Forum:Clutter on wanted pages

Forums → Hailing Frequencies → Clutter on wanted pages (Reply | Watch)

For some time now (ages!), the wanted pages have been littered with oodles of starship & class names which seem unlikely to ever be turned into articles. Unfortunately, that's the problem when folks create all kinds of such links, usually on templates, then never create the articles. To wit: USS Potedaia is currently at the top of the list, with 200 links. Has anyone else heard of Potedaia? I haven't. That even outranks Akyazi subclass (currently 95 links), of which I've seen many more mentions across the fan spectrum. And every time somone gets around to clearing one off the top of the list, the next automatically takes its place... and it's never-ending. I don't doubt the existence of those various ships, classes, marine strike groups, task forces, starbases & whatnot, in whatever fan sources they came from, but without that information handy to anyone other than the person(s) who created those links, and without time to do extensive web-searches (assuming such info can be found on the internet), it's difficult for anyone other than the person(s) to create the articles.

I've been contemplating how to clean it up, in order to get them off there, allowing other unwritten articles of probably more general interest to the ST fan community to move up & take precedence, like fan-film actors & so on. But, I'm not sure what's the best route/plan of action, short of removing those links from the templates... which seems the only way to go, yet might be inadvisable for the reason cited above. So: Does anyone have any ideas? Please share them here.

If after a period, say a week or two, there's no consensus on an alternative method, or the majority doesn't feel we should leave it as-is, I motion to remove the red-links from those templates. They can easily be reinserted when & if someone decides to write the articles, which is how it should have been done in the first place. If no clear majority opposes this, I'll start removing them, and/or Jrofeta can do so.

At the same time, a policy might be in order for dealing with this type of situation in the future, so that this doesn't keep happening. What do y'all think? – Sasoriza ^{Adm • Tlk} 03:59, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

How about creating a generic placeholder page, and redirecting links like USS Potedaia to it. I looked through the "what links here" page for that redlink, and only pages which bear the template link to it. For wanted articles like that - where no other data can be found to create even a stub - a generic placeholder that says something like "if you have any information regarding this starship, please edit this article" might be a good idea.

My guess is since Captainmike added it and a lot of these other ships to the templates, that it's from some obscure print source that isn't readily available online. That's just a guess, we can ask him. --TimPendragon 05:00, 28 October 2008 (UTC)