Wikipedia should avoid breaking links wherever possible. However, its community of alternate inclusionists and deletionists like to use the delete links quite a bit. Some interesting pages, collections, and fora are from time to time deleted, moved and deleted, transwikied to other sites that then disappear from the 'net, and otherwise hidden (often unintentionally).
This is a collection of things that have at some point been on Wikipedia, at some point been deleted or threatened with deletion, which I would like to preserve a link to. If you feel compelled by virtuous zeal to delete anything linked below, please let me know.
Fun edit
Games edit
At some point, Wikipedians played games on-wiki. Some delightful templates were designed for chess and go games. I think this is a fabulous idea; as of late 2006 it was out of vogue.
- The chess championship, featuring many WP heroes, was the culmination of WikiChess. It almost made it through a double-elimination 16-entry tournament before interest waned.
Design awards edit
- /User Page Award - 1 pg + 2 older archives + 2 talk pgs
- this was part of a series of projects encouraged by groups like Esperanza, which combined a desire to make editing fun for others with a sense of pride in their own importance to the project. The latter led to their being eventually disbanded; there was no strong justification for the deletion of the project pages, save a certain destructive momentum.
- We were unable to develop a suitable great award for good illustrations, even with motivation from philg in 2007.
Jokes edit
- Wikipedia:Silly Things is all that remains of the once-burgeoning Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense pages, which at one point had scores of subpages, along with a few "best of" compilations. Only the "best of" survived, the rest were pruned, and adding to the lists discouraged.
- In the vein of pools for when we would reach a certain number of edits, or what the topic would be, we have kept a "last topic" pool but deleted a number of 'surprisingly large' pools (for when we would reach billions of articles). At first, only the multiplicity of those pools was opposed; a single eleventy-billion pool was kept in parallel with the last topic pool. Then that too was deleted, despite its 500 contributions.
Community edit
Noticeboards edit
- An Advocacy noticeboard (never started, but see the hundreds of edits on the talk page - Jan 2011)
- a previous effort led to another deleted project page.
Pages with long histories edit
Some pages, despite hundreds or thousands of edits, get deleted in the end... official policy is that an article can be nommed for deletion quite often, and deleted over a 5-day period. So articles or topics opular in the past with people who do not visit regularly may be pruned. When I come across interesting articles that were so deleted in the end, I'll keep a list and history copy here, for nostalgia's sake.
- /List of songs about masturbation -- one of those bizarre and bizarrely well-tended pages that occasionally flourish. Showed up on today's AfD; had 1440 edits when deleted.
- /Thamesis - comic / online world with dedicated site and animation. deleted once its author moved from his original site to FB; 140 edits.