Wikiversity talk:Deletions/Archives/Archive 2

Notability for articles solely about people and organizations
Notability wouldn't work for subject matters. Even allowing primary, secondary or tertiary sources to make a subject notable may not work, since a contributor is allowed to create variants or research that is not made in sources. Articles about people and organizations are different, since this is not directly related to teaching. What standards of notability should we set for people and organizations? Other articles should never be required to have a notability requisite. As an example, there are real subjects that don't get included in Wikipedia because they don't have 3 secondary sources (and sometimes they make even more demands than that). An organizational course or school that uses Wikiversity wouldn't fall in this category. - Sidelight12 Talk 03:36, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I've never liked the notability criterion for anything. It's subjectivity pure and simple. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 04:07, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * On Wikipedia it has been a hassle. Since they want to require an excess of secondary sources for something undoubtedly real, then keep making up standards simply, because they don't like something or want to stick with obsolete ideas. I can agree with no notability for subjects. People and organizations are different, there shouldn't be an article about everybody, or a local group only known to themselves. Allow primary and tertiary sources that are third party. It seems like a fine line between not letting in a scientific journal used in pubmed and allowing a group of people known to themselves to be as an article. To an extent it is subjectivity, there can be 20 secondary sources, and some moron would claim, "well they're not really reliable sources." I understand how frustrating it is, on Wikipedia, to get into edit conflicts with agenda pushers/biased/narrow minded people, and people who want to delete anything they can. - Sidelight12 Talk 04:31, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Wikiversity is about learning resources, not about people and organizations. Reputable people and resources (medical journal, news source, famous scientist) can back up information written on here. - Sidelight12 Talk 04:36, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I agree with Marshallsumter. Notability is subjective.  I can envision a variety of articles about organizations and/or people that would meet educational objectives.  The masters degree program I completed was an IT degree, but we reviewed dozens of companies and industry leaders throughout the courses, and were required to write about many of them along the way.  That said, I do have an idea that I think would work if we want to go in this direction.  Rather than our own endless discussions on notable or not notable, we could use Wikipedia as a guide.  If an article exists as a Wikipedia entry (with some minimum longevity), it is accepted by definition as 'notable'.  If there is no corresponding Wikipedia entry, and there are objections to the article being in the main space as is, the article is then either moved to user space or moved under an appropriate learning project.  This would address articles written as assignments, for example.  Howard Community College takes this type of approach for many of their assignments here on WV.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 19:30, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I realized if we used notability on Wikiversity, half of the important articles would be wiped out. Using Wikipedia as a guide would do this (wipe out half of wikiversity), and this could be realized by working on Wikipedia. Notability for subject matters is off the table.
 * Perhaps notability should be used only for people, but allow primary, secondary, or tertiary sources of third parties also to establish this. Does anybody have any suggestions for organizations? Not include schools who use Wikiversity as a resource. - Sidelight12 Talk 17:14, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

About notability
"Notability is not required for resources that are not about people or organizations. Articles about people require at least 3 reliable third-party sources to make them notable. Notability for organizations is not as stringent as the requirement is for people. Really, Wikiversity is about learning and less about people and organizations."

Sidelight12 has suggested addition of the above, about notability. I think it should it be discussed here first to decide whether a notability requirement guideline is wanted. Notability hasn't previously been a criteria for Wikiversity.

Notability criteria isn't necessary for Wikiversity. IMHO, basically if content is clearly related to Wikiversity's learning and education mission, then it should be accepted by Wikiversity, regardless of notability. 06:11, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

for similar reasons. I'd much rather see this as a category or location discussion (main space vs. user space or main space primary article vs. main space subpage article) than a criteria for deletion. It's not just content that provides educational value, but also the creation of content that provides educational value. A learning project could be very educational without being notable. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:00, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

See my comment in the section above. For original research, there may not be one notable person on the planet that has sufficient background to make any kind of comment or criticism about some of the subjects I perform this research on. Sometimes this research does include people or persons or is about people or persons. Their notability is irrelevant. But, the research may be life-saving! --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 22:12, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

This is good. I don't feel strongly about this subject. I suggest: "no notability for organizations, but they must be real organizations." I agree with no notability for subject resources, because the material can be created by the user. So, no notability for organizations and subject resources. - Sidelight12 Talk 02:23, 15 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't understand the restriction that organizations must be real organizations. Most educational assignments in my field are based on hypothetical organizations.  See  List of fictional Microsoft companies for examples.  The focus should be on quality educational materials rather than notability or reality.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:05, 15 September 2013 (UTC)


 * To prevent someone from writing an article about themselves, or a group that is only known to themselves. This might be ok to some extent in sub-pages, if its about person C's studies. Userpages are the place for articles solely about people though. I noticed someone trying to bring articles here about people who I didn't understand how this had value for Wikiversity, or what to make of this (it was self promotion, or someone wanting to put their names in stone); an admin deleted it. It was stuff like: so and so is a librarian and their biography, and person B works at this place. I just want a solid rule for that, group A's school friends, or team B of a classroom. An organization as a University's mandated group would be ok.


 * For that particular Wikipedia page, a delete monger would have had that article in a deletion discussion if it was noticed by them, because it uses only Microsoft which is a primary source, and internet archives which wouldn't help its case (I will not interfere with that article, I am mentioning what I notice when trying to keep pages from deletion there). For Wikiversity, I'd say Microsoft (or the subject) is the anchor so it will stay here, so long as its educational or research. A hypothetical article about a comparison of people's studies or conditions would be ok. There is some gray-space because a page here can cover many subjects. But for the most part, I hope the subject or importance to anchor it. - Sidelight12 Talk 20:15, 15 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Organizations that use Wikiversity shouldn't be affected. I wish a namespace would be created for them. - Sidelight12 Talk 20:18, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

but not for the reasons why I have voted delete in recent RfDs. I feel people will use Wikiversity more if its information was more authoritative - when I first edited content pages here, I had to correct tons of wrong things that were just poorly written.--Jasper Deng (talk) 06:30, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

The idea behind Jasper Deng's comment is of "use" of Wikiversity as a reference source. That interferes with its usage for research, study, "learning by doing." Correcting errors is fine. But that is not the issue here: the issue is deletion of non-notable topics. Students in real classes in real schools write essays and papers about their personal experience, and the results of personal research. They express opinions, and in good education, they are trained to distinguish opinion from fact, i.e., conclusions from evidence. There is a lot of material on Wikiversity that I could consider "garbage." It is intrinsic to our mission that this be tolerated, to a degree. We have procedures for cleaning it up: any user can fix an error, or balance it. Any user may tag for proposed deletion if it is considered that there is inadequate educational content or purpose to support continued hosting. And then any user may remove that tag. Most of the "garbage" is not being maintained. Nobody cares if it is deleted. -Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:27, 18 August 2015

Proposal section 90 days
"Resources may be eligible for proposed deletion when activity ceases for 90 days or more, further development may be difficult, education objectives and learning outcomes are scarce, and objections to deletion are unlikely" <---This section is not practical. There are many good resources here that shouldn't get this excuse to be deleted, when editor activity may be low or the resource is completed. - Sidelight12 Talk 03:40, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I agree! There are many that I wish to contribute to but time constraints prevent it. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 04:04, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * IMHO value should be based on quality and relevance of material to the Wikiversity mission, not whether it or not it has been edited recently. The 90 day guideline was introduced by User:Adambro in January 2012. I would be in favour of removing this guideline (see also Template:Proposed deletion). -- Jtneill - Talk - c 11:21, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I guess I read it differently. As a software developer, I see the 'and' in the statement and assume that all of the listed conditions must be true in order for the proposed deletion to apply.  Any content that is 'complete' should have  educational objectives and learning outcomes, immediately removing it from this option.  Likewise, content with quality and relevance would negate the 'objections to deletion are unlikely' clause and remove it from proposed deletion.  Are you all opposed to the concept entirely, or can the requirements be tweaked in order to make proposed deletion useful?  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 19:06, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * This part "education objectives and learning outcomes are scarce" is obscure that people will interpret how they wish to delete. I see this on wikipedia, the meaning of the text is so obscure, that the meaning seems to change if you read it fast or slow, because of conflicting phrases. People will interpret it for their own pov pushing, or just say oh 90 days, delete, disregarding the rest of that sentence. It doesn't say if a subject is complete. If what you are saying is the case, the quote in question is very poorly worded, and encourages misinterpretation. - Sidelight12 Talk 19:29, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I, like Dave Braunchewign, interpret the proposed deletion as applying when all conditions are true, not when just some are met. I also agree with Jtneill that quality and relevance are valuable. I see the 90 days condition as way to give busy people time and some confidence that their good intentions will still be around for awhile without someone using the current conditions as an excuse to delete it immediately. -- dark lama  19:12, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Revision deletion policy
Recently revision deletion was used to hide an offensive racial epithet in an edit summary. The edit was totally inappropriate, it was spam. the epithet was a deliberately offensive comment aimed at a global sysop who helps out at Wikiversity. The editor who made the comment was properly blocked, by the global sysop. A local probationary custodian revision-deleted the edit summaries.

The edit summaries were not needed for any legitimate use here, but there is a problem with revision deletion. Generally, every administrative action here is transparent. If someone is blocked for making offensive comments, the comments can be seen by anyone in history. It is as if the whole wiki is a public place, with a public memory.

There are legal reasons for having revision deletion available as a tool, but it's one that can, sometimes, increase public distrust of the administrative body.

There is a policy on Wikipedia for revision deletion:

w:Wikipedia:Revision deletion


 * RevisionDelete was introduced for administrators in 2010. The community's endorsement of the tool included a very strong consensus that its potential to be abused should be strictly barred, prevented by the community, and written into the policy. Especially, RevisionDelete does not exist to remove "ordinary" offensive comments and incivility, or unwise choices of wording between users, nor to redact block log entries.


 * Material must be grossly offensive, with little likelihood of significant dissent about its removal. Otherwise it should not be removed. Administrators should consult as usual if uncertain that a revision would be appropriate to redact.

Now, because this editor was clearly a vandal, and was simply using the edit summary to insult the global sysop who had been reverting his vandalism and blocking his accounts, I do not raise this for this case, which is why I'm not providing diffs. I'm raising this because revision deletion is a dangerous tool. We have rarely used it. Sysops are trained to have thick skins. The sysop did not complain and request revision deletion. The offensive summary did not land on the sysop, but on the user who wrote it, who looks like a complete idiot, and a nasty person, to boot. Our deletion policy mentions revision deletion as a possibility, but provides no guidance.

When it is actually needed, revision deletion can be a bit of an emergency. Therefore a custodian should be empowered to act promptly. Except for repeat cases, I suggest that any usage of revision deletion here be noticed on Request custodian action and the action requested is review by another sysop. This would not apply to repetitions of something already considered. The request should describe the removed material, in terms that can stand. I.e., here, I referred to it as an "offensive racial epithet." My concern here is that the custodian, new to use of tools, used revision deletion without any apparent awareness of the need for restraint. It wasn't mentioned. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 23:57, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

-- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 01:25, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
 * -- this is nonsense. the edit history was offensive. That needs no explanation for commenting it out. You should stop trying to dictate, while at the same time telling others not to use their custodial tools. - Sidelight12 Talk 16:35, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Template:NowCommons
We have the following category for speedy deletion:
 * Resources moved to another project due to scope, or files uploaded to Wikimedia commons with history intact and links fixed.

Files that are used here, it can be argued, should continue to be hosted here. If a file is copied to Commons, it is possible that the file is later deleted on Commons, because of issues that interfere with the strict Commons policy of only allowing free content with no restriction other than attribution. This has happened after years of being hosted there. Sometimes license issues are quite complex.

Then the Commons delinker will come and delete the local reference to the file. If the file has been deleted here, ordinary users cannot see the file here, and cannot determine if a fair use claim would be appropriate, in order to supply a non-free use rationale for usage here.

I see no value at all to deleting local files, in use here, merely because they are also on Commons. I also see a lot of files that are being copied to Commons that have no reasonable use elsewhere, but that's a Commons issue. Note that if a page here is edited or deleted, so that the file is not used here, these files could easily be deleted from Commons, and a user here cannot then restore the page as it was, without custodial action.

Deletion of files moved to Commons simply makes work for custodians and risks damage to resources here, producing nothing of value. We should remove this as a reason for speedy deletion. We can and should keep the NowCommons category, so that users who want to improve Commons do not waste time checking to see if the file is already on Commons.

(Some users, copying files to Commons, change the file name. That is contrary to Commons general policy, local file names should be kept if possible. Of course, sometimes there is a file conflict, but, then, a Commons file name could be chosen that is clearly connected with the original file name here.)

If there is no objection, I will remove the Commons speedy deletion reason. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:35, 5 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Objection: "Please propose and discuss before making significant changes to ensure your revisions reflect consensus." One advocate constitutes neither discussion nor consensus. TeleComNasSprVen (discuss • contribs) 11:30, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

RFC: Amendment to criterion 2 solicitations
Or "spamming" as it is more commonly called on the bigger wikis. The amendment would read: 2a. Indiscriminate advertising of a cross-wiki nature wherein the user shows no apparent interest with participating in Wikiversity's educational mission can also be considered solicitation. --TeleComNasSprVen (discuss • contribs) 11:02, 9 April 2014 (UTC)


 * How about 'Indiscriminate edits of a cross-wiki nature wherein the user shows no apparent interest with participating in Wikiversity's educational mission may also be considered solicitation.' instead? Indiscriminate edits is easier to define and quantify.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 12:27, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
 * What is "advertising"? Indeed, what is "indiscriminate"? We are looking at an actual example, see Requests for Deletion. permanent link. Further, we are looking at a user page, not mainspace resources. By the proposed rule (either wording), any user page of a user who has not edited Wikiversity otherwise ("participating") and who does not explicitly state interest in participation, and who creates another user page with similar content elsewhere, becomes eligible for speedy deletion.
 * What would be allowed individually, on each wiki, becomes disallowed by being repeated? If this were ordinary content, added at high rate, it's understandable. It's not. It is a user page. The existing controversy is only over a user page. If the proposed policy is about pages other than the top-level user page, yes. We could use this clarification of policy. The top-level user page should be excepted. It is speediable if it, by itself, is recognizable as spam. "Cross-wiki" for it, is irrelevant. As a content page, say in mainspace, yes, such creations would very likely be "spam," with few exceptions.
 * Creating a user page is not "indiscriminate." It is targeted. There is a move afoot to effectively automatically create user pages cross-wiki, on all the wikis, see UserWiki.
 * Does the proposal suggest that we review the cross-wiki status of a user before welcoming them?
 * How is "no apparent interest" determined? Registering an account here and creating a user page is an indication of some level of interest. What has actually happened is that cross-wiki spam fighters have inferred a promotional interest, and then it is assumed that if there is a promotional interest, there is no participational interest. But a user page with no participation is not terribly effective as promotion. It will be seen when created and then never again, unless someone is already looking for it, in which case the "promotion" is irrelevant.
 * It's a can of worms, guaranteed, over time, to cause a certain level of disruption, with no gain as to our "educational mission." We gain nothing by "preventing promotion" on this level. Users routinely link to photos of themselves, or other photos they have taken, hosted on Commons or here.
 * spamming as it is called on the bigger wikis. Try to find the policy covering that on en.wikipedia. Cross-wiki spam is handled at the meta level, by a small, rather closed group of administrators, who are not working with a defined policy. It's "spam" if they say so. Users are locked and sites are blacklisted, sometimes, without discussion, and they get away with this because they are usually handling actual spam. Usually their actions cause no harm. The exceptions can be doozies.
 * Defining spam isn't necessarily easy. However, what happens is that the cross-wiki antispammers become mind-readers, assuming that because something resembles spam in some way, it's spam. That's confusing a symptom of a thing with the reality of it. If I receive an email that is not offensive, that in some way relates to my interests, that is connected with them, I don't think of it as spam, even if it was sent to many people. Reviewing the cross-wiki situation with Augusto De Luca, it's likely that only a very few local administrators considered this "spam" independently. I have found evidence for maybe one, out of 557 instances. When tagged with "cross-wiki spam, see CA" quite a few more deleted the user pages, but most deletions were done directly by a global sysop and two stewards. There are now two discussions of the user pages. So far no deletions from discussion have occurred, but the argument "no intention to work locally" does have legs.
 * It is obvious that this user did not intend to work on content locally in all 557 wikis. But it's highly likely that he intended to work where the occasion arose. Communication with him has been cut off by the global lock, because he cannot enable email, so he cannot set up watchlist and user talk page notification. That would have taken him quite a bit more time than what he did, and he was locked before he had the chance.
 * The antispam effort is preventing participation, whereas our overall policy is to encourage it. Spam should be strictly defined. Antispammers may certainly make exceptions for the protection of the wiki, but they develop an agenda of "preventing promotion," when, in fact, promotion is not contrary to policy, if it is not what is called "excessive" on Wikipedia, referring to user pages. If this user posted his photos all over the wiki, at a high rate, not on his user page -- one page per wiki! -- I'd have no trouble calling that spam. At a low rate, and if they are appropriate, not spam but participation. Even if there is a promotional intent. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:52, 9 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Your opposition to this effort is well-noted. Is there language you can propose that you find acceptable and that would address the situation?  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:25, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not "opposed to this effort," and, in fact, I support it. In what I bolded above, I suggest a small modification, plus I'd be happier with clearer definitions. What I see is that the existing criteria (1 and 2) are adequate for most purposes. What is being suggested is actual practice, which is that some edits which would be tolerated here, otherwise, are handled as spam because of being cross-wiki. That is only for marginal cases, in fact. This is what I find remarkable about this effort. As the amendment is stated now, it still does not clearly indicate that the user page would be speedy deletable, or not. It remains ambiguous, depending on discerning intent, i.e., mind-reading.
 * I think we need to look carefully at something missing from the speedy deletion criteria. We routinely allow lots of pages in user space that are not allowed elsewhere, and one criterion (sandbox other than the site Sandbox) explicitly allows in user space what is disallowed elsewhere. The criteria are generally written assuming that the pages are in mainspace or namespaces other than user space. A user page is an exception, and, I'll repeat, if the speedy deletion criteria are amended as proposed, and interpreted to apply to User:Augusto De Luca, we are specifically prohibiting users from creating accounts on all wikis unless they have demonstrated participation or explicit participatory purpose here. We are creating a difficult-to-enforce speedy deletion criterion.
 * I think it's important to recognize that there is almost consensus here.
 * Clear spam (visible from the edit itself) is deleted or reverted on sight. As to reversion, that's easily fixed and is transparent. Page deletion is not, and thus requires extra care.
 * If a user page is clearly only being created to set up spamming, perhaps to make it seem more acceptable (user not redlinked in Recent Changes), then we agree on deletion. There was an example recently, where I did challenge the speedy deletion tag on a user page. When the tagging user disputed that, and I looked more closely at the page, the user was almost certainly lying about "herself," and the behavior clearly resembled known spammer behavior, so I agreed with deletion. "Spambot" was asserted, but that's actually irrelevant. Spammers may manually do these actions, and this wasn't massively cross-wiki. The behavior was really the same whether a bot was involved or not.
 * We appreciate notice of what is considered cross-wiki spamming, by cross-wiki antispammers.
 * So, I propose clarifying the policy to allow consideration of "cross-wiki" behavior in speedy deletion criteria. However, at the same time, I propose that an exception for the top-level user page be carved out. User pages are often promotional in some way, or interpretable as such. That's why Wikipedia doesn't prohibit such promotion.
 * Deletion of a user page, possibly created in good faith by the user, believing that this was not contrary to policy, and seeing many user pages cross-wiki that resemble the page the user is creating, is about the most unwelcoming thing we could do, aside from blocking and locking. If the user page is excessively promotional, in our judgment, any one of us may trim it back. In the Augusto case, trimming it back would be silly. It was already slim. If someone starts a wiki project and wants participation, and puts a notice on their user page, cross-wiki, is that "spam"? In this case, there is an image project, a collection of photos available for use on Commons. While the utility is limited, so too was the impact of the "notice," i.e, only on the user pages, one per wiki. That is about as minimal as could be imagined. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 18:57, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

@Dave Braunschweig: I could definitely go with that formulation. My concern is that we risk targeting the global work of the members of the Small Wiki Monitoring Team as collateral damage, who may use the OAuth protocol to create multiple pages of their own on various wikis. Though perhaps one could substantially argue that their participation in global anti-vandalism/anti-spam is inherently productive towards Wikiversity's educational mission, in that their activity protects the website from unsavory interests. TeleComNasSprVen (discuss • contribs) 15:54, 9 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Well, one might argue that either the Small Wiki Monitoring Team members are active editors / vandal cleaners here, or they are violating the same 'policy' that led to this discussion. If they have other edits on behalf of the community, it shouldn't be an issue, at least from my perspective.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 16:25, 9 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I think what matters is the question/test whether anyone could reasonably implement concrete improvements to solicited works to solve specific problems with the solicited work, or if its only something the person who submitted the work could resolve. I think the question/test is even simpler with user space because in general only one person is considered responsible for maintaining a user space. I think that could help address the "No true Scotsman" problem that Dave Braunschweig pointed out, and perhaps help solve the potential for begging the question too. -- dark lama  14:36, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

Speedy deletion criteria only apply to "resources"
That's explicit on the policy page.

That's mainspace, or can be interpreted also as topic, school, and file space. Yes, some of the criteria do obviously apply to user space. But the user page has never been required to have an "educational purpose" other than, perhaps, introducing the user to the community. And the instant case did exactly that, introduced the user, with minimal fuss.

If we want to extend speedy deletion criteria into user space, in particular, and to be clear, we need different standards. RFDs for user space files are rare, and we often avoid deletion of pages by pushing them into user space. If we overextend the criteria, it backfires by creating contested speedy deletions; the general policy on speedy deletion is that any registered user may contest the deletion, making proposed deletion or RFD necessary. The point of speedy deletion is to avoid that. (IP users may also contest it, but might commonly be reverted, as a matter of practice, not policy.)

In the case we have in front of us, "cross-wiki spam" was interpreted, at first, as allowing speedy deletion (and later it was realized that the criteria don't allow that.) We are proposing, and I agree, that cross-wiki behavior can be relevant for many page deletions, and this is actual practice. If this is used to delete non-disruptive user pages, however, with possible legitimate intent, we may see what actually happened here. The page was deleted, I saw the discussion and looked at the cross-wiki behavior, which showed me the likely page content, so I requested undeletion for review. We are already getting up to more work than the loss that would be involved in simply leaving the page alone. The page was (properly) undeleted, but the custodian then started the RFD. That is taking us way outside the work we will normally devote to "spam." Had this been actual spam, the RFD would have been unnecessary. I'd have seen the file and speedy-tagged it myself. Or it could have been prodded. Instead we got a train wreck.

So we need a clear criterion to follow, so that we all know what the community consensus is likely to be. I'm suggesting an approach that fully respects the work that antispammers do, and only looks at a marginal case, alleged "self promotion" that is cross-wiki. We have done a lot of work to establish Wikiversity as a safe place, a refuge, if you will. We have allowed users to edit here even if locked elsewhere (by facilitating an acknowledged sock, or by a device that used to work for delinking a local account from the global one). If users behave and are not disruptive here, we don't sanction them for what they have done elsewhere. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 19:19, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

User pages
Wikiversity has developed a strong tradition of allowing essays, original research, and other kinds of personal content, opinion, etc., in user space, or as explicit attributed essays in resource subspace. When content is allegedly non-neutral, it has been widely accepted to handle this by pushing controversial material to subspace, attributed, or to user space, and this may be done by any user, it does not require a custodian.

Almost all users who see their resource moved to user space do not object, thus this is far less disruptive than a deletion request, and often such requests result in moving to user space anyway, either as a close, or actually done before close and accepted. A resource in user space may be improved, at the discretion of the user, and then may be moved back to mainspace (which will ordinarily take custodian intervention if it is moved back to the same page name).

Personal essays as mainspace resources can cause harm to Wikiversity. Such essays may represent fringe positions, idiosyncratic opinions, and are often not neutrally presented. By identifying this as attributed essays, harm is prevented. Several users have worked for a long time, now, moving essays out of top-level mainspace, and this work is only rarely disruptive.

It's time to formally state in the draft policy that personally-authored user pages are not to be deleted unless it is truly necessary to hide the content. Recognizing this is not an open door to spam. Rather, genuine page creation spam has no redeeming qualities. Most spam here is the addition of external links, and those are remedied by blanking the links. If a user page is intrinsically damaging or harmful, it should be deleted, and almost always this can be handled with a speedy deletion tag.

If content is harmful, but the page itself is not, the harmful content can be removed, and even revision-deleted if necessary. (Content requiring revision deletion is ordinarily handled, where appropriate, by off-wiki communication, because making a revision deletion request on-wiki calls attention to the harmful content, and may thus cause additional harm.)

We simplify a whole series of historically disruptive situations ("disruption" occurs when a process is controversial and contentious discussion occurs) by establishing in policy that, absent clear harm, user pages are not to be deleted. If the tradition is then strong that pages that are problematic (don't belong in mainspace, or consensus for that is absent) are moved to user space (either of the creator or a user willing to "adopt" the page), we have eliminated a major cause of disruptive deletion discussions, and almost all highly controversial discussions on Wikiversity have been such. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:39, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

Proposed addition
- Absent clear harm from keeping a page -- as distinct from removing or editing harmful content -- (in which case a custodian will ordinarily speedy delete the page) -- pages in user space are not to be deleted. Most standards for Wikiversity content do not apply to user space.

Moving to user space is then a possible and easy solution to most page problems that would otherwise require deletion.

Exceptions are blatant spam (not merely "self-promotion") with no possibly useful content in history and no reasonable possibility of such, pages where the page name itself is grossly offensive and uncivil, and clear and blatant copyright violation (where a "fair use" claim is not possible), and privacy policy violations where page deletion is necessary as distinct from revision deletion. - Please discuss. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:39, 18 April 2014 (UTC)


 * No, because ultimately your userpage does not belong to you, it belongs to the Wikimedia Foundation and they have the right to decide what they want to do with it. Wikiversity is not your webhost; there are often other sites to host your content, such as say WikipediaReview or a Wordpress blog. And "clear harm" is a vague, non-concrete standard, that's open to varying interpretations by many different people, and is not so easily discernible; as evidenced on the deletion requests page, what is "clear harm" or "cross-wiki spam" to some may not be "clear harm" to others. I'm sorry but this seems like an attempt to circumvent the consensus found at the RFD page. TeleComNasSprVen (discuss • contribs) 04:34, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * What is proposed as policy has been our actual practice for some time, for the most part. There is, indeed, a conflict of visions here. If content has potential educational value, even if minimal, we routinely do not delete it. We ordinarily do not allow users to edit the user pages of others, absent clear harm. I don't need Wikiversity to host "my" content. Free web space is easy to obtain. For me, the question is whether or not content created here will be safe from transient, ad-hoc, and unexpected deletion. The question is whether or not we will stand as censors: "you may say this on your user page, not that." You may create a user page on every wiki, "best place to reach me, [wiki]User talk[name]," but not place a photo stably hosted on Commons, which then, through "what links here" points to articles.
 * I had been moving toward inviting scientists and others to contribute there. They are suspicious of wikis, based on what they have seen on Wikipedia. When I see arbitrary deletion, and train wrecks of discussion over an RFD that could not possibly improve this wiki, but only harm it, I realize that maybe they are right. Wikiversity is, perhaps, unreliable.


 * No, harm is a highly critical and volatile standard that is likely to cause more harm. I think offering specific solutions that participants can learn from to implement concrete solutions works much better. I think most standards for Wikiversity content do or should apply to user space. I think the only exceptions are about what additional things the Wikiversity community decides to allow participants to do in user space that is felt may not be appropriate to include in other namespaces. -- dark lama  12:25, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * For a long time, the development of policy has been hindered by mostly-absent administrators who show up to preserve their freedom to do whatever they please, who act to block anyone who questions this, and as long as this prevails, even if it is inactive and only present, most of the time, in the background, Wikiversity cannot be stable. What I described in the proposed policy is what we have actually been doing, while those who have just shown up were doing something else.
 * Attempts were made, over two years ago, to codify recusal policy, and, as well, how to make exceptions, to act under IAR, outside of policy. It was stopped, resisted, and ignored. Indeed, policy receded, what had been considered policy for years was demoted to proposed policy, based on a technicality, not on substance. JWSchmidt was right. There was a hostile takeover of Wikiversity, through a mechanism that is quite natural to wikis, if not recognized and handled. The proposal here of avoiding deletion was part of the founding vision of Wikiversity.
 * There is another alternative to deletion which isn't mentioned: blanking. If a page is blanked, the content is still visible on history. Later, anyone, seeing that content, may restore it -- or propose restoration.
 * If people are offended by someone "using Wikiversity as a web host," first of all, if this is spam, we will continue to delete it, it's speediable. If it is not spam, but, say, personal biographical material, we routinely allow it. But if it is excessive -- I can't think of an example in actual practice, so this would be rare -- we could blank it. Blanking was proposed for Wikipedia, see w:WP:PWD. Google doesn't pick up content from history. It could have avoided the massive inclusionist/deletionist wars. Blanking can be done by any user, and if revert warring develops over it, then a discussion may be necessary. Blanked pages may be protected, requiring custodial intervention to add content. But the history remains accessible to the user and others.
 * I am not proposing "high freedom" in mainspace. Deletion policy, quite simply, must be different for mainspace and for user space, and that's obviously our practice, we routinely avoid deleting fringe or marginal educational resources by moving them to user space. If mainspace content policy applies to user space, that would be useless.
 * So if user space content is to be deleted, we need to warn users, so that users do not waste time creating what may readily be deleted. This function of policy -- creating predictability -- has been widely ignored in favor of a view of policy that is about "controlling behavior."
 * I hope we can come to consensus here, because if we cannot, Community Review remains, reviewable issues have been piling up. I see the future of Wikiversity as being at stake. With certain basic policies in place, the rest can be worked out, safely. Without them, Wikiversity remains unsafe. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:34, 19 April 2014 (UTC)


 * No, to me it goes back to mission. The difference between user space and other spaces is an assumption that the learning is personal.  I have a very liberal view on what constitutes learning, but I'm not prepared to state we don't delete user pages, or to state that the way to avoid deletion is to move content to user space.  Legitimate learning should be valid in either main space (likely as subpages) or in user space, depending on target audience.  But if it doesn't support the mission of Wikiversity for either the user or other users, a page may be deleted.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 15:03, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Dave. Your idea is almost what I would propose, and the difference is about the excluded middle, and about how difficult decisions can become in the middle, and thus how contentious the decisions, how much time they can waste. The time is well spent if the content is clearly harmful, but if it is clearly harmful, the page is ordinarily speediable, and if someone removes a speedy deletion tag for clearly harmful content, that's sanctionable -- or should be -- though we should generally assume good faith.
 * My concern is not only the safety of Wikiversity for users, but also the practicality of custodial decisions, such that such decisions clearly represent consensus -- and where they do not, or arguably do not -- to provide guidance for custodians seeking to serve consensus. If a custodial decision is marginal, a good custodian will know how to consult the community, and will do so actively.
 * A standard of "lack of educational objectives" is often very simple and clear, in mainspace. It is not even required, routinely, in user space, and particularly on the user page. A user may routinely place an image or quotation there, or a link to their own personal web site (that's controversial, it is only allowed, generally, for active users, otherwise it can be considered spamming the site). A user creating a massive unrelated structure in user space might well be questioned. We would not delete it without notice, though, again, unless it's a new user and this is all they have done.
 * The real policy, i.e., what we actually do, is work to document. It seems easier to sit back and deal with each case as it arises, but, then, the actions can be other than what consensus would actually support, and they can be unpredictable to users not intimately familiar with the wiki history and practices.
 * Yet there are deletion discussions that raise similar issues, and that have for years, where the outcome is relatively predictable. Those waste time and custodial attention. We save time if we clarify policy.
 * Move to user space (or maintenance there) is not proposed as "the way." It is "a way" to avoid deletion, one that, as you know, we often use. The founders of Wikiversity were highly liberal as to what was allowed in mainspace. We are still cleaning up the resulting mess. However, the highly inclusive intention of the founders may be maintained, through two devices: user space and mainspace essays, often moved to subspace because of site neutrality issues. We use both.
 * No policy is being proposed that we "don't delete user pages." That would be far too rigid. However, what is being proposed is that policy discourage deletion of user pages, absent harm. Obviously, people may differ on what is harm, and as examples arise, policy may be clarified. (Wikipedia has a user page guideline, w:WP:User pages, which allows the kinds of pages currently being questioned here.) I could list some kinds of harm, and some of this was highly contentious in the past, and could become so in the future. We tend to avoid development of policy until we have a train wreck, and even then, we prefer to throw the book at whom we perceive to be the engineer, instead of developing and providing community guidance. We fear that policy will be over-rigid, and will prevent us from doing what the welfare of the wiki might require.
 * I've mentioned, in a recent deletion discussion, "violation of policy" by a steward. It's been assumed that I mean "wrong." No, a violation of policy shows some sort of inconsistency, but it could just as easily be showing a deficiency in policy as in the steward. It is only that when something is not prohibited in policy, I'd suggest, a user should not be sanctioned for it, unless the harm should have been crystal clear, but might well be warned, and sanctioned if the user goes ahead and insists in spite of warning, and absent discussion. Even when a thing is prohibited by policy, we will generally warn, so warning instead of sanction is even more appropriate if there is no policy violation by the user. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:46, 19 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Above it states 'pages in user space are not to be deleted', so that is the current proposal. If that's not what you are proposing, please propose something else.
 * I'm not yet convinced policy needs to change here on behalf of saving user pages. We might clarify that user pages are specific to learning about or for a given user, and that may involve unstated learning objectives.  And as you point out, that learning may be the act of creation rather than the content itself.  But user pages still need to support learning.
 * Separately, it seems to me that you are mixing issues. There is nothing about the current RFD that can be solved by changing deletion policy in favor of saving user pages, because the page in question already does not violate local policy.  The problem with the page is the scope of combined edits in relation to the overall Wikimedia project, and the perceived benefit to the entire project as a whole.  When a user's edits impact a significant number of wikis (and whatever percentage is chosen to be significant, it is way less than 557), the edits must be taken as a whole rather than evaluated on individual merits.  The page in question should be deleted simply because of the combined impact on the overall project.  However, the user would be welcome to come back and recreate the exact same page here alone, once the user indicates they understand the implications of their actions.  But because the user is globally locked, this is a debate for meta, not a debate for Wikiversity.
 * I think we should clarify policy in that pages may be speedy deleted (any pages, user, main, or other) if the creation of those pages resulted in a global lock or block of the user. This would move the debate for the user to meta, where it belongs.  This would also allow us to support global sysops, stewards, etc.  It does not prevent the user from going to meta to state their case, and does not prevent any user, such as yourself, from following up at meta on the user's behalf.  If the appeals are successful, the user may request undeletion under normal procedures.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 18:07, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Dave, I'm surprised. You "Except for A, we should not B," with "We should not B." There would, in fact, be additional exceptions. I wrote "Absent clear harm," which is a catch-all. Another exception would obviously be user request.
 * You are presenting this as a change in policy. It's not. We don't have a policy, Dave. We have a proposed policy, and we have actual practice for years. The actual practice has been for the most part what is now proposed for the proposed policy.
 * As to the rest, I can hardly express how disappointed I am. So I'm going to stop. I will maintain work on certain specific resources of interest to me, but I'm now convinced that Wikiversity is not into positive stability as to safety. It merely appeared so for a time. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 21:14, 19 April 2014 (UTC)


 * With regard to the page currently under discussion, the user went to very substantial work, over three days, -- this was not a bot -- creating a user page like ours on most WMF wikis. That was not prohibited by policy. Our own practice here would have allowed the page, and many local administrators removed, without fuss, the speedy deletion tag. Many more would have done so, I suspect, had more pages been tagged instead of simply being deleted by the global sysop or stewards. Most of those fewer pages locally deleted simply repeated the deletion tag, i.e, "cross-wiki spambot, see CA." The decision to delete those pages, instead of simply leaving them and watching the user, to ascertain intention, created a great deal of work, all done without discussion and on-wiki consensus (it is obvious the antispammers communicate off-wiki). The antispammers complain about how much work it is, yet, in a few cases, they create the work. Setting up a title blacklist to stop the page creations took very little work for Vituzzu. Globally locking that account was trivial, and reasonable given how it was appearing to him. However, beyond that, it was all unnecessary and very much outside what stewards ordinarily do.
 * A belief that "promotion" is evil and must be punished easily arises among antispammers, I've seen this for years. The protective function (necessary!) is lost in favor of a punitive model, as if punishing one "spammer" will deter others who don't know about the one punished. If we left those pages untouched, why, spammers would pour into to take advantage of the "loophole!" We would be overrun with spam! Yet, in fact, only the naivete of Augusto De Luca caused the reaction. A true SEO "paid editor" of any skill would never have done this. "Paid editing" is a huge problem for the Wikipedias, and this hysteria is a distraction from addressing it. The truly problematic paid editing would never advertise itself as Augusto did himself. Sitting with the data for two weeks, my conclusion is that his intention was to open up communication, cross-wiki. He didn't know how to do that, in fact; had he known, he would have set up email notification on his home wiki, it.wikipedia. Nobody advised him, so far. And he can't fix it because of the global lock. I know how to advise him, given my experience with "globally banned users," and will eventually be able to reach him, I'm pretty sure of that, as long as his health permits. For someone supposedly "promoting" his work for profit, he's not easy to reach!


 * We need a user page policy, to guide users, custodians, and those who might think of deleting user pages. What kinds are speediable, what kinds are worth proposing deletion for, and what kinds would require a deletion discussion? what kinds of proposals would just waste time? What are legitimate arguments for deletion and what are not? Etc. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:46, 19 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree most legitimate educational resources should be appropriate for either main or user space. I think one exception is where the target audience is one person then the resource belongs in user space. I think we should only be prepared to state user pages will be kept when they are resources with an educational objective that supports the Wikiversity mission, whether the objectives are personal or not. I think we should also encourage participants to move non-personal educational objectives out of user space. -- dark lama  15:22, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * We are not discussing "most legitimate educational resources." It is not controversial that a user may create a "legitimate educational resource" in their user space. "Target audience" is a red herring. Yes, if the only intended reader or user is the author, user space is appropriate. Then, who judges if the user's purpose is educational or not? I'm suggesting that, absent harm, the user himself or herself is the judge. It's their user space they are cluttering up, if they are, with useless pages. If someone abuses the proposed freedom, we can address that. (It's important to realize that this is our actual condition, we do not routinely interfere in user space.)
 * We have not proposed a policy that says "user pages will be kept." Rather, the proposed policy says that "absent harm," they will routinely be kept. We tend to have these discussions in the abstract, without any actual cases. Common law is built from cases, but our discussions tend to focus on abstractions and people may have entirely different cases in mind, it's a formula for continued disagreement.
 * So, case in point. A user was creating pages, here and cross-wiki, considered "vandalism," because they appeared to be nonsense. The user did this here. I recognized that this "nonsense" was what would be normal for a very young user. And I mean very young. So, instead of deleting these pages -- I was a custodian at the time -- I moved them to his user space, and encouraged him to work on them, whatever he wanted (as long as it wasn't harmful). I was following what I have proposed as policy. Scribbles, effectively, on a page, fantasy, all that, were teaching him how to write and how to use wikitext, and he learned, also, how to avoid being disruptive -- i.e., to create new pages, not appropriate as Wikiversity learning resources in mainspace -- in his user space. It worked. He learned by doing. He stopped the cross-wiki vandalism. The approach being followed elsewhere was training him to reboot his modem. I have no doubt that he would have figured out "open proxies" soon enough. My suspicion is that a fair amount of cross-wiki vandalism is simply very young users. Treating them as the enemy trains them to be enemies.
 * Very easily, it could have been said -- I think it was said -- "no educational objectives." Yet in school, an essay on what he did over the summer, or a fantasy about this or that, would be allowed as learning about how to write. I still watch this user, and, for his age, he is astonishingly literate. He didn't start that way, though he was definitely precocious. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 17:16, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

Alternative Proposal
I propose the addition of the following speedy deletion criteria:
 * 15. Global lock or blocks of the primary contributor, when the reason for the lock or block is directly related to the resource.

Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 18:21, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Only if vandalism or spam, or something related to the Augusto De Luca incident. Quite frankly, should be involved in this, I bet his knowledge would help in this proposal. --Goldenburg111 21:24, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Ugh. This makes the decision of a single steward (no discussion needed) have primacy here. We don't even delete user pages when the user is actually globally banned. See User:Collingwood, User:Poetlister, and User:Moulton. See also User:Thekohser, and see CA for him: though he was locked for 3 years, the user page was intact. Placing a notice on a user page that the account is locked, that may be acceptable, though the user Talk page would be better. I think allowing the user the respect of having an unmarred user page is simple decency. A global lock is not a ban, in spite of some pretense to the contrary. (Poetlister is considered banned, though present ban policy was not followed. Collingwood was, as the user page currently shows, considered a sock of Poetlister. Moulton is not globally banned, that requires process that has not been followed at all. He was being deliberately disruptive, and he was stopped, that's all.)
 * I'll stick with a requirement for user page deletion be that the page be harmful here, (or positively harmful to the WMF overall, which is rare), as with blocking, this has been established with blood, sweat, and tears. I hate to see it slide back to the wikimuck.
 * As to resources, the "primary contributor" is irrelevant. There is a general exception to that, for page creation by banned users, which are considered deletable on sight. It is not the content that is being rejected, but the right of a banned user to create it. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 22:12, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * sorry if I have frustrated you about that situation, I meant the hands of the corrupted's view and ideas. --Goldenburg111 15:19, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

I looked at the last 1000 actions in the Meta Global account log and found the following lock reasons given:
 * 649	Spam
 * 280	Long-term abuse
 * 30	Cross-wiki abuse
 * 22	Vandalism
 * 10	Abusive user name
 * 2	Compromised account / Impersonator
 * 1	No longer works for WMF

If the user had created a page or pages here that resulted in those global locks, which of the contributions would you have wanted to keep? -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 03:35, 20 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Having been part of this project a bit longer, I think this is a wonderful idea, which is not to detract form the first proposal (which I need to consider further). I would alter the language slightly.  First we would also want to include global bans.  It may not always be clear if pages here are directly related to a global ban, and believe me if there is any ambiguity it will be argued relentlessly (and unfortunately ceaselessly).  It would be better to add "... of the primary contributor, when the reason for the lock or block is directly related to the resource. Or if the resource cannot reasonably further the goals of Wikiversity without the primary contributor".  That criteria should be more straight forward to test. Thenub314 (discuss • contribs) 14:12, 20 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I think "If the resource cannot reasonably further Wikiversity's educational objectives without the primary contributors" should be what to look for, no need to mention blocks, bans, or locks at all, and the focus remains on the value/qualify of the resource itself. -- dark lama  15:11, 20 April 2014 (UTC)


 * (edit conflict with below) I agree with focus on the resource itself. However, a user page is not, per se, a resource, it is an introduction to the user. We have a lot of resources with the primary contributor -- or all contributors -- missing in action. Should we delete them?
 * Again, we are seeing discussion in the abstract, which then attempts to cover all situations, while missing our actual experience. There is only one global ban. When it was discussed, the issue of the independence of the wikis was raised but never clearly addressed. At that time, a 'crat could delink the account to undo the local effect of a global lock. I think that is no longer possible. We also allowed local socks in the presence of a global lock. What the proposal appears to say is that if a steward, who may be acting outside of policy, locks an account, we should start deleting pages here.
 * As to the question asked, we routinely delete spam. We do not routinely ban someone accused of "spam." We look at behavior here. In the case currently under discussion, the designation of the created pages as "spam" is highly questionable. If someone registers and creates a user page here, with content we would normally accept, do we check to see if they have registered somewhere else? If we see that they have created the same user page in other places, do we therefore delete the page? Now, that "same user page" is often created cross-wiki and there is even a bot that does it. It is most commonly done for global sysops and stewards, but other cross-wiki contributors do it. Basically, this is all irrelevant here, or should be.
 * Lock policy describes what can be locked. Augusto De Luca was locked as a "spam only account," not merely "spam." The next four locks in this sequence had the same description. After a number of users pointed out that the pages created were not "spam," the steward then locked another account, GIUNCO, for "cross-wiki promo." "Promo" is a content judgment. There are more accounts that he hasn't touched yet. "Promotion" may be true, in the same way that a fan promotes their favorite topic. Or a user points out their qualifications, on their user page.
 * Locking accounts that are actually spam-only makes sense. A spammer has little invested in the account. It really doesn't harm them. It just stops that account from editing. Real spammers expect these accounts to be blocked, and a global lock just saves locak wikis the trouble.
 * But in this case, as an example, the locked users had uploaded photos to Commons, and as soon as these accounts were locked, deletion discussions began. The first batch of 42 photos were images of the photographer himself, sometimes photographed in the act of photographing someone notable, such as Carla Fracci. That batch was quickly closed as kept. ("Promotion" is not a reason for deletion on Commons.") Then a photo widely used in Wikipedia articles of the photographer, a piece of art in its own right, was nominated for deletion, based on a technicality. I expect more of these. In that next nomination, there were questions that could easily be resolved by the uploader. But the uploader is thenow-globally-locked GIUNCO. Commons is one of the few sites that directly blocked Augusto, and immediately, and without warning or discussion. Thus a possible communication channel with Augusto, as well, was cut off. And then, of course, the deletions and blocks and locks are justified by "no intention to participate."
 * My suspicion is that Augusto saw what had been done, that his account was locked, and most of the user pages deleted, after spending three days creating those accounts and pages, and basically said, "forget them." He likely has no idea that the action is not "official," but was the ad-hoc decision of a steward (based on a decision of "spam") I have asked the steward to unlock the accounts. So far, no reply, but he has no edits in the last 8 days.
 * Wikiversity, I hoped, would be a place where these dramas don't bite. Was I wrong?
 * Unless we shift our community practices, policy discussions will very likely continue to be rootless, abstract considerations, mostly ineffective, without a shared body of evidence (actual history) behind them. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:30, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I disagree that "..a user page is not, per se, a resource...". And even if we agree to disagree on this point.  It is a bad idea to have two separate deletion policies regarding different namespaces.  Should we delete abandoned resources which cannot help to meet the goals of WV?  Yes, we should.  Thenub314 (discuss • contribs) 19:11, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
 * User space is very different from all the other spaces. On some wikis, in fact, users are given admin privileges over their own user space. (I've never seen this with the WMF, but we routinely grant quasi-administrative rights, we do respect the right of users to control their own user space, provided that they do not otherwise violate policy there. Neutrality policy, as an example, does not apply in user space. Users may express opinions, may exclude other users from editing their pages (ordinarily), and so on.
 * It's easy to say "resources which cannot help," but actually determining that can be an administrative nightmare. In fact, that's been claimed many times about resources that could help. When we all agree that they cannot help, there is little difficulty with deletion, and two processes for it: speedy deletion, either accepted or not, and proposed deletion, where we could develop the process a bit better, but it's designed as a nondisruptive process. If a page is positively harmful, speedy should be easily done.
 * The extreme version of my proposal is that harmless pages are kept, period. Because it is a harm for mainspace to be cluttered, this implies that the pages are moved to user space. If the user is long gone, and nobody is willing to adopt them, then they would be deleted. So prod would be used to determine this.
 * If we can clean up mainspace (and the associated topic and school spaces), do we really care if "abandoned and useless" pages exist in user space? How much effort should be put into "cleaning this up"? More accurately, into hiding the pages, since they are not actually deleted, no disk space is saved. If a user requests they be hidden, fine. If they are positively harmful, fine. But are truly useless -- and harmless -- pages worth continual effort to examine and delete them?
 * Semiprotection should be utterly noncontroversial and we might even develop a policy that abandoned pages are routinely semiprotected. It could be done by bot. Basically, the goal is to ease the maintenance burden. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 22:42, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I think that is fine. Clearly, it can always be argued that a contributor's creation meets his own educational goals.  So we would only want this to be applied to pages that are long abandoned, or where the primary contributor is otherwise unable to contribute.  The legalistic side of my would like to say something like "Resource that cannot reasonably further Wikiversity's educational objectives without the primary contributors, if the contributors are unable or unwilling to continue to contribute to the resources." Thenub314 (discuss • contribs) 16:07, 20 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree with Thenub314, except for one thing, the practicality of reviewing created resources. If leaving the resources in place causes no harm, we create burden on the community and sysops by legitimating deletion, when it is possible that the original user will return or that someone else will adopt the resource. Deletion is not transparent to the community, and (rare) administrative abuse may escapes attention for a long time because of this. If a resource standing unmaintained is a problem, i.e., spam and vandalism-magnet, then it can be protected or blanked and protected, if the content is itself problematic. The decision to protect a page is trivial and transparent, it can usually be done without worry, since it is so easily undone; anyone may request unprotection. Semiprotection will often be enough.
 * Thenub, what we have been focusing on is organization of content. I want to emphasize that this is a task that can be assisted by any user, for non-deletion options. When we depend on custodians for organization (by having them delete "useless content," which is not a fact but a judgment), we lose the potential of broad participation. w:WP:PWD was a minority position on Wikipedia, rejected because, I suspect, encyclopedias don't have lots of blank pages. However, university libraries have lots of works that are archived and accessible to those who might need them, often with no fuss. Those works may not be on display, as such, but a simple request to see them will suffice, and that request, here, might be a look at page history. Deletion, under this concept, is reserved for harmful content. (Blatant copyvio, the kind that if done intentionally, to evade copyright and thus damage the copyright holder, not mere negligence in a nonprofit activity, and which can result in prosecution or liability, is harmful, and so are privacy and child protection policy violations. Often revision deletion will handle these, the entire page need not be deleted. And we need policy to cover revision deletion; there are obvious standards that the community accepts, but they are not codified so that new and possibly inexperienced custodians can understand them. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:59, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

Thenub314, I think under normal circumstances, even abandoned resources can be improved by anyone other then the primary contributors. I think what to keep an eye out for are "non-educational resources where implementing concrete improvements that further Wikiversity's mission are only reasonably possible through collaboration with the primary contributors." -- dark lama  14:46, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree. Abandoned doesn't mean bad.  I meant to imply abandoned and having no reasonable method of being continued.  I am happy with the wording in your quotes. Thenub314 (discuss • contribs) 15:10, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * However, this, then, wastes custodian time on useless deletions. Do we have any examples of the pages in question? What I can think of are test pages, something that nobody will miss, including the user if the user comes back. However, while these can be deleted without harm, are we going to encourage our wikignomes to look through user pages to find test pages or other junk? Sometimes possibly useful content is in history, not on the face. There is a series of steps to be taken by a custodian before deleting a page. Anything link to it? Any history? It takes time. Useless stuff in mainspace, yes, but ... any user may move useless pages to user space, and I've done this many times, and, if nothing links to it, I may tag the redirect for speedy deletion. (The deletion summary should point to the user page, ordinarily). It is far, far simpler, if we don't delete user pages absent harm. We don't really delete them anyway, so there is no saving of disk space, all we are doing is making the pages invisible to ordinary users. Why?
 * And the problem that then arises is lack of transparency, it becomes impossible for ordinary users to review what a custodian has done. And for other custodians to review it, again, takes time. This is a common wiki shortfall: user time has not been valued. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:27, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * A user's time is up to that individual user, some people will show up and get involved because they like to clean things up. If it is a waste of their time I trust them not to do it.  There are no oblications in editing a wiki.  The "wasted time" argument is a complete red herring, if no one choses to clean up dusty corners that is fine, if someone does, they should have a clear idea of what is allowed to be deleted.  This is not an edicte that "This must be done."  It is acknowledgement this is an acceptable activity.  But let's face facts, an opening paragraph of the  biography of someone's mother from 2008 is not something a) that anyone else can continue or b) that further's our goals.  And if you don't think we have pages that have level of utility hanging around, spend some time looking.  You have made (in other posts) references to brick and morter university libraries.  These libraries have regular sales where they remove things they deem useful to them.  I know, I frequent them myself, so it is very poor analogy to argue for keeping these type of pages around.  Finally the point of doing any of this to make it easier for users to find resources they are interested in, or if you like analogies, improving the signal-to-noise ratio.  Thenub314 (discuss • contribs) 15:54, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Cleaning up dusty corners in mainspace, yes, yes, yes, by all means. Please, however, do not enter my dorm room and clean it up, unless something is truly hazardous. Yes, libraries have sales, because the value of the income exceeds the value of keeping certain material, to them. The kind of content we are discussing could not be sold. Useless, remember?
 * Do they sell the copies of student dissertations? The argument made by Thenub applies to mainspace only. There is no actual "cleanup" of pages in any space. Rather, they are painted over to make them invisible to others. That makes sense in mainspace, because for the utility of mainspace, it should not be full of useless junk. But why in user space? Deletion doesn't just take the time of the busybody who checks out "dusty corners" of my dorm room, but of a custodian who must review and act on a deletion template. What is the value to the wiki of this activity? --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:21, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Excellent we are making progress, so we are agreed about main space. I will grant you they do not sell Doctoral dissertations, nor do they keep masters or undergraduate dissertation. If we want to use an analogy to brick and morter dorm rooms, might I remind everyone how strict the rules are for dorm rooms/offices.   One may not have candles, use blue tack, hang pictuers that offend roommates.  For faculty the rules are more strict, in my experience, janitors will regularly through away papers on the floor on their schedule without the promise of notification.  I digress.
 * Again, I point out that no one "must" act on a deletion template or to review another custodians actions. The wasted time critique just doesn't make sense to this enviornment.  I will grant that a user pages deserve a little more lattitude, my personal user page doesn't contain much of educational value.  Perhaps there is not intrinsic value to the wiki of deleting/blanking old user pages for users who have retired, left, been banned, etc.  But it also does no harm, as any of these actions could be reversed if the user returns.  And if it keeps an active editor happy involved and logging in on a regular basis (and hopefully preforming an odd edit here or there to other resources) then I am all for it. Thenub314 (discuss • contribs) 16:52, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * While it is technically true that nobody must act on a deletion template, it happens, from time to time, that nobody acts, and Category:Candidates for speedy deletion expands and this, then, suppresses attention to the requests. Thenub, this is what really happens. I've been, for some substantial period, almost the sole maintainer of this site. Just as we need to clean up mainspace, we also need to clean up the maintenance templates like that, or the mess accumulates. I am pointing out that removing harmless material does do harm, where it takes up user and especially administrator time.
 * That deletion category is empty at the moment. We like it that way. "Speedy" should be .... speedy. I've seen what happens when the requests accumulate. Custodians have a little time, they pick what's easy, and the rest accumulate. In fact, if it's not easy, the template should be removed. "Not easy" means "not a candidate for speedy deletion."
 * What we want to encourage is cleaning up mainspace. That's where this site is a mess, still. To make it easy to clean up mainspace, we have developed the practice of moving marginal resources to user space. First of all, any user can do it. Secondly, deleting a redirect, when that's appropriate, is a much easier decision than deleting a resource that someone might or might not develop. I tag, for speedy deletion, redirects to user space, when doing so is not likely to cause harm. Those tags are routinely acted on, very quickly. A dorm room is going to be re-used, so eventually, it must be cleaned up. A user space is not going to be re-used, unless it is by the user.
 * We have seen that moving resources to user space is usually not controversial. I've seen users get upset by it, but, previously, these resources would have gone to RFD. If we then repeat the process all over again, for the files sitting in user space, we have defeated the purpose of making it all so easy.
 * Frankly, the kind of user attracted to going over the user space of other users, looking for stuff to tag for deletion, isn't the kind of user I'd choose to encourage for Wikiversity. It gets worse when the user doesn't speedy tag or prod, but goes to RFD over harmless content, which then wastes even more time.
 * Files in user space are more like material in a professor's filing cabinet, than stuff left on the floor, but even there, in a filing cabinet, the physical analogy implies some cost to maintaining the files, i.e., the space, the cabinet, etc. In our case, there is no cost at all to simply leaving them alone. They are neatly filed, they are not in anyone's way. There is no visual clutter, unless you deliberately look.
 * Again, these comments do not apply to harmful content, which is entirely a different matter.
 * I should disclose that I'm sensitive on this issue. See w:Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Abd_user_pages. There were definitely useful pages there, such as "Lyrikline poets," several hundred good edits indicated, to add links to lyrikline.org, all listed, showing what had been done and what remained. I had become distracted from completing that task, but anyone could have done it. (There are now many more possible, because lyrikline keeps adding notable poets. They are all notable, being hosted on lyrikline is an independent judgment of that, by experts.)
 * Wikipedia does have a habit of deleting "useless user pages." As a result, when I've had occasion to research history there, the necessary pages are often gone. Wikipedia hides its history, and the community gains nothing by doing so, but those who may want to hide the history gain. And these preferentially watch deletion requests. Most of the community does not, it would be overwhelmed. What did Wikipedia gain by deleting those user pages of mine? To answer that question, one would need to look at the identity and history of the nominator and many of those !voting. They gained, at least in their own minds. The community lost. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 18:18, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Most websites have rules concerning what is appropriate or acceptable to share on their website. If you posted a scientific paper on cold fusion to a poetry website, other posters are probably going to tag it or report it, and someday it will be deleted. I would find a poetry website counterintuitive if its terms of use focused on how and why sharing scientific papers is harmful, rather than focusing on what is appropriate to share there. User space is for sharing personal things that people want other people to view. I think at Wikiversity, what should be appropriate or acceptable to share in user space is personal educational goals and some information about themselves. People can tag or report resources in user space that they think isn't furthering Wikiversity's educational objectives. People should be able to feel safe that as long as what they post in user space meets some standard that the Wikiversity community has decided upon their contributions won't be subject to deletion. -- dark lama  19:53, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I think Darklama has summarized my feelings nicely. But, I like to comment on the sentence including "...isn't the kind of user I'd choose to encourage for Wikiversity...".  I think we could use a lot more people then we have, and if anywhere in the wikimedia universe is more tolerante of quirks it is WV.  As long as users are contributing positively, I say we encourage everyone.  And if that means allowing a bit of freedom, so be it.  There is very little that cannot be reversed, and for those interested in history they can always find it.  You can request undeletes, heck you can even download backups of old versions of wikimedia projects.  Nothing is ever really gone. Thenub314 (discuss • contribs) 20:13, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

The discussion is being misdirected in order to encourage others to fight a battle that hasn't been proposed. There is no proposal to edit user pages. There is no proposal to evaluate user content. The proposal doesn't even address clean-up. It is very simple. If a user is locked, blocked, or banned, and the page that was created is part of what led to the lock, block, or ban, the page *may* be deleted based on a speedy request. That's it. -- What is the best way to word that proposal so we can seek approval from the community and move forward? -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:14, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Any page may be deleted based on a speedy request, if a custodian agrees. And anyone may remove it, what is being proposed is not a change in policy, nor is it a clarification in any way that will avoid disruption. Deletion is editing, Dave, so I'm dismayed. Since you appear to think this discussion is being "misdirected," I do not see that I have sufficient support here on Wikiversity to allow me to continue. I will still proceed with what I've said I would do, and I will participate in Community Reviews, if allowed. I know that the views I'm expressing have been consensus on Wikiversity, but that all changed, as to what became centrally expressed -- and acted on -- by custodians, part of what led JWSchmidt to lose it. It may still be consensus, in reality, but those who would agree don't speak up, and they gave up. So there goes the wiki. The history is being misrepresented, but so what? The essence of the change: we may delete pages based on what someone else does, somewhere else. Good luck managing Wikiversity, I'm becoming seriously disinclined to help any more. Been there, done that. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 01:28, 22 April 2014 (UTC)


 * We're all volunteers here. You need to decide where and how you want to volunteer your time.  As I have indicated in several places, I believe you have a lot to offer to Wikiversity.  But my schedule doesn't allow the investment of time this issue is requiring.  I'm here to help others learn, and this is preventing me from doing that.  So, we need to solve this one way or another.  Either the community doesn't trust global sysops and we stop accepting their assistance, or we do trust them and we accept their recommendations, and then fight them at Meta when we think they're wrong.  But wasting our time discussing an issue that can't be solved here is pointless. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 03:20, 22 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I think discussion here and at WV:RFD have been misdirected based on various straw man and red herring arguments. This discussion page is about the deletion guideline. I think the "no policy" argument is another misdirection. If there is a problem that needs solving I think the focus should be on a problem with a resource rather then who made the resource. If a resource is deleted which would otherwise be within Wikiversity's scope because of who made it then the action becomes punitive rather then preventative, and Wikiversity participants lose out because a good educational resource was deleted. If anything is needed at all I suggest something like, "Non-educational resources where reasonably furthering Wikiversity's education mission requires collaboration from the primary contributors." I think user accounts that are locked, blocked, or banned demonstrate a lack of ability to collaborate, but there are other reasons why a person may not be able to collaborate too, such as they have retired from the wiki. -- dark lama  02:21, 22 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Would this then be a clarification of the first item? -- No educational objectives or discussion in history. Welcome users and resources when likely to be expanded shortly. -- If it is a non-educational resource that is not likely to be expanded (because it is a user page and the user is no longer available / participating), that means it can be deleted? That's a much broader interpretation than I was looking for.  I just want to be able to prevent situations where cross wiki edits do not violate local policy directly but do violate the Wikimedia community standards as a whole.  Yes, this means trusting the global sysops.  But we already trust them, based on Colloquium/archives/September_2013.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 03:20, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Ethical breaches
I think there needs to be more clarity on what is an ethical breach. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 19:07, 12 October 2014 (UTC)


 * This resource links to Research ethics and Scholarly ethics for ethics information. Those would be the places to initiate a discussion clarifying ethical breaches as addressed by speedy deletion.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 19:41, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
 * At this point, an "ethical breach" is what anyone thinks is an ethical breach, if confirmed. In this case, there was a page considered to be such a breach. Not as an accusation of misbehavior, by the way, but a page that could potentially cause harm. Wikiversity supports academic freedom, but freedom is not license. When research can possibly cause harm, academia handles this with standards and ethics committees.
 * So the process here was that a user (me) placed a speedy deletion tag on the resource, asserting a breach or lack of compliance with ethical guidelines (which mostly don't exist, so lack of compliance is not a surprise nor is it an offense. There are only common-sense guidelines, which are obviously nonspecific.) I suggested with the deletion request or in discussion of it on my user talk, that guidelines be developed and expressed with consensus. That would then allow study of the topic, subject to the guidelines. In some cases it might disallow the topic entirely, but I would not care to predict the specifics in advance.
 * The other remedy available to a user who wishes to contest such a deletion would be to remove the speedy deletion tag or to request undeletion. In this case, the page had been deleted, which indicates that a custodian agreed that the page was problematic. Because of the possibility of harm, this could be an exception to the rule that a speedy deleted page is to be undeleted upon request, in which case the issue goes to WV:RFD, if the deletion tagger takes it there. Sometimes a custodian will do that, with undeletion, though I don't actually recommend that, unless the custodian is *personally* requesting deletion *and* considers temporary hosting harmless.
 * In this case, hosting the page even temporarily could be harmful. If the custodian agrees, then, the page stays deleted unless another custodian undeletes. The matter may still go to RFD as an undeletion request. A copy of the page can be provided to the author on request (and perhaps to others on request if that is considered not to be likely to cause harm. Thus it might be provided to trusted Wikiversitans unlikely to abuse the information.) The page can be summarized on the RFD page with a summary not likely to cause harm. For example, a common case could be a page on how to make a bomb. The summary can state that without causing harm. It may be able to state more, but caution would be in order. Custodians, with issues like this, have revision deletion as an available tool, and deletion of revisions with harmful information is relatively routine; wherever possible, this should be explained for transparency. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:03, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Copyright violation
The guideline page already suggests that alternatives to deletion be considered. "Copyrighted material" is a speedy deletion reason, but students routinely copy material for personal study. Sometimes the legality of that is questionable, but it depends on complex details. However, we need to understand that "legality" almost never is a real issue with material on Wikiversity. That is, the owner of the site, the Wikimedia Foundation, is not obligated to make sure that all material is free or properly licensed, in the absence of a DCMA take-down notice, primarily because it is nonprofit. However, it seeks to ensure "free," not as a legal requirement, but so that all material may be freely re-used. And then exceptions are allowed under Fair Use, and the WMF wants those tagged as such, so that a commercial re-user is on notice that the material might not be usable by them (especially because of the CC-by-NC licenses out there).

When material is blanked, it remains in history, and I have never seen copyvio as a reason for revision deletion. I looked at Wikipedia policy on speedy deletion. Unambiguous copyright infringement covers this. As I read this, if it is possible to make the page non-infringing as currently displayed, there is no need to delete it. A page which is "unabiguously" copyright infringing, is what is deleted.

There has been a specific case recently. A Template was copied from Wikipedia without proper attribution. That is, the content was a technical license violation, because the general Wikipedia license requires attribution. However, once one knows that the page is copied from a CC site, the violation is fixed by a link to the original. However, a custodian deleted the page, and, after a repeated violation, blocked the user indef.

After writing this, I did some more research on Wikipedia, and found on w:Wikipedia:Copyright problems, that revision deletion is being used now.. Users may "clean a page" and then request revision deletion with a template.. Looking at the history of that page, I see a problem. Attribution of edits has been lost, it seems. They are robbing Peter to pay Paul. This will occur with the revision deletion tool as it exists. It's quite a mess, for copyvios that are not caught quickly and the page continues to be edited.

Deletion requires custodian action, and apparently the custodian felt obligated to act. Blanking and tagging can be done by any user. In this case, the user was not communicative, the user probably has difficulty with English, and the custodian was frustrated, I suspect.

Our guideline already implies that deletion is a last resort, when less drastic measures are available and not an onerous burden. Our customs require notifying a user that a page is to be deleted -- or is deleted. It is faster and easier to blank a page, and problems can then be fixed by any user. I have created Template:Blanked copyvio to allow this, and instructions on that template can become more specific.

Any user may apply this solution. Deletion then takes the page out of community visibility, requiring more custodian action if the problem is to be fixed.

There is an exception to the above approach, involving truly illegal content.

There is a nice document on copyright and fair use at. Reading that brings up an issue. Students may copy materials, rather freely, under some conditions, detailed in the document, and substantial copying from a book, here, might meet those exceptions. (And the document emphasizes that it is not legal advice, and copyright law is so complex and difficult that even experts get it wrong, I've explored many cases.) However, that copying is generally for the students own use, and perhaps for presentation to a class or small group.

Our situation is somewhat like publication, which then can take possible fair use into copyright infringement. However, we have the option of burying such material in history. I can imagine some strict-interpretation, precautionary principle (see Commons) user as thinking that, being in publicly accessible history, the material is still "published," but, then, finding that material is difficult, history is not indexed by search engines, not directly. Essentially, routine practice is simply to blank minor copyvio, and only if the whole page is copyvio is it to be deleted, and blanking is adequate.

What, then, about links to History? Linking to egregious copyright violation is illegal, but where this can see legitimate use is where the material is not "egregious violation," i.e., what the library I linked to considers possible fair use with limited distribution. Copy an entire book or copyrighted article, egregious violation. Copy selected pieces for study purposes, not.

Key would be lack of damage to the original publisher. If a sale isn't lost, there is no damage. And then one can start to understand why the law is so difficult. We need guidelines here that are easy to apply, but we also need to foster education, because our mission is broader than what is normal for the WMF, we are not just about providing "free materials," but also "free education, learning by doing." When copyright issues become complicated, one ends up with train wrecks, as a few months working on Commons showed me. The "precautionary principle" administrators ((those who most strongly insist on certainty of permission) had taken it to a gross extreme, disregarding WMF lawyer legal advice, and law review article examination, and deleting material that was, as to legal reality, free and licensed by the actual owner, based on their interpretations that would probably not stand up in court. I've looked. There has never been a test case directly on point, and the cases that exist support what I was pointing out.

We don't need that. I have argued on Commons that Commons doesn't need it either. The arguments had some level of support there, and might even become policy, but ... that all takes work and time. Mostly I don't have that time, I work in bursts.

Here, it is rare that deletion is actually necessary, if there is any apparent user desire to use Wikiversity for their own education or to create materials useful for others. It is also never an emergency, unless there is a take-down notice, and that is then handled by the WMF Office. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 20:31, 4 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Most copyright violations I've seen in the last year or so are blatant, complete copies of entire pages of copyrighted website content. It's just content dumping, not academic work.  Speedy delete is the appropriate response.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 21:49, 4 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Probably right. However, why is a user "dumping content" here? I can imagine academic work where there would be what could look like "dumping," and then editing that is something else. Blatant copyvio with no original work, no other edit history, no clue that the user is good-faith, maybe speedy deletion is the best way, though we still should follow the tag and confirm approach, for security. That will often give a user some time to object. At some point, a study of what is deleted would be in order. (Ad hoc impressions can be warped.) At the present time, I can't do that, because I don't have the tools.... If this is the user's first edit here, deleting it is not particularly welcoming. Properly, and for reliability as well as efficiency, we should design good templates to use so that this is all very easy, and the templates will handle boilerplate civility and helpfulness. I.e., "if you object, here is what to do." What we see is that spammers and vandals generally don't respond at all. Then there is that set of users that have communication problems. Still, we can make efforts, nobody is expected or required to be perfect. We will make mistakes, as will anyone. That is, we will do things that are less than optimal! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 03:16, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of talk pages
Criterion was: Discussions about deleted resources where context is lost and becoming an independent resource is unlikely.

Here it was when originally proposed:.

This was becoming interpreted as applying to IP talk pages, which was simply an error. Context is not lost for these discussions. It exists, though some of it may be deleted. A non-custodian can't see it, that's all. So this limits research to custodians, who mostly don't have time for it. The original purpose was talk pages attached to resources. That's a practice that came from Wikipedia, where I've seen, again, context being lost, caused by deletion, when deletion is not necessary, it is just "being tidy." In fact, the place is no tidier, the pages are still there in the database, they have merely been hidden, swept under the carpet, so to speak, or shoved into a closet, with the skeletons.

There are Articles for Deletion discussions on Wikipedia where there is extensive reference to article talk pages, such as discussion of sources, and those, then, become unintelligible. My view, years ago, was that deletion itself was a bad idea, there was a proposal for what was called Pure Wiki Deletion, which is blanking, which leaves content accessible, but hidden in history (the PWD proposal included some tweaks to searches). Even without such special support, if one is searching for a topic, say Loony Idea, one could suppress, ignore, or look at talk pages of a deleted page. What's the harm of them not being deleted? So that we don't know what we are missing? I do know the harm of deletion, it is routine. People wrote that stuff, and it's being discarded as junk, worthless, fancruft, or the like. I might have put a lot of effort into finding sources that I documented on an article Talk page, and it's all stuffed away where I can't read it unless I bug an administrator.

While "becoming an independent resource" may be more than merely unlikely," it may be impossible, there is still no harm of keeping the pages, documenting history of activity. Hence I am removing this criterion as inappropriate for Wikiversity. If there are other problems with a page, there are other speedy deletion criteria that may still apply. But "useless" isn't actually an argument for investing the labor of deletion and the cost of lost transparency. In mainspace, a resource will attract searches and Random Page, but an attached talk page doesn't do that.

This was the Wikipedia speedy deletion criterion as of the data of our proposed policy creation:
 * Talk pages of pages that do not exist, unless they contain deletion discussion that isn't logged elsewhere or notes that would help in creating an article. User_talk pages are exempt from this. Subpages (including archive pages) are only deletable under this rule if the corresponding top-level page does not exist.

Ontological point: if a page has been deleted, but had a talk page, does the page "not exist"? It is not readable by non-admins, but it exists!

This is now w:WP:G8, which maintains the basic ideas, but goes into more detail.

The real basic speedy deletion criterion: material that, if not deleted, will uncontroversially cause ongoing harm, including wasted time of users and administrators. This is a problem that specially can apply to blanked mainspace resources, but it doesn't apply to talk pages, blanked or otherwise.

I have removed the criterion. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 21:32, 5 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Reverted. So, please discuss.


 * Based on current positions, I don't see any point in the two of us discussing this. You are convinced that all discussions have historical value.  I am convinced otherwise.  Others will need to discuss this and let us all know what the community prefers.  Absent consensus for change, the guidelines should remain as they are.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 23:52, 5 August 2015 (UTC)


 * There are two issues here, Dave. The first, split below, is the interpretation of the present criterion, which is being misapplied, very clearly, with respect to user talk pages, particularly IP user talk pages. These pages are not merely discussions, they are records of user actions, showing, for example, how the user was welcomed -- or not welcomed, sometimes driven off.


 * The second is the issue of other talk pages. The second is an established criterion.


 * I am not convinced that "all discussions have historical value." Please don't put words in my mouth, creating a straw man position. I am convinced, however, that the assessment of value depends on the assessor, and that we cannot know this in advance, and when material is deleted without necessity, we have damaged a possibility. That damage must be balanced against the possible benefit, and I'm claiming that simply having "lost context" does not create a benefit from deletion. Context is not actually lost, it exists, it may simply be hidden, requiring additional steps to recover. If we can't see the clue, how would we know to ask for more?


 * What I have just discovered through research is that what I thought was our speedy deletion practice is not our actual practice. Deletion is a dangerous tool, and we place restraints on it for strong reasons. Speedy deletion should require very clear conditions, based in consensus and unlikely to be controversial, not marginal or speculative or just one user's opinion, even if the user is a custodian.


 * I.e., we trust custodians to apply clear criteria, and to avoid marginal cases without discussion or opportunity to oppose. I've seen a lot of great restraint, in using Proposed deletion for example, where value was doubtful. And then I just found a huge pile of exceptions. The deletion of IP talk pages is one. There are others.

Now, as to "current positions," this is the place to first start community discussion. So if you have nothing more to add, please add nothing more. That is, if you don't want to participate in the discussion, it certainly is not obligatory. Your revert was well within expectation and propriety, it does not need to be justified. However, it has also been fairly common practice to edit our guidelines and even our policies, without first having consensus, in spite of what the boilerplate says. If nobody objects, well, nobody objects. If someone does, then it's discussed. w:WP:BRD --Abd (discuss • contribs) 00:52, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

IP or other user talk pages
These are being speedy deleted. This was never an intended speedy deletion criterion, this was a misreading, see above. See also, where it is argued that "They dissuade casual anonymous users from participating. Removing them adds value." While that is a possible effect, that is not a reason to speedy delete, it is a reason to blank stale discussions, perhaps, and that, being so much less disruptive and easily reversible, can be done by bot. Wikipedia has templates for shared IP, but we don't need that complexity. We can create a standard IP user template to place on any so-blanked page. This will produce value in a number of ways; among other things, it could encourage account registration. Deletion isn't necessary, and removes transparency. I notice this because I commonly research wiki history. Similarly, I also, on occasion, handle cross-wiki vandalism, and IP talk page history can be of great value. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 23:45, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Other talk pages
The deletion of WP article talk pages was an extension of a basic Wikipedia principle, that the entire project is about creating articles, and all other content is to support that. I think talk page deletion was a bad idea for Wikipedia, by which I mean that it creates more work than it saves, whereas simply leaving the pages alone would do no harm and could preserve valuable content, such as references, sources, and arguments; Wikipedia's current criterion actually refers to this. Here, this is far more clearly true. Most deleted pages here don't have a talk page attached. If the talk page is itself disruptive, qualifying for deletion by itself, removing the "lost context" criterion still allows speedy deletion for other reasons. Further, discussion is, in itself, part of our mission, which is radically different from Wikipedia. While I would create a stub, at least, before creating an attached talk page, there is no harm, in itself, in creating the discussion first, it would merely be less likely to be noticed. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 23:45, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Commons Uploads
User:Abd would like to remove part of Speedy Deletions criteria item 4, specifically related to "files uploaded to Wikimedia commons with history intact and links fixed." Please discuss and provide support or opposition before changes are made. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 22:45, 17 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks. In fact, this has been discussed before, in 2014. See above permanent link. Arguments were given. I wrote "If there is no objection, I will remove the Commons speedy deletion reason." There was no objection to the change. What appeared was only this comment, over a month later: "Objection: "Please propose and discuss before making significant changes to ensure your revisions reflect consensus." One advocate constitutes neither discussion nor consensus."


 * This was not an objection to the change, but to something that had not happened: an actual change to the guideline without opportunity for discussion. The actual topic was long discussed in various locations. I did go ahead, this time, and make the change. Dave reverted and brought it here for discussion, but something about how wikis work has been missed: users make changes and if nobody objects, that is consensus. Obviously, perhaps nobody sees it, which is why such changes may be reverted back, later. If I make a unilateral change (as Dave called it), I cannot then use lack of responses to counter later arising objections based on "consensus." It seems that some idea of formal ratification of changes is being advocated here. That has not been followed in the past. Major changes have been made unilaterally, many times. This change is not "major." It does no harm. If many NowCommons files accumulate, and someone sees that as a problem, the entire set can be nominated for deletion. However, what is really happening here is that I'm objecting to the deletion of NowCommons files. As objection exists, the first-pass situation is that speedy deletion is not in order, speedy deletion requires the absence of objection, generally.


 * This came up today in this discussion: . In particular, Green Giant, a Commons administrator, gives, there, his experience with files copied to Commons. He details the problem I've encountered, missing license information when files are copied to Commons; but I've seen many files be deleted on Commons after years, when some potential defect in copyright is found. Perhaps it was a bystander selfie, and some Commons administrators think those are owned by the bystander, who must give permission. Others think differently, and it can be the luck of the draw. An example has been NASA images. NASA work is public domain. But what if the work was done by a contractor? Maybe it's public domain and maybe not. Researching files on Commons, I have found it's a nightmare. The process is not reliable. There is no guarantee that images on Commons are "free." So the tide may turn, and a Commons image may wash away, leaving us with a damaged resource, where if we still had the file, we could claim fair use. We would want to be notified of licensing problems, so we can handle them.


 * So we could undelete, and perhaps claim Fair Use. That takes far more labor, and I found that nobody was noticing the Commons delinker bot that comes around and deletes links to deleted Commons Files. Researching this is difficult when the files have been deleted, unless one is an administrator. I've been able to find files in Google cache, when I caught this quickly.


 * Nobody has, here, argued that the files should be deleted. It was a habit that started, as part of a push to copy files to Commons. Deleting the files does no good, it is wasted labor, and as Green Giant points out, the license information can be obscured. No disk space is saved, because deleted files are still there, merely hidden. What I don't know is what is displayed if the filename exists on both wikis. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 23:27, 17 August 2015 (UTC)


 * The objection quoted is still valid. One advocate is neither discussion nor consensus.  Both should precede any changes here.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:54, 18 August 2015 (UTC)


 * - I support removing this speedy deletion section. Having written that I
 * uploading any of our files to Commons unless the original uploader wants it uploaded there. If it's a file that I'm using, I'll make a copy, change its name, and re-upload it here under Fair Use. I spent time from 13 July 2015 to 9 August 2015 up at Commons trying to save images of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto from being deleted while images of Pluto were being reported by NASA's New Horizons at the same time in July. Fortunately, I asked an admin to look at the problem and the images were saved once proper licensing was done. Then an even clearer image was found and the duplicates could be deleted in August. Sorry, but Commons is still a nightmare. --Marshallsumter (discuss • contribs) 02:04, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
 * On Tombaugh, look at commons:Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Clyde_W._Tombaugh.jpeg this, just closed today. This should give some idea of how complex these things get. It's complex because of the Commons purpose, not for legal reasons. For any nonprofit activity, you can almost ignore copyright unless someone complains. (Deliberate violation, intending to harm the copyright owner, is not protected, but simple error is.) --Abd (discuss • contribs) 18:53, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
 * There are two entirely different issues here. The one I raised is deletion of files that have been uploaded. I have reviewed the history of this page, speedy deletion of files uploaded to Commons was not discussed when added to the page. I worked on this page extensively and it never stood out for me as a problem until I gained experience with what Marshall is talking about. I now see the problem as routine, common, afflicting all the wikis, including Wikipedia, which is where the practice of deleting uploads to Commons probably came from. User:Green Giant, a Commons admin, has commented on this here. He does not even mention the additional factor: a file which cannot be hosted by Commons may be usable here, under fair use. Making such a claim gets more complicated when the files have been deleted. Often, the original uploader is gone. What we would want, to support WMF licensing policy, is to be notified when files hosted here are deleted from Commons. Green Giant states he is proposing that wikis where files are in use be notified of pending Commons deletion process. We would want notification, and when Commons makes a decision, we would want to know the outcome. We might then see a proposed deletion tag on the file here, unless a non-free rationale has already been asserted. There is then time to handle the process, with original upload information still available. Otherwise, this is a job for custodians, instead of being supportable by the community. I have done the job anyway, sometimes using Google cache to recover information. It's much more complicated with the page having been deleted.


 * The other issue is copying to Commons. That is harmless, at worst, if we dump the speedy deletion reason. We will also dump, I predict, unclear licensing as a speedy deletion reason. Rather, this will move to proposed deletion, giving much more time to resolve issues. Speedy deletion will be reserved for blatant violation only. (Right now, the copyright template gives seven days from notice. That is not quite speedy deletion, though the deletion guideline originally suggested giving time for speedy deletions to be reviewed before deleting. We developed proposed deletion to address the problem. Speedy deletion should be reserved for truly uncontroversial deletions. The whole point is to make it easy to maintain Wikiversity. With the triple process (Speedy, Proposed, and RFD), we only do the "difficult" one if consensus is not found in the first two steps, consensus meaning lack of objection. I'm seeing that we really do need resources on wiki theory.... One might notice that, with some consistent pursuit of this concept, by me and others, over the years, WV:RFD is gathering cobwebs, most proposals there have become errors or misunderstandings, and there is very little disruption. It was not always this way.


 * A corollary of the triple process is that the first two kinds of deletions are to be undone on request from any established user. When we get big enough for spurious requests to be a problem, it will be easy to handle, with a request page that requires the autoconfirmed privilege. (Others simply have to gain support from any autoconfirmed user.)


 * We could not prevent copying to Commons if we wanted to. Any properly licensed material here is subject to copying *anywhere* with attribution. We just don't want it to damage our resources, which is, unfortunately, common.


 * So, as a result of this discussion, I looked at Special:Contributions/CommonsDelinker. And sure enough, I found . That was hosted on Commons (not here). However, it was originally uploaded to Wikipedia, for use in an article there, by w:User:PlanetStar, . The link was added in March, 2011. Then, in November 2012, it was deleted, by a Commons user, (File deleted: F8: now available on Commons under the same name (TW)). The file was apparently uploaded to Commons before then, and not by PlanetStar, because it was another user who was notified of the allegedly missing license information. While this user is very active, it appears that the user did not respond. And, of course, the original license information would not be accessible to this user, it was as much as four years or so earlier. So deletion of the file on Wikipedia has resulted in harm to Wikipedia. The image itself is currently in Google cache. I did not find that exact version hosted anywhere else, so it may have been created by PlanetStar, working from a public domain image, probably from Australia's UK Schmidt Telescope, so the license information was merely incomplete, perhaps. In any case, versions of that image with different color balance are all over the internet, being sold as physical photographs. I found credit to the telescope, but no specific license information. The telescope official web site has an NC license. For all we know, those selling the image obtained permission. Or didn't. In any case, a reduced-resolution version of this is usable here and on Wikipedia under Fair Use. There is a specific image at, click on "Display color image," and there are many others. The actual image used in PlanetStar's upload may be recoverable from Google cache, and could be similarly tagged for non-free usage here. It would be an NC file, being derived from one, perhaps.


 * Commons copyright policy and practice is incredibly complex, because copyright law is incredibly complex. We simply do not need that complexity. If a file is deleted for missing license or improper license on Commons, for our purposes, I would trust that there is a license defect, even though I know that such deletions are often incorrect, I've seen some doozies. We may then consider a non-free rationale ... or delete the file here if that cannot be justified. That is not appropriate for speedy deletion if there is any objection. We need to keep our custodians out of this mess. As can be seen, the file was hosted on Commons, an alleged repository of free media, for over four years. I've run into many of these. Commons has no reliable process for vetting licenses, it is all ad-hoc, and if nobody looks, nobody vets, and it can occur that nobody looks for a very long time. Meanwhile, how many of those who are selling the image got it from Commons? Green Giant has a NonFreeWiki proposal. I've suggested that this should be commons, and that a process actually vet all files on Commons, and all files not vetted would be tagged as "possibly non-free," by bot. Then, instead of deletion, other options open up: tagging as NC licensed, tagging as "probable public domain, but not verified," tagging as "in use under fair use," etc. Commons copyright expertise would then be harnessed non-desctructively. Green Giant, with much more Commons experience than I, thinks that the Commons community would never agree to this. I think they have never really been asked the right question.... --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:38, 18 August 2015 (UTC)


 * I don't think people should be stopped from transferring files but there is no reason that local copies could not be kept. However I'm wary of knee-jerk reactions i.e. Wikiversity keeping files by default. If a user requests a local copy be kept then there should be a better reason than just "I don't like the pitchfork-wielding policies of Commons". If a file is PD (public domain) or is licensed for reuse (without restrictions like -NC or -ND) then there is no earthly reason to prevent that file from going to Commons. Just so this is clear, a deleted file is simply hidden from public view - admins/custodians can still view most deleted files on their wiki. The only way to get a file properly deleted is for a sysadmin (a different kind of admin) to physically delete the image from the servers (this is usually only in response to DMCA takedowns). A couple of other matters need to be clarified - the file description page is on the local wiki but almost all images (including Commons) are kept at upload.wikimedia.org, so there are no actual images stored on Wikiversity, Commons or other wikis. Please also note that for every Commons file that is viewed here on Wikiversity, you can add a local description which hides the Commons description. Furthermore if a file on Wikiversity has the same name as a file on Commons (we call this shadowing), then only the "local file" will be visible on Wikiversity.
 * My experience of transferred files is that there are well-intentioned but often ill-informed people who transfer files to Commons but without checking things like the copyright status. I have had the displeasure of deleting transferred files because people won't do the leg-work needed to comply with Wikimedia Commons policies. I could just carry on doing this and be labelled a deletionist. However I've been trying to look at things from a different perspective i.e. get the files fixed before transfer and I have been shocked by the sheer numbers of files on other wikis. Right now, Wikiversity alone has thousands of files tagged as not having machine-readable license. This might not concern some people but it is a significant cache of files that need attention and could be transferred by well-meaning users. This discussion has pushed forward my agenda (yes I have an agenda), which was to propose some changes at the "target end" (Commons) and at the "source end" eg Wikiversity. However the proposals are still at a draft stage so I'm only going to outline them:
 * when files are transferred from a wiki like Wikiversity and subsequently deleted here, there should be a record kept, even if it is a bot keeping weekly pages updated
 * when files are nominated for "normal deletion" at Commons, the nominator should leave a note on the talk page of every place that the file is in use on other wikis
 * the deletion requests norm at Commons should be extended from the current 7-day minimum to either 14 days or even 28 days because unless it is a blatant copyright violation, I don't see why we need to hurry these discussions (we have a permanent backlog anyway of about three weeks)
 * if a file is transferred from another wiki to Commons, and is then deleted, there should be a fast-track mechanism to allow the deleting Commons admins to request the restoration of the file at the source wiki (whether or not it is restored would be up to the local admin)
 * a local help page for transferring files or at least a local copy of the Wikipedia help page
 * a Trans-Wikimedia program to improve and share knowledge of copyright issues (perhaps based at Meta-Wiki?)
 * I don't think these are insurmountable challenges but an insular approach will not help. If you are struggling with Commons, then that is a good reason to engage each other rather than retreating into our home wikis. P.S. I welcome any suggestions on how to proceed with my agenda but please let's avoid launching requests for comments here and elsewhere until we can be sure how to move forward. I'll step down from my soapbox now.  Green Giant  ( talk )  18:31, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I have put a substantial effort into engaging with the Commons community. My assessment: it is insular and doesn't generally give a fig about harm to other wikis and users. Commons process is routinely uncivil, and doing anything about it is unpopular. There are some truly fine people working on Commons (we see an example here). There are also some clearly suffering from some malady, and they have buttons to enforce their POV. I requested temporary undeletion of a set of files because I needed the original license information to support a user attempting OTRS review. It was denied and the request closed, in spite of policy allowing that. Yatta yatta. Sure, I could identify a friendly administrator. I only do that as a last resort. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 18:53, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the great information, GG, about file hosting and behavior. I'm aware of the untagged problem, and have worked on it from time to time. We need more help with that. However, there is another problem that you have not mentioned. Files are transferred to commons with some licensing claim. The uploader will then commonly tag them with Template:NowCommons. That has been treated as a speedy deletion reason. We may assume that most files transferred to Commons have some prima facie claim to being public domain or licensed for free use. But, later, some defect is asserted. And the user is gone, very often. Often the uploader is also gone. We have content using the file. Your proposal would allow us to be notified, perhaps, though we have much content that is on nobody's watchlist. If Commons deletes the file, let's assume there really is a licensing defect (sometimes there is not). We have lost content, and only a custodian here can recover it. Usually our custodians don't even notice. I only see these when I look at Special:Contributions/CommonsDelinker. And it can be a lot of work to fix the problem.
 * If we routinely don't delete based on NowCommons, there is no problem that I can see. All we are actually keeping or deleting here is the file description, including file history and licensing information.
 * The biggest problem with what you wrote is that even if a file has a claim of "public domain," it may still be deleted. I think you just Kept a file that had such a claim (the Tombaugh photo discussion linked above). In fact, it appears to have been copyrighted and copyright not renewed, so still public domain, but for a different reason. Easily, if nobody had done the research on that, it could have gone the other way. I am seeing zero benefit from deletion, yet obvious and not uncommon harm. Notice: if the file is not deleted here, you won't need to make that "fast track" request for undeletion. It's already readable. As well, if the page is deleted on Commons, and there is a valid copyright concern, you can then tag the file here, according to our process. You can reference the Commons deletion discussion, so this could be very quick. (And it could be automated) And then we will handle it.
 * If the file is actually illegal and a fair use argument not possible, it should be deleted wherever it is. Whether it is on Commons or not is irrelevant!
 * By the way, that is a great set of proposals for Commons practice. Good luck. I can imagine opposition there. However, this could be done by bot, it is not necessary to require every nominating user to manually add all the notifications. Please point us to the discussions of your proposal! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 19:15, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
 * It would be best done by bot but when this was recently queried by a Wiki-Sourcerer, the response was that technical problems would prevent a bot from doing this. I'm not so sure but I don't have enough coding experience to say either way. However, before that it would be useful to know whether this is something that Wikiversity would like to have.  Green Giant  ( talk )  20:16, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Ah, what we lose when we depend on the technocrats! If CommonsDelinker can seek out and remove every link, a bot could place a notification on the Talk page of every linked usage (or on the page itself if it is a Talk page already). A bot could also place a notification on a designated page for every wiki using a file of deletion under consideration. If the original is not deleted, a bot could ping the talk page, and could notify the original uploader. Etc. A great deal depends on the question that was asked, first of all; then answers can simply show lack of imagination. But this is off-topic here. This is only about whether or not we speedy-delete pages merely because they have been copied to Commons. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 20:59, 18 August 2015 (UTC)


 * My change to SD item 4 was reverted because not discussed. It was, in fact, discussed in 2014, and was opposed then, also because not discussed (in spite of the discussion!), no actual opposition to the change was expressed then. Again, now, no opposition has been expressed. My understanding of policy editing procedure is that widespread community review is only needed if a change is controversial, and consensus cannot be found. If, after more than a year, no opposition has appeared, I conclude it is not actually controversial. Hence I intend to edit the page, and request that it not be reverted unless the user actually opposes the change, in which case I request that this be discussed. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 00:21, 2 September 2015 (UTC)


 * I oppose this, and any other policy/procedure changes until an announcement is posted in the colloquium making all users aware of the proposed change and giving them an opportunity to respond. The proposal isn't controversial.  The attempt to change procedure without notice to all is the controversy.  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 01:12, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Great. The proposal is not controversial. Thanks. What is controversial, now, is the process. Policy pages have routinely been edited when there was no controversy, so a requirement that this be widely discussed is new and, in fact, contrary to standard process. Wider discussion is only needed for controversial changes (and this change has already been mentioned on the Colloquium). So I will take this issue to the Colloquium. Because this is about fundamental Wikiversity organizational process, it really should have a Community Review. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 02:43, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Issue of change process raised at Colloquium. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 17:46, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Speedy deletion process
There are various traditions and procedures that have been followed at various times here. We should understand that deletion is a relatively drastic measure, unless it isn't! Most of us want to clean up Wikiversity, but this can be done in a number of ways, including organizing content. A stub, for example, is harmless if organized in a certain way, and will waste user time if organized a different way; our generally tendency has been to delete stubs or content that does not seem useful. However, for the cleanup of Wikiversity to proceed, it must be easy. The following is a description of a procedure that is, in some ways, what I thought we already had, but some may disagree with that.

The goal of this is to clarify a process that is efficient, that avoids unnecessary controversy, yet that allows cleanup and that can be managed by the community, with custodian activity (as custodians) being limited to what is easy, with the only difficulty (requiring serious care) being closing discussions on WV:RFD. (Custodians are only needed for Delete closes, any experienced user, respecting consensus, may close discussions with some other result.) --Abd (discuss • contribs) 03:23, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

This is broken into subsections on individual aspects of the process to allow discussion of each. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 05:20, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Ad hoc deletion
This is deletion by a custodian with no request. It is based on the sole judgment of the custodian. This may be clearly based on the deletion guideline, or may be done for some other reason. I suggest that this kind of deletion be ordinarily limited to clear vandalism, obvious spam, or non-remediable copyright violation, where damage is immediate, so immediate response is necessary. This is covered in the present guideline as a speedy deletion, but I'm distinguishing it. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 03:23, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

Speedy deletion
This is deletion as an custodial response to a deletion tag (Template:Delete) placed by another. The tag will ordinarily give the reason, and by deleting, the custodian is agreeing with that. If a custodian thinks a page should be deleted, as a speedy deletion, the custodian should place a tag like any other user.. Wikiversity has established prompt response to tags, custodians have been doing a great job. What this procedure does is to set up quick review, where at least two users think a page should be deleted, and there is no opposition. Any user may remove a speedy deletion tag, if they see it before the page is deleted! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 03:23, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

Review of deletion
Any user may request a speedy or ad hoc deletion be undeleted, just as they may remove a speedy deletion tag, and this will not ordinarily require a "reason." So far, in this process, no debate is necessary. We do not want to have a debate over every piece of garbage thrown in the trash, but if someone thinks the page is not garbage, or just wants to see it, it is quick work to undelete, much less work than discussing it. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 03:23, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

If a user wants a page deleted, and the custodian does not want to undelete it, this is a content dispute, and custodians, in theory, should have no advantage in content disputes. Because no custodian is required to do anything (ever), the standard procedure has been to request undeletion by the deleting custodian, and, if not satisfied with the response, to request undeletion on WV:Requests for Deletion. There has been opposition expressed to the individual custodian request, as if a request for undeletion was some kind of accusation of impropriety, which it is not, in itself. So we may simplify this with a tag that would be placed as a new page creation, with the deleted page name, requesting undeletion of the underlying page. (That tag will then stand as the latest edit, when the page is undeleted, until the page is edited.) --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:18, 12 September 2015 (UTC) edited Abd (discuss • contribs) 05:17, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Proposed deletion
This is a process for what was originally called "slow deletion." It starts a clock, allowing three months for improvement or objection to deletion to appear. Very often, nobody cares about a resource, and it will then be deleted when the proposed deletion period expires. I am suggesting, on Template talk:Proposed deletion that prod date be categorized by month, not be a speedy deletion reason, but allow any user to confirm deletion by placing a regular deletion tag. Key to understanding this is that anyone may remove a proposed deletion tag, and, again, discussion is not necessary for that. So far, this should not be a contentious process. If anyone wants to keep the page, they may. Where it is kept is another matter. The page might be moved, to user space, for example.

Proposed deletion, after a page is deleted, is subject to the same review as ad hoc or speedy deletion.

The present guideline says, about proposed deletions,
 * A custodian may examine the resource after 90 days, and either delete the resource or remove the proposal. Anyone may object by removing the proposed deletion template from the resource, with or without an explanation on the resource's discussion page. Anyone still considering that the resource should be deleted may discuss deletion.

The immediate thought I had with this is that it shoves off responsibility for review of proposed deletions on custodians. That's not necessary. However, many proposed deletions were piling up in the Category:Proposed deletions and there was no prioritization, i.e., no easy way to see which proposals might be ready to expired. At the end of 90 days, the page was placed in Category:Pending deletions, but these files were then subject to immediate deletion at the discretion of a custodian.

I have modified Template:Proposed deletion to generate a new Category:60-day proposed deletions, which shows proposed deletions that are 60 days old. These deletions (like any proposed deletion) are subject to review by the community, any user may handle this, assuming that it is handled in reasonable expectation of consensus, should the matter come up.

This, then, displayed for me the oldest prods. There are many ways to handle these, and a user may choose between them.
 * The prod was overconservative, perhaps, or under the conditions (user not active anywhere, for example, and no significant loss if the page is deleted), 60 days was enough. So it may be tagged for speedy deletion, removing the prod.
 * The page may be moved to an appropriate location where it need not be deleted. Common: a move to the user space of a registered user who created it or who was active on it.
 * The page has a useful function as-is, so the prod may be removed.
 * The page may be improved, so the user improves it. If the user wants more time for that, the user may renew the prod. Please don't simply remove a prod based on "I -- or somebody-- may improve this someday." In that case, you could renew the prod (you could even postdate it so that the prod takes longer to expire), or you could move the page to your user space. Pages on Wikiversity with no useful content cause harm when users arrive from a search and find nothing of value. User pages? Not a problem.
 * For pages created by IP users, the page may be moved to a Playspace. This is particularly appropriate for pages likely created by children, but "Playspace" is not just for children. It is a monitored space where harm will be avoided and user experimentation ("play") is not quickly deleted.

I cleaned up the 60 day category in about an hour. As with any user's work, my work is subject to review. "Speedy deletion" is minimally discussed deletion, "discussed" only through tagging or untagging with edit summaries. If a discussion is needed, the normal place is WV:RFD. However, if a user shows repeated behavior that another user considers a problem, that discussion should normally start on the user's talk page.

Many hands make short work. We are now being very efficient in cleaning up the custodian requests that display at WV:RCA. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:15, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

Discussed deletion
It is remarkable how rare this has become, even while cleanup proceeds. If someone believes that a page is harmful, and other options are not available or have been opposed, then we have a discussed deletion process. The default is Keep, and only if there is consensus for deletion, particularly if rooted in argument and site welfare, will the page be deleted. These discussions take up user time and have often caused dissatisfaction with Wikiversity. Thus they are to be avoided if possible. Nevertheless, if someone, without good cause, stops the non-contested deletion process, the remedy is WV:Requests for Deletion, discussed deletion. Up to that point, there need be no wasted custodian time. Dispute over deletion or undeletion is what wastes time. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 03:23, 6 September 2015 (UTC)