Forum:How outrightly should articles with expired fix/expand tags be deleted?

Forums: Index > Ministry of Love > How outrightly should articles with expired fix/expand tags be deleted?

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You know, the stuff in bold on these lists. I'm just trying to establish a consensus here, because I'm not sure whether there is one. —Sir Socky (talk) (stalk) GUN SotM UotM PMotM UotY PotM WotM 21:21, 19 January 2012

*deletes Socky* 1234 ~ 00:38, 20 January 2012

: / —Sir Socky (talk) (stalk) GUN SotM UotM PMotM UotY PotM WotM 00:47, 20 January 2012

Oh, come on. We have a VFD process for half-way bad or good pages. An admin huffed something like 100 pages in a few minutes yesterday. How can you check a hundred pages in a few minutes to see if they were so bad that they weren't even VFD worthy? The process seems to be broken, and anyone can slap a Fix tag on any page and then wait for it to be huffed (last week someone put up a fix tag with the edit summary saying something like "PLACING TIMEBOMB"). Why do we have VFD if that's how this works? Someone please edit Ginger, because it's set to be gone soon.Aleister 1:50 20-1-'12

Let me try to address your concerns Aleister: 1) Due to the magic of tabbed browsing, admins can open and look at lots of pages simultaneously, then go through quickly deleting them and closing the tab. I know I do that all the time. 2) It's not that they "weren't even VFD worthy", it's that the page went 30 days without being edited. 3) Anybody can do almost anything, this is a wiki. 4) As far as I know the phrase "The bomb has been planted" is a reference to Counterstrike. Probably was not meant literally. 5) You can edit Ginger. Hope this helps! -- The Zombiebaron 02:07, January 20, 2012 (UTC)

No, it doesn't. The system is broken. Thousands of pages have been killed this last year, and now maybe hundreds in a day? While some of us look at VFD every time we're on, and judge a half-dozen or so articles on their merits, in the back somewhere hundreds of pages are being taken and beheaded. I can't help how I look at pages, and what I do is realize that someone has put the time and creativity into every one of them. Ideas, pictures, their life experiences, and when we judge these on VFD all these factors are taken into account. I cannot believe that Fix tag works the same way, it just feels like overkill and an overkill which seems to have gone on a long time. Every time I do a page sweep of things I've written I'm finding new red links, and the red links on Random Page's seem to be growing much more numerous than I remember. The words were in caps, PLACING TIMEBOMB, and I'm willing to bet they weren't meant as anything but that. I'm being a bit serious here because, as I said, I "feel" the creative force behind each of the pages, and mass killoffs don't fit my view of what a wiki should be, even if we "can do anything". Aleister 3:19 20-1-'12

Grasshopper's Briefs. --RomArtus*Imperator ® (Orate) 00:01, January 22, 2012 (UTC)

Soon uncyclopedia will have only 120 to 500 articles left. That's not a joke.--WELCOME TO UNCYCLOPEDIA HELL!!!! 11:29, January 22, 2012 (UTC)

But no less than 120...specifically? mAttlobster. (hello) 23:23, January 23, 2012 (UTC)

Baby out with bathwater

Although the concept of throwing the baby out with the bathwater is appealing to me, it also summarizes my feelings about this issue. Maybe 76.7% of the pages with ICU or Fix tags on them deserve to be huffed and forgotten. Yet what I see is almost total huffing of the pages with these tags, with very little taking the tags off and letting them live, even as placeholders. I went through maybe 50 of them, and found many to protect, including Bathtub, which is almost feature-worthy. Maybe a consideration of "Would this survive VFD?" with a liberal leeway--if the answer is "maybe", then definitely keep it--would be the way to go. Or restrict the use of Fix tags somehow. I'm just saying that uncy has lost too many good pages lately, and there has to be a better way of protecting these pages from deletion. Aleister 10:04 22-1-'12

The issue of placeholder articles, tags is something I do support. I have linked to articles only to discover I am chaining my article to a pile of crap. The problem is new users still think were are the home of random and Chuck Norris. If I see something new or different I try to encourage a user. If we want to improve the overall quality of the website then there will be articles that may fall through the crack but that is always going to be the risk. --RomArtus*Imperator ® (Orate) 11:14, January 22, 2012 (UTC)

Al has a valid point. There was an issue recently where a semi-regular user created an article that was incomplete, had an {{ICU}} slapped on it, and he was upset about it. He completed the article, removed the tag, and it has now been featured. He argued if he had been a new user he would have left the site and we would have lost a featureable article, and a potentially good writer. The site has become more and more delete-on-sight happy, which doesn't encourage new writers to stay. If I had had Care Bears deleted when I first started on it years ago I probably wouldn't have hung around. That article is still only just above VFD status in my opinion, but the reality that any user can nominate an article, and although admins should check the quality of the article prior to deleting, there are too many to thoroughly check for a grain of keepability, and every person here has at some stage seen an article that they felt was delete worthy, but community consensus disagrees. It's too much to expect every admin to thoroughly check every article, and too much to expect that every admin will always make the right choice. I'd rather have a partially good article here and encourage a new user than a small number of brilliant articles and less talented writers. Pup 11:35 22 Jan '12

Just to chip in here from the 'Lurk' mode - this worrying trend of deleting stuff in a Judge Dredd fashion is not really what admins should be about. I suppose the mongos on VFD aren't what's it's supposed to be about either. One shitty problem is being outsourced to another shitty problem of this relatively recent trend started by ZB and practiced by a few other admins.--Sycamore (Talk) 20:14, January 23, 2012 (UTC)

We are slowly uglifying and eating our wiki. With mustard, please.

I'm finding things like this more and more, and many essential vital placeholders gone. Does anyone have a proposal to stop this? Maybe a moratorium for a couple of weeks until a viable solution is agreed to? Sasha Baron Cohen, Miami, and Steven Spielberg might agree (well, Steven Spielberg may have left us just for awhile). Aleister 10:42 23-1-'12:

I am getting fucking tired of this, and its part of the reason my editing has been down of late

Most of our content sucks and is full of bullshit in-jokes that were funny... in like 2007. I think ED is practically bang on by saying

“ Uncyclopedia exists to parody itself, and to take up a lot of space doing so ”

Mass deletion, and starting again in half our content is a great idea. Simply put we will become closer to what Chronarion set out to do in 2005 and create a parody of Wikipedia, not an encyclopedia for documenting in-jokes that were funny for 30 seconds because someone said something stupid on VFD or we decided to keep one article that should have been flushed with the rest of the crap on QVFD. Zombiebaron's point of a lot of new users not writing anything is extremely valid. Example you want to write an article on Fisher Price, great I have all the ideas set and how I'm going to do it. Well damn its taken up by a waste of date space bullshit in-joke that was funny... 7 years ago. Or I want to create something on Originality. Damn, already taken by something that's about as original as the category it resides in. It would be very frustrating to find articles you feel inspired to create is already taken up by an in-joke we refused to delete because it was funny to some users several years ago, or a half baked stub that nobody finished. And its extremely fucking frustrating (to me personally) when I find shitty one liners that the writer spent 5 seconds writing become protected parts of uncyclopedia history, whilst I'm trying to write something, spending hours of my time writing that just joins the countless other articles that nobody will ever bother reading. Sorry, but thats exactly the way I feel about this place at the moment and its time for the people who wrote them to except new users will not get the joke and that moving them into userspace is a far better option.

As for stubs, most of them are a paragraph and an image. Most of them don't even make sense, so by deleting them nothing of value was lost. Most of the time when a user expands on an article you can see, little to no trace of the original article in it, thats why the desire to delete them is lost. Now this point is extremely valid, we don't have the userbase to go through all 30,000 articles and fix them up, so you delete them. New users get inspired by redlinks and suddenly we have less content to go through (because all the crap got deleted) and we have a bigger userbase. And don't think I'm white knighting Zombiebaron here. I'm getting frustrated by the amount of complete garbage on this site and the fact that several users only reason to keep it is. Oh... it was funny to me in 2007, because X said something ridiculous on page Y so its an established in-joke. Cool story bro, since when did uncyclopedia become a site for in-jokes and shit like that? This as a site for comedy, and in-jokes does not equal comedy and its fucking annoying. Sorry if I'm upsetting anyone here, but I've a gut full of this crap. ~Sir Frosty (Talk to me!) 22:40, January 23, 2012 (UTC)

You make some good points Frosty, but chill out man :) --Black Flamingo 22:47, January 23, 2012 (UTC)

It's not the in-jokes I'm concerned about. Quite honestly, I couldn't care less about in-jokes as far as this topic is concerned. The pages I'm concerned about are the somewhat-decent articles that are being deleted along with the crappy ones for no apparent reason. Also, quite frankly, I'd rather think a load of red links are off-putting to new users rather than "inspiring". —Sir Socky (talk) (stalk) GUN SotM UotM PMotM UotY PotM WotM 22:55, 23 January 2012

I think that Aleister and Frosty both have valid points. It's true that most of the articles on this site suck horribly and are not funny at all, yet articles like those continue to remain here since 2005, while articles that are actually not half bad (such as Pornography) have Fix tags placed on them and are huffed. I think that the best solution is to first get rid of the sucky articles about topics that most people have never heard of and no one will ever search, such as Eoghan Quigg, before going after vital articles. Perhaps, we could also come up with some way to encourage authors to rewrite vital articles that suck, like maybe a point system. I know that PLS encouraged me to rewrite SpongeBob SquarePants, which was a disaster of memes and gay jokes before I rewrote it. -- Sir Xam Ralco the Mediocre 23:31, January 23, 2012 (UTC)

Which somewhat decent articles have been deleted in this way? Do you have examples? mAttlobster. (hello) 23:36, January 23, 2012 (UTC)

Some of them are now in my userspace. But there's probably a huge pile more of them, as many admins have been deleting pages with expired tags almost-by-default to actually-by-default. —Sir Socky (talk) (stalk) GUN SotM UotM PMotM UotY PotM WotM 00:08, 24 January 2012

As Socky said, in-jokes are a minority in relationship to this issue. And stuff that is being deleted that is stubby but okay is generally unprotected. And as for not encouraging creativity - the first time I saw Stereotype I thought What the fuck is this. So I changed it. If it had been a redlink I wouldn't have bothered. Stubs and less quality articles do get changed - redlinks more often get ignored. And the advantage in having stubs on UN:VITAL articles is that it means they're found via google search. I found Uncyc while looking for lateral thinking puzzles. I still have no idea while I'm still here. Pup 11:42 23 Jan '12

I have no idea who Dan Kwon is, but I have arbitrarily decided to add {{fix}} to it. Pup 11:49 23 Jan '12

Fix Team, assemble!

Zombiebaron suggested the creation of a "Fix Team" to combat the loss of half-decent articles to Delete-o-cron, so who's interested? I have absolutely no idea how we'll organize ourselves, but I find the idea of having a Fix Team rather appealing. —Sir Socky (talk) (stalk) GUN SotM UotM PMotM UotY PotM WotM 01:16, 24 January 2012

Hell yeah, I'll join the Fix Team! -- Sir Xam Ralco the Mediocre 01:19, January 24, 2012 (UTC)

Yup, I'll join. -- The Zombiebaron 01:47, January 24, 2012 (UTC)

Won't join, but I am going to fix User:Nikau/Night of the Long Knives thanks to Socky posting the fix link.--Nikau 02:25, January 24, 2012 (UTC)

I'm already doing what I can, tbh. I don't want to divide my focus any more than it already is, but happy to do what I can. Pup 03:32 24 Jan '12

I'm interested, but my schedule might be limited in the next few months. -- Simsilikesims(♀UN) Talk here. 07:34, January 24, 2012 (UTC)

I'm in. -- 02:08, January 26, 2012 (UTC)

Croatia was a battleground between two unpleasant guys I presume are Croats. They conducted a revert war between inside jokes funny only to Croats, which I moderated for a while. The article was deleted in one of the purges; recently MadMax re-created it as a redirect. Now one of the Croatian antagonists has seen that the coast is clear and reinstalled a very old version--far from the best--from a mirror site or a personal copy. The revert war will surely resume shortly. You are on your own. Spıke ¬ 01:33 27-Jan-12

Thanks for reporting the issue, SPIKE. I have reverted back to MadMax's edit and protected the page. In future, it would be best to report issues like this directly to an admin's talkpage, not on an unrelated forum page. -- The Zombiebaron 01:37, January 27, 2012 (UTC)

No it wouldn't. Because a campaign to bypass VFD and aggressively delete "bad" pages--the topic of this Forum--doesn't just pepper the site with neat little red-links; it occasionally induces the return of even worse pages from the past, as happened here. Spıke ¬ 12:14 27-Jan-12

I think that most of the above discussion has shown that there is a significant proportion of the userbase that dislike the way {{fix}} is working. There are other forums that are discussing now what the options are for preferable systems where pages can be deleted more readily via VFD and less readily via {{fix}}. Revert wars will happen regardless of the issues above though. While we are the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, anyone can edit us, regardless of their diplomacy or level of sanity. If you have an alternate suggestion as to what we can do to ensure that pages that have no redeeming quality are removed according to community consensus, and pages that the community would like to improve remain, then we'd love to hear that. Pup 01:54 27 Jan '12

Here is a graphic example of the result of huffing here: Maniac1075 apparantly made a huge list for his Wilt Chamberlain page, of people Wilt fucked, and now that list is a checkerboard of blue and red links. Lots of names are repeated over and over, but it's a good place to pick up a page or two, or to wonder where a page went. Olson Twins, where did that go? Maybe go through that list and see if you recognize any page which you think should be brought back, then user space it and clean'er'up. Aleister 00:48 30-1-'12

Who the hell's editing Tom Cruise? Well, we need someone to make articles on Zelda and video games! Some of them are completely shit, and I'm working on a Marmite article! And I have my own crack team of Fix Teams anyway, so I'll join Zombiebaron. |Si Plebius Dato' Joe ang Kyurem CUN|IC Kill | 01:19, January 30, 2012 (UTC)