Wikibooks:Requests for undeletion/Wikimania 2005 proceedings

Wikimania 2005 proceedings
These proceedings had been suggested for transwiki'ing via the addition of a transwiki template on the main page. They were deleted without a VfD listing. Hundreds of sites (a naive Google search turns up 250) reference or link directly to these wikibooks URLs. Researchers concerned with preemption in the scientific literature care about being able to prove the original online publication date.

Please undelete all proceedings pages so that a) the world at large can verify the original date of publication, b) individual history diffs are preserved, and c) third-party links from the web at large to Wikibooks pages do not break. After undeletion, pages can be replaced with transwiki redirects to meta, if necessary.  Thanks, Sj 20:32, 16 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Some questions, if I may: (a) How important is it to know the precise date. The year is 2005, do you really need to be more precise than that?; (b) How important is this? If it's to know who has contributed, we could recreate, allow someone to paste each history page to a new page on meta (or wherever the Wikimania 2005 proceedings are going to live) (give it 2 months, say) and then delete the pages again; (c) if anyone ended up on a dead link to Wikibooks (and google does come up with some pages that I guess are very infrequently visited nowadays), wouldn't they then search for "Wikimania 2005" on a search engine and find the goods quickly enough anyway? Jguk 20:48, 16 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Any form of 'proof' of publication is necessarily forgable. A live history is better than a cut-and-pasted history-which-anyone-can-edit; which is better than no history.  Research ideas spread pretty quickly in this community; so July or August 2005 is significantly different from February 2006.
 * As to "wouldn't they then search for 'Wikimania 2005' and find the goods" -- they might or might not; link death is an easy way to lose an audience; and it would certainly take them another few minutes, which would lose a furthe portion of said audience. Breaking links on the web is never good form; if you are aiming to provide access to information, it is unconscionable; and in this case, there is furthermore no benefit to not preserving redirects. Sj


 * The history of each page is posted in the talk pages, which was added immediately after the transwiki. --Rob Horning 00:50, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

BTW, not all content requires a formal VfD before removal, especially when it blatantly violates established policies. And none of the policies which this content violates were especially new to Wikibooks either. On top of all that, what notification about this move that could have been done without making a major issue on Foundation-l and inappropriately involving Foundation Board members about this discussion was done. See also the discussion on Meta:Talk:Transwiki:Wikimania05. I agreed with the opinion of two other Wikibooks users and simply removed the content, after making sure all of the content had been moved to Meta. I was even "nice" and fixed as many links on Meta as were reasonable, especially within the proceedings content itself. The proceedings are still available, just not now where some individuals were expecting it and thinking it would remain "forever". --Rob Horning 00:48, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep Deleted - (Obvisouly... I deleted it in the first place). See my main objections here: Staff lounge.  As for external links, as I mentioned elsewhere, add them.  These pages aren't protected and anybody, even at the moment anonymous users, can recreate the content at least so far as any necessary redirects are concerned.  An admin does not have to do that.  As for losing the history, don't hang me up to dry... yell at the developers instead, file a Bugzilla report (or vote on one of the various import bugs that still need to be fixed).  This has all been covered elsewhere with Transwiki issues that relate to all Wikimedia projects.  All of the content is still available and can be found here:  Meta:Transwiki:Wikimania05.  Most of this content is duplicates anyway on Meta, as there were many translation requests that also copied verbatum entire pages that were hosted on Wikibooks earlier prior to this transwiki.  Those pages will need to be merged, and there were some "orphaned" pages that also need to be dealt with.  If Meta is not the place to host this content, then it really needs to be decided somewhere, prefereably by the proceedings contributors and the project it is going to be finally staying in.
 * As I mentioned on the staff lounge, this content was very clearly not a 'speedy deletion' candidate when it was first put up. It was neither "original research" nor use of wikibooks as a soapbox, though it contained bits of each.  A discussion about how to improve the book, or how to coordinate a freezing of the content and a move of that frozen content to Wikisource, would have been enlightening and useful.
 * As to what notification about this move that could have been done without making a major issue on Foundation-l and inappropriately involving Foundation Board members about this discussion was done -- could you please elaborate on this? I don't see what Foundation-l or Foundation Board members have to do with it; how about a post to the Staff Lounge, or to the wikibooks mailing list, or to one of the active book-contributors' talk pages on this or one of their other favorite wikis?
 * Noone is trying to hang you up to dry. I'm certainly not.  But I do hope that administrators would feel a responsibility to be polite and to inform others of major changes they make; informing more widely, the more broad the changes -- and not only to do as they please within the restrictions of 'the letter of the law'. I see you condinuing to say that the notification that took place was sufficient; which I feel strongly it was not.  And I don't want this to set a precedent in that regard. Sj 00:53, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
 * You are entitled to your opinion on this matter, and this is a proper forum to bring up all of these points if you want this fully restored, or to suggest a proper place for this content. For some time now, administrators on Wikibooks have been operating under the assumption that the VfD forum is to gain community opinion, and to help bring up policy points that either support or deny particular content to remain.  Once a clear course of action is apparent, action is taken.  We don't count votes on the VfD forums but consider strongly reasonable opinions for both sides of keeping or removing content.  That is why move VfD discussion end up quoting specific policy point to support or reject the content, to prove the point through appeal to policy.
 * As this content is clearly original research, by definition (it is a publication forum for original research... the whole point of going to places like Wikimania in the first place), that by itself is clearly a candidate for removal from Wikibooks. If you want specific papers for me to point to within the proceedings that show statistical and educational research that took place at Wikimania, I will provide those specific links to demonstrate that.  The whole reason everybody is complaining about removing this content is precisely because this is original research, and people, like Thomas who raised the original stink about this whole thing, was complaining about the fact that he couldn't use Wikibooks any more on one of his patent filings to document his "original research" and date of original publication.  How more explicit can I get on this point?
 * As far as a soap box is concerned, I know that if I went in and did massive changes to some of the papers, rearranged the content, combined papers and added substantial new content, that there would be many authors of those papers who would be screaming their heads off at me and others would would do that sort of rework. I'm not talking minor spelling checks, but a major overhaul of the content.  Yet that is precisely what we do here on Wikibooks in many cases, and whenever an author adds their paper here (outside of Wikimania) that has been published elsewhere, one of the criteria I always ask that author is if they are willing to have the Wikibooks community tear the paper apart and rework it into something they might not recognize as the original content.  In every case the answer has been a resounding yes, or they instead donated the work to Wikisource instead.  A soap box is intending the content to remain exactly from the POV (another enforced policy on Wikibooks that we exclude) of the original author, without any changes.  Come on, tell me you've heard about NPOV policies before, SJ.  Yet that is precisely what we have with the Wikimania content.
 * I mention the Foundation-l, because I think it is inappropriate to bring up this issue in that forum. I am waiting, however, for some of the individuals who are complaining about my actions to do exactly that, as they apparently have brought in Brion, Anthere, and Jimbo into this conversation.  Jimbo is staying surprisingly silent about this whole thing, BTW.  More to the point, I am willing to trust the Wikibooks community to come to a reasonable conclusion on this topic, and note that others will either come to my defense or suggest I screwed up here.  I have seen a total lack of interest in even involving the Wikibooks community at all in any of the discussion by those who oppose this action of deleting Wikimania, except of course yourself, SJ.  I've answered reasonable questions as I could about why I did this, as I am still doing.  I felt it was inappropriate to demand that I drop everything and do certain actions, sometimes conflicting at that (from different people).  I insisted that this was the appropriate forum to discuss this issue, and only one person, you SJ, has even responded, dispite at least 8 other people that I'm aware of that have expressed some sort of opinion to me about this matter.  Let the Wikibooks community decide the ultimate fate of this issue, and don't beat me up personally about my actions.  And work within already established procedures to restore this content that would also alert other Wikibooks administrators (there are 30 of us BTW, I'm not the only administrator here... although I am quite active) who could have helped to restore the content if any one of them cared to.  Brion did, but Kernigh reversed his decision.  Let's decide this for once and all, and let this be the place to make the arguments.  My talk page or somebody else's talk page is the wrong place to do this.  --Rob Horning 08:24, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep the redirection to meta (or to whatever future place) as full deletion will result in breaking of hundred of external links. This should be avoided as much as possible. I do believe the proceedings belong here, but I can understand the local community thinks differently. To settle the issue, I only ask that the links be not deleted but redirect to each individual pages. This does not *deface* wikibooks and I am sure the Foundation will be glad to support the extra-financial cost of preserving the traffic related to this less than 100 pages from their original location to their new location :-) Anthere 19:57, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
 * While the financial cost of server time is trivial, who is going to patrol the redirects to make sure they remain redirects and not some sort of vanity page or pure vandalism? (See 5040 for a partial solution to this, however).  Also, what is redirected and where?  Every page?  Even when the pages where moved due to simple renaming?  Even stuff that was marked "please delete me" by the Wikimania participants?  Talk pages even?  My main objection to the complaints sent my way was that not only did they object to my removing this content, that they were also expecting me to make these decisions and demanding that I add these redirects.  As I've pointed out repeatedly, you don't need sysop privileges in order to create and add redirects.  You don't even need to be a registered user at the moment.  If you want the redirects.... add them.  That is not the point of this VfUD or conflicts with the reasons why I deleted this content.  I think it is unreasonable to expect me to to do that work as well if you are not willing to help in the process of creating the redirects.  As I pointed out as well, please make note in a very public forum on Wikibooks (which you have, Anthere, finally) why the links need to remain.  I am still warning the Wikimania participants that even if I accept the logic to keep the links here, without engaging the Wikibooks community as a whole they are likely to be deleted again by future administrators.  I am not the only person you have to convince.  --Rob Horning 12:50, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I think Robert, that a couple of words in your comments above should not exist (such as implying that I FINALLY accepted to discuss the issue HERE). I discussed the issue on your talk page from the very moment I was told of the deletion of all the pages; Not on *any* other public forum. I think you are not assuming good faith from me at all. I find that rather unpleasant. I have no problem with you having an opinion different than mine, but please try to "argue" with arguments only, rather than trying to belittle those who disagree with you. And please do not pretend they did things they did not do. As for fixing the redirect without restoring the pages, I mostly see it as a quite unpleasant proposition. It costs nothing to restore those links. But it will cost me (or others) a lot of time to guess where the pages should redirect to. I feel as if you are trying to impose us a very unpleasant and unecessarily work load just so that we give up. Why are you doing this ? I will give time to help "fix" the redirects if necessary, but not from scrap. If a work already exist, it is stupid to do it twice. Ant
 * The redirects weren't added until much later. My objections have always been that I was expected to create those redirects.  Not just put on a list of "things to do" by the Wikibooks community, but that I, myself, personally, under diress and fear that something would happen to me that would be somehow unpleasant, had to undelete and restore the content or at least add the redirects or face that punishment, what ever it may be.  My talk page, BTW, is not a public forum, nor is my talk page on Meta.  Staff lounge is, but unfortunately not all of the discussion about this issue has taken place either there nor here.  Other public forums like Foundation-l, Meta, or the Wikimania mailing list are inappropriate as it will not involve the Wikibooks community to help with the ultimate goal:  To restore Wikimania content to the status it had before I deleted the content.  If that is the goal, this is the most appropriate place to make that discussion.  The rest is posturing and a personal attack against me.  --Rob Horning 13:51, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
 * User has 41 edits. --Kernigh 04:59, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
 * So what ? Anthere
 * Keep the redirects, obviously, as with Florence's reasoning. James F. (talk) 22:44, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
 * User has 4 edits. --Kernigh 04:59, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Redirects are okay, but do not undelete. The "Wikimania05" book was WikiSquatting. Unlike the instructional textbooks on this site, "Wikimania05" was not a book that I could edit. The book is now eligible for speedy deletion because it was transwikied. (User:Brion VIBBER had undeleted the book to restore external links; I redeleted it because this poll for undeletion was in progress, and because I dropped redirects to Wikimania05.) --Kernigh 04:59, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
 * You may not at the same time oppose undeletion but accept redirects AND tell us to do the job ourselves. We are not sysops here, so it would give us a lot of work to guess to which pages the pages should redirect. An alternative would be for Brion to again undelete them so that we can restore and fix the redirection. At a minimum, it would be a good gesture from you to prevent us spending hours to figure where the redirections should go. Of course, at this point, you have two choices. Either you let the pages undeleted till we have time to fix them all. Or you could also decide to re-delete again the pages before we have time to do so. So that we earn time in the process, can you tell us what you intend to do if the decision here is to keep the redirect ? Anthere 15:26, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
 * If you want to see what pages are involved, you can look at: Special:Log/Delete. An undeletion is not strictly necessary if you want to simply add the redirects.  --Rob Horning 13:59, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Just a note to say I agree with Rob and Kernigh on this one. Wikimania 2005 did not and does not belong on Wikibooks. Hopefully it can find a nice home elsewhere and those who wish to review it can find it easily, Jguk 17:46, 21 February 2006 (UTC)