Guidelines for preserving content edit
Recently I ran across an article on a very well-covered topic online (BOAI) which, despite being closely related to Wikipedia's core mission and edited in the past by many active editors, was redirected without a merge or discussion. That must be happening all the time on other articles -- older articles were created under different style guidelines, and often have fewer sources, more primary and tertiary sources, &c. It should also be easy to identify such removals (historically and in the feeds) as its own category of cleanup: preservation of historical work.
Here are some raw ideas for rules of thumb for how to preserve long-standing articles (please edit, refactor, comment at will):
POV: you run across a substantive article that's not up to current standards. Maybe it's an orphan, or has few secondary sources, or reads like the coverage of the topic that would show up in contemporary press releases.It's been around for a while, and already has a cleanup banner that hasn't been acted on in years. What do you do?
- Is it in a popular navbox? Discuss on the navbox talk.
- Is it otherwise linked to by more than 10 articles? Start a talk-page discussion about merging or rdr, perhaps ping the most popular of the inbound articles for visibility. (using
{{please see}}or similar) - Is it rated high-importance or at least a C-class article by its wikiprojects? Ping wikiproject for cleanup
- Has it been around for 5+ years with many authors? Ping past contributors on talk. There is no rush
a) You decide to delete.
- Prod. (Are existing guidelines sufficient to preserve old, substantive articles with few watchers today?)
- AfD w/ no comments. (" ")
b) You decide to merge.
- Is there an obvious merge target? (SOP: add template to source + target, integrate into appropriate section, wait modest period)
Article has no obvious merge target
- Is there no mention in possible targets? (alt: start discussion on merge target talk, or leave a "please see" notice there)
- Is there no good article to add a section about this? (alt: ping wikiproject if exists? talk of pages that link in? ping misc pump??)
c) No time to merge, it's a duplicate, an orphan, no content worth saving, just blank and redirect
- ... what were those past editors thinking? (ping them as with deletion)
- ... what's the rush? are you really sure this is the right solution?