Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Villages in the Brooke Benefice, England

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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. There is a universal acknowledgment that all of the articles in this small, inactive WikiProject fall under the auspices of WikiProject East Anglia, and the majority consensus is that there is little substance to keep or merge as a consequence. As a courtesy to the creator of this Wikiproject (since that seems to have been a concern) I will encourage them to work on these articles alongside WikiProject East Anglia.  bibliomaniac 1  5  03:52, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Villages in the Brooke Benefice, England

 * – (View MfD)

Far too narrow a scope, and no activity since creation three months ago, on 1 January 2020.

This is a WikiProject for five small rural villages in the English county of Norfolk, with a total population of only ~2,500: Mundham, Thwaite St Mary, Brooke, Norfolk, Kirstead, and Seething. There is no article on the Brooke Benefice, and no mention of it in any of the five village articles. it gets a list entry at Diocese of Norwich, but not even a namecheck anywhere else on en.wp: a wiki-search for "Brooke Benefice" returns no hits at all.

It is theoretically possible that such a project could be viable if there was:
 * 1) a team of local historians keen to collaborate on this extremely niche topic;
 * 2) plenty of reliable, secondary sources to allow many topics to pass WP:GNG

But both of those features are rare. In this case, I don't know whether the sources exist, but it is clear that the editors do not exist. WikiProject Villages in the Brooke Benefice, England has been edited only by its creator and by drive-by editors fixing categories etc. Its talk page Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Villages in the Brooke Benefice, England is a redlink, and Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:WikiProject Villages in the Brooke Benefice, England shwos only 18 links, all the results of edits by the project's creator User:Erik Sergeant. This seems to be a one-editor project ... and as noted at WikiProject Council/Guide, "Single-editor projects tend to have short lives."

WikiProject Council/Guide offers the bolded advice; A WikiProject is fundamentally a social construct: its success depends on its ability to function as a cohesive group of editors working towards a common goal. One editor may be a wonderfully `productive person, but is not a group.

Meanwhile, the broader-scope WikiProject East Anglia is at best semi-active. There is no need to crate a new collaboration space when the existing one is almost unused. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:02, 31 March 2020 (UTC) Redirection doesn't solve any problem, because it will then leave the talk pages with two instances of the WP:East Anglia banner, so the redirect will have to be removed just if it was still a template. So we're just left with redirects from a completely implausible search term, which would also help nobody, and would add clutter to the list of redirects to Template:WikiProject East Anglia, which means extra hassle for maintainers. I do appreciate your desire not to bite newcomers, but we can do so without cluttering up Wikipedia with memorialisations of mistakes like this 13-word page, and without being dragged into debate about a simple bit of cleanup. There's already far more words on this MFD page than on the project page, and I wish you paid as much attention to need for efficient resolution of simple issues as you do to memorialising 13 words written by a newcomer. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 01:22, 2 April 2020 (UTC) As to Wikipedia:WikiProject Villages in the Brooke Benefice, England will be perfectly fine as a redirect ... whaaat? In what way is that a remotely plausible search term? Sorry, but I am really am boggled by that assertion. This would be the sort of redirect that is deleted every day at WP:RFD. If the user returns and if they need advice, they will find it here at this MFD page, which linked from their talk page. They don't need their 13-word bypass of WP:COUNCIL to find this MFD page. And your preference for creating a redirect will actually make it significantly harder for them to find out what happened to their nano-project. If you leave it as a redlink, then if they follow a link to that page they will a link to the MFD ... but if you redirect it to WP:WikiProject East Anglia, the user will land on WP:WikiProject East Anglia with no clue why. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 01:59, 2 April 2020 (UTC) I have literally tens of thousands of deleted edits. Categories which were deleted, templates which were deleted, categories which were renamed before they were movable. Many of them deleted at my own request. It's no problem. We're creating an encyclopedia here, not a museum of the good-faith bad ideas of new editors. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 03:43, 2 April 2020 (UTC) The history is available on this page, and linked from the user's talk, so there is no obliteration. And yes, it is a bad idea to start a WikiProject without first seeking collaborators, and a bad idea to create a project then give up on en.wp the very next day, and a bad idea to create a project with such a tiny tiny scope. There's no sin in that error, which is all part of the learning curve ... but also no benefit to anyone in retaining it. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 04:03, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Keep, rework, and weave into WikiProject East Anglia. Too thin, and entirely within scope of WikiProject East Anglia. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:31, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
 * @SmokeyJoe, what exactly do you propose to "keep and merge"???
 * All five articles are already tagged with the banner of WikiProject East Anglia, so there is no point is merging that.
 * Apart from the assessment categories, the only page involved is the project's main page (WikiProject Villages in the Brooke Benefice, England), which contains nothing worth preserving.
 * So "merge" has exactly the same effect as deletion, just with a lot more work. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 11:41, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Redirect to the WikiProject. Let the author or another interest editor consider doing the merge.  I don’t really mean “keep”, sorry, but no need to delete. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:45, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
 * @SmokeyJoe, as I noted above, there is nothing to merge, and no value to be retained in redirects. This is not even a failed micro-project; it's a nano-project which never moved a milimetre off the drawing board before its creator User:Erik Sergeant gave up on Wikipedia the next day. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 22:28, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Still, it could be solved by redirection. Or by userfication. Why the need to hide the edit history? WP:BITE. Asserting that the editor will never return and so deserves little consideration is a self-fulfilling prophesy, and very bad practice. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:33, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
 * @SmokeyJoe, there's nothing WP:BITEy about saying "sorry, but this was not a good idea".
 * "sorry, but this was not a good idea" is a good thing to say, I never said that was biting. Biting is the needless deletion of the user's edit history.  Relevant policy is WP:ATD. Redirection can solve all of the problems.  The main page is a perfectly reasonable redirect title to leave behind, because it will help the user, and no one else will ever care.  If there was a page with an edit history under a title that is inappropriate to leave, then MoveWithoutRedirect.  I find MfD clutter arguments are almost always overstated.  What are the title that you thing need deletion?  Wikipedia:WikiProject Villages in the Brooke Benefice, England will be perfectly fine as a redirect.  I do not care to memorialise, but to ensure that when the user returns, they can continue, this time with some advice, and that advice is mainly to look first at WikiProject East Anglia.  For them to understand, they need context, and their edit history provides them and other the context.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:30, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
 * @SmokeyJoe, WP:ATD suggests alternatives to deletion, with a focus overwhelmingly on articles rather than on project pages. It does not require the use of those alternatives, especially on a page with only 13 words.
 * I never said it is a plausible search term. In fact, I no not believe in redirects are being helpful for searches, not since ~2007 when the Wikipedia internal search engine was improved.  It is a perfectly fine redirect for satisfying the authors mental and offline records of what they were doing.  For all others, redirects are cheap.  Break your tie between "redirect" and "search term", it is not logical.  They may follow the redlink, but I don't share your confidence in that.  But more importantly, they, and others who later interact with them, will follow their contribution history.  I do not agree to needless deletion of good-faith edits.  Move, archive, redirect, tidy, but do not delete needlessly.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:39, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
 * @SmokeyJoe, If the reader won't follow the redlink, then the redirect won't help them either, for the reasons I set out above.
 * The issue is retention of the user's edit history, for their reference, and for easy reference for other users, when the user returns, which is something we should anticipate and facilitate. Their edits were good faith attempts to improve the encyclopedia.  The idea was not "bad", just ill-fitting to an aspect of arcane Wikipedia culture. The WikiProject idea belongs inside another.  This is not a case for deletion.  I don't agree that the residual redirect causes any problem needing a solution, but if it does, then userfy without redirect, and redirect to WikiProject East Anglia.  Move, but don't delete their non-trivial edits.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:54, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
 * @SmokeyJoe, it's a non-content page with only 13 words. That's trivial.
 * I disagree that the user's start of a list of villages for article improvement should be considered "trivial". Retaining it is beneficial for the user, assuming they return, and they are more likely to edit again after returning if they earlier edits were afforded reasonable respect.  "Trivial" is easily read as insulting.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:11, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete Unfortunately, this has to be the outcome here. It's not as if the creator of the "project" is even still active, editing these articles, and around to defend keeping the wikiproject. It's a single person, a misguided new editor, who has not properly understood what the scale and scope of wikiprojects usually is. I take BrownHairedGirl's point that sometimes a niche project can survive if it has active editors, but we know that isn't the case here. I wouldn't even advocate merge/redirect, as it's not a project anybody is going to be searching for or clicking onto. That might have sounded blunt, but there is simply no future for this skeleton of a wikiproject.  Rcsprinter123    (warn)  19:24, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete - It appears that the originator came, left this turd, and departed. The turd does not appear to be useful.  Robert McClenon (talk) 03:47, 3 April 2020 (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.