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DeleteTestAndWelcome
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesOn WikiWiki, nominating a page as a candidate for deletion is merely an act of replacing the entire text of the page with a small sentence (less than 50 characters) that begins with the word "delete". Do this twice and the page is deleted in accordance with the EditCopy versioning system it employs.
In order to gently explain to newusers what just happened to perhaps a text they wanted to preserve, the locals of WikiWiki invented the CommunitySolution of replacing the text of candidate pages with the moniker "DeleteTestAndWelcome". As the only text on the page, as a hyperlink to Wiki:DeleteTestAndWelcome, this would hopefully attract these new users to read more about the CommunityExpectations of WikiWiki before again jumping into the shallow end head first.
This solution in particular got around the problem of reiterating the same welcome message repeatedly in the natural hypertext way (create a new page for the text and just link to it), as well as the technical limitation of the WikiWiki mechanism that does not provide enough space (50 characters) to explain to anyone, not just new users, why a page was deleted. Further, it gave the new authors the opportunity to reverse the deletion if they saw fit. Finally, if the page was forgotten and never deleted, it could be found again through the BackLinks of DeleteTestAndWelcome and then finally sent to its grave.
See also PageDeletion, and compare against MeatballWiki's DeletedPage system.
Use on meatball
We used this system briefly on meatball wiki. However, there were some problems:
- It didn't interact with meatball's deletion system, so we would have to manually add DeletedPage later on.
- DeletedPage: DeleteTestAndWelcome works, but there is the grave danger that the new user will click on the "DeletedPage" link first and get so confused that they will not go back and read the DeleteTestAndWelcome page.
- We could make DeleteTestAndWelcome work like DeletedPage in script, but this is poor FeatureKarma, and we couldn't just look at the backlinks of DeletedPage to find all the deleted pages any more.
In the end, we rewrote DeletedPage to be clearer and more friendly, so now we just use DeletedPage with a brief (textual, non-linked) explanation.
CategoryWikiWiki?