Battlestar Wiki talk:Think Tank/Deletion discussions

Suggestions

I'm not going to call a vote on this proposal yet, because I want to wait for people's suggestions first. What could be added to, removed from, or changed in this policy? --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 10:18, 19 April 2007 (CDT)

Looks good to me. --Serenity 10:22, 19 April 2007 (CDT)

Vote

Since everybody is awfully quite in the suggestions section, I'm calling the vote.

• Date Started: Saturday, April 21, 2007 at 12:00 (UTC)
• Date Ending: Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 12:00 (UTC)

Instructions: Use {{Support}}, {{Oppose}}, {{Abstain}}, and {{Neutral}}, supported by a reason and appropriately signed using the four tildes (~~~~).

Other users are encouraged to vote as well, simply use {{vote}} to add your vote. Refer to Template:Vote for complete instructions.

1. Joe Beaudoin Jr. - Neutral I've been given time to think about this... Not to sure if this process has to be this mechanized. I'm for transparency, but not necessarily at the cost of productivity. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 18:04, 22 April 2007 (CDT)
2. CalculatinAvatar - Abstain. Automatic leave of absence due to inactivity.
3. Day - Abstain. Automatic leave of absence due to inactivity.
4. Gougef - Neutral I think that it would a lot of work with little gain.
5. JubalHarshaw - Neutral - I agree with Mercifull's comment below. JubalHarshaw 15:42, 22 April 2007 (CDT)
6. Mercifull - Neutral I still am not 100% convinced. I think deleted things should stay deleted. Sysops can always refer to a deleted page anyway. --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 04:43, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

   Comment You just said it. Sysops can, but regular users cannot (and even sysops need to physically undelete the page before they can view it). We have similar templates and procedures for requesting moves and deletions. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 05:02, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

   Comment Why does a user need to see deleted pages? And sysops don't need to restore a deleted page before they can see it. --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 05:09, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

   Comment Damn, you're right, didn't know Special:Undelete was that versatile (I'm a sysop at the HB). Like the policy says, users might want to see a deleted page if they think its deletion was unjustified. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 05:45, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

   Comment Then that user should place a message on the sysops that deleted its userpage. When i delete something I always explain on their talk page why. Would we still keep talk pages where people have spammed or written profanity? Who decides what gets kept and what is deleted? --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 05:55, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

7. April Arcus -
8. Serenity - Neutral - Technically it's a good process, but as said, most deletions here have a reason and aren't disputed. However, why did noone bring up this point before? --Serenity 06:06, 22 April 2007 (CDT)
9. Shane - Oppose in it's current state. A lot of things still need to be hammered out if this way going to become policy. The number of deletions that we discuss on talk pages are very few and right now, our size of the wiki does not need to "archive" deleted discussion or the articles them selfs. Sysops delete things based on the BW:DEL policy and the BW:DEL policy has no flaw in the wording. Under the " Criteria for Deletion" #2, 3, 6 and 7 seem to be the most common reasons for deletions on the wiki. BW:UNDEL, an un-binding policy at the moment, offers little insight on what we should do also. However, most deletions that we do here are again #2, 3, 6, and 7. #8 though sets up the policy for archiving the talk pages of deleted items. This should be removed to reflect that we do not link the pages currently at the moment. But if the article was already deleted under #2, 3, 6, and 7 there would be no point in leaving the talk page, but leaving a note on the user who created it talk page. The intention is good, but we need more "vandalism" deletes for this policy to work and right now, we don't have any anonymous edits and most are fixable within an hour or two and don't effect the search engine spiders. Shane ^{(T - C - E)} 05:59, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

   Comment I agree with you and Mercifull above that most deletions we execute here are "obvious" ones (the 2367s). We could have the policy say deleting talk pages in those cases is OK. However, this policy was written to cover the more "controversial" cases, e.g. BSG Rap (this one was actually undeleted), Starbuck's Raider, Galaktika, Culture in the Twelve Colonies (RDM) (the latter's talk page was accidentally kept). These pages were not 2367 cases, but were deleted after a discussion, and in some cases a vote. It's not that I disagree with their deletions, but someone who did would have no other explanation than the (usually very brief) summary in the deletion log. That's the kind of case this policy aims to cover. I'll put in a clause later today saying these procedures only apply to non-obvious cases (where I'd define "obvious" as something close to your 2367 story). BTW, Shane, please put in a more correct diff link, as the current one doesn't really make sense. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 06:20, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

   Comment You will note that while I deleted the bsg rap page I wrote an explaining message on the persons talk page and even included the content of the page so that it would be easy to restore once more citations were made etc. --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 06:31, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

   Comment Last thing before I goto bed... I undeleted BSG Rap after seeing the rap song did have a source. Kinda like I know what everything is deleted because I have like a stupid memory process. But those other ones I can give my reasons why, but here I go. Starbuck's Raider - more in depth on the raider itself but had no "real history of even existing" according to RDM and we already have Heavy Raider article. Galaktika clearly falls under #8 (new #8) and BW:NOT, BW:FAN. And finally, Culture in the Twelve Colonies (RDM), and reading the talk page I fully understand the reason why it was deleted. I have no idea why the talk page was missed, but it can stay for now. It's almost like a merge and why would we need to really keep something that we know the content was not removed, just move to a new location. So right now everything else it deleted. Now it took me five minutes to find everything int he undelete section and to read it. So it doesn't take one long to restore a page or read the reasons. And when even an admin sees a "new page" on the same subject and there was deleted content, it tells us there was deleted content and we should see that. Also removing these items makes the wiki look cleaner in my option. Showing what we deleted is a good thing, but we can tell if it's been recreated and take the needed actions to delete it again. 06:43, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

   Comment I wasn't objecting to those deletions, nor did I ask you to provide reasons. Like I said before, I fully agree with those deletions; hell, I even participated in some of the discussions leading up to them. But Shane just proved my point: not everybody has a Shane-like memory, and the talk page for Culture gives a great deal of insight in the reasons for its deletions. Shane does seem to misunderstand some subtle points:

   • We do not keep deleted content around. Rather, we only keep the talk pages, which accidentally happened to Talk:Culture in the Twelve Colonies (RDM). As you said yourself, they're a valuable source of insight. If you're really worried about clutter, we could truncate the talk pages and remove everything except the deletion discussion itself.
   • Not everybody checks BSWiki daily, or even weekly. I was lucky enough to be around at the time of the Culture discussion. If the creator were on a holiday, come back a week later and find both his article and the associated talk page deleted (deletion summary: "deleting per talk page"), he'll have no easy way of finding out what the frak was wrong with his article. This policy aims to keep the talk page so "latecomers" can object or at least get clarification.
   • Not everybody is an admin. Non-admins can't read or restore deleted pages, so they have to ask admins to do it for them. For that same reason, we have {{delete}} and {{move}}.

   Also, please note that I have updated the policy to include an obvious cases clause. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 07:23, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

10. Spencerian - Oppose. We delete things for a reason. They don't belong. I make it a custom to tell contributors of major changes (rollbacks, article deletions they started). Having an "undelete" option leaves more work and confusion and questioning what should be clear. Normally, deletion is the last option we give to an article; merging to other articles is preferred. If a person recreates a deleted article (wondering why it's gone), we admins haven't done our job in keeping the original editor informed about the change (as only we can delete pages). Be sure to tell contributors what's happened on their talk pages, please. No undead articles. --Spencerian 22:32, 22 April 2007 (CDT)
11. Steelviper -
12. Talos -
13. Catrope - Support. I wrote the proposal and created the templates. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 15:42, 21 April 2007 (CDT)
14. Zarek Rocks - Support Caprica seconds for various reasons which are far too obvious and numerous to go into right now but certainly we can all agree it would be a good idea to have a successor.....oh wait. --Zarek Rocks 10:59, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

Move

Could someone move this page to Battlestar Wiki:Think Tank/Deletion discussions and add it to "Proposals without consensus"? --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 11:28, 4 June 2007 (CDT)

Thanks, Spence. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 12:18, 4 June 2007 (CDT)

Re-imagined Series definition: used to signify a civilian transport vessel over a certain gross weight/mass, i.e. Colonial Heavy 798