- Understanding the Value of Pharmaceuticals (talk|edit|history|logs|links|watch) (XfD|restore)
In the RfD discussion there were several good faith recommendations for keeping, which included explicit counters to the good faith deletion recommendations. This was completely ignored though by Ruslik0 who closed the discussion as "Speedy delete as G11 (spam/political advocacy)" (and then deleted it with the same rationale), despite that fact that not one commenter in the entire discussion characterised it as such nor called for speedy deletion for any other reason.
In discussion on his talk page Ruslik0 has defended his actions as saying that if any administrator thinks something is spam they can speedy delete it as such, regardless of what anybody else thinks and that any discussion about it, ongoing or otherwise, is irrelevant. This is not the way speedy deletion works though - pages must clearly meet the criteria and it must be clear that they will always be deleted at a deletion discussion. When an active deletion discussion has good faith recommendations for courses of action other than deletion, then by definition the page cannot meet the speedy deletion criteria.
Yes I am biased with respect to this specific debate, but I can easily see how the debate could be closed as keep or no consensus based on the arguments. A delete outcome based on the discussion is possible, but I think a stretch. A deletion that completely ignores the arguments though is out of process. Thryduulf (talk) 21:18, 9 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- {{tempundelete}}'d. T. Canens (talk) 22:34, 9 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- OK, this is weird. As I understand it, what Ruslik was trying to delete wasn't so much the redirect, but the text underlying it. This page originated as an essay-ish...thing... that was later redirected in an decidedly unorthodox manner that retained the entire original content in wikitext. As far as I could determine, none of the RfD participants noticed the unorthodox nature of this redirect or the questionable content, so the silence in RFD shouldn't be taken either way on the G11 question. Since the original content is plainly unsuitable for Wikipedia, I think the best solution under these peculiar circumstances is for DRV to keep the current revisions deleted (as no merge seemed to have been done in conjunction with the redirect), create a redirect from Understanding the Value of Pharmaceuticals to Pharmacology#Medicine development and safety testing, and then list the new redirect for discussion at RFD afresh. T. Canens (talk) 22:34, 9 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn-And a good trout slap to Ruslik0. Speedy deleting a page in the middle of an XfD when several users in good standing have called for it to be kept is wholly inappropriate. The purpose of speedy deletion is to avoid unnecessary deletion discussions, not to allow administrators to overrule community consensus.--Fyre2387 (talk • contribs) 22:39, 9 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Yup, I think Fyre2387 has nailed it. Our main role here is to see that the deletion process is correctly followed and it wasn't. T. Canens' wise suggestions about what to do with the wikitext deserve serious consideration, of course, but let's consider them at the RfD that shouldn't have been closed early, rather than here. Overturn and relist until the discussion has run its proper duration.—S Marshall T/C 22:50, 9 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- The problem with that, in my view, is that the 15k bytes of wikitext is not really within RFD's usual expertise. RfD usually discusses (1) whether a redirect should or should not exist at a particular location and what the redirect should point to, but it is entirely a different matter to decide (2) whether 15KB of text should be retained in the page history, which is not something usually discussed at RFD, because redirects usually only have a single line with the target and at most a couple more categorizing templates. The process is a total mess because the RFD was discussing only (1) and then Ruslik came in and deleted it based on (2). Of course when there are reasonable disagreements over whether a speedy criterion applies, admins should not speedy delete, but in this case the RFD debate sheds absolutely no light on the proper answer to (2). It simply did not consider the question at all. Of course we can send the whole mess back to RFD, but I think that we need not defer to RFD on a question that is squarely outside its area of expertise, and that the better course is for us to resolve (2) ourselves, and then send (1) back for discussion. T. Canens (talk) 23:12, 9 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Relist. The G11 call is reasonably contested. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:22, 9 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn and relist per the convincing argument of Fyre2387 and S Marshall. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 00:52, 10 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment. I do not know why Thryduulf is trying to defend this crap. This is just a waste of time. We do not redirect dozens of spam pages created every day to normal articles. If this overturned I will simply revert the redirect to its original state and send it to AFD. Ruslik_Zero 07:05, 10 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Comments from DRV-nominator. Firstly I'm not defending "this crap", what I'm doing is defending the integrity of RfD against misuses of speedy deletion. Incorrect speedy deletions are one of the most harmful things to Wikipedia, and countering them can never be a waste of time. While dozens of spam pages every day may not be redirected to normal articles, some are (and per WP:ATD it wouldn't surprise me if more should be than are, but that's beside the point). The vast majority of these redirects are not at all controversial and are widely regarded as a Good Thing. Some are not though, and those get nominated at RfD. Once nominated at RfD the redirect is discussed on its merits and the course of action taken is determined according to consensus - part of the fourth pillar that Wikipedia is built on. The consensus in this case was that the title was not spam, and no one editor gets to overrule that.
It's true that I did not notice the unusual nature of the redirect - as a regular I always check the links, history and usage stats, and other things as appropriate to the specific discussion. This rarely involves looking at the actual redirect page itself as almost all redirects are the same (this appears to have been one of the exceptions though). The correct course of action for an editor discovering the wikitext would have been to mention it in the discussion so that others were aware rather the unilaterally speedy delete it. Had I been aware of the text, my recommendation would have been to delete it while retaining the redirect. While normally converting a redirect back to an article and then sending it to AfD is going to be non-controversial (and is sometimes recommended at RfD), I'm not certain whether it would be if this was contrary to an explicit consensus that the title should be a redirect - it certainly wouldn't be an example of best practice. If you want to do this, then you should probably get consensus to do so - an ongoing discussion would be the perfect place, in the absence of one then probably the best would be a new RfD. In an AfD I suspect that I'd recommend redirecting, but arguments presented for other courses of action may be persuasive. I'm not objecting to an AfD though, as long as it isn't done out of process or otherwise against consensus.
- While the closure was (imo) incorrect, it wasn't premature and so any return to RfD would need to be a new or relisted one (I'm sure everyone can agree that a discussion open for at absolute most a few hours would be pointless in the extreme). Thryduulf (talk) 18:03, 10 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn and relist. It was not a speedy G11, either as an article or a redirect. It was an essay, and properly deletable as such, and I don't see the point of making it a redirect out of it, but still, not a speedy. It does have article potential, biut to preserve the text for a while userification would be more appropriate than the redirect. DGG ( talk ) 19:36, 10 May 2012 (UTC) DGG ( talk ) 19:36, 10 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Weak unredirect and list at AfD, the best venue for dealing with the essay content. The essay seems to be neither useful nor harmful, so an AfD may end as redirect and be a waste of time. Flatscan (talk) 04:29, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn - Clearly not a speedy candidate. Not seeing a particular need for T. Canens' suggestion either; if the page works as a redirect, I don't see that the history is a problem. But that could be discussed at AfD or RfD (of course, the AfD result may well be redirect). Rlendog (talk) 19:13, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Overturn and relist - Not a speedy deletion candidate. The page started out as a detailed essay,[2] then was changed to a redirect by Haruth,[3] probably as a way to get rid of the troubled essay. In relisting, suggest that the discussion include talk on WP:REDIRECT#DELETE. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 12:45, 12 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
|