Especially this:

I really, really don't like the idea of removing the proof of people's legacy and contributions, because they earned it. Anyone who came here, posted and acted as part of the community for a couple of years, and left deserves to have their name and legacy remembered, no matter how much we now consider their name and legacy to be irrelevant.

But… people, its not that hard. We don't need a complete rework of how author pages are done. They're side projects for us to be silly while actually holding a list of our work. Lots of people have taken to keeping records of their failed stuff there too. And, hey! Sometimes people get left behind and lose all their articles and tales to the sands of time. That's okay, there's no reason to punish further. The member pages are usually silly and harmless.

And I'm not interested in deleting 'historical' pages to keep on top of edge cases. That's unnecessary.

I still don't know who the edge case was whose member page is/was floundering, but I'm inclined to just say "let them keep the damn page, maybe they'll do some collabs in the future or do a couple tales that will stick". They had 3 articles at one point.

The only cases I could see a member page be called for deletion is if they have literally nothing but an empty list of failed articles.

I can't recall how I felt during past discussions regarding author pages, and I've probably changed my mind since then. Nonetheless I'm going to say this is my position now, leave the author pages as they are and just deal with edge cases if you still think its absolutely necessary.

Additionally, -ARCing the pages will have the opposite effect of what people suggesting -ARCing will want. It's effectively calling for the removal from a larger page of sources and placement on a smaller page, which has a higher level of prominence and is linked in several places. You're going to be calling attention to pages you were planning to sweep under the rug. Furthermore, a big point of -ARCing in recent years has been less for the purposes of "It's in a story" and more for the purposes of "We like the idea, and we want it back on the site in better form." In fact, we've had two or three attempts at such a process within staff, with middling success. These would be Archived Pages with literally no chance of return to the site proper, which goes against recent Archiving philosophies.

The number of cases where this pops up is small, extremely small, absurdly small for the amount of discussion we've currently spent on the topic.

On the case of "historical pages," we have thirteen total author pages (see the link in Crayne's post above) which would be up for deletion. They all belong to people who, in their time on the site, were authors of several pages, many of which didn't age well. They all qualify as historically significant, because they were writing at a time when the site was fresh, new, and changing rapidly into what it is today. I really, really don't like the idea of removing the proof of people's legacy and contributions, because they earned it. Anyone who came here, posted and acted as part of the community for a couple of years, and left deserves to have their name and legacy remembered, no matter how much we now consider their name and legacy to be irrelevant.

If you're wanting to apply new standards to the creation of author pages, then by all means, do so. But you're calling for the deletion of a dozen pages for people who, for the most part, are not here to defend themselves or make their wishes known. I am all for the protection and preservation of author pages, regardless of how much you like/dislike the author or their current number of pages on the site, so long as those pages have some sort of content.

As an aside: going through the author pages when I first joined was one of the things that convinced me to actually stick around. I thought they were fun, and I decided I wanted one myself. Then I started working for it. It's a goal for users, and it pulls in contributions. Why not make more goals instead of moving the only inherent posts we have back even further?

The maliciously part only exists in the context of the deletion process. Without that context, it's just downvoting.

Edit: As Wogglebug pointed out, there is ample opportunity to maliciously downvote any page if you do so as a FUCK YOU to the author. However, there isn't really a way to prove this, and thát, coupled with the fact that the normal context is missing, renders the whole thing moot in my book.

1. The creation of author pages and the requirements therefor.
2. How to handle author pages that don't meet those criteria anymore

1) Clef's proposal of having three articles or tales up for a week is good, but I'd prefer the caveat that they need to stay above 0 be added. Regardless of the deletion threshold, if you can't keep an article above 0, it's probably going to sink.

2) I'd support opening deletion votes for author pages that don't meet the basic three article criterium, as long as we give authors a chance to bring them up to spec. I'd say a week to add a new article or tale isn't pushing it. I can alter the deletion timers to include an option for this. Also, I'd leave staff the option to -ARC author pages that don't meet requirements anymore, but are by authors who played a role in the early years of the wiki (as moose proposes.)

…or else Arc those. Either works.

If we were to revise the requirements, I'd aim for the "three positively rated articles that are on-site for at least a week" requirement. Grandfather in the old stuff for now, but after a grace period of about a month or so, every page gets judged the same way. Gives enough time for borderline pages to be edited and brought up to standard, but doesn't mean we need to keep up a double standard in perpetua.

Then I read Reject's link. My chief objection to that is I don't think that people should be taking author pages seriously, and if you intend for it to be a story about your avatar, then it ought to be just reworked into a personnel file tale or something. Author pages are, to my understanding, a consolidation of your work for the site, nothing more.

/$0.02

Not to be contrary to Crayne, but I really believe that every wiki page should be protected from this regardless. Whether or not the downvote has weight is not the issue, it's do we as staff, abstain from taking action against this behavior if it's pages we don't patrol?

To clarify, it's not known if that's evident in the author page I referenced, again that's not the issue I'm discussing. I'd like to hear how other staff feel about why we don't take this seriously enough. Personally, I feel that it needs to be squashed wherever evident because it'd be a thing that could turn ugly real fast and be almost impossible to manage (that's my own opinion, take it with a grain of salt).

Posting this here because it's a derivative of the whole author page argument.

As an aside, I feel that author pages should be a reward for those members who actively contribute to the wiki. This influences my thoughts on the matters to a large degree. That said, there are a few things I'd like to see happen/talked about.

1. I'd like to see it explicitly clarified that new author pages made when the articles listed have only recently been posted and/or are skirting the negatives, can be subject to deletion if those works do not survive. I'm fine with people being enthusiastic, but I feel it's patently unfair to leave those pages around with fewer than the required three pages when there's members out there who've written one or two very successful works, yet can't make an author page.
2. I'd also like it explicitly clarified that point 1 only concerns new author pages, and that older pages may be left up as they may contain site history. I'd also like to look at the pages listed under the link above on a case-by-case basis.
3. If author pages are not subject to normal deletion for falling below the deletion threshold, I have no idea why we'd have rating modules on them. It's not a big thing, but having a rating module on a page gives the impression that a member's vote matters. As it doesn't in the slightest, I really don't see the use.

In the past I've argued for the outright deletion of those pages not meeting criteria anymore (something about keeping things tidy and being consistent), but I've since changed my mind on that one. I can see how author pages are a part of site history and should be kept around if only for that.

As for the suggestions of adding a requirement that pages stay up for an arbitrary length of time, or reach a certain rating, neither of those would guarantee that the page wouldn't fall below those requirements at a later stage, and therefor don't really solve anything. As long as we are explicit about the fact that we reserve the right to deletion author pages that don't carry site history and fall below requirements, I'm good.

If we had to go with a requirement, I'd agree with Reject's proposal, with, as Tuomey suggested, old users grandfathered in.

On the other hand though…..I'd also like to require that if a person's works later get deleted and they fall below the 3 item threshold, that there be some kind of push given to them to post additional surviving works, else risk losing their author page, regardless of how long they've had it. Say someone has three articles that survive today, but 6 months from now all of them fall and go away. No entries, but an author page? This obviously isn't a common scenario and might be getting a tad bureaucratic at that point, but it came to mind.

The bad news is, I'm delegating the task to you, cause you spoke up about it.

The better news is you can still delegate it further down!

This also kind of makes me wanna measure how long, on average, pages stay on the first page of Most Recently Created.

Now yes, this is an edge case, but after some discussion in chat, how does updating the rules to say "3 articles rated at least +10" sound? Once an article has reached that point, it's unlikely (though not impossible) for it to drop back into deletion threshold.