Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion/Speedy/Criteria

Misleading and confusing transclusion and subsequent redirect

On 20 November 2009 an editor transcluded a listing of the the criteria for deletion of categories from a discussion page into the policy page Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion instead of leaving them directly coded in the policy page. That transclusion lasted until 4 December 2013. This had several rather unfortunate consequences, including giving a very misleading impression of what the policy was like during that period to anyone looking at the history: if you look at an old version of the policy you see not what was policy at that time but a copy of what the transcluded page looks like now. It is made even more confusing by the fact that during that period the transcluded page was moved, so that at different stages in the history of the period different transcluded pages appear. Currently one of them is a redirect to a discussion page, and the other is a redirect to the policy page itself. During part of the history of the tranclusion period two different copies of the criteria for categories, from different periods in the history of the policy, both appear in what you will see if you look at an old revision. I wasted a huge amount of time wading through histories trying to figure out what was going on before I worked it all out, and it is virtually certain that there will be editors who simply read what appears in an old version of the history and believe that what they see is what policy was at the time, which is not true.

I am therefore going to remove the misleading redirects from the transcluded pages, and replaced it with a note summarising the situation (more briefly than I am doing here). The loss of the redirect from the pages will do no harm, as for the discussion page I will give links to the pages that the redirects currently target, so anyone reaching the page will be able to follow one of the links, thus reaching the same destination that the redirect would have taken them to. On the other hand anyone looking to see what the policy was like in the past will be informed where they can find that information for the "categories" section, rather than simply being shown the wrong version. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 20:20, 5 July 2018 (UTC)