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I noticed a couple of problems with https://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Deleted-Article that we currently have and have thoughts on fully deprecating the page.

  1. {{nfd|dup}} when no duplicate title is supplied redirects to Deleted Article when there are enough votes in NFD guardian, which is unhelpful (the page should just be outright deleted until a duplicate target is found or the deletion template should spit out an error saying that you need to provide a duplicate target.)
  2. People can still export the contents of the deleted page by looking at the redirect’s page history, which may pose a security or legal concern if they fish out the contents of the bad title that was redirected (especially if libelous).

We have already deprecated creating links to this page in favor of create protecting the title, but NFD guardian still creates links to Deleted Article. I think the page should be fully deprecated, but the contents of that page should be changed to “This page title has been identified as a duplicate and will either be redirected to another article or deleted soon. If you disagree with this decision, please contact an admin or post in the forums.” as NFD guardian still uses this page.

The form it is currently in is also inaccurate, implying that a duplicate title is unsuitable for creation and assumes bad faith, which we do not want either. We can also provide a link to WhatLinksHere on that page so admins and other editors can delete/retarget these links to deleted article.

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From what I understood of my reading, I would request not to fully delete the material in articles as it gets saved despite getting deleted. As I am having second thoughts about some articles I nominated for deletion and got deleted. I might want to use that original matter and write more to fully complete that article, in the future.:slight_smile:

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This page is used as a fail safe for the NFD Guardian for invalid dup tags (as you mentioned in your post), so it’s probably best to keep it.

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I’m not a fan of depreciating the page, because when duplicates get redirected to the Deleted Article page, it means the creation of that redirect goes through RCP; if a patroller spots the redirect and knows the article isn’t meant to go there, they can fix the redirect themselves (or, worst-case-scenario, they can just ask for an admin to delete it). A run-of-the-mill driveby troll isn’t going to know how to access the history of a page once it’s been redirected, so I don’t really see copying the old content as a concern.

I also used to redirect clearly bad-faith articles to that page before I was an admin, because I didn’t have the ability to delete pages, and it was clear that some articles would never be viable topics (and sometimes were being continuously recreated after admins did delete them). I’d like to keep that option open for other users who might’ve been in my position.

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I think what I meant is having Special:WhatLinksHere/wikiHow:Deleted-Article be a maintenance page and changing wikiHow:Deleted-Article to say as I said above. As for bad-faith titles, I would just ask an admin to delete, tag the article with {{speedy}}, and fully create protect the article.

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Yeah, when I was redirecting stuff to the Deleted Article page, it was either because it was getting continuously recreated or because I didn’t see any admins online to handle it and the content was incredibly offensive. This was also prior to our use of title protection, to be fair. I mostly mentioned it because I do believe there’s still potential use for it when deletion and title protection isn’t available to whoever’s managing it.

But I don’t really see a need to change the page as-is. Most people nfd|dup from NAB, where the duplicate article is automatically inserted into the tag, and in other situations it’s probably going to get caught in RCP; anything that’s redirected to that page for any other reason was done so because it was a bad-faith article (not all admins use title protection, so it’s important to keep that in mind). I also checked what does link to the page currently, and most of the links are either pages that can’t feasibly be redirected anywhere or pages that the university students kept creating that didn’t comply with our policies, which gives me the impression that duplicates don’t get redirected to that page that often.