- Martin Süskind (talk|edit|history|logs|links|watch) (restore)
Underline formatting is mine.
Page created 2022-01-31T20:25:43 by Bestof2022, blocked in response to a 2022-03-01 ANI thread.
Speedy deletion reason: "G5: Created by a banned or blocked user (Friedjof) in violation of ban or block"
Last edit summary of the deleted page, me removing a fresh PROD, over 15 minutes before the speedy deletion happened: "It's not that easy. Regarding 'sock': The user wasn't blocked at the time of creation, on any account. Regarding NBIO, WP:NAUTHOR#1 may be satisfied per "Further reading" added now. Wikidata-linked to the German article. I don't generally oppose deleting the article, but I oppose doing so without a proper AfD discussion."
Well, this may have been overlooked! So I asked Dennis Brown on his talk page which block he was talking about. The specific question was not answered; I asked again. Turns out there is actually no such block.[1]
Okay, I said! If there's no actual speedy deletion reason, I will probably undelete the page (?!)...
I don't agree with unilaterally undeleting it. I think the spirit of policy is more important than the letter. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 13:47, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
Here's the spirit: Speedy deletion is for uncontroversial cases, the rest goes through a deletion discussion or stays on Wikipedia.
- "Speedy deletion is meant to remove pages that are so obviously inappropriate for Wikipedia that they have no chance of surviving a deletion discussion. Speedy deletion should not be used except in the most obvious cases." (WP:DELPOL#Speedy_deletion)
- "The criteria for speedy deletion (CSD) specify the only cases in which administrators have broad consensus to bypass deletion discussion" (WP:CSD, sentence 1)
- "Administrators should take care not to speedily delete pages or media except in the most obvious cases." (WP:CSD, lead)
- "[The G5 criterion] applies to pages created by banned or blocked users in violation of their ban or block, and that have no substantial edits by others." (WP:G5, sentence 1)
- "To qualify, the edit or page must have been made while the user was actually banned or blocked. A page created before the ban or block was imposed or after it was lifted will not qualify under this criterion." (WP:G5)
What kind of "policy spirit" can possibly be seen in the exact opposite of what the policies say and mean? The strong formatting is there for a reason. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 14:35, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Edge cases of G5 usually turn on why the article's creator was banned. Here, it's for - direct from the ANI section title - "socking, block evasion, vote stacking, copyvio, BLP problems", and their SPI also mentions they were banned from de: for source forgery. It's absolutely proper to speedy articles written by such a user even if that they were written before we noticed the problems. It's different if someone was banned for, say, edit warring or personal attacks or such. Endorse.That aside, if you've read the sources - and as a native German speaker, you're in a better position to do so than most - can confirm that the article is ok, and are willing to take full responsibility for the content, undeleting is fine too. —Cryptic 15:11, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- The article wasn't without problems; it did indeed suffer from at least one problem described at ANI: The title was mistranslated ("Süßkind"), and I moved it. There may be similar issues I haven't yet noticed, and they can be fixed. Or the entire article can be AfDd if there's a disagreement about the notability, which would be perfectly reasonable. But I'm a bit baffled both by the action and your "absolutely proper" unless you say it's an IAR action. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 16:32, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Well, since the user (sockmaster and sockpuppet) wasn't blocked when the article was made G5 doesn't apply, and one could argue that ToBeFree's edit was "substantial edits by others". On the other hand, if the article is written by someone blocked for copyright violations and source forgery, I would recommend a thorough check of the article before restoring it. So I am not going to say "overturn", but I can't quite say "endorse" either. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:51, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Obviously I endorse my own deletion. Given the source of creation, someone known to have BLP, copyright and other issues, I felt a deletion was in the best interest of Wikipedia. That they were blocked "late" doesn't mean that much to me. Call it IAR, or whatever you want, sometimes the best course of action is to comply with the spirit of the policy, or perhaps the goal of the policy, which I feel this does because of the unique situation we are in with the author. Normally I would not have deleted an article with this particular timing, this was the exception, again, due to the actor involved. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 17:46, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- It wasn't speedy eligible--that seems to be generally agreed. And I'm not a fan of IAR when it comes to speedies because there is no meaningful way for non-admins to even find these to object to. And we've seen a lot of abuse of CSD here, so it's not a theoretic issue. That said, if ever there was a case for it, this is it--we can't have copyright or source forgery around. But even so, I think AfD would have been a better choice--a note at the top of the article expressing concerns about possible issues would have been enough IMO. So overturn and send to AfD is where I'm at. If we're really concerned, we could blank the article during the AfD with a note explaining why. That would seem to address any issues. If you feel that creation by a sock later blocked for copyright/source forging should be a speedy criteria, propose it. But based on the existent wording, I think that option was considered and rejected. Hobit (talk) 23:53, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- In no circumstances should we undelete without an admin doing a copyvio check. That being said, from what I can tell here, I endorse the deletion on IAR grounds given the weight of what's gone on here. The easiest remedy available would be to recreate the article from scratch, if it's indeed a notable topic. SportingFlyer T·C 00:25, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- If G5 doesn't cover BLPs made by users banned at any time after CCI review... then it probably should. I do recall sometime in the past six months I had declared that I could not think of a single reason for an IAR speedy, but if this is covered neither by G5, G10, or G12... then I guess I was wrong. Jclemens (talk) 02:50, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Yeah. If someone is making content so bad we ban them isn't enough reason to delete that content without further discussion, then we aren't maintaining an encyclopedia; we're following the letter of the rule for no other reason than to follow the letter of the rule. —Cryptic 19:14, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Oh, I should probably have pointed this out earlier. The article wasn't a BLP at any time. Hut 8.5's copyright concerns below, finally actually citing a policy, are more convincing to me than BLP concerns in this specific case. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 14:20, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- This is...interesting, for a defintion of the word. I'm not in a position to do so myself, but could an(other) admin do a G12 check, as that would be a gordian knot method to resolve it. Like Hobit, I share the reticence on IAR speedies (my IAR in general is anomalous keeping, not deleting, but that's me) - but this is certainly a legitimate case. Hobit's proposal is probably the best means of trying to balance all our different policy goals, but it feels like it might be a needless bureaucratic generation (whereas I feel this DRV is well worth having), so maybe I'm "weak overturn to afd?" if there isn't a G12 issue. Nosebagbear (talk) 14:54, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- This user was banned for copyright infringement in translation. It's not a matter of googling likely-looking phrases. —Cryptic 19:14, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- The best answer here is to create a fresh article from scratch that we know doesn't infringe. Copyright infringing editors are a lot of work to clean up after, so we sometimes take pragmatic shortcuts including deletions that might not otherwise be strictly within criteria. I think this is justified because the infringing editor doesn't get the assumption of good faith everyone else does -- AGF doesn't survive the evidence of bad faith -- so the procedures that protect that editor's contributions from arbitrary deletion don't apply. German to English is a fairly easy language pair so this content was hardly irreplaceable.—S Marshall T/C 00:53, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- I agree that's best, but we have a (very) experienced editor asking for the material. And they are correct in that there is no relevant speedy criteria that this falls under (AFAICT). If they want to start there, I'm okay with it. And if folks want it deleted we all know where AfD is. I'm very conservative on IARs for CSDs, but I'll agree when there is no other choice. I've outlined what I think is a workable choice. I'd rather we follow our own rules rather than taking short cuts when it comes to a process as opaque to regular users as speedy deletions. Hobit (talk) 01:14, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- I haven't seen where he is asking for the material. He seems to simply be protesting the deletion, ie: this isn't about access, it's about procedure. Being an admin, he can already see the material even though it's deleted. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 01:21, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Well, I agree with Hobit that we should normally follow the procedures and it's DRV's role to see that they are followed. But WP:CCI has open cases from twelve years ago and their job is positively Augean. It really is a slog, in which violations that took thirty seconds to create need many hours to find and remove. Those people do a job I wouldn't volunteer for. I'm proud of Wikipedia's high standards on copyright, and I'm willing to support actions by the CCI team that I wouldn't support in other areas of our work. The thing is that we're here to write an encyclopaedia, not to steal one.This particular case is made much harder by the fact that it's an interlanguage copyvio. Those are really hard to work with even for an editor with dual fluency (because the way ToBeFree might translate a German phrase might not be exactly how I translate it). But we don't have a huge army of multilingual copyright investigators. On balance I feel that in such cases precautionary deletion can be the lesser evil. The alternative is to leave copyvios up indefinitely.—S Marshall T/C 11:12, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- If the conclusion of the discussion is that the deletion was fine, this list of remaining article creations may be next. It currently contains 53 pages that have been created by Bestof2022 but not yet deleted, and some of these page creations are current revisions. It's worth having this discussion, and yes, it's not about access. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 11:13, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Ugh. I don't want to say it was "fine". My position is that it was an acceptable shortcut with some collateral damage.—S Marshall T/C 11:20, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- (sorry, I didn't mean to imply any position specifically from you, in case that was the impression.) ~ ToBeFree (talk) 11:21, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Cases like this are always tough. It's rare that I would push policy to the breaking point, but sometimes it is the lesser of two evils. I think people here know me well enough to know I'm careful about what I delete, even when acting very boldly. So I completely understand and respect the couple here that disagree. As for the remaining 53 pages, of course I wouldn't support just rapidly deleting them, but I think it would be helpful if someone "adopted" the list and started going through them, not with a fine toothed comb, but well enough to be reasonably sure they aren't violating copyright law or BLP. If there is any question as to copyright status, they can be recreated in draft and merge/revdel or just deleted and recreated via CSD/AFD depending on the cirumstances. Part of this is not rewarding a sock, this is true, but the copyright issue overrides other concerns. Half of them might be fine, some may need a little revdel, and some may need removing. We don't know until we dig in. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 12:49, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- For the record, if it isn't obvious, I'm quite certain you did this because you were looking out for the best for the encyclopedia. I just feel you may have picked the greater of the two evils, but fully acknowledge this is anything but clear. Hobit (talk) 21:14, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- While this isn't technically a valid G5, the deletion is at least consistent with policy and it wouldn't be a good idea to restore it. Policy does allow the presumptive deletion of content added by people with a history of copyright problems, especially people with CCI cases (as this editor does). Since the copyright problems associated with this editor involve translation from German websites it would be difficult to establish that it isn't a copyright violation. Frankly it's not worth it, the article was fairly short and I'm sure an editor who isn't banned could write a non-copyvio version. If someone does want the sources in the article to help with that (all in German) I'd be happy to provide them. Hut 8.5 13:34, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- I should add that the correct procedure in this case would have been to blank it and list it at WP:CP for a week. This would almost certainly have led to deletion though unless it was completely rewritten. Hut 8.5 17:36, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- We shouldn't be using the techicalities of procedure to defeat substantial equity. Our rules on copyvio are important, and ndd to be interpreted strictly, but they equally need to be interpreted within their stated narrow limits, or they do not serve the encycopedia. When there;'s a substantial disagreement in good faith about how to proceed among established editors, a new discussion is needed. We can deal with the quantity of such discussions, because most similar requests are not in good faith and do not have to be-litigated.We know how to tell thew difference. DGG ( talk ) 08:28, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- I don't know whether G5 or G12 were met, or borderline. At the very least, list the references from the deleted article, perhaps here. The reference list carries no creative content and cannot be copyrighted and its reuse does not involve attribution to the blocked user. "Start from scratch" is unreasonably harsh, at least provide the references. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:49, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- All external links present in the deleted article's last revision:
- No offline-only references have been cited. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 13:56, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
|
