Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I think this is an interesting scenario where a 404 is actually better. 301 might not hurt but looking at the substance value which looks like nil in this case....there's actually no value in doing a 301. Granted that it can only help (and very very rarely hurt), but if it did not help the page itself,  there's no value there to redirect it to the other page and this is that rare case scenario where it "might" hurt to do a 301...so not worth the risk. Definitely delete and let it be a 404.

Well the content was written by specialists in respective areas but was not updated for long time. content was also very long between 1500-5000 words like a long essay. We are re-writing content but keeping it max 1000 words. The most valuable content that I have written is really long articles with a lot of photos, graphs and art to support it.  Chopping that down to 1000 words would be the very absolute last thing that I would do to fight a panda problem or solve any type of search engine issue.  It would be like throwing the treasure chest overboard! What else could be causing your panda problem?  I can't answer that but would consider duplicate content, thin content, ad density above the fold.  Or, maybe your problem is something other than panda? Has someone republished your content without your permission, have you given your content to article sites, maybe the content was not original when you placed it on site. Don't burn down your house to get rid of the mice.

Worked fine for me just now.