Requests for comment/mass deletes on swwiki

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The following request for comments is closed. The pages in question were undeleted, and there's no need for discussion to continue in this GRFC.

Hi, as admin at swwiki I came across a massdelete (over 900, see delete list here) done by a steward Tks4Fish sw:Mtumiaji:Tks4Fish on 24.09.2020 . We had not noticed it at that time. I checked a few of the deleted entries and brought them back like sw:Shojiro_Sugimura, or sw:Kiyoo_Kanda. I cannot see any fault with these articles; the lemmata are available on other wikipedias, too. I wrote to user:Tks4Fish and asked him to kindly tell us why he deleted and why he decided not to inform the swwiki community about a problem he may have seen (sw:Majadiliano_ya_mtumiaji:Tks4Fish, also by email). As I have not received any reaction for 3 days I come here to get some advice. -- Pending a possible reaction from Tks4Fish who might have seen a valid reason back then, I would like to ask: 1) what can we do to bring back such mass-deleted articles (unless typing our fingers off undeleting them one by one); 2) is it normal in your stewards world to act in a local wikipedia without any contact to the community? Kipala (talk) 15:55, 3 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Kipala! As I said in the email I just sent you, I've been fairly busy recently so I didn't have the time to reply to you. As for the deletions, I've massdeleted those articles as they were created by a crosswiki spam LTA. I also did that on some other wikis at the time. This is a normal-ish procedure when this happens on GS wikis, which swwiki is. I say "-ish" as some GS's/stewards don't but others do that. As for the other question, there is currently no native way to massively undelete pages. That could, however, be achieved with a script. Best, —Thanks for the fish! talk•contribs 14:57, 4 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, I don't oppose the undeletion of the pages, and can do it if it's wanted. —Thanks for the fish! talk•contribs 14:59, 4 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry for delay, I was traveling. So several of our people (and myself) checked a random number of pages and brought them back. We did not discover any reason to delete. Sources were correct in all checked cases. Thus I request you to kindly restore the said pages. What was the reason to delete anyway? (What is "LTA" and "GS wiki"?? ) Kipala (talk) 10:34, 11 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely. I'll get to restoring them. As for your questions, the reason for deleting was crosswiki spam. LTA stands for "long-term abuser", that is, a user with multiple accounts that have been locked yet new ones keep popping up to continue abusing the projects. GS wiki stands for wikis where global sysops can act. Best, —Thanks for the fish! talk•contribs 03:17, 19 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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