Vim Tips Wiki:Delete guidelines

Vim Tip Guidelines
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In short

Remove unhelpful tips using deprecate, hide or delete.

Examples and explanations

Many tips are of doubtful value. Or perhaps a tip is great, but it is similar to another tip, and the two tips should be merged.

We need fairly ruthless pruning to make the Vim Tips wiki a valuable resource so newcomers don't have to read several poor tips before finding something useful.

Also, we want to focus the attention of contributors so they only work on useful tips, and don't waste time cleaning up material that should be deleted (because it's not helpful, or is obsolete, or is a duplicate).

We need to ensure that tip navigation works after a tip is deleted. Each imported tip has two pages: a VimTipNumber redirect page, and the actual tip page. Take tip 12 as an example:

• This is the redirect page
• This is the tip page, using its redirect
• This is the tip page, using its title

When viewing a tip, a navigation bar at the top allows you to view the previous or next tip. That navigation needs to keep working after a tip has been deleted.

We have not reached a general agreement on the best way to handle this situation. Here are some procedures to handle an unwanted tip:

• Deprecate Mark the tip as deprecated.
• Hide Request tip deletion, and change its redirect page.
• Delete Request tip deletion, and change its redirect page, and delete the tip.

You can use the Deprecated template if you think a tip should be retained, but you want to warn readers that the tip is obsolete. See Template:Deprecated for the template, and Category:Deprecated for the resulting category, with a list of deprecated tips.

If you think a tip should be deleted, please remove any [[Category:CategoryName]] lines from the tip to reduce clutter on the category lists.

Use Template:Removed to change the redirect page of a tip that has been deleted, or that you want to delete. If you're not ready to actually delete a tip, you can remove the tip from any categories and replace the contents of the redirect page using Template:Removed. The tip is not deleted, but it has effectively been removed.

Only an administrator can delete a tip. You can request deletion by putting {{Delete}} at the top of a tip.

That displays a prominent This page is a candidate for deletion box, and adds [[Category:Candidates for deletion]] to the tip. You can click the resulting link to see all to-be-deleted tips, and to discuss whether a tip should be deleted.

In doubtful cases, you might like to post a message on the vim_use mailing list. For example (make VimWiki the first word of the subject, and submit the URL):

Subject: VimWiki: delete tip 124

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/VimTip124 is simply a request for assistance. I think it should be deleted.