Proposal:Actually delete old deleted articles

From Strategic Planning
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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation


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Summary

Currently deleted articles are merely suppressed so that only admins can see them. Newbies wanting to create a new article with the same name get a rather scary warning message which may dissuade them from creating that article or even editing at all. When we started there were none of these, this has grown over time and now there are many millions of such articles on EN wiki - others may have less of a problem but for all wikis this will grow with time unless we do something like this.

Proposal

Either completely delete articles deleted as non-notable biographies after a year, or just change the new article creation screen to not warn you that you are recreating an article if it was deleted as a non-notable biography and was deleted over 12 months ago.

Motivation

When you go to create a page it tells you that you are recreating a page that was previously deleted and why. This may be having a deterrent effect on good faith contributors creating a new article, especially if the article is in someone's name. Newbies are not to know that we delete hundreds of thousands of such articles every year and that it may not be the national champion of their sport who was deleted as not notable - it could just as easily have been an eleven year old who plans to win gold in the 2016 Olympics. If we don't warn them, or we at least make the warning more fluffy they will be more likely to create articles.

Key Questions

Potential Costs

A bit of programming.

References

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Actually delete old deleted articles.

Want to work on this proposal?

  1. Vibhijain 10:43, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
  2. .. Sign your name here!