This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
This page discusses policies or guidelines of Wikipedia that are wrong, incomplete, or missing. While most policies and guidelines on Wikipedia are well-conceived, there are some instances where editors fight tooth-and-nail against policies that make sense or would help the community. This page is to be used in the gray areas where other editors have fought common sense, helpful information.
What speedy deletion is not
edit- Background: I have been patrolling new pages for a while
There's an entire page on what wikipedia is not; this is a policy describing such things as essay-writing, creating dictionary pages, creating how-to articles and others. Yet, when it comes to speedy deletion of articles, many of these "not" reasons aren't observed. Make sense? Absolutely not! There is a clear inconsistency on how new pages are handled:
I have found that essays and how-tos can be speedily deleted, but not not because they are essays or how-tos. An article named How to post a video to YouTube can be deleted as WP:A10, an article that doesn't expand on YouTube. Similarly, essays written about the dangers of smog (or something like this) can usually be deleted as WP:A10 duplicates of smog. Unfortunately, essays/how-tos that are written about non-existing topics cannot be so quickly deleted. |
- A new page "written like an advertisement" can be speedily deleted, under G11, as it requires a fundamental rewrite to become encyclopedic.
- A new page "written like an essay" or "how-to" cannot be speedily deleted, even though it would require a fundamental rewrite to become encyclopedic.
- Some admins use WP:IAR to delete the pure trash, while others don't. They all should.
In many cases, my recommendation to fix this would be WP:Criteria for speedy userfication, by which some articles are immediately userfied. This satisfies the people who want the junk articles immediately removed from the main namespace (me) and also people who, for some reason, want to keep the trash around (the current policy). Why can't we do this?
Why PROD is a waste of time
edit- Users often remove PROD tags on articles, with no improvement and no explanation. Yet this apparently means it's not possible to reapply PROD? Who voted on this?
Foreign redirects
editDid you know there is a category that includes redirects from other languages? Well there is! And there's absolutely no policy or guideline anywhere on Wikipedia that explains when it's valid to create a foreign redirect! (Despite my attempts.) This is absurd. So here is the guideline, and it is almost entirely true for existing articles/redirects:
- Proper nouns and titles, where the subject is originally from another language, can have foreign redirects from the original term. For example: Les Trois Mousquetaires→The Three Musketeers or 北京→Beijing are valid redirects.
- Other foreign redirects, aren't valid, almost without fail. Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a translation website, even though WP:R3 implies that foreign redirects are exempt from deletion. (Oh, and with no reason given!) So, invalid translations include any random translation of nouns: voiture→car, or motocicleta→motorcycle.