# Should Wikiversity allow pages in Draft namespace to stay there indefinitely?

Should Wikiversity allow pages in Draft namespace to stay there indefinitely rather than being deleted, except for overriding cases such as copyright violation, attacks on persons, etc.?

## Wikiversity should allow pages in Draft namespace to stay there indefinitely
### Pro

* Pro People are likely to be more motivated to contribute if they know that their contributions are less likely to be completely deleted. For example, if one creates a writeup and only places it to Wikiversity, it is good to know one can retrieve the writeup much later without help from administrators. This is especially important given that Wikiversity has no specific/non-vague inclusion criteria.
** Objection User space can serve the purpose; one does not need the Draft namespace.
*** Objection User space does not work for pages with multiple major contributors.
**** Objection For pages with multiple major contributors, the most important one could be chosen, or any one could be arbitrarily chosen, and these contributors would still have access to their past writing in the user space.
***** Objection That is rather cumbersome, adding cognitive/investigative cost to the administration while delivering no clear value.
* Pro Having the quasi-deleted pages visible to everyone rather than only administrators greatly increases auditability of the deletion process: any outsider can review the quasi-deleted pages and raise a concern e.g. about pages being deleted when they should stay in the mainspace.
* Pro Wikiversity has been around for years and will almost certainly continue to be around for years. A apparently-abandoned draft still present may draw random attention from passersby years later and get pushed over the finish line which wouldn't have happened if it were deleted.
** Comment As an aside, this could work great for the English Wiktionary, if it would quasi-delete pages by moving them to Draft space. One could then expand the coverage of languages via Draft space, thereby working around the narrow mindset of all too many editors.
* Pro The proposal (indefinite survival of pages in the Draft space) could move people to more readily accept deletion/removal of low-quality mainspace material away from the mainspace, thereby contributing toward increase of quality of the mainspace.

### Con

* Con Wikipedia allows pages in its Draft namespace only for six months (about 180 days) after last edit.
** Objection Wikiversity has very different needs than Wikipedia, including learning by doing.
** Objection Wikipedia's "Drafts that have not been edited in six months may be deleted under criterion for speedy deletion G13" lacks tracing to a discussion and therefore it cannot be quickly verified whether it was based on sound arguments.
*** Objection See w:Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion/Archive 65#Expand G13 to cover ALL old drafts and w:Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion/Archive 48#Proposed new criterion: abandoned article drafts. The fact that the discussion isn't prominently linked does not invalidate it.
* Con Pages lingering in draft space indefinitely blurs the distinction between what is and is not a draft - providing a time limit forces/encourages a draft to continue developing and there to be an explicit point when it is done and moved to mainspace.
** Objection The distinction between a draft and non-draft is very clear/sharp rather than blurred: 1) drafts are not found via random function; 2) drafts are not full-text searched by default; 3) drafts are not indexed by Google.
* Con Every page needs maintenance to handle things like lint errors, changes to template code, the upcoming Parser Unification etc. None of this will need to be done if pages are deleted.
** Objection We could create a bot that blanks pages one or two years after they are archived. Wikiversity edits that violate copyright laws do not result in page deletion, so it is fair to say that blanking copyvios is sufficient for WMF purposes.
** Objection That is true in principle, but in practice, we would need to look at the actual quantity of the additional maintenance.
** Objection Editors checking lint errors can ignore the draft space to no detriment.
* Con If things get deleted eventually, there's less need for someone to manually sanity check drafts for things like copyvios since they will fall into the ether anyway. If they remain around forever then they someone will have to do stuff like that.