Wikipedia:Blow it up and start over

Sometimes it's the only way to be sure.

A page can be so hopelessly bad that the only solution is to blow it up and start over.

Sometimes, the damage is fixable, but the effort in doing so dwarfs the effort involved in merely starting over. With articles, this is the TNT tipping point argument; if the only argument to keep an article is to keep the title but none of its content be kept, then the article is hopeless. If you keep the article, then you're keeping something of no value until someone replaces it with something of value, when people tend to be more inclined to fill red links. When you see this as an argument to delete, don't give up. If you can repair the article in a timely manner, then you've neatly refuted that the article is irreparable. If you can't repair it in a timely manner, then this is the simplest argument to refute at WP:DRV; after all, they said it couldn't be fixed and you fixed it.

Sometimes, the damage is completely irreparable. While you can edit any page to fix the page content, you can't edit the associations and social history of a page, even if you delete every trace of that page on the wiki. Most often, this is common with perennial policy proposals that have been the subject of so much fighting that even a brilliant, earthshattering work of genius would face significant opposition just because it's proposal #3941. And no, your version probably isn't a brilliant, earthshattering work of genius. Your best bet under these circumstances is to let the fight go and let the perennial warriors blow each other up (or at least wear each other out) and try again under some other name, if at all.

Copyright violations are traditionally blown up, and anyone can start over as long as their version isn't itself a copyright violation.

Nuke and pave

The typical argument to delete an article is to nuke and pave: to delete this article's content, and disallow any future article of this form under this title. It is a rejection of the article's concept, as well as its content. Policy or guideline proposal rejections can also take this form, with arguments along the lines of "This is a bad idea, and no amount of rephrasing or streamlining can fix it." (The closest a proposal can come to being "nuked and paved" is getting listed on Wikipedia:Perennial proposals.)

Nuking and paving is different from blowing something up to start over. Nuke and pave arguments reject the possibility of having an article on a subject or adapting a proposal to be something acceptable. Blowing something up in order to start over admits and can even encourage a better try at a later date, and consensus to blow something up to start over should not be used to justify a speedy deletion for recreation of deleted material.