UESPWiki:Deletion Review/Oblivion:Roleplaying

This is an archive of past UESPWiki:Deletion Review discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page, except for maintenance such as updating links.

Oblivion:Roleplaying

Okay, instead of this piecemeal stuff, I'm nominating the whole lot of Oblivion:Roleplaying/Whatever pages for deletion, or possibly userfication if people think deletion is a bit too extreme. By doing these all one at a time, it's like we're saying that the rest of them are okay, and I don't want to encourage that. As long as there are any of these pages, people will continue to think it's okay to keep adding more of them, and we will continually be forced to go through the work of cleaning them up and/or going through more mass-deletions. (Rather than placing this tag onto every single one of the pages I'm nominating, I'm going to place it on the top of the Character Types section of the page. Keep in mind that this only means I'm nominating the section for deletion, not necessarily the whole page, though I'm honestly not crazy about the rest of what's on there either...) --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 12:55, 16 June 2008 (EDT)

• Partial Support - How can support be partial? Well, I believe while most Roleplaying articles are badly written and only make the entire collection less readable, there are a few articles that do not deserve to be deleted. A good example is Mages Guild Member. The article has several examples on daily activities, and gives details to a variety of subjects (e.g It tells you precisely what kind of clothing fits, instead of "dress like a mage"). If we remove all Roleplaying sub-articles, we will lost articles like these too. I'm not saying these articles don't require work to bring them up to standard, but I like to see that something good has come from this entire Roleplaying collection. I don't believe that this amount of work has resulted in nothing of value.
  My support is also conditional. If no one (else than me) is willing to review at least a part of the long list to see if there are articles that are worth keeping, than I think we should not blindly delete everything. So I hope a few people (I nominate myself as one of these) will step up and try to find if there are more articles that deserve to stay.
  Now, what Roleplaying articles deserve to stay? I believe a good Roleplaying article should describe a role that is directly related to the game and series. It should not be a stub. It must describe multiple possible daily activities, that are not all covered by regular game-playing. The information should be concrete and be specific to the role. Use of the console is not an immediate no, but if it is required, it should have a significant effect, but still easy to work with.
  In the end, I agree there are way too many Roleplaying articles, and I feel a lot of them should be deleted. I just don't want to have everything deleted without a level of reviewing. --Timenn < talk > 14:19, 16 June 2008 (EDT)

• Opposition I am quite strongly opposed to the idea of removing all of these, not least because i enjoy reading and writing them myself. However, I do believe a lot of them are in serious need of a cleanup, following the guidelines above. Some of them are, quite frankly, irrelevant and should be deleted, others, however are quite good and an excellent way to improve the experience of Oblivion. The-manta 14:30, 16 June 2008 (EDT)

• Support - Most of the roleplaying articles are no more than a few sentences or a paragraph thrown together. Nominating them one by one would certainly be a hassle. I also agree with Timenn, that there are a few really good ones. Maybe we can create a guideline on the page stating that a new entry must be more than a paragraph long, have day-to-day activities, and refrain from using console-only methods. There would be way fewer articles, which would make it easier to patroll and keep it up to wiki-standards. However, there can be problems to doing it this way. Some people may believe that other non-TES articles should be added and such. Others may oppose the deletions of some articles. And, it may actually be easier in the future to delete all of the articles. I'm torn on which strategy to use, so I'm just supporting for now. Vesna 14:35, 16 June 2008 (EDT)
  • I also believe that the entire page should not be deleted. Even if the sub-articles are, the simple roleplaying ideas section is helpful and mostly up-to-standards. Vesna 14:35, 16 June 2008 (EDT)

• Opposition Though many of the pages here are in good need of a clean-up I don't believe all of them should be deleted, after completing the game my initial reaction was to get a look at things to do when you're bored. however these get wearing after a while, when I found the roleplaying section i suddenly had new things to do, new schedules toadhere to new rules to follow. while some articles are poor there are some real gems hidden there, I believe that the deletion of this sector would reduce the reality of the game this section gives you ideas and i think it would be a shame to see these ideas lost for the sake of a couple of stubs. Yours sincerely Lewbot1 14:47, 16 June 2008 (EDT)

• Oppose - I agree with Timenn. Whilst some of the roleplays are amongst the worst pages on the site, some of the others aren't all bad. I've previously called for a full cull but having read most of the roleplays in the course of patrolling I've gradually come around. I think the piecemeal approach, whilst irritating for everyone, is exactly what's necessary to weed out the truly awful ones. Once they're gone it will hopefully allow people to focus on what's left and amalgamate / improve where necessary. At the moment there are simply too many ideas, which is making it impossible for people to determine when they need to create a new idea and when they could contribute to an existing one, and that's partly why things have got so out of control. So, whilst I'm opposing this deletion I'm in favour of people nominating other articles that they feel are substandard. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 14:52, 16 June 2008 (EDT)

• Not yet voting - Why don't we write out the above mentioned criteria, -conduct, specific clothing, schedule, etc.- and nominate the articles that are worth keeping? After that is done, delete the rest of them. That should be a more positive approach, focusing on the few good articles, instead of he bad ones, and a lot less voting. --Benould^•T•C 15:19, 16 June 2008 (EDT)

• Oppose. I do not agree that the entire set of roleplaying subpages qualify for mass deletion; there are individual subpages that we need to keep. If the deletion decision needs to be made on a case-by-case basis, then we need to evaluate and decide on each individual article, not treat them all as the same. That process cannot be done on a mass-deletion review like this.

For reference, the topic of what to do with poor-quality articles is an old one that has been discussed endlessly. For example, the multiple rounds at Curing Stupidity, and all of the other discussions linked from there. Although there may not be any final solution in all of those discussions, one message that I think comes out of it all is that simply deleting content is not a real solution.

The basic fact is that the roleplaying articles are useful to many readers. Personally, I do not use the roleplaying articles and I think many of the articles can be cleaned up (some deleted, some merged, all rewritten). But deciding whether to delete an article should not be based upon personal preferences. It should be decided based on what is best for the wiki and what is best for the wiki's readers. If there are readers who find the content useful, even if they are only a fraction of the readership, we do not help those readers by deleting the content.

And it is undeniable that many readers find the roleplaying articles useful. Not just based on number of times the page has been viewed or the number of articles that get created, but based upon what many readers have said. For example, The-manta's comments above, the feedback at Oblivion talk:Roleplaying, and the fact that it has been nominated (even if unsuccessfully) for Featured Article status. In addition, numerous editors have demonstrated that they care enough about the roleplaying articles to put a lot of effort into trying to clean up and improve the articles -- and, no, I don't mean the patrollers who feel compelled to do it, or the editors who just create their own personal page and disappear. But the new editors who routinely go through and clean up typos, add links, add images, etc. to articles that they did not create in the first palce.

Even from a practical basis, mass-deleting everything in the section will not work. It's comparable to the decision made at one point to "clean" the Glitches page by deleting everything that was there (good, bad, and ugly), protect the page, and then force all contributions to be added to Glitches/Proposed. What it accomplished was a lot of work long term for other editors who had to dig up and restore the useful content on the page, often in response to negative feedback by unhappy readers; and, it just shifted all of the new, poorly written contributions from one page to another. Basically, if people find an article useful, deleting it from a wiki will just shift the problem somewhere else because editors will want to restore the content. And any replacement content is likely to be of even lower quality, since it's starting from scratch instead of improving what we already have.

I do not even support userfying any remaining roleplaying subpages. These articles are not single-author articles. Nearly all of the articles have been incrementally improved by many contributors (if not in the current subpage history, then previously when the content was all on the main page). And I think if we really want to try to improve these articles and bring them up to wiki standard, then userfying them is completely counterproductive. We want as many editors as possible to work on improving the articles. We want the articles to be non-subjective and cover the topic in depth, based on many readers' experiences. Perhaps once we can establish a core number of quality roleplaying subpages we would then require any new contributions to be created as user articles then proposed for addition to the main page. But that's not where we're at right now; deciding what might be done in some speculative future would just side-track the current discussion.

Yes, we need to clean up the roleplaying section. The process will involve selective deletion of substantial content, but selective deletion is very different from indiscriminate mass deletion. There are many aspects of such a cleanup that may need to be discussed (what criteria do we use; how do we maintain the article long-term; etc). However, I don't think a deletion review page is the place for such discussion. The article's talk page would be a better place so that the reasoning behind criteria can be easily found by new editors. --Nephele^Talk 15:33, 16 June 2008 (EDT)

• Oppose If I thought this was a good idea, I would have done it myself. Decisions need to be made on a case by case basis, not in a Blitzkrieg assault on 30+ articles. In fact, if anyone proposes more role playing articles for deletion this week, I will vote against it. I hate the "nuke from orbit" method of cleaning, and I don't wish to make this into one. Nominating more articles for deletion is only going to insure that people don't take the time to consider each article individually.--Ratwar 20:59, 16 June 2008 (EDT)
• Support I agree that most of the the ideas really have no significance, but as explained before, there are a few good ones. Anyway, the whole lot should be deleted, possibly with a few good suggestions from some of the articles placed into other sections, or a section should be made called Suggestions or something of the like. If we decide to keep some of them, I do nominate myself for patrolling them, but honestly, the majority of them, if not all of them, sould be deleted.-Puddle ^{Talk•Contribs.} 20:34, 24 June 2008 (EDT)