Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Leadership opportunities

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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: keep, de-link, and mark historical. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 05:07, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Leadership opportunities


The claims made on this page may have been reasonable when it was created in 2007 (although I'd argue not even then), but it's been virtually unchanged since its creation. By now it's obsolete (such things as a "Featured Article Director" haven't existed for years), inaccurate (most of the things listed here couldn't possibly be described as "leadership opportunities"), and against the whole ethos of Wikipedia (it implies that Wikipedia has hierarchical structures, something which has consistently been rejected).

I'd argue that in this case the page's continued existence is actively damaging. Because of its inclusion in some high-profile templates, it's linked to from a lot of the pages which new editors hoping to learn about Wikipedia are likely to visit, and consequently runs the high risk of giving new editors a misleading impression of how Wikipedia operates, with no obvious benefit to compensate for the potential risks given its obvious inaccuracy. (If any OTRS volunteer, Bureaucrat, Arbcom clerk or WMF local chapter manager were actually to tell people they were "in a leadership role" and start bossing other editors around, they'd find themselves removed from that role, and probably removed from Wikipedia, in fairly short order.) &#8209; Iridescent 10:39, 4 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Delete apart from possibly some of the WMF roles I don't think any of the positions listed can be reasonably described as a "leadership" role. Most of them are people who have volunteered for some specialised task and may have been given some restricted user access rights in order to do it. That doesn't make them leaders or managers of other people. There is some value in having a list which enumerates these roles but I think other pages such as Administration do a better job of it. Given the lack of meaningful edit history there isn't much value in keeping it for historical reasons.  Hut 8.5  11:52, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Question—Can this be unlinked from all the high-profile pages it currently links to? Per the nom's reasonable suggestion that this is a page that could be a) easily reached by noobs, and b) mislead them when they get here. However, on principle, I prefer the idea of maintaining for historical purposes (internal history, anyway), so if the links could be broken there would be less need to delete. Mind you, it's not that important, so delete if that's the general peference. Can't believe I missed out on becoming Director of the Colon-Indentation Clerks Project though.... ——  SerialNumber  54129  12:14, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Essentially all the links come from Template:Wikipedia accounts, so just removing it from there would get rid of most of them.  Hut 8.5  12:18, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Unlink and mark historical. Obsolete and misleading, but of possible internal historical interest alongside all the failed proposals, unsuccessful RfAs and suchlike. 28bytes (talk) 12:45, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Unlink and mark historical, as first preference, delete if people are not happy with that. The page paints a picture of the project that is damaging, and we shouldn't sanction this picture by linking from a number of places. I think it may actually be useful to keep around as documentation of our attitudes at the time it was written, but I wouldn't be too upset if it was deleted. Vanamonde (talk) 22:07, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Unlink and mark historical seems the least invasive solution here. Guy (Help!) 23:36, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Mark historical and Unlink as per other editors. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:44, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Unlink and mark historical per above. Page had its use back in the day but doesn't now. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 06:22, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Just delete. It's entirely subjective in terms of "leadership" and was surely always contrary to Wikipedia's (perhaps naive) ethos of egalitarianism. I see no historical value. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:13, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete Per nom and Boing. &#x222F; WBG converse 05:47, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete I don't really see what is "historical" here because it was never true and has been useless since day one --that's being against Wikipedia's ethos. Besides that being contrary to what we keep as historical, marking it "historical" now will be seen as retroactive stamp of validity. Ammarpad (talk)
 * Mark as historical per those above. — Godsy (TALK CONT ) 14:13, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment I created the page approximately ten years ago after a discussion (I believe at Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship) concluded that there was a lack of awareness of opportunities to contribute in ways other than writing articles. One goal was to encourage transparency by documenting some of the roles that were not widely realized to be influential.  In this regard the subject page is out of date, particularly with the ongoing transfer of power from admins to bot and tool writers, and the changes to the organizational structure within the foundation.  I will leave it to others to decide what to do with it now. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 20:24, 16 November 2018 (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.