Talk:Jelapang, Perak

The mess at "Jelapang"
Summarizing the edit history: Until the first edit of 16 Sept '09 the role of Jelapang was stub/article on the town in Perak; with that edit, it became a Dab for the title "Jelapang". Such shifts, without starting a new page with its own edit history, are not so uncommon; they can take place without any appropriate determination that the entire preceding history (when it was an article) was unworthy of retention, in which case the effect can turn out to be indistinguishable from an undetected out-of-process article deletion. This case profits from the significant difference: any reasonably experienced user could in theory review the edit history and find the non-deletion-worthy content -- as i in fact did. Using the same page for both the decent stub and the Dab was an error, which i am about to remedy by splitting the edit history into two new pages, one with the early (article) revisions and one with the later (Dab) revisions. What follows, i will present here as i proceed in the next day or so. --Jerzy•t 06:09, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) Starting with "Jelapang is a main town in Kinta district, Perak, Malaysia." on 06:39, 18 June 2006, Jelapang was an stub and then short article about that place, evolving smoothly thru 04:57, 13 August 2009
 * 2) From 00:19 to 00:30, 5 September 2009 an IP replaced the 797-byte result of that evolution with 1,197 bytes of presumably good-faith, but low-quality and rambling content.
 * 3) A week and a half of minor changes ensued.
 * 4) On 16 September 2009, one editor made 7 edits in quick succession, discarding all the preceding prose and creating a non-compliant Dab page.
 * 5) Over the next 13 months, 3 editors made an edit each, with minor changes.
 * The 5 Sept '09 edits of the accompanying article were IMO a major setback for the article, and after splitting out the later revisions as a Dab Jelapang (as discussed above) i reverted Jelapang, Perak to the earlier 13 August revision. Nevertheless, those 5 Sept contribs can IMO be mined, by an editor familiar with the context, for info that should be combined with the current revision that resulted from my reverting to the 13 August '09 revision.  The log for the Dab page, and the two pages' edit histories should explain pretty thoroly the mechanics. Note that i also cleaned up the Dab. I think that's it, tho it seems simpler than what i made it sound like would be involved, and went far quicker than what i covered myself against. --Jerzy•t 07:27, 20 October 2010 (UTC)