Wikibooks:Reading room/Administrative Assistance/Archives/2016/November

Decapitated book
I'd like to hear other admins' thoughts about this.

The book was Parent Education Course Writer's Guide. The main page, containing most of the book content, was deleted in 2013 at request of its principal author, but a number of smaller peripheral pages were left lying around, including the book category. Other things I've figured out: So, what to do now? I could put a nomination at WB:RFD, but then would feel I had to wait for that to run its course; is it necessary? Or can the original deletion request be reinterpreted as a request for deletion of the entire book? --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 00:39, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
 * The English Wikibooks book was started by User:Fasten in 2007. User:Fasten appears to have retired from all wikimedia projects earlier this year.
 * By my best guess, the primary version of the book was on German Wikibooks, Elternkurs Autorenleitfaden, but I'm unsure, partly because I haven't been able to get a clean translation of that German title; and has been deleted in (afaics) its entirety at author's request, but I don't know for sure whether that author was User:Fasten, since the deletion log summary ran off the end of the available summary field length.
 * The deleting admin here on English Wikibooks was User:Az1568, fwiw. I'm leaving a note on their user page linking back here.
 * Special:Undelete/Parent Education Course Writer's Guide
 * Category:Parent Education Course Writer's Guide
 * Hmm.. to be honest I would just delete the rest as orphaned pages. The books author did request the book be deleted but I'm not certain why I had missed those pages. --Az1568 (discuss • contribs) 08:36, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Fair enough. I have deleted all the pages involved (which I found an unexpectedly melancholy affair, removing resources when we're so oriented toward providing them).  If there's any further discussion of the matter, of course, we can resurrect things.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:11, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Why delete? If the book was usable, then the (principal) author's request shouldn't keep everyone else from using it. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:25, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
 * FYI, this deleted content can be found with a copyright on scribd.com, uploaded by feanor981, with a few other PDFs from here, with the mention "from wikibooks". So this is not totally lost.
 * My opinion is, when one person wants to remove what he had posted, this could be because he needs to sell it or because it may be incorrect. So let's respect the author will because he's supposed to be the best expert on the matter. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 00:43, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
 * But what if others edit it? That is the point of a wiki, anyway. If the book was deleted because it's inaccurate, then anyone could propose it for deletion with that reason--being the original author would be irrelevant. Also, posting it here in no way prohibits anyone from selling it. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:45, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
 * If the original author is responsible for less than 90% of the book, I would be in favor of a deletion vote. Otherwise this could create a moral conflict comparable to the breach of trust. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 00:53, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
 * But I think that deletion of valid, legitimate content per a user's preference also undermines the spirit of a CC license and sharing--you cannot revoke the license and while you cannot be required to offer the work for free, it seems antithetical to sharing it with an irrevocable license in the first place if you can ask others to delete it from a shared repository at any time. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:57, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
 * It's my understanding that we usually honor a request-to-delete from the sole author of a page; it's reasonable to discount administrivia (like putting BookCat on pages), I think. In this particular case, I looked over the revision histories of the peripheral pages and was satisfied that User:Fasten had provided the content, so that it seemed very plausible to me to consider them within the scope of User:Fasten's request for deletion.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 02:20, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I might note, as a matter of curiosity perhaps, that we don't generally have this problem on English Wikinews because, although we do sometimes delete a page at the request of the sole author, any article that we publish is no longer sole-author, it's an intense collaboration between the reporter and the reviewer (in traditional news rooms, our reviewer would be editor and sub-editor). I can't think of any case where we've taken down a published article at the reporter's request, and I can think of a case where we refused to do so. It's my understanding this sole-author deletion thing is considered a courtesy to the author.  I admit deleting stuff under these circumstances usually feels unpleasant, and this case especially so because it'd been up for years.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:42, 13 November 2016 (UTC)