User blog:Gideoncrawle/TEN THOUSAND

No, not 10,000 edits. That’s still a way off.

I have made over 10,000 deletions since the first of the year. I think we now know why I fell behind on my reading.

My deletion binge has had the following effects, among others:
 * 1) We now have 275 redirects, give or take, down from a peak of about 5500. That’s a 95% drop.
 * 2) We now have 14,000 image files, down from a peak of 15,600 a few weeks ago (after people added over 500 images in one day). Before that, my cleanup had kept the file count more or less constant for months, at a little over 15K, as people added new files at roughly the same rate as I deleted old ones. I’ve deleted substantially all unused files that were posted more than 21 months ago. Before I started, we had forgotten files that had been gathering virtual dust since the wiki’s earliest days.
 * 3) We now have slightly less than 5100 articles, down from a peak of about 6200. I’ve encountered stories (or, more commonly, fragments of story beginnings) that have been dead for three years and forgotten for nearly that long.

Of course, this wasn’t all my doing. Other admins have deleted things during the last five months, but none have been as relentless as I.

The reason why there were so many useless redirects is because of the way Wikia handles blog comments. The wiki software treats each blog comment as a single page; so any time somebody changes their user name and Wikia ports all their stuff to the new name, every comment on every one of the user’s blogs gets its own useless redirect.

''Every. Single. Bleeping. Comment.''

Fortunately, just as with the comments themselves, the blog comment redirects can’t survive without the equally useless “parent” redirect to the blog post. So, by just looking for redirects to the blog posts, I was able to slaughter the comment redirects by the crapload.

I suspect that all this adminly activity is the single biggest reason why I’ve been averaging about 350 edits per month since the first of the year (recently passing Brandon to become #6 on the edit count leaderboard) instead of my usual 250. I’ve been posting a lot of deletion notices on people’s talk pages.

So, there you have it. It’s ironic that part of the reason I initially resisted the idea of becoming an admin was because I didn’t think I could find the time to do the position justice.

But this is no time for complacency. In the course of hunting for dead fics, I discovered that one out of every six articles on this wiki--almost 900 in all--are 500 Bytes or less. Most of these are underdeveloped, "barely legal" character pages. Personally, I think we should tighten the rules governing how much content a character page must have, but that's another subject for another blog.