• If you need help -- please feel free to ask! -- add a post at the bottom of my talk page.

• I am currently interested in expanding my duties on Wikipedia -- let me know if there's anything I can do!

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I am concerned about the deletion review process on Wikipedia.

I mean, it's great that there is one, but can anyone out there appreciate that quite a few articles are being deleted when they could very easily be amended?

Consider the article on Anal stretching for example. It was a fairly well collaborated article, but someone put it up for deletion review because it contained a small paragraph that almost read like a how-to guide.

Now, reading like a how-to guide is grounds for deletion on Wikipedia, but, it shouldn't be when

• a) only a small paragraph of an article is a how-to guide, and
  
• b) if it is fairly easy to fix.

And you know? Wikipedia seems to agree with me. In fact, (I didn't know this at first), there are templates you can add to an article that say

• This article or section was considered for deletion and requires cleanup per its AfD discussion. or
  
• The how-to sections in this article may be unencyclopedic. or
  
• Some of the information in this article may not be verified by reliable sources. It should be checked for inaccuracies and modified to cite reliable sources.
  

Isn't that fantastic!

But in the article on Anal stretching, not one, not even a single user or admin bothered to put up a single one of those tags. And as a few days passed and the Deletion Review committee saw that the article still looked like a how-to guide and still had bad referencing, they decided to delete it. Just like that.

I was rather shocked at first. I never thought the article would be deleted instead of fixed (read: amended).

But it seems a few admins on wikipedia prefer to delete articles instead of fixing them, which is a pity really, seems like they score brownie points for deleting seemingly problematic articles.

So when I discovered it had been just deleted, I thought, "Stuff it, I'll fix all those problems -- if I can -- I'll fix that paragraph that read like a how-to guide and I'll fix up the referencing.

So I tried. And half way through the post, another admin deleted the article on speedy-deletion, citing G4 (gibberish to most people) -- G4 is the rule that an article can be speedy-deleted if it's remarkably similar to an already-deleted version.

So, I of course just recreated it again, just 5 minutes after it had been redeleted, and I tried to -- once again -- fix the article. I fixed the how-to guide (I think) and added a wiki template saying "This article has bad referencing which needs to be fixed" etc.

But guess what!?

It was deleted, citing G4. but then...

the article was simply locked from recreation, meaning that neither I, nor anyone, can recreate the article!

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So here we have a topic that I think should be included in Wikipedia, that has been entirely removed and blocked, which can't be fixed.

So I say, well done admins! How smart of you!

Of course the admins will say that the article was deleted by consensus, but that doesn't mean that you should block it from being fixed, and not one of them will explain why it isn't a good idea to fix it instead of deleting it.

So spare some thought before you try improve articles at Wikipedia. There's a chance you'll just be met with bureaucracy and tunnel-vission. And this, on the best invention since 2000.

I love wikipedia, but I've just been very disappointed at this bureaucracy and philosophy to delete instead of amend. Wake up people! Wake up!

• If an editor/admin criticizes an article on AfD and it's a potentially fixable problem (such as reading like a how-to guide for example), that editor/admin should not get away with not putting up tags in the article to indicate the problem.
  

:It should be noted however that there are cases where a problem is unfixable, such as advertising etc

• When citing anything to do with G4 or SALTing in a discussion on AfD, an admin must provide a link to wikipolicy that explains what the hell it is.
  

:This should prevent misunderstandings when users try to recreate the article. I once thought articles were only deleted via AfD, didn't know you could enact something called G4

This constructive criticism about Wikipedia doesn't just exist in a vacuum, and if you have something constructive to say about it, you can do so here (although I will delete if it's not constructive) or on my talk page (I will not delete unless it's against policy).

{{User wikipedia/Administrator someday}}

{{User South Africa}}

{{User WikiProject South Africa}}

Was trying to figure out why the Main_Page doesn't say "Main Page" at the top of its article, and yet, all other pages on Wikipedia do.

Here's the solution:

Basically you have to fiddle with this. You place it at the very top of your article:

style="position:absolute; top:0; width:100%; background:#F8FCFF; color:#888;" valign="middle"

| Type your replacement heading text here

-just replace the color part with your desired colour, and

-replace "Type your replacement heading text here" with whatever content you want -- you can put a table there if you like, or a big heading using or

tags.

Problem solved.

Rfwoolf