Proposal talk:Armory

Why do we delete proposals? I am in favor of keeping them and linking to them rather than moving the content to the discussion page of another feature. These pages together with their history and activity are part of the documentation, even in the case of rejected features, which btw. is not true for military=armory (36 uses as of 8/2018) —Dieterdreist (talk) 22:17, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for commenting. I am not a fan of such deletions either. Copying the content in this case was a step to avoid further edit war, check the history. We might need a discussion which objective criteria to apply for deletion. A proposal abandoned/rejected after hefty discussion is definitely on the keep side. Maybe something comparable to a few lines on a piece of scratch paper that did not gain anybody's interest, or somebody's own little draft, might be considered for deletion. Note the subjunctive. Where to draw the line is difficult as usual.--Polarbear w (talk) 10:00, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I agree there can be reasons for deletions, but I would see these cases as rather rare, compared to the subjectively rising number of proposed deletions I feel to encounter recently. If someone has set up a page, no-one else has commented or added information, and the author wants to remove it (and there are no objections), then it is surely ok, especially if they were online for a short period of time. I would be very reluctant to delete proposals in other cases. They can be archived, and should be linked from the feature definition page. Btw.: Kstaden only set the page to abandoned, she didn't create the proposal, and her only contribution ever to the OSM wiki was this kind of wiki fiddling: setting tens of proposals to abandoned (back in 2012, some of mine were among these, that's why I noticed). --Dieterdreist (talk) 11:14, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Dieterdreist, the few reasons I can think of are:

A. Often times proposal pages come up in the search before the tag does. Both here and in Google search

B. People might be more inclined to use an older abandoned tag just because there is a proposal page for it. Even if a newer tag might of replaced it.

C. If its an extremely old proposal that never had any discussion or never went anywhere there might be advantage to deleting it in the off chance that someone might want to propose the same thing in the future, which could create new discussions, but might be put off from doing so by the fact that it was already proposed but never went anywhere. Therefore, deleting them in that case is like pruning the branches so new, better ones can grow in their place. If there was no "productive" discussion on the proposal etc there is no point in keeping it anyway. It just acts like dead branches that clutter up the ground so to speak.

D. Essentially empty proposal pages clutter up their category pages and make it hard to find legitimate proposals. There are also some problems with status. What status should be used on what proposal and how it should noted on the tags page. Which getting rid of the old never revisited proposals might help with.

Archiving them might deal with the problem of people mistaking it for a legitimate tag, although I don't know if it would necessarily, but there is no evidence that I have been able to find that it helps pages to not come up on top in searches when they shouldn't. I thought about proposing on Github some way of sorting searches by proposal status or something, but I haven't gotten that far yet. Perhaps that would deal with it. The other issues, I don't know about. Deleting the proposals seems like the best option to me and I see no compelling reason by Polarbearing or the few others who disagree not to delete them. Other people agree with me also. Although I agree with him that should be a threshold for what qualifies for deletion, its not clear what that threshold would be or who would decide it. Its kind of up to opinion what constitutes value. I don't think that means none should be deleted though. Especially considering the problems I noted. Even without those though some would still be worth deleting.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Adamant1 (talk • contribs) 11:22, 29 August 2018

For me, A-C aren’t valid cases for deletions. I acknowledge these are issues that could be dealt with, but removing the content is not the appropriate answer. D is about essentially empty proposal pages, and these might be up for deletion discussion, although the tag names already are quite significant in themselves, I agree a missing definition is critical.—Dieterdreist (talk) 21:51, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

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One and a half years later, I would suggest not to delete this page for the following reasons:

• The deletion was contested, so there is no agreement about deletion.
• EzekielT argued that they copied the content into their userspace, which sounds like they have agreed to keep the proposal.
• For the sake of consistency, it seems preferable to keep the content at this location.

If you want to voice your opinion, please do. Otherwise, I would restore version 1785057 on 2 April 2020 at the earliest and thereby decline this deletion request. To address the concerns of EzekielT, I would then archive the proposal using Template:Archived proposal. --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 20:32, 1 March 2020 (UTC)