Category talk:Pages for deletion

Not all Orphaned Pages should be marked for deletion. In some cases they are appropriate pages and need to be enhanced/expanded. In other cases, the information on the orphaned pages needs to be incorporated into other pages.

In any case, when an orphaned page is tagged for deletion, it creates work for the administrator to figure out whether it is a good page, a page that should be folded into other pages, or a page that should be deleted. We can help the admins by only tagging empty pages for deletion. If a page has content, then first incorporate it into other pages, then blank the page, then tag for deletion. When the admins check the logs, they can see that the content has been moved elsewhere and just delete blank pages.

Ideally, these blank pages would contain only two things: a redirect to another page, and a Category tag.

Since I'm the user that's been doing most (all?) of the tagging, I'll try explain my rationale.

I agree that there must be some policy / criteria :) Your comments about helping the admins workload by moving content is a good one—hadn't really thought that side of the equation.

I basically went sort of randomly through the Special:Lonelypages and checked them for two things in its history: (1) low number of editions and/or editors, and (2) how 'old' were the editions.

A third -subjective- criteria was the nature of the page's content which I thought either inappropriate, spam-like or out of place (ie: OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/The Laptop Experience/index.php, One Laptop per Child/index.php, OLPC:Questions, Page Categories, Donations, Main page, Skovde, etc.) BTW, there are 155 orphans vs. 19 tagged for deletion, maybe not all pages fit, I'll try to check them :)

Ideally, an orphan page SHOULD be linked, or deleted. I don't think a redirect will do any good (there's no traffic to redirect to start with—it's an orphan) and adds noise when trying to find in the Special:Lonelypages pages that SHOULD be re-linked into the main corpus...

On a (sort of) different track, this subject brought to me the issues of garbage collection with circular references—pages that will have references between them but no path from the 'root' page. IOW, pages that will never appear in the Special:Lonelypages because there's another 'lost' page that references it... is this handled in the wiki? After all, we wouldn't want to 'forget' coherent pieces of work... --Xavi 18:35, 1 January 2007 (EST)