits that took place at its peer review and scientific peer review, each of which helped lead to the article's being featured (the editor who appears to have been most involved in improving the article, in fact, was a participant in the sandbox discussion), which documentation is probably useful, for reasons that, since (a) is, for me, dispositive, I need not try to set out here. Although "it's useful" is an argument to avoid in AfD discussions, it it is a bit more appropriate on MfDs of this sort, and I'd suggest that, just as at RfD we consider as persuasive an editor's profession that a redirect is helpful to him, we here trust Jeff's supposition that the page may serve some propitious encyclopedic purpose (or, even, that it already has, and that it valuably documents that purpose); to-wit, that it is useful. Joe 06:58, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

• Keep per Jeff and inasmuch as the "private copies" proscription isn't generally understood as applying in situations in which the article substantially copied is one that continues to exist in mainspace (where the preserved copy does not exist as a POV fork and where some meaningful editing that might reasonably be seen as prospectively, even if only at some indeterminate future date, having some mainspace use has occurred); it would, in fact, be altogether ill-advised and unconstructive for us to construe so strictly "private copies...", and even a PIIer like me would prefer that we be clueful here. Joe 22:55, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. I won't go wading through our ever growing list of policies and guidelines, but a user keeping annotated content for development purposes in his own personal sandbox is nothing at all negative. Let's stop badgering. Martinp (talk) 17:30, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
• keep per Martin and Joe. No POV fork or any other serious issue. I have trouble understanding these ongoing needs to target pages in userspace of active users in good standing. We have generally given them more leeway about what can be in userspace and we should continue to do so. JoshuaZ (talk) 19:10, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
• Keep - as a useful non-private copy in userspace used for development of a featured article. This might even survive if it were in a non-user space like Project space or main talk space, at most it would be sent right where it is now rather than deleted.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 04:09, 15 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 page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.