[Vim-l] Deleting tips

[John Beckett]

Tom Purl wrote:
> This all sounds pretty good to me.  The only thing I would
> recommend is that we wait longer than a week to delete a tip.
> The original author may be on vacation or sick, and not see
> the message.  Maybe we should wait a month?

A month is ok. I suggested a week so readers would get some
sense of urgency, and to help the person proposing the delete to
not forget about it. However, a month is more fair.

I realise only a handful of people are reading this, and there
is a natural tendency to put it all off, but could I ask you
(Tom) to please develop a process for performing deletes. We can
later ask the vim mailing list what they think.

Suggestion:
- On the Community Portal page, make a new second point:
   For how to edit, see [[whatever|the tip editing guide]].
- Move the "If you need help editing..." point to the new page.
- The new page would be a quick intro, and list of links to
  other pages with the community views on procedures.
- One link would be "Policy and procedure for deleting tips".
- I'll suggest some other policy/procedure pages later.

I would be happy to help with wording, but I want someone more
experienced with a wiki to set up the structure.

For a delete policy, I would suggest a couple of paras saying
that the aim is to fix the tips so new users would want to
browse them. That's too hard if there are lots of obsolete or
misguided tips. I would come up with more reasons for why
deleting is good if I thought anyone would read them<g>.

Then we need a precise delete procedure. See my earlier message
for ideas. One thing I don't know is how to actually delete a
tip when its time is up. Perhaps a message on vim-l for a sysop?

If we were to delete tip 124, I'm now thinking we need a
"deleted" template for the redirect page:

http://vim.wikia.com/index.php?title=VimTip124&redirect=no

There would be a standard statement that the tip had been
deleted. It would have a link to the original tip from vim.org,
and links to the previous (tip 123) and next (tip 125) pages.

Then we wouldn't have to adjust many links when deleting.

There will be some tips we don't want to delete, but we don't
think much of them (or they're good, but apply to obsolete
versions). In that case, we could add a deprecated template:

http://vim.wikia.com/index.php?title=Forum:Deprecated_tips&t=20070617055416

John