Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/List of math draft pages

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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. RL0919 (talk) 07:53, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/List of math draft pages

 * – (View MfD) &#8203;

I'm proposing this be a redirect to Category:Draft-Class mathematics articles. I already implemented this after dropping all the deleted drafts and making sure all the listed drafts were tagged to show up in the category. But reverted and noted on my user talk page:
 * "...the list actually has useful information not covered in categories; list of red links. The deletion of drafts is automated and it is important to request undeletion of drafts on topics not covered in mainspace yet. Of course, I can just have the list in my user page but putting the list in the wikiproject page can invite contributors from the others too. So, can we agree to have this list instead of/besides categories?"

also deleted all the redlinks on this list, and TakuyaMurata reverted that. Note that TakuyaMurata has a topic ban on draftspace per Administrators' noticeboard/Archive292 and this was brought up again at Administrators' noticeboard/Archive314. This activity appears to violate that ban. This is currently under appeal at Administrators' noticeboard. Regardless, I thought it would be worthwhile to establish consensus on what we want to do here.

I would argue the following about draft procedures in general:
 * Undeletion is not a process that should be depended upon to work upon request. It causes overhead for admins, and should not be a routine part of WikiProject activities. Repeated undeletion is the worst.
 * Because they have no way to see the content, there's no way for non-admins to tell if a specific draft *should* be undeleted or if it was deleted because it was not useful.
 * If an editor intends to work on a draft more than 6 months in the future, they should probably move it into their userspace (as I have done myself in the past).
 * If other editors are needed to work on the draft, it can be tagged promising draft, though if you ask me, it would be better to simply move it into article space and tag whatever problems it has with referencing or incompleteness. At worst, anyone who cares so much about the topic they don't want it forgotten could create the shortest of stubs, with just a clean defining sentence. Whatever can be saved from the messy draft can be put on the talk page as suggested improvements for an expert to take a look at. As this will start showing up in public search engines, it will almost certainly attract more expert editor attention and useful contributions than a messy draft, and will certainly get more attention than a maybe-to-be-undeleted deleted draft.
 * If no one intends to work on a draft enough to move it into their own userspace, and the text is in bad enough shape that it can't be moved into a problem-tagged article or even trimmed down to a clean one-sentence definition for a stub, then after 6 months the right thing is indeed probably to delete the draft. If the topic is notable, someone will eventually start an article, and if the previous contributions were a mess, it's not necessarily a bad thing that they are starting from scratch.

In this specific case, it appears that this list of drafts was not being maintained, and thus is not fulfilling its intended purpose. The category has 131 drafts, so the list is missing something like 80% of them. Userspace drafts are included in the category. Any annotations on specific drafts made on this page would be better made on the draft's talk page, so all editors interested in the draft could see it. -- Beland (talk) 22:32, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment In the past there were a number of us intermittently maintaining this page, as it was a convenient common spot for looking for math-oriented drafts to work on. Personally, I like that the drafts were partitioned into categories of mathematical topics and that the occasional notes beside the links sometimes helped with understanding the rationale behind the drafts. It's true that it is being less well-maintained these days. If this page goes away, I would recommend creating subcats under Category:Draft-Class mathematics articles corresponding to the categories in the list, or something along those lines. It isn't always apparent what the topic being proposed just from the draft title--is Draft talk:Lagrangians in Graphs about graph theory, or mathematical physics? -- 00:12, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep (note this is just a list in the wikiproject page and so is not within the scope of my topic ban). My argument would be: is having this page harmful in anyway? As I said above, anyone can have a list like this in their user page after all. This list was put in the wikiproject so it can benefit from edits from other editors. About up-to-date: so for the past several months, I have been quite busy, but I (and hopefully others) still intend to update the list. About comprehensive: the list is not complete; that’s a feature not a bug since there are many low-quality drafts that we don’t need to keep track of. Again the need for the deletion seems very unclear to me and the original poster has failed to elaborate on the need. —— Taku (talk) 04:47, 24 February 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep While I personally use Category:Draft-Class mathematics articles for keeping track of mathematics-related drafts, I don't see why other editors shouldn't make use of a list in project space if they find it helpful. Subcategorising Category:Draft-Class mathematics articles seems more cumbersome to me than an ad hoc list that can be quickly adapted to whatever people on the project find useful.
 * Felix QW (talk) 20:42, 26 February 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep Harmless, and more useful than a category (this page can say, for example, why a person might be wiki-notable). It's likely to go for longish stretches without modification because, well, this is a highly technical area and thus a low-traffic part of the encyclopedia. It's not out of line for the task of encyclopedia-building, though. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 19:27, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Via this list, I found Draft:Ruler function, tidied and referenced it and resubmitted it to AfC (since I don't know the etiquette for moving AfC drafts into mainspace once they've been improved). I think it's easier to do that sort of thing when drafts are sorted by topic and have auxiliary information. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 22:39, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
 * comment I think that the drafts on the list on this page may be sent to MfD and then deleted instead of being deleted after 6 months. If consensus for that can be get through this discussion, I think that reduce the burden on the administrators. --SilverMatsu (talk) 00:10, 3 March 2022 (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.