User blog:Yambub/Page Deletions

27. Jan 2014

In case anyone is thinking "he dleted the Acid Rain page! What a fascist":  as an example of how thoroughly screwed up this wiki was when I started, here's a summary of the "Acid Rain Conservation" Category page:

• It has 99 sub-categories, including Plastics, Indium gallium aluminium nitride conservation‎, Transportation Recycling and Racing cars!
• 1,897 pages are in the category, including Dam failiure, De Rigeur Reusable Water Bottles, BMW and Beer
• There are 206 files in the category, including photos of various fashions, a hemp shirt, recycling logos and a NASA satellite.

Even a category as obscure as "1,1,1-Trichloroethane conservation" has 58 subcategories, 1,669 pages and 215 images (including a picture of a Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress). And these pages are themselves both subcategories of "Conservation". 

There are over 4,500 categories.

4. Jan 2015: 6,652 pages.

The vast majority of pages I am deleting are clearly irrelevant, but some are less clear. Here are some reasons:

1. Page title appears relevant (e.g. a make of hybrid car or an article about mining) but the article itself is a general article and not specialized to the theme of this wiki.
2. The article is copied from another site with all the internal links of that site converted into Wikia page links which do not exist, spawning loads of new pages, which are clearly not relevant to this wiki.
3. The article is full of dead links converted from wikipedia, which in turn causes the "wanted pages" list to become bloated and useless.
4. The article is part of a swathe of related articles copied en masse from wikipedia. Usually this is everything in a category, e.g. Minerals.

Some pages may be deleted that could be construed as relevant to this wiki if they were in a better form. I don't have time to go through all the dead links and links to other irrelevant pages, remove the thousands of added categories (most of which have no relevance to the article. If the poster wants such an article they can make it themselves. I am putting the reason for deletion as "off-topic" for all of them, because I don't have time to write a separate reason for all the thousands of such articles. "Off-topic" is close enough.

An example of point 4 above is Infobox:Minerals. The list "categories" attached to it links to hundreds of pages, most of which have the title (xxxxx) conservation. While energy conservation may seem relevant to this wiki, the list also includes "Fog Conservation" and "Acid Rain Conservation. The latter title doesn't exist anywhere else on the web because it doesn't mean anything.

Some pages with relevant titles were intitally actually composed and reseached by a contributor. They were overwritten by InsaneBot (usually Votaw) with wikipedia pages with the same title. I found a few, I don't know how many there are because it's impossible to go through the history of thousands of pages. 

I am just going through the list and deleting as fast as I can because

• I don't have time to read through each page to see if there is anytihng relevant
• All the pages have masses of dead links in the text
• All the pages have other massive category templates attached to them

So, I am just doing a quick visual check to see if it was actually composed by a Green Wiki contributor. If it's just a wikipedia page, it gets deleted. Obviously there may be errors, so if your article got deleted, please let me know.

Category Spam

Yambub (talk) 10:03, February 5, 2015 (UTC)  Transferring this text from the Clean-Up page as it is now fixed (mostly):

The categories are in such a mess it will probably be most efficient to just delete all the categories and start over. Anyone have a good understanding of how categories work? Loads of templates have been created and seem to be filling all the pages with links to categories that have little to do with the articles they are attached to.

It's not easy to figure out what's happening with these categories, but it's probably a result of copying over thousands of wikipedia pages with what seems to be some kind of mass url conversion from wikipedia to green wiki, Looking at the latest (relevant) page copied: Environmental impact of meat production, the page seems to have been copied verbatim but the links are changed from internal wikipedia links into links to this wiki, regardless of whether the pages exist or not. This then creates "wanted pages", and it seems like this is what Votaw was using as a guide to what pages to add next. I think the categories generate more categories and grow in the same way. The categories get added to templates which Votaw then adds to thousands of pages, and the templates keep growing. How else could Eco-Friendly Grilling get into a category like Calcium hydroxide conservation?