Talk: Policy/Deletion

huh?

Not sure what's going on here. I see from the banner that this new policy is winning the vote but I haven't seen any votes cast. Oh well.... (edit: This is the discussion page linked to by the Proposed2 article. If it's in the wrong place, the link needs to be fixed.)

I vote in the negative for the following reasons.

1. The page is a redirect left over from a move or merge, all links have been changed to the new page, and the redirect is unlikely to be useful.
   • Every "expert" and "those who think they're experts" of SEO will tell you that this is a bad idea. All you're doing here is creating a dead end for someone visiting a site. The url may not be useful to the admin and the normal users of this site but the url will still exist elsewhere with search engines and possibly outside links. In this case a redirect should be put in place.
2. The page is improperly named and a properly named article with the same content already exists.
   • Same response. Redirect not delete. This also should be done with articles and user pages created in the main namespace that should be in other namespaces.
3. The page is a user page and the owning user has requested its deletion.
   • I'm sort of ok with that but maybe a redirect to a "This user has requested that their page be deleted" would be a better idea. Ditto for their talk page and anything underneath.
4. The page is obvious spam, vandalism, completely and unequivocally off-topic, or has always been blank.
   • Agreed but most professional sites redirect to a "Deleted for spam" page. This is done because nothing is stopping the spammer or would be spammer from coming back and recreating the page. I've seen this with a lot of the social networking sites that we host. Those urls already normally already have pagerank and some spammers go looking for them.
5. The page is for a duty officer that is no longer, or never was, available on the live server.
   • I don't even want to think about duty officers anymore....
6. The page is in clear violation of any other policy of the wiki.
   • I don't like catchalls but I see their value. --Drmike 15:18, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

The vote is here since recalling the current policy is necessary before this one can take its place. The votes were just combined into one so we didn't end up without a policy in the interim.

Note also this part of the policy is only clarifying our current practices and applying specific limits to speedy deletion rather than basing it on which template the user uses to request deletion, not changing them in any way. Under the existing policy, we've already been doing all of the above. In fact, nothing you've objected to is even out of the norm for a small wiki. I think you'd have to propose a new policy, because I don't think a recall or keep vote can reflect your objections. — Eyes 15:36, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Hope you don't mind, I reformatted your arguments so I can refer to them more easily. As a general note, my basic mentality can be summed up as: "If it's not necessary, get rid of it."

• 1 & 2: I have never understood the benefit of "littering" a wiki with redirects, and yes, I've heard all the arguments about SEO. All they do is cause a maintenance hassle if you ever move a page that has multiple redirects pointing to it, because they have to be updated manually (MW core can't do it automatically, although there might be an extension to do that) to avoid leaving double or broken redirects.
  
  It's pretty easy to spot a useful redirect. Historical names of an in-game asset that's been renamed, common misspellings, alternate spellings, shortened forms or abbreviations, i.e. things that users are very likely to search for are useful redirects.

• 3: That's actually already done by MW - if someone visits a deleted page, MW displays a notice saying, "This page has been deleted. The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference." with the deletion/move log entries following. No reason at all to leave an extra notice behind, assuming the admin who deleted it did their job and filled in the delete reason appropriately.

• 4: Yes, there is something to stop them: MW allows you to pre-protect a non-existent page title so that it can't be created. If a page has been deleted more than once as spam, and it's not related to the wiki subject (i.e. most spam pages), just pre-protect that page. As a corollary, if you leave a redirect to a "deleted for spam" notice, there's nothing to stop the spammer editing the page... unless you protect it. Since it gets protected either way, and the reason for protection will be displayed to anyone accessing the page (same as the deletion log for a deleted page), there's no point in leaving a redirect to a separate notice.

—Dr Ishmael 04:34, 25 March 2012 (UTC)