Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User talk:75.108.94.227/Jigsaw (video game) userfied

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was Delete. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 05:25, 11 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

User talk:75.108.94.227/Jigsaw (video game) userfied[edit]

Per WPUP#COPIES, it's not appropriate to keep a back-up copy of Jigsaw (video game) in userspace to prevent possible deletion discussions. Ricky81682 (talk) 22:00, 2 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Well, technically I made the backup copy in case the article was deleted, aka as a pre-emptive WP:REFUND, so I would not need to bother the deleting-admin (if and when). You can delete User_talk:75.108.94.227/Jigsaw (video game) userfied if you like. See also, User_talk:75.108.94.227/Dunnet (video game) userfied which was created for a similar reason, but AfD on that one is over as bangkeep. Actually, I moved that stuff to userspace from draftspace, at the behest of a person who complained that draftspace was not a good place for pre-emptive WP:REFUND either. :-) So is it correct to say, that per WP:BURO, the only way to keep a backup copy, is off-wiki, on a personal non-web-visible non-collaborative storage location? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 13:39, 3 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- The problem is basically that if it's decided that it's inappropriate to have something on Wikipedia, that means deleting it from the entirety of Wikipedia, including userspace. Why do you want to keep the article around? If it's because you're planning a potential WP:DRV (which would only really make sense to do pre-emptively if you see an AfD going badly off the rails well before it's closed), then you can probably just request a temporary recreation at DRV itself once the article is deleted. If it's because you personally want to keep the information in the article around, then just save a copy locally, or perhaps transwiki it to some wiki where it's more appropriate (although I don't know of a wiki offhand that would accept this particular article). --ais523 22:22, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
  - Jigsaw is an appropriate topic for wikipedia, but it doesn't pass the letter of WP:42. So it might be an appropriate topic as a subsection of Graham Nelson, or as a dedicated article Jigsaw (video game). In my experience, AfD is a fickle place, though, and outright deletion of easily-WP:NOTEWORTHY-but-borderline-WP:N-where-offline-sources-probably-but-not-provably-exist articles is pretty common. So, when I ran across Jigsaw, I cleaned it up and added sources to it, during an unrelated AfD about another videogame where I happened to stumble across Jigsaw. I *suspect* there are offline sources about Jigsaw from the late 1990s about it (NYT passing mention calls it an "acclaimed" videogame in a profile of the game-author but gives no further details). Anyways, in the current AfD environment, bangMerge of the Jigsaw article is the most likely outcome iff WP:PRESERVE is followed (followed by bangRedirect), but bangDelete is definitely not unheard of in such cases.

In any case, I do disagree with the premise: just because something is WP:FAILN is no reason to delete it from draftspace and/or userspace, where somebody can work on improving it without worry of AfD. If by "inappropriate" you mean blatant vandalism / copyvio / blpAttackPage, then sure, *those* things are not 'appropriate' anywhere on wikipedia. But in a deletion-discussion, the correct outcome (when sources exist... and jigsaw has a few) is to merge to an appropriate parent-article, or draftify/userfy for further improvements. So to be clear: nobody has nominated Jigsaw for AfD. Nobody, except possibly myself, is currently planning on nominating it. As currently written, the Jigsaw article sticks to the (known) sources, is NPOV, and otherwise policy-compliant. But since if fails WP:42 with the known sources actually listed in the reflist, at present Jigsaw is at risk of being bangDeleted in the current harsh climate that is AfD.

Thus, after adding sources that I could find, I made a backup-copy in draftspace. That was pointed out as against some vaguewave wiki-policy (I don't think anybody cited a WP link but assured me that draftspace was not the place for backup-copies or (ahem) draft-copies or experimental-copies of mainspace articles), and in a nutshell said that there should not be articles in mainspace which are simultaneously also in draftspace. So I made a userfied copy of jigsaw, instead, again as a backup-copy. Here at this MfD, there is some specific thing called WP:UP#COPIES ... which is not the same as the radio-station WPUP that the nom mistakenly linked unto. ;-) Specifically, there is this worry:

Old copies of mainspace articles should be deleted if unused. Mainspace material may be copied to userspace for short term drafting or experimental purposes, but edits should be soon incorporated into the mainspace article or deleted, as content forking represents an attribution hazard.

Now, in this specific case, there is zero actual 'attribution hazard' to speak of, because per CCBYSA requirements I've specifically backlinked to the edit-history of the wikipedia page from whence the text I userfied originated. Basically, at the end of the day, the question here at MfD revolves around the meaning of "short term" and the meaning of "soon" (or perhaps the meaning of "unused"). I don't have time right now to mess with Jigsaw at AfD, so I'm not planning on using the backup-copy I userfied 'soon' in any WP:TIAD sense. So please, go ahead and delete it, there is always WP:REFUND. On the other hand, WP:NORUSH implies that 'soon' by on-wiki standards rather than by everyday-english standards might be stretched to mean "sometime in the next couple of years" roughly. In which case, feel free to leave the userfied backup-copy, and if I don't get to messing with the Jigsaw AfD within a year or two, then go ahead and MfD the by-then-blatantly-unused backup-copy in userspace.

In any case, as I mentioned in my previous comment, I am 100% okay with this userspace page being deleted. I can always ask some admin to WP:REFUND the mainspace version for me, if and when Jigsaw is taken to AfD, and if and when said AfD results in an improper bangDelete contra WP:PRESERVE. In the meantime, if it makes anybody feel better, feel free to delete the userfied backup-copy at User talk:75.108.94.227/Jigsaw (video game) userfied to set the precedent that "old"=="2.5 months" and also that "soon"=="within a month or two" in the WP:UP#COPIES wiki-guideline. Perhaps worth noting that AfC drafts are warned at the 5-month-point, and deleted at the 6-month-point, after zero non-bot activity for that entire timespan, but maybe userspace is stricter. I'm not particular, in any case, do as y'all see fit. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 14:28, 5 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The point is, allowing multiple versions to exist ~~(especially if they are copy-and-paste jobs which actually technically violate our copyright rules)~~ does not in the end resolve the issue. If the article was deleted, then the proper remedy is to make a refund request or to argue for its recreation so that we have a singular history of the article itself. Otherwise you can end up with the article's history being stored across a dozen places and it'd be impossible to put it all back together. The issue isn't the age of this page, it's that another version already exists and no one should have to go around and "know" that this userspace draft is just a storage of the current version and not to be edited while other drafts are actually drafts. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 17:41, 5 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You think a backlink in the edit-summary, and a hidden-HTML-comment within the body-wikimarkup, are somehow a technical violation of CCBYSA? I think you are reading more into the attribution-clause of CCBYSA than me; URL is the *normal* way to give attribution, and fully satisfies copyright law. p.s. Yes, I do see that fully satisfying wiki-bureaucracy-oriented-process-and-procedures, demands more than copyright law and the clickwrap legalese. And, I agree that nobody should have to 'know' not to edit the userfied content... though I'm not sure why anybody *would* edit the userfied content. Most people don't mess with stuff in other people's userspace. I know better than to edit a pure-backup-copy, myself, and have not done so. Nobody else has edited it either (ignoring meta-edits of adding templates and such).

Now, on first glance, your main argument, that there should be one single on-wiki copy, because otherwise there are too many page-histories floating around... and since a couple other folks *have* edited the Jigsaw article in mainspace, it is true that there are now divergent page-histories ... seems to be a very good one. I agree that history-merge is a horrible thing. ;-) But, you are recommending, that I make an off-wiki copy of the current mainspace wiki-markup, on my local storage, as an alternative... and that wipes the entire page-history. Plus, means that only *I* can restore said backup-copy, rather than any wikipedian with access to Special:Search. If there was a deletion, and later I uploaded my old local-storage-backup into draftspace, leaving a URL to the now-deleted-version of the former article, it would still be a case of divergent page-histories, right? Assuming that the hypothetically-deleted-mainspace-version was edited between the time I made my local-storage-backup-copy, and the time of mainspace-deletion. Anyways, I do not mind using WP:REFUND, I know the ropes there. But I do firmly believe that the insistence on deleting on-wiki copies after a couple months, as hypothetical history-merge headaches, *is* a mistake, generally speaking, because only on-wiki copies have the page-history (up to the time they were copied anyways) and only on-wiki copies are easily accessible and editable by other wikipedians collaboratively, in the event such a thing makes sense (aka the primary-copy was deleted).

In this particular instance, deletion of the backup-copy is not a mistake, because I'm familiar with the WP:REFUND dance, and a strong adherent of the WP:NORUSH approach, so I don't mind the waiting around for the wiki-procedures to grind along to completion. Speaking of which, I think we can go ahead and consider this MfD to have run to completion, from my own commenting-perspective. Appreciate you folks listening to my thoughts on backup-copies. Go ahead and discuss further if you like, or go ahead and close as bangdelete, since in this case no harm will be done by zapping this particular backup-copy. But if you see a proposal at VPT for a new namespace called Backup:Jigsaw_(video_game), which is locked against editing, but which provides a convenient on-wiki automated WP:REFUND process, with post-hoc tagging of pagemoves and cut-n-paste actions, as a means to speed up the wiki-bureaucracy, then please bangvote in support. ;-) 75.108.94.227 (talk) 19:38, 6 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You are correct, I struck out the language regarding copyright issues. Nevertheless, I don't think there will ever be an automated REFUND process because REFUND isn't always guaranteed. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 00:20, 7 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.