Holder

Wêrom haw ik al dy siden net yn de wisk-prosedure sjoen eart dy ferdwûn binne? Mysha (oerlis)

Hi Mysha. These pages were just some broken redirects, no articles. Best regards. --Holder (oerlis) 12 apr 2016, 14.45 (CEST)

And we have a page here, Wikipedy:Siden wiskje, for removing broken redirects and other pages we don't want anymore. It allows to participants time to check what the problem with such a page is. E.g.: Why are these redirects broken? I appreciate the effort to determine broken redirects, but not so much the sudden disappearance of those pages.

Now, let me see what the problems were with those. Mysha (oerlis)

These redirects wre broken because the target page was never created. An example: I've deleted the page The Marx Brothers. Content of this page was #REDIRECT [[Bruorren Marx]] i.e. redirect to the page Bruorren Marx. But there is no article named 'Bruorren Marx' nor was any one. So such redirects are useless until these target articles are written. --Holder (oerlis) 13 apr 2016, 14.11 (CEST)

At the least, such a synonym would indicate that Bruorren Marx is preferred as that page's title over The Marx Brothers. It isn't completely useless.

Other examples:

• I've now created Wilfried and related Wilfryd. Had I seen the former before it was deleted, I might have been able to tell why it didn't exist. As it is, I'm just hoping it doesn't have a synonym somewhere.
• I've recreated Michael (aartsingel), as as a synonym it's a guard against a different (also korrekt) spelling. It may be the redirect went to an empty page (which I can't check anymore), but we sure do have a page covering the topic.

In all, had I not logged in at the right moment to see a list of deleted pages pass by, I might have been unable to check what was wrong with those. So, by all means, do make such lists to clean up the wiki, but, please, use the page for page deletion, so we have the ability to check whether the wiki could be improved even more by using a different solution. Mysha (oerlis)

Ok. Thanks and best regards. --Holder (oerlis) 13 apr 2016, 16.12 (CEST)

Mass deletion

Holder, I'm pretty pissed off at you. Why did you delete the pages for the years 2026 to 2093? There was nothing wrong with those pages. Alright, I wouldn't have added them yet, but once they were here, there was no reason to delete them. The anonymous user who created them didn't take the trouble to connect them to Wikidata. As administrator of this Wikipedia I gave him a stern talking to, and then took it upon myself to make those connections myself. I invested about one and a half hours in that. All that time and trouble went right down the drain with your deletion. What in the hell possessed you to do such a thing without any form of prior consultation with the actual administrators of this site? Even after our long-time user Mysha removed two of your deletion warnings precisely because there was nothing wrong with those pages. As far a I'm concerned you can stay away from the Frisian Wikipedia in the future. Ieneach fan 'e Esk (oerlis) 13 apr 2018, 21.34 (CEST)

Hi Ieneach fan 'e Esk. I'm sorry for deleting your work on Wikidata. There is a user from the U.S. (MasonDecker2017) who creates thousands of such empty articles in all kind of language versions just to lift Wikipedias above specific mile stones. If you have a look in the log of 2093 you'll see that these articles have been also been mass deleted a few months ago by Drewes. But if you think that nothing is wrong with such empty pages I'll stay away from fywiki in the future. --Holder (oerlis) 13 apr 2018, 21.42 (CEST)

Look, Holder, I spoke (wrote) in anger earlier. I'm sure you meant well. But these pages weren't empty as such; they were set up to receive information about those years that is sure to come in the future, and just the calendar info on the top right side was worthwile. So once they were there I figured they could stay, and so did Mysha. I myself have created dozens of such "empty" pages (though in the past, not the future). Anyway, next time just consult with the administrators before you do something like this. It's not a pleasant thing to log in and discover that hours of your work have been deleted. Ieneach fan 'e Esk (oerlis) 13 apr 2018, 21.52 (CEST)

Ok. Best regards. --Holder (oerlis) 13 apr 2018, 21.54 (CEST)

Sorry man, I shouldn't have reacted like this. Should've cooled down first. Anyway, I accept your apologies and I hope there are no hard feelings from your side. Ieneach fan 'e Esk (oerlis) 13 apr 2018, 23.07 (CEST)

@User:Ieneach fan 'e Esk and User:Mysha: The vandal in question typically creates stub articles for years, numbers, or letters (Ă, ų, etc.), merely to push wikis past milestones that are regularly announced at m:Wikimedia News. The text is always copied, sometimes with little or no changes, from a similar page that already exists, meaning that the resulting pages almost always have errors in them that are hard to spot by users who do not know the language of the wiki. All pages created by known globally blocked/banned users, regardless of their quality, regularly get deleted because there is a policy (as far as I know) that globally blocked/banned users should be unable to edit even under IP addresses (since that is a method that allows them to easily circumvent their block/ban). (In this case, it may have only been a "suspicion" that it was that user, or perhaps the specific IP address was sufficient evidence to "know" it was the same user. Holder can explain his own reasoning.) As for whether this should be done on wikis with local admins, you would have to take that up with the stewards who do the deleting, which you have already done here. Note, though, that there are several stewards who do such work, so just asking one to not do it in the future won't necessarily prevent others from doing so. Holder might have suggestions about how best to warn off stewards in the future. One way to proceed (assuming you can't control the behavior of every steward, and given that this is based on a longstanding policy about cross-wiki vandals) is to make an actual edit to all of the pages in question, so that a logged-in user appears in the edit history of every page. As I understand things, the stewards should not delete such pages (although they still may neglect to check the page history and delete the pages anyway — perhaps Holder could weigh in on this). Of course, if the original pages were created by a logged-in user, none of this applies, unless it were shown that the user was a sockpuppet of a banned user. Again, the policy in that case (AFAIK) is to delete the pages unless (?) some other local user has edited the pages in the meantime. I assume the changes you made were visible only at Wikidata and not in the page history? But more importantly, isn't there a bot that adds new items (and new language links for existing items) at Wikidata without any user intervention? So maybe your efforts were not necessary in the first place? (Not sure about that, as I don't hang around Wikidata that much. Holder?) If that is the case, then you can create the articles again ("relatively easily") and then let the bot add the items to Wikidata for you. You might need to provide at least one interwiki link (to a wiki with an equivalent existing page — say, at the English Wikipedia) for the bot to go on, or maybe not. Holder, do you know? - dcljr (oerlis) 13 apr 2018, 23.33 (CEST)

@Dcljr: Let me first thank you for taking the time and effort to make such a full reply. You are quite right in assuming that my work was only visible in Wikidata, and Holder couldn't know what I had done if he didn't stop to wonder why all these pages had Wikidata links while the others created by this vandal presumably have not had that. I didn't like having to create those Wikidata links, but I liked even less seeing all that work go to waste, which is why I was so angry at first when I saw what Holder had done. Moving past that, I am not aware of bots connecting pages to Wikidata; I've always done that by hand, so to speak. And in the time it takes to add an interwiki link to a page, I can also link that page to Wikidata myself, so even if bots can do such things, I'm not sure how much help it would be. As for the pages themselves, I don't think we're going to recreate them until we need them. It was just that once they were here, we figured they were here to stay. Ieneach fan 'e Esk (oerlis) 13 apr 2018, 23.56 (CEST)

@Ieneach fan 'e Esk: A good starting point for researching bots at Wikidata that add language links to items seems to be d:Wikidata:Bots/Import bot features, if you want to look into that some more. - dcljr (oerlis) 14 apr 2018, 08.29 (CEST)

Thanks Dcljr for the explanation. The problem we encounter here is that, as you say, pages of the hunted type almost always have errors in them that are hard to spot by users who do not know the language of the wiki. So, basically, as the stewards couldn't see whether these pages were OK, they were deleted. Sounds like guilty until proven innocent to me.

Editing all such pages is probably not a solution, as it would require knowing which pages are such pages to begin with. It would also waste lot of time. Basically, stewards taking over fjildwacht-duty is a time-saving system for small wikipedias, where time-waste hits hardest. Here it turns into its opposite, which suggests there's is something wrong with the implementation of the system. (Editing such pages also may not work, in the sense that adding a delete template and undoing the edit as a user was not enough to keep those pages.) How many pages are we talking about, on average? Would it more sense for stewards to merely note such occurrences, and use a special English language section on Wikipedy:Siden wiskje to warn behearders to take a look? It would seem that that is the part missing from this system of stewards saving time for smaller wikis. Mysha (oerlis)

The number of pages typically created by this particular banned user can be anywhere from 1 to 1000s, whatever is necessary to push a wiki over the next "reportable" article-count milestone. (I'm sure he also creates pages in other situations sometimes, but causing a milestone is how I find out about it.) I don't know if Holder found out about this because of the milestone or because of the IP addresses that were used. Presumably it wasn't my tagging of the pages, since those templates were removed well before the pages were deleted. In any case, like I said, Holder is the one who knows for sure why the pages were deleted. If he doesn't comment here soon, you should ask at his "home" talk page. And, like I said, many other stewards are involved in this sort of thing, so you might also consider posting at m:Stewards' noticeboard (I think that's the best place to discuss this issue with the "steward community"). (And, by the way, this isn't really about "saving time" so much as keeping banned users from circumventing their ban.) - dcljr (oerlis) 17 apr 2018, 07.07 (CEST)