Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2017 August 15

15 August 2017

Draft:Tensor product of representations

Draft:Tensor product of representations (talk|edit|history|logs|links|watch) (XfD|restore)

My only concern here is about the procedure. But I don't think the closure reflected the deletion discussion (e.g., no one voted for redirect. -- Taku (talk) 09:18, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

• Overturn. We need to stop this witch hunt for old drafts. They don't hurt anything. If draft space becomes an unsafe venue for works in progress, people will abandon draft space and go back to using their own private user space as protection against having works in progress getting deleted. And that would be a shame because it would reduce the opportunity for collaborative editing. For those who would point out that this particular draft hadn't been edited in three years, my response is that there is no WP:DEADLINE. I don't mind cleaning up truly abandoned drafts, where the author is no longer active, and the draft itself has zero value, but that's not the case here. The question to ask yourself is, Will getting rid of this draft improve the encyclopedia? For drafts like this, the answer is No, it will not. -- RoySmith (talk) 11:13, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Question: Will this page ever get any attention or improvement short of lighting a fire under the Author? Taku spends several magnitudes more bytes defending the creations than building them in the first place. Hasteur (talk) 13:01, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
    • This assumes there's a problem that needs fixing. Nobody has yet explained to me why these old drafts cause any harm to the encyclopedia. -- RoySmith (talk) 13:33, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
      • It squats on the namespage address, it is a "land grab" for creation credit, it prevents a true new user from feeling like they've discovered something, and it fractures the attention away from useful and purposeful improvement of namespace. All harms that this causes. Back to topic at hand. Do you really thing this is worth retaining and not Merge/Redirecting? Hasteur (talk) 13:40, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
        • Yes, I think it is worth retaining. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:34, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
• Endorse As the nominator I suggested that it be redirected. This is only a new step on Taku's Disruptive Editing burecracy train in which they will tendentiously make every single argument rather than fixing the problem. I would love for Taku to fix the problems, but they spend somewhere in the order of 50 times as many bytes defending a topic that they created in draft space 3 years ago than actually doing something about the topic. Hasteur (talk) 12:09, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

Can you show us some evidence of Taku's disruptive editing? The user in question has a clean block log and no community sanctions that I could find. What's the problem with taking several years to complete a draft? A Train^talk 20:17, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

• I also ask for speedy closure of this malformed DRV as it does not make a valid case for why the XFD was incorrect. Hasteur (talk) 12:10, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
• Also Redirection is perfectly in the discretion of the closing administrator per WP:ATD Hasteur (talk) 12:59, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
• Overturn the only real issue which was discussed here was whether the subject should be covered in a standalone article or as part of another article. MfD is not the correct place to have that discussion, it needs to happen on the relevant article talk pages. The other arguments raised, such as "old", "stale", "clutter", and concerns that "an admin with less tollerance [sic] to come in and start willy nilly deleting drafts that are more promising" are not valid, as they don't articulate some policy or guideline that this page's existence violates or some rational argument as to why we should get rid of it. Hut 8.5 18:30, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
• overturn no policy based reason for the outcome IMO. Per Roy and Hut, the whole point of draft space is to have drafts that aren't ready to be articles yet. The only reason I've seen that makes sense is the "land grab" argument. I don't buy that argument as I suspect that having a starting point is more important to people than getting credit for starting the article. But if such a land grab is hurting the encyclopedia, we should discuss what to do about it. I don't think it's (yet) a policy-based reason for deletion. Hobit (talk) 22:12, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

@Hut and Hobit: I would have had the discussion elsewhere but it would be Taku and me arguing at each other and no consensus hapening and Taku would have filibustered it to death. There's a valid reason to funneling the effort to a mainspace to spin off a subsection into a page. The only way we could compel that effort is by having a MFD. Hasteur (talk) 00:54, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

• Hi Hasteur, I tried to parse that a few times and failed. I understood the first and last sentence, but the middle one lost me, sorry. Would you mind trying to clarify that? Thanks, and sorry if the fault is on my end. Hobit (talk) 00:59, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
  • @Hobit: See the other recent MFD nomination notifications on Taku's page to see how others have been forcably redirected. We're chosing and picking our debates for the least quality ones. Ones that are ready for mainspace are promoted. Ones that are ready and are on the stale are challenged at MFD or redirected (with Taku screaming "vandalism"). If the only way we can get a result is by having these procedural exercises with forgone conclusions because Taku is being obstructionist, then we have them. Hasteur (talk) 01:10, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
    • The proper place to have a discussion about a possible merge would be Talk:Tensor product. I don't see any edits by you to that page. I frankly don't see much point to this crusade to get rid of a few old drafts. Hut 8.5 06:44, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
      • When you say, We're chosing and picking our debates, who is we? You make it sound like you're part of some organized team of people. I see you've also started WP:AN#Willfull and persistent disruption of Draft space by TakuyaMurata. Honestly, that seems a bit excessive. My take on this is that you've got more invested in this than is good for you, or for the project. I would suggest that you move on to other things. There's more than enough work to go around. If this issue of stale drafts is really a problem, somebody else can pick it up. Meanwhile, you and Taku can disengage from what appears to be a personal conflict. -- RoySmith (talk) 11:54, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
        • Would you rather a "Bull in a china shop" admin come in and clear cut all these Drafts, because that's been threatened multiple times and took an ArbCom case with Desysop to protect draft space. Pull back and see the larger situation where consensus has been on the force redirect side of the debate on multiple occasions yet Taku causes us to waste time having to fight over every last inch of consensus. Hasteur (talk) 12:07, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
          • Could you provide links to those conversations, please? -- RoySmith (talk) 13:36, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Kafziel, Any of the MFDs on his talk page, Any of the failed DRVs resulting from those MFDs, the 2 failed RFCs at WT:Drafts by Taku. The OWN walled garden is quite clear. Hasteur (talk) 14:00, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

I'm confused. You're citing a 3-1/2 year old ArbCom case which didn't involve Taku at all as why this draft needs to be redirected? Honestly, I think everybody involved here (on both sides) needs to just back away. The drafts aren't doing any harm. On the other hand, redirecting them (while I don't think that's the right thing to do) isn't doing any great harm either. Everybody should just take a chill pill and find something less controversial to work on. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:21, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

@RoySmith: Wow... just wow... CIR much? the Kafziel case was about a bull in a china shop admin coming in and straight out deleting Drafts because they were stale and offended him.

I'm attempting to demonstrate what the unintended consequence could be if drafts like this are allowed to remain. Taku is only showing up because they created this class of Draft pages 3 years ago and haven't done any improvements on them. I'd be more than happy to walk away just as long as Taku agrees to some form of binding remediation that results in either Draft space being cleaned up or they taking the pages back to their userspace to work on since Taku feels that they are the only ones who can judge if it's worthwhile. Hasteur (talk) 17:19, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

• • • • • Also in the "We" I'm counting Legacypac as another editor who has been taking Taku to task for these drafts. Hasteur (talk) 12:09, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

• Support redirect. On one side Taku has done plenty of great work building math articles. On the other side Taku gets into a serious tizzy if someone touches any of the approx 200 stale drafts they started. I keep encountering these pages as I clean up non-AfC Draft space. I could not believe when they fought deletion of 8 words not about the topic and a link! I offered to copy the short pages and any links to User:TakuyaMurata/Drafts so the topic ideas could be preserved in one place, but that was rejected. If this user spent a tenth of the effort expanding of merging the abandoned topics as they do defending some false entitlement to WP:OWN abandoned Drafts, we would have so much more useful content. I've taken some of the shortest ones to MfD and in each case the pages have been deleted or in this case redirected. Why the heck are we at deletion review yet again? It's disruptive. Let's move these Drafts forward to merge the info into mainspace, and delete the ones that are nothing. but a topic idea. Legacypac (talk) 12:26, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
• Guys, other than the "land grab" argument, I've not heard any reason why these drafts (or frankly any draft that doesn't have BLP, copyright or similar problems) are such an issue. Why does it matter to you? What is the issue you are trying to fix? You complain about Taku being disruptive, but I'm unclear on why trying to delete these isn't the actual disruption. Not saying you aren't right. Instead saying you seem to be starting off with the assumption that these need to be cleaned up but you haven't provided an argument (other than the land grab one) why that assumption is valid. If the land grab thing really is causing us to not have articles get created, I get that. But I don't know of any evidence to that effect and I tend to think people prefer to have a starting point rather than a blank slate (so I'd expect the draft articles to help, not hurt)--though I admit I have no evidence for that claim either. Are there some other arguments? Some evidence to support the land grab claim? Hobit (talk) 17:48, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

@Hobit: Please familiarize yourself with the various debates including WT:Drafts, WT:Mathematics, and WT:CSD to see Taku's WP:OWN that these pages need to live in perpituity and never be improved in the random chance that someone in the future will want to make the 99.9% effort to get them into mainspace. Fundamentally, Taku is misusing Draftspace in which there's supposed to be collaberative effort by decreeing that draft space content that will never make it to mainspace without drastic rewrites is preferable than a redirect to a very closely related topic (or section) and focusing the effort there to improve the content.

Hobit aksed me why I redirected it. Basically it is an abandoned draft. If it was abandoned and the editor was inactive I would have deleted it. I'm fascinated by the amount of discussion here and at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Tensor product of representations. It would have taken less time to reference the thing and expand it into a proper article. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 23:29, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

That still doesn't really answer my question. What harm does it do as a draft? You all are assuming that we all agree an abandoned draft should be deleted. It can be in userspace if the user is gone, but it's not clear how doing so helps. How does deleting or redirecting help? It feels controlling and discouraging to editors. So there needs to be a good reason to delete or redirect. What is that reason? How does it help? Hobit (talk) 02:43, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

Draft space is full of truly problematic pages. These 200 abandoned math stubs add to the clutter and must be checked and rechecked as we sort out the pages that really need to be deleted. It is not even clear if these are real proper topics. the idea that Abandoned Drafts need to be cleared to ensure we can do maintenance more efficently is nothing new WP:G13. Legacypac (talk) 06:30, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

• Endorse, more Takucruft. Would counsel the nominator to spend his time writing in depth about a small number of topics rather than writing one-liners about dozens of topics and then tendentiously arguing about when they get deleted. Stifle (talk) 08:38, 17 August 2017 (UTC)