 | This is an essay on the deletion policy. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Transparent deletion is any method of deletion in which deletions are a normal part of article history, visible to all, rather than being a special case, visible only to administrators. Some Wikipedians believe that this method of deletion is preferable in many cases, and that hard-deletion is only desirable in cases of copyright violations, posting of personal information, or similar edits.
One obvious advantage to transparent deletion is in seeing what problem editors have been up to: under the current software, if someone has made ten junk articles that have all been deleted, there's no way to see this in their contributions.
The various experimental deletion methods are examples of transparent deletion.
Transparent deletion is similar to many of the original known methods of wiki deletion.