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Add option to remove associated talk pages in Special:Nuke
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Description

User story: As a Wikipedia administrator, I want to delete all talk pages associated with pages I'm deleting in Nuke, so that I don't need to delete them manually and individually afterwards.

When deleting pages with Special:Nuke, only the pages created by the targeted user are deleted. This extends to not deleting talk pages for deleted pages. In almost all cases, when a page is deleted, its associated talk page should also be deleted. This generates additional manual work for administrators. We could instead provide an option to delete associated talk pages when running Nuke, regardless of who actually created the talk page.

To do this we can add a simple checkbox to the form with the text "Delete associated talk pages". The checkbox should be unselected by default. Assuming the current design of the page (non-Codex), the option should be placed between the 'Other/additional reason' text field and the 'Select: All, None, Invert' line, with appropriate spacing.

If the checkbox is selected, when deleting pages, the discussion page for each should additionally be deleted.

The edit summary for these additional deletions should prepend Delete-talk-summary-prefix to clarify the action being taken, in the same way as for individual page deletions.

Proposed design

Indented checkboxes_.png (993×1 px, 74 KB)

Original description
I would like to request an addition to Special:Nuke which will add a checkbox to permit deletion of associated talk pages for any pages being nuked. There was recently a user on en.wiki which required a Nuke per policy, but their 100+ pages also had talk pages which were rendered irrelevant after the Nuke and had to be removed manually.

Event Timeline

Nakon raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.
Nakon updated the task description. (Show Details)
Nakon added a project: MediaWiki-Special-pages.
Nakon subscribed.
Aklapper triaged this task as Lowest priority.Apr 11 2015, 10:59 AM

Some top of mind questions we'd need to answer to tackle this:

  • The default edit summary, "Mass deletion of pages added by ..." doesn't exactly apply to talk pages - the page isn't added by this user, it's just a related page. What edit summary should we use for associated talk pages?
  • How do we present the option to delete talk pages? A checkbox that applies to all pages below? It could check/uncheck all the not-created-by-this-user talk pages in the list.
  • How should talk pages be displayed in the list of pages to be deleted? It might make sense to display them differently to other pages to make clear these are associated pages, not pages directly created by the user.

Some top of mind questions we'd need to answer to tackle this:

  • The default edit summary, "Mass deletion of pages added by ..." doesn't exactly apply to talk pages - the page isn't added by this user, it's just a related page. What edit summary should we use for associated talk pages?

We could simply prepend text like "Deleting associated talk page - " to the selected/entered deletion reason.

Normal page:
(G2: Test page: Mass deletion of pages added by Samwalton9)

Talk page:
(Deleting associated talk page - G2: Test page: Mass deletion of pages added by Samwalton9)

  • How do we present the option to delete talk pages? A checkbox that applies to all pages below? It could check/uncheck all the not-created-by-this-user talk pages in the list.

If we present all associated discussion pages as checkboxes in the list in some way, we could add a checkbox at the top which says "Also delete associated talk pages" and have this control those checkboxes specifically.

Screenshot 2024-05-03 at 12.38.33.png (518×1 px, 78 KB)

New question: Should this checkbox be on the initial form too, or only once you've brought up a list of pages? If the latter, should discussion pages be selected by default or not? I'm inclined to say not, as this is probably unexpected behaviour.

  • How should talk pages be displayed in the list of pages to be deleted? It might make sense to display them differently to other pages to make clear these are associated pages, not pages directly created by the user.

We decided not to display them - the primary purpose of doing so would be to facilitate deselecting specific pages, but we (and two other admins I spoke to) couldn't think of circumstances where deleting a page but not the associated talk page would be helpful.

The downsides of live-commenting your thought process at a Hackathon is that the back-and-forth is fully documented. Since my last comment we went back and forth on a bunch of options and explorations and spoke to ~5 admins to get their feedback. I'm going to update the ticket description based on what we've decided.

Samwalton9-WMF raised the priority of this task from Lowest to Needs Triage.May 3 2024, 2:48 PM
Samwalton9-WMF updated the task description. (Show Details)
  • The default edit summary, "Mass deletion of pages added by ..." doesn't exactly apply to talk pages - the page isn't added by this user, it's just a related page. What edit summary should we use for associated talk pages?

Apologies if I'm stating the obvious here, but could MediaWiki:Delete-talk-summary-prefix be used for this?

  • The default edit summary, "Mass deletion of pages added by ..." doesn't exactly apply to talk pages - the page isn't added by this user, it's just a related page. What edit summary should we use for associated talk pages?

Apologies if I'm stating the obvious here, but could MediaWiki:Delete-talk-summary-prefix be used for this?

This is a great idea! I didn't realise this existed - it definitely makes sense to re-use this.

Samwalton9-WMF renamed this task from Add option to remove associated talk pages to Special:Nuke to Add option to remove associated talk pages in Special:Nuke.May 5 2024, 8:25 AM