User talk:Abd/Nonsense

The attached user page is a copy of Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll, from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)

However, this is notable nonsense. Wikiversity does not have a notability requirement, so what if I wrote non-notable nonsense. Is that allowed in my user space? --Abd (talk) 15:12, 21 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

my view: yes, ----Erkan Yilmaz uses the Wikiversity:Chat (try) 16:06, 21 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Of course that is your view, you are a Wikiversitan. This could also be allowed in mainspace, properly done. So what we do on en.wikiversity is to move questionable pages to user space, we do it routinely, it avoids a lot of mess and fuss, and then engage with the user to support a move back to mainspace when the resource is presentable. I.e, it's clearly a learning resource. Sometimes, if there is a reasonable way to do it, we will instead create a containing resource structure, or move a page underneath a related existing resource, and place a link to it on the page above. We will sometimes label pages as "essays," where the material is possibly controversial.

So a page of apparent nonsense, what happens depends a bit on the user who comes upon it. It might get tagged for speedy deletion, in which case, unless the user or someone protests, it gets deleted. If, however, the user is an active one, and I see it, I may directly move it to the user's space. There is a custodian who commonly does this, too. Sometimes a page will be prodded, i.e., a proposed deletion tag will go on it, giving about three months to improve the page, or it gets relatively automatically deleted. Again, any user may remove speedy deletion or proposed deletion tags.

The result of all these policies and practices together is that the Request for deletion page gathers cobwebs, it's rarely used. And that's a very good thing. Deletion controversies can tear a wiki apart. It is completely worth tolerating a little mess in user space, compared to train wreck discussions on RfD. That little mess costs practically nothing, whereas the train wreck takes up much user time, and sometimes drives users away.

The really cool thing about the approach is that it can mostly be done by ordinary users. A page move by an ordinary user leaves behind a redirect, and if the redirect isn't needed, I can pop a speedy deletion template on the redirect and it's gone, often in a few minutes. The way the usual en.wv custodian works is that the deletion summary shows the original redirect, so anyone can track that if they want. Custodians here don't use the same default summary, I'm not sure if it's a Mediawiki setup or what. There are quite a number of site issues to be addressed here, such as broken global contributions links, all those toolserver links are dead. --Abd (talk) 02:49, 22 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]