Template:Venezuela Squad 1990 FIBA World Championship ( talk| | history| logs| links| watch) ( XfD| restore)

I believe the above templates were deleted out-of-process and that administrative tools were misused.

In May 2019, 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup and 1998/2006 FIBA Basketball World Cup-related templates were deleted as a result of Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2019 May 8#Template:Angola Squad 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup. Three days ago, the templates listed above were tagged for speedy deletion as {{ db-g4}} by Sawol, and the link discussion was cited for the removal of the templates. Several of these templates were created several years ago, some over a decade ago. They were not part of the aforementioned deletion discussion, so the speedy deletion of these templates should have declined and deferred to WP:TFD. However, they were deleted by Anthony Bradbury.

WP:CSD criteria have very narrow definitions and are not particularly open to interpretation. The templates deleted failed to meet several aspects to qualify for speedy deletion under G4. They were not: a) recreations of templates that were previously deleted; b) sufficiently identical copies of content previously deleted material; c) previously deleted as a result of a deletion discussion. The deletion of these templates appear to be out-of-process. I asked for clarification on the deleting administrator's talk page, who believes the deletions the deletions were fine based on his interpretation of policy. I explained my points, and attempted to gather insight regarding his understanding of policy by providing a different example. The responses I received were underwhelming and don't appear to attempt to adequately explain how policy was applicable in this situation. He refused to comment on the example I provided because it was from 10 years ago, but somehow felt that deleting templates under G4 based on a discussion that never took place can fly. I would like the community's input regarding the matter, as I believe these deletions should be overturned as they do not meet CSD policy. Ə XPLICIT 10:51, 7 September 2019 (UTC) reply

• I don't know a ton about templates, but it very much looks like the deleting admin couldn't justify the deletion under anything other than an IAR-type argument. IAR is rarely appropriate for speedy deletions. My guess is that we'll end up in the same place, but this should be listed at TfD. That said, I'm hopeful the nom here has a reason to believe that the templates are useful and stand a snowballs chance of being kept at TfD rather than just objecting for form's sake. But undelete and list at TfD. (Normally I'm not fond of DRV listing something, but we can safely assume the speedy tagger wants these deleted). Hobit ( talk) 13:12, 7 September 2019 (UTC) reply
  • I, the deleting admin, have no argument here. I accept that the deletions were out of process, although I am pretty certain that WP:TfD would/will ultimately lead to deletion. I simply have not yet got round to what appeared to me to be a significantly time-consuming and non-urgent procedure. I deleted as a batch, but am not ware a way to batch-restore. Is this possible? If so, how? ---- Anthony Bradbury ^"talk" 16:18, 7 September 2019 (UTC) reply
    • Copy an undelete rationale to your clipboard, click on each of the "restore" links above, ctrl-v, enter, and rollback the speedy tags? — Cryptic 17:04, 7 September 2019 (UTC) reply
      • That will undelete the templates themselves. The ugly part is that when the templates got deleted, whatever script was used to do the deletion probably also removed the template from all the places it was used. That's the hard part to undo. -- RoySmith (talk) 17:44, 7 September 2019 (UTC) reply
        • Should mass-deletion scripts be required to have an undo function. — SmokeyJoe ( talk) 02:21, 8 September 2019 (UTC) reply
          • That would be nice, yes. But, it's not possible in the general case. Later changes might make it impossible to undo an earlier one in any rational way. That being said, there should be a simple way to "best effort undo" a mass action. The changes required can be triaged into 1) Trivial, so do them without human intervention, 2) Likely to be correct, so generate the likely change in an edit buffer which is presented to a human for confirmation, and 3) No clue how to proceed, in which case a human needs to evaluate what to do. In practice, a scheme like that will significantly reduce the amount of human effort required. This is a well known problem, and solutions similar to this exist for most version control systems. Now, we just need to get somebody to volunteer to code it up :-) -- RoySmith (talk) 14:50, 11 September 2019 (UTC) reply
• Overturn the deletion of all the templates not listed at the TfD. Is this all due to a procedural and script error/mistake? Maybe list at TfD without undeleting, if they are likely to be deleted. — SmokeyJoe ( talk) 02:19, 8 September 2019 (UTC) reply
• I agree with the OP that these templates don't qualify for speedy deletion because they aren't recreations of templates which were deleted at TfD. However the TfD rationale obviously applies to them, they would have been deleted at the TfD if the nominator had bothered to list them with the others and I don't see anybody here arguing that we should actually have these templates. As a result I don't think there's any point in listing them at TfD per WP:NOTBURO. Hut 8.5 11:16, 8 September 2019 (UTC) reply

• If they are relisted, having looked through the "precedent," I would make an argument for keeping them. SportingFlyer T· C 21:05, 9 September 2019 (UTC) reply

• Overturn and relist at TfD, as speedy deletion does not apply here. SportingFlyer T· C 04:45, 9 September 2019 (UTC) reply