Wiki talk:Rejected deletion policy/Pre-voting

criteria for deletions

4. Draft pages on request of the original author, that have not attracted discussion from other users except for relevance and deletion discussions. After a period of one year passing without significant content changes, other users might suggest deletion (using {{Delete proposal}}) and finally request deletion in case of no objections.
I propose to remove the exceptions ("except for relevance and deletion discussions"). --Dieterdreist (talk) 15:22, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

I commented at https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=737114#p737114, just in case you missed it. --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 21:48, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

"In case that a deletion is opposed"

We have discussed this in the forum previously and I think it will never work that way. Use of delete instead of delete proposal should not occur except when the page is clear spam? So this should be stressed in the beginning.

If someone uses delete instead of delete proposal and someone else objects the only clean solution is to revert and have the original delete requestant add the delete proposal.

Anything else has too much potential for confusion: say Alice adds "delete". Bob changes that into delete proposal. Alice sees that, changes her mind and thinks the pages should not be deleted after all so she removes the delete proposal or opposes it in the discussion page. Now figuring out the history is interesting .. and then flies by User:EzekielT, does something like this. RicoZ (talk) 22:14, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

There are several technical reasons to delete a page. I do not want to hinder myself. If you check my contributions you will find several of them (just search for "deletion request" in the edit summary, I always label them this way): duplicated files, copyright issues of files, licensing issues (I usually forward them to admins), empty pages, broken files, broken templates with no use (creator writes: "sorry it is broken and useless", I sometimes contacted the people individually), pages like "Please delete..." without the template, empty and wrong translations (e.g. English version equal to Japanese version, and no page history to keep), redirects to deleted pages, automatically created pages containing a template only (I see, you could discuss in this case), content not relating to OpenStreetMap in any way (like private images, Wikipedia-like pages about general concepts like "Publishers"), multiple identical pages (usually changed to redirects), and ... lastly spam.

I mainly think that EzekielT did not fully understand what they were doing and how the undo feature works, so it does not really relate to this problem specifically. I just wanted to stop this whole business of "undoing" because it is somewhat aggressive. I mean you basically say "this was wrong!" or "you made this page worse than it was before". But, ok I will give in. My approach is probably too confusing with regards to the page history. --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 12:03, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Your approach could be rescued if it could be agreed that when using delete the contents of the page should not be blanked because than it would be just a simple edit - adding a single word into the template instead of the unblanking and placing a new template required now. Do not know how realistic that is? RicoZ (talk) 21:48, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

AFAIK, the blanking idea comes from this change of the delete template by Harry Wood (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.). I guess this is used to demonstrate to less advanced users what might happen to this page soon, so they do not miss the message...?

Please remember that we would need to change all translations of this template (we could delete them in the worst case, but I would rather contact the authors). I recently found out that the German version of {{Delete proposal}} was not identical to the English one, pretty bad! --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 22:53, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

I can see there's potential for things to get confused, but if you explain what you're doing in the wiki edit comment, doesn't that solve confusion to a large extent? I mean if you say something like "Downgrading User:xxx's deletion to a delete proposal while we discuss" ...it should be pretty clear that it's not you proposing the delete. Is that the main issue? (and yes I'd expect that edit to involve restoring the content).

Maybe you should add "with a clear edit comment" to your advice there Tigerfell.

Admittedly I haven't dealt with edit-warring with deletion templates very much. I saw there's been some animosity related to deleting archived proposals recently. I hope that calms down somehow (I'm trying to stay out of it to be honest)

-- Harry Wood (talk) 01:06, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

General advice/#2

What does this mean or how is it relevant for the decision whether to delete something?

I would like to help getting this article into shape, should I fork it and work on my own copy or edit your copy? RicoZ (talk) 22:29, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

#2 intends to say that you should rather indicate that a proposal is inconsistent with current mapping styles than propose or discuss a deletion.

Please feel free to change the page or fork it, whatever you prefer. If you change this page, we can keep the history together and I currently do not intend to change the page, so there will be no conflicting edits or similar. Thanks, I appreciate it. --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 11:36, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Before I start too boldly..do you envision the final result be one or two pages? Is it to replace the current Delete page? RicoZ (talk) 21:55, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

I actually thought of one page (like on the flip side, but without the insertion and deletion marks). I was thinking of a community guideline or rule, meaning you could end a deletion discussion by naming a section from this guideline. If I were to write an intro about this I would write:

This page reflects a consensus among the community. It was formulated to avoid edit conflicts with regards to deleting pages and to provide a fair decision making in this matter.

Delete rather documents what happened in the past, but of course it would be mostly obsolete then (except for documenting the use of the templates and defining the terms). It was set up by singular editors, but it is not based upon a consensus. I did not thought too much about it, because I wanted to adhere to the opinions on the mailing list. I acknowledged that there were some people rather opposing strict rules, but I think it is good to have a fixed baseline. --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 23:21, 22 February 2019 (UTC)