Extension talk:PureWikiDeletion

Have you considered empty rather than a special string like #DELETED? Ashley Y 08:45, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
 * It's a possibility. Some editors have pointed out that #DELETED makes it clear that the intent is to delete rather than vandalize, but a vandal could just as easily replace all content with #DELETED. It saves keystrokes to use empty too. On the other hand, if we use #DELETED, then blanking is unnecessary; we can just add a #DELETED tag to the beginning of a page and leave the rest of the content, so that people don't have to dig through the history to find what was there. Then again, that possibility also exists with #REDIRECT, but in practice almost everyone replaces all the existing page content with #REDIRECT. Tisane 23:19, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Blanking should be logged?
The current spec says: The blanking of a page already appears on watchlists and recent changes, so I think this is redundant and unnecessary. However, it would probably be useful to be able to get a list of all blanked pages and filter and sort it by user and time of blanking, as we do with the deletion logs. So, I will create a special page with that functionality, and I figure out a way to filter the blanked pages out of AllPages. (Right now it shows up in AllPages as redlinks.) Tisane 09:24, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
 * The replacing of all content on a page with "#DELETED," or the removal of "#DELETED" from a page should be logged, and listed on watchlists and recent changes like the other logs (the move log, the protection log, etc.)

Are all these features necessary?

 * Blank pages will not show up in searches using Special:Search, random pages using Special:Randompage, or the list of all pages using Special:Allpages.
 * The URL prefix to a blank page should be listed in robots.txt, and the page will emit "noarchive" and "noindex" and "nofollow" tags, to prevent caching in search engines.

I can see why people wouldn't want it to show up in RandomPage or AllPages (although I haven't figured out yet how to implement that). But given that these pages are blanked, won't the external search engines stop directing people there anyway? Also, it still shows up in the internal search as "page title matches," but as a redlink. Maybe it's not so bad for it to continue showing up there. If it's a search term people are looking for a lot, maybe the article should remain there, or at least be a redirect? Maybe it should show up in search accompanied by the edit summary explaining why it was blanked. Tisane 12:42, 13 March 2010 (UTC)