User talk:LrdChaos/Closing a deletion discussion

Taking action on articles
One thing not mentioned thus far in this handy guide is that action must be taken when a discussion is closed. When we update Deletion policy (or its equivalent), we'll need to incorporate this step as well. Here are some possible actions (not necessarily all of them), and some points that may encourage close/archive steps to be done separately from actions (which can cause problems, but must be accomodated):


 * Delete. Delete the article, of course, but also many if not all of the article talk page, redirects, anything that links to either of these, except inarguably notable subjects (which benefit from red links), user page or user talk page references, and other discussion pages (especially VfDs). Also, we may want to leave article talk pages in place if they contain discussions that aren't materially represented elsewhere (like in the VfD discussion).


 * Keep or redirect. Remove the VfD template from the article and add a vfd-kept (or equivalent) tag to its discussion page. (I don't want to get into all the X vs. X-new template issues here, as we should eventually have only one set after migrating the old forms to the new.)


 * Redirect. Replace the article with a redirect and add a vfd-redirect (or equivalent) tag to its discussion page.

NOTE: All of the above are relatively simple and are usually done by the closers at the time of the close. The rest of this list often gets delayed or even never done.


 * Merge. Add the non-redundant content of the article into the merge target. Refomatting is often necessary. Either provide an edit summary for the addition that includes the originating article title, user name, and date of originating edit (if it's a single edit), or post a history of the originating article on the merge-target's talk page. Then redirect or delete the originating article, as decided in the closure.


 * Transwiki. Copy the entire content of the article (without the VfD tag) into a new page "Transwiki:ARTICLE_TITLE" on the destination project. Log this transfer both here (at Transwiki) and on the new project (at its " Transwiki " page). At least, that's the official method. (See Help:Transwiki for details.) In reality, most people never bother to do this. They just copy the article to the same name on the new project in its article space — procedure, crediting, and GFDL be damned. If one knows the practices of the target project and does at least minimal crediting, they might be able to get away with this. But transwikis often involve transfers to unfamiliar projects (as I expect Votes for deletion/Proverbi albanesi will).

If a sysop is not prepared to take the necessary action on these last two cases (and there are probably others I'm not thinking of at the moment), I recommend we don't simply log them as usual and forget about them. We have a "Pending action" section of Votes for deletion/Log that is specifically provided to list problem articles whose fate has not yet been implemented. We should also try to encourge editors (not just sysops) to review this periodically to execute the chosen actions. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:44, 16 April 2007 (UTC)