The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was No consensus to delete the content, consensus to delete the flow content-model - however this is not currently technically available. Should it become available in the future, then it may be converted to wikitext, plaintext, or any other format that will maintain attribution history. . — xaosflux ^Talk 02:36, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Breakfast/Flow archive[edit]

Administrator note Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Breakfast/Flow_archive_text is an example of an alternative - if it will not be used, whoever closes this, please delete. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:48, 21 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: I created and tagged WP:WikiProject_Breakfast/Flow_archive for deletion because the WMF mistakenly[1] put Full Protection on the linked Talk page, which is true target for deletion.

RFC - Remove Flow from WikiProject Breakfast? reached an affirmative consensus. The WMF converted all Flow discussions into Talk page discussions at WT:WikiProject_Breakfast. The Talk page and the Flow_archive contain identical content in wikitext/Flow formats. On Phabricator the WMF told me they were leaving deletion to us.[2]

I believe the Flow page essentially falls under speedy criteria WP:G6 Technical deletions as a duplicate, and arguably WP:G4 Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion (it is an "identical and unimproved copy", and an RFC to "remove" is a synonym for a deletion discussion for the Flow version). However Admin noticeboard pretty much concluded this unusual case was better to go through MFD.

I have previously run two MFDs covering three Flow pages which closed as deletes, and an admin MFD'd a fourth Flow page which also closed as delete. This leaves only two other Flow pages (1) inactive Wikiproject Hampshire with one Project-related post in the last half year and (2) the Flow testing page. Several editors&admins have been discussing an RFC to remove Flow from EnWiki completely. We decided to wait for resolution on the Village Pump Gather RFC. Alsee (talk) 20:21, 20 February 2016 (UTC) Alsee (talk) 20:21, 20 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It is an archive of contributions. The flow page needed to be removed to allow a normal discussion page to exist again. The Flow page isn't obstructing that anymore, and we should keep the history of the contributions to that page, which is not on the other page.--Müdigkeit (talk) 21:41, 20 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Suspended sentence of deletion. The Flow page is currently the only place where the detailed history of the discussions is kept. I Am Definitely Not A Lawyer, but heuristically, deleting the Flow page would break GFDL compliance, but we could probably get away with CC-BY-SA. Note that we don't require our pages to be GFDL compatible, but we license our edits under it anyway for maximum compatibility. It would have been better if the WMF had written a script which caused comments in the Flow page to be individual diffs in the converted history; there may yet be hope for this but I think this is unlikely.

Therefore I think we should keep the Flow archive for attribution purposes, but remarking that this should not be an obstacle to the complete uninstalling of Flow, and that if that course of action is decided upon, this page must of course also be deleted, and the outcome of this MFD should not obstruct that. BethNaught (talk) 21:51, 20 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Attribution only requires acknowledgement, not original system records. If the edits and their authors are able to be preserved as text, etc - that should suffice. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:56, 21 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps as such; Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Breakfast/Flow_archive_text. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:10, 21 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

xaosflux you should Speedy delete Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Breakfast/Flow_archive_text as the creator. The WMF already converted Flow into Wikitext at WT:WikiProject_Breakfast. What we were discussing was that the WMF could have created a history for WT:WikiProject_Breakfast, but decided that it wasn't worth their time to write the code to do so. Alsee (talk) 19:18, 21 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

All put a note up top - who ever closes this can delete it without nomination if not useful. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:48, 21 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep for now per my comments in the AN thread linked by Alsee. It is not doing any harm at the moment and it is desirable to keep a record of the history if at all possible. No prejudice against deletion if it ever gets in the way of turning off Flow on en. Jenks24 (talk) 10:06, 21 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Attribution is served by a copy of the text. Such a copy could have full protection applied if people really felt it necessary. Consensus was to remove Flow from the page entirely, not keep it around in a frozen state on a page copy. — Scott • talk 23:50, 21 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
As Nominator, I'd like to particularly endorse Scott's comment above. The WMF put Flow on the page as a trial, with an explicit promise to roll it back to a Talk page if the trial turned out unsatisfactory. In the WT:WikiProject Breakfast#RFC - Remove Flow from WikiProject Breakfast? it was my expectation, and I believe the expectation of probably all participants on both sides, that passing the RFC meant the Flow page would be gone.

On Phabricator the WMF said they could provide the Talk page with a proper history, but they decided that it wasn't worth their time to write that code for use on just one or two pages. If the issue of Talk page history is important we could ask the WMF to finish writing the conversion software. Based on the votes above "Suspended sentence of deletion" and "Keep for now", it seems there's general agreement that the current converted page is adequate and that it isn't really worth pestering the WMF to write a better converter. As that is the case, I believe we should follow through on the original RFC result and fully roll back the Flow Trial. We don't need the mess of having exactly one (or possibly two in the future) anomalous and inactive Flow pages. Alsee (talk) 19:57, 22 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

As for copyright, there isn't any reason to not delete the Flow page: any copyrightable content in the wikitext page is a comment, which is already signed. If someone added or altered content without signing, that must be a very minor contribution, not eligible for copyright. The history should be preserved for transparency, but the database is supposed to store deleted pages as well (until a database table is explicitly dropped) and devs swear that dumps work, so we only have to archive said dumps on archive.org when they are published. Nemo 21:46, 22 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Keep to serve as an example if anyone were to ask in the future what a Flow page looked like. A box can be added to the page making clear that this is the purpose, if desired. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:43, 14 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.