Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Blank userspace drafts

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 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was  Delete. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 22:21, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Blank userspace drafts


The contents of the following pages were replaced with the templateinactive userpage blanked by Ricky81682:



Blank userspace drafts consisting of nothing apart from the default text produced by the Article Wizard and occasionally a rephrasing of the title. All these pages are also stale by over an year. User:Ricky81682 recently replaced the contents of quite a few of them with the template inactive userpage blanked. But this is quite unnecessary. Even in the unlikely event of a user’s return (although its worth noting that most – if not all – of these users have few or no other edits), there is nothing in the draft of even any trivial value.

Creating a draft with no content apart from the title is no better than suggesting an article. The place for that is WP:Requested articles. Given the sorry state of the Requested Articles project, we all know how worthless these article suggestions are. 103.6.159.83 (talk) 17:21, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Addendum in view of Graeme Bartlett's comment: The reason why I think deletion is necessary is that these pages flood a number of categories such as Category:Articles created via the Article Wizard, Category:Userspace drafts from, and most significantly, Category:Stale userspace drafts. The latter is a place where editors can fish out plausible drafts for improvement, but this cannot happen if thr category remains flooded with blank pages. 103.6.159.88 (talk) 06:37, 19 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Sounds like pointless deletionism to me. The users who created them have not been notified.  I myself would be annoyed if someone proposed a blank page of mine for deletion. Basicly these are sandboxes for experimental editing.  I certainly agree that Ricky81682's changes were quite unnecessary, and for these inexperienced editors confusing and harmful. So I think ther is no need to delete.  We just increase the size of Wikipedia by doing so. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:45, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Blanking is a moderate proposal. In the past, those pages were often listed at MFD for deletion per WP:WEBHOST concerns and blanking was an option. They do appear in Category:Userspace drafts and other categories which does need to be cleared at some point. Most of these are the only edit conducted by a user two, three, four years ago so I don't see why there's such an objection to clearing out those categories so we can focus on actual drafts from years ago. There's no other way to triage out real drafts from five year old one-time edits if you don't blank or delete them. We're finally under 45k pages at Category:Stale userspace drafts and that backlog will never decrease if we can't even blank old pages. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 21:26, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I did ask the AWBers to notify the users, but they don't seem to have acted yet. 103.6.159.88 (talk) 06:44, 19 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Comment If user pages or subpages are blank this is not a problem; perhaps the user created the page for a reminder of a topic to work on later. Other editors who are looking on the category listings for content to improve can look at the preview pop-up boxes which tell the size and number of links, etc., or use CatScan. Blank pages in Draft space, on the other hand, might be considered to be requests for articles, (and should likely be deleted, so that another editor who actually writes a draft will get credit for its creation). If a blank user page has old history in it of an article now in mainspace or draftspace, it may need to be redirected, deleted under db-blanked, or history merged.  Otherwise, according to WP:STALEDRAFT, what Ricky81682 did is within the User pages guideline, provided that the user "appears to have stopped editing".  The guideline is pretty vague, though, about when to use the "inactive user page blanked" template.  Perhaps a discussion is needed on the talk page of that guideline if editors think that not all old abandoned user drafts should be blanked, including ones with little content, but only ones with specific types of problematic content.&mdash;Anne Delong (talk) 12:56, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Technically these are purely blank pages. Those would be G6 eligible. These are pages with the default Article Wizard templates for the most part (some I blanked have some text there). The main point is that these are multi-year-old drafts for the most part and I do check whether the person is an active editor (necessary to check if there's a mainspace article and this isn't just a history merge issue). I use six months of inactivity which is based on when a draftspace article would be eligible under G13 and that's kind of the timeline that MFD uses. Even then, the articles aren't even deleted here. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 23:59, 20 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete While I blanked these pages, I know that other editors take these kinds of pages and had them deleted. I think it'd be fair if they were taken to MFD to delete them but I blanked them rather than flood MFD with these requests. That said, the users should be notified of this discussion. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 00:01, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep and blank the ones that aren't already. There's nothing wrong with indefinite retention of blank pages or ones tagged with inactive userpage blanked; they don't clog up categories or otherwise cause problems, and their creators aren't left thinking that the pages were deleted for some weird reason.  We can always delete the exception that has significant problems in the history (e.g. an attack page or copyvio), but as we don't have any evidence that it's a significant problem (not faulting Anne, Graeme, or Ricky, as I'm the only one to raise the issue), there's no need to mass-delete them for this problem.  Nyttend (talk) 19:51, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Comment Instead of blanking, wouldn't it be better if we just remove the invocations of Userspace draft and Category:Articles created via the Article Wizard? This way, the page wouldn't appear in any categories and still look natural. Inactive userpage blanked is quite pathetic as its wording never suits the circumstances. 103.6.159.85 (talk) 10:39, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * There were concerns that the editors wouldn't know what's going on if you did that. The note tells them to review the edit history and provides a link and doesn't confuse it with a G6 author blanking. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 11:20, 24 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete. No useful content here. Why do we have to fret about, what non-page creating non-contributors think - in the completely hypothetical case that is never going to happen in real life - when they return to edit their empty non-article after years have passed and are so clueless they can't figure out why their editing experiment of producing an empty page has not been preserved for posterity and revered eternally for its great contribution to the sum total of human knowledge, but deleted instead? jni (delete)...just not interested 18:27, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.