Wikipedia talk:Content removal

Regarding the "Impact of the discussion" section and 3RR
This would require a change in 3RR because under the current policy, "Legitimate content changes, adding or removing tags,  edits against consensus , and similar actions are  not exempt ." -- OlEnglish (Talk) 21:56, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I sometimes forget WP:IAR however. -- OlEnglish (Talk) 22:02, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

If this proposal ever becomes policy, 3RR would then be changed accordingly. Until then, it should remain the same.

Purpose of this proposal
The purpose of this proposal is to protect good-faith additions made to Wikipedia. Any and all information that is relevent to the article, sourced, and that does not fit any criteria under what Wikipedia is not should remain unless there is a concensus for it not to be present.

I would not expect that these removal discussions as I have proposed would be extremely common. Most often, information that is removed from articles fits into one of these seven categories for which no discussion would be needed. The remainder would only apply to the most controversial topics. Sebwite (talk) 04:38, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Unclear passage
It is not clear what is meant by "How consensus will prevail: If there are two editors who have a dispute over the presence of content, either can be guilty of a three-revert rule violation if they engage in an edit war. If a second editor steps in on one side, and two editors outnumber one, the reverts count collectively in the three-revert rule." It is unclear what is meant by "counts collectively." So if A says "The sky is azure" and B says "The sky is blue" then C joins in and says "The sky is azure," and the azure side (A and C) makes 4 reverts, are A and C guilty of breaking 3rr, so both get blocked (the reverts count collectively against both A and C) or is there safety in numbers, and they win the revert war? (Granted, they should all be more adult and work toward consensus. Edison (talk) 00:19, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Time to rethink wording of essay tag
The tag states Unless the definition of "guideline" has been changed, the word still means: advice, instruction, recommendation. Guidelines are precisely what this page provides. Additionally, WP:INAPPROPRIATE redirects to this page. So I think it is time to either change the wording of the essay tag (because it contradicts the contents of the page), or remove the essay tag from the page. Pyxis Solitary (talk) 11:20, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
 * "This essay contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays are not Wikipedia policies or guidelines."
 * As meta as it sounds, I'm calling WP:IRRELEVANT on this one. That tag is part of Template:Essay, so comments on the content of this tag should be posted to Template talk:Essay.
 * As to the merits of this argument, "guidelines" here refers to Wikipedia guidelines, which is defined at WP:GUIDES, the page the words "Wikipedia's policies or guidelines" in the tag links to. Therefore, the usual meaning of the word is irrelevant. TroyVan (talk) 15:34, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Talk page content removal
Am I allowed to delete a question that I wrote on a talk: page and that received no answers or should I leave it there to be answered or archived later on? Dominic inquisitive (talk) 21:35, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I've no idea whether there's any official view on this, but I find it helpful seeing the whole history of a page. An unanswered question on the talk page tells me to check whether there's a corresponding unfixed problem in the article. So I say leave it there. Musiconeologist (talk) 18:47, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Editing for conciseness
I noticed that this page is quite wordy in places, and have begun making edits for conciseness and clarity—in small doses so it's easy to see what I've done. This used to be my paid job and I'm taking great care not to remove any content, but you might want to double-check that I'm succeeding. Musiconeologist (talk) 21:57, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Headings
I realised that Reasons is a new section, not a subsection of Types of content removal, so have promoted it and all its subheadings by one level. I've also changed it to Reasons for content removal, which I think better suits the overall outline and is a more informative destination for links to land on. So they do indeed land on it, I've added an anchor with the old name, and checked that a link to content removal from my sandbox still works. Musiconeologist (talk) 01:39, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

Types of content removal: examples
At present there are examples of removing a word, and removing a sentence. I think an example of removing content by changing a word might be useful as well: for example changing a small town in Bavaria to a small town in Germany removes geographical information. There are probably more subtle examples too, where what looks like a harmless word change has more effect than intended. (In fact I recently corrected an edit which had changed a Fellow of the Royal Society to a fellow of the Royal Society—the uppercase F indicates that this is an official academic title, and lowercase can be seen as removing that information, quite apart from being straightforwardly incorrect.) Musiconeologist (talk) 00:25, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

Content removal versus page deletion
In order to distinguish clearly between content removal and page deletion (WP:Deletion policy), I propose replacing "delete" with "remove" when it refers to content removal. I believe that this applies to one instance in the lead. Also see User talk:Samuel Blanning/Blanking. Flatscan (talk) 04:23, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Seeing no objections in over a week, I replaced the one instance. Flatscan (talk) 04:35, 23 June 2022 (UTC)