Too long!
I came to the page to copy and paste the admonition I use to mark pages, and was surprised to find it gone. It was deleted during a clean-up by ?AndrewSayers which also moved to transcluding content from DebianWiki/EditorGuide. IMHO, the end result is worse. The page doesn't need to describe policy for deleting pages; it's just meant to collect them. That's what the Editor Guide (etc.) are for! I don't have time to adjust this right now, but I intend to pair this back, remove the transclusion, explicitly link to ?EditorGuide for documentation and restore the admonition template I was looking for (here for convenience):
Proposed page deletion (example) This page duplicates data from the package metadata and/or archive, and will just fall out of date.
-- jmtd 2025-07-01 09:09:44
I'm also pushed for time, and probably won't be able to reply usefully until next week. Some notes:
The text <<include>>s the guide section instead of linking because I previously got the opposite complaint - that when someone is on the canonical page for a topic, they shouldn't be forced to click through to sundry other pages. I don't have a particularly strong opinion in general, but it's fair to say the current version of the page only caters to a deletion workflow at the expense of a proposal workflow, and I'd argue swapping that round would be as hard to justify as the current text. And anyway, it sounds like your problem is more about the absence of the text you want, rather than the presence of the text you don't want?
I moved the admonition template to the Editor Guide because the same template makes sense for e.g. CategoryRedundant. Other solutions include:
- have it in both places, and add a comment telling people to keep them in sync
<<include>> the section of the guide that shows the template, and put up with it being a bit generic
find some clever MoinMoin magic that approximates a MediaWiki-style template with parameters
The last one is by far my favourite, but I've yet to find a way to do it.
If you go for a solution that puts the admonition on this page, please do so in a way that shows the raw text to copy on the page (as in the editor guide) instead of an actual admonition (as above) - the former is easier to copy and makes it obvious at a glance that it's just a template, not an indication this page needs to be deleted.
-- ?AndrewSayers 2025-07-01 11:30:18