IRC summary: Issues around CategoryProposedDeletion
We had a useful (but long) discussion on IRC today about deleting pages.
Rather than paste the whole thing, here's a summary of my understanding.
Some pages should be deleted when they're no longer current
(e.g. Multiarch/Compiling is now inherently misleading), others are still good
if properly contextualised (e.g. Packaging/Intro helps newbies so long as they
know it's from 2010). DebianInstaller/SHA1Removal was brought up as an edge
case - some people see it as a historical document about a particular era of
Debian, others see it as an unfinished list of out-of-date information.
MoinMoin's user experience is clunky enough that a "Proposed Deletion"
category is the best we can realistically do, but MediaWiki makes better
solutions practical. Specific issues include:
* an "archived" category would help with pages that are outdated but harmless
* linking to a random page in Proposed Deletions might attract people who are
willing to review pages so long as it doesn't take too much time
* linking to the deletion log would let people find deleted pages
* a standard "proposed deletion" banner could answer common questions
* scheduling deletion would help focus people's minds, and avoid the wiki
filling up with banners promising to do work that nobody actually does
* maytham suggested one month as an example, nobody challenged it
* mentions (e.g. in talk pages) make it more likely that interested users
see the conversation before it's too late
Note that Wikipedia deletes pages automatically, but also has roaming editors
who can be expected to respond to proposed deletions within that time.
That might not work here unless and until there's a similar cultural shift.
I sketched out [0], [1] and [2] based on the conversation (and an unrelated
discussion from the start of this month[3]). These still need a lot of work,
but hopefully they show a better approach.
[0] https://wiki2025.debian.org/wiki/ExampleForProposedDeletion
[1] https://wiki2025.debian.org/wiki/Category:ProposedDeletion
[2] https://wiki2025.debian.org/wiki/Template:ProposedDeletion
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/CategoryProposedDeletion/Discussion
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