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User:Rossami/GAFD temp

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This is the guide to Wikipedia's articles for deletion (AFD) process, one of several mechanisms by which objects are considered for removal from Wikimedia. The AFD process is an implementation mechanism of the Deletion policy for articles (as opposed to images, redirects, etc.). It is supported by the companion speedy deletion process.

You may have come here because an AFD deletion notice was applied to an article that you wrote. Please read this guide to see what happens now and how you can contribute to the process.

Overview

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For those not familiar with the deletion process, a brief synopsis:

  1. Anyone acting in good faith may challenge whether or not a particular article is appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia. They nominate the article.
  2. The community as a whole takes five days to discuss the nomination. All users are encouraged to present relevant facts and evidence in support of the discussion.
  3. At the end of the discussion period, an experienced Wikipedian will determine if a rough consensus was reached on the fate of the article and will "close" the discussion.

General advice

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Please do not take it personally

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Please remember that the deletion process is about the appropriateness of the article for inclusion in Wikipedia. A deletion nomination is not a rejection of the author or an attack on his/her value as a member of the Wikipedia community. Over time, the Wikipedians have invested a great deal of thought in the question of what should and should not be included. Please take the time to review those standards. Please do not take a nomination personally.

See:

Please be tolerant of others

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Please remember is that AFD is a busy and repetitive place. The people who volunteer to work the AFD process may seem terse, gruff and abrupt. They are not (usually) being intentionally rude. We value civility and always try to assume good faith. However, over a hundred articles are nominated for deletion each day. Experienced Wikipedians have been through thousands of deletion discussions and have read and thought through many of the same arguments many times before. For speed, some employ shorthands (described below) rather than typing out the same reasoning and arguments again and again. They are trying to be efficient, not rude.

Deletion discussions follow the normal Wikipedia talk page etiquette. Please be familiar with the policies of not biting the newcomers, Wikiquette, no personal attacks, and civility before contributing.

Sockpuppets are bad

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One exception to the principle of assume good faith concerns the use of sockpuppets. This tactic is commonly employed by vandals and bad-faith contributors who create multiple user accounts in an attempt to bias the decision process. A close variation is to enlist others from outside Wikipedia to "run in" (for example, if my vanity article on a web forum is up for deletion and I post a call for other forum members to "help keep our website in Wikipedia"). Signs of these tactics are that a contributor's account was created after discussion began, that a contributor has few edits or that a contributor's other edits have been vandalism. Other Wikipedians will draw attention to such facts.

Unfortunately, (vandalism aside) such cases are notoriously hard to distinguish from good-faith contributors writing their first article or from anonymous users who finally decide to log in. If someone does point out your light contribution history, please take it in the spirit it was intended - a fact to be weighed by the closing admin, not an attack on the person.

Because of our past problems, opinions offered by new or anonymous users are often met with suspicion and may be discounted during the closing process. This decision is made at the discretion of the closing admin after considering the contribution history and pattern of comments. In practice, civil comments and logical arguments are often given the benefit of doubt while hostile comments are presumed to be bad-faith. Please note that verifiable facts and evidence are welcome from anybody and will be considered during the closing process.

You may edit the article during the discussion

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You and others are welcome to continue editing the article during the discussion period. Indeed, if you can address the points raised during the discussion by improving the article, you are encouraged to edit a nominated article (noting in the discussion that you have done so if your edits are significant ones).

There are, however, a few restrictions upon how you may edit an article:

  • You must not blank the article (unless it is a copyvio).
  • You must not modify or remove the AFD notice.
  • You must not rename the article unless you rename the associated discussion page(s) in parallel and update the section headings on the discussion page(s) to note the old and new names.
  • You should not turn the article into a redirect. A functioning redirect will overwrite the AFD notice. It may also be interpreted as an attempt to "hide" the old content from scrutiny by the community.
  • You should exercise extreme caution before merging any part of the article. If you are bold but the community ultimately decides to delete the content, all your mergers must be undone. (This is necessary in order to remain compliant with the attribution history requirement of GFDL.) It is far better to wait until the discussion period is complete.

Deletion process

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Main article: Wikipedia:deletion policy

Deletion of articles from Wikipedia occurs through one of two processes. So-called speedy deletion involves the scrutiny of only a few people before an article is deleted. The allowable criteria for speedy-deletion are deliberately very narrow. Articles which do not meet those narrow criteria or which might be controversial are discussed by the community through the AFD process.

Nomination

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Before nominating an article please:

  • check the deletion policy to see what things are not reasons for deletion. Consider whether you actually want the article to be merged, expanded, or cleaned up rather than deleted, and use the appropriate mechanism instead of AFD.
  • investigate the possibility of rewriting the article yourself (or at least creating a stub on the topic and requesting expansion) instead of deleting it.
  • check the "what links here" link to see how the article is being used within Wikipedia.
  • check that what you wish to delete is an article. Templates, categories, images, redirects and pages not in the main article space (including user and Wikipedia namespace pages) have their own deletion processes separate from AFD.

If you still think the article should be deleted, you must nominate it and open the AFD discussion. Nomination is a three-stage process. Please carefully follow the instructions at the bottom of the Articles for deletion page. You must perform all three stages of the process. Nominations follow a very specific format because we transclude the discussion page onto a consolidated list of deletion discussions. This makes it more efficient for other participants to find the discussion and to determine if they have anything relevant to add. Incomplete nominations may be discarded or ignored. If you need help, ask.

Anyone can make a nomination including anonymous users. The nomination, however, must be in good faith. Nominations that are clearly vandalism may be discarded.

Nominations imply a recommendation to delete the article unless the nominator specifically says otherwise. (Some nominations are performed by experienced users on behalf of others, either because they are inexperienced with the AFD process or because the deletion recommendation was the result of a separate discussion.)

Discussion

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Discussion occurs on a dedicated discussion page, a sub-page of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion named after the article.

For consistency, the form for the discussion is a bulleted list below the nomination text. You may indent the discussion by using multiple bullets. Mixing of bullets and other forms of indentation is discouraged because it makes the discussion much harder for subsequent readers to follow.

Sign any contribution that you make by adding ~~~~ to the comment. Unsigned contributions may be discounted at the discretion of the volunteer who closes the discussion.

Anyone acting in good faith can contribute to the discussion. The author of the article can make his/her case like everyone else. As discussed above, relevant facts and evidence are welcome from anyone but the opinions of anonymous and/or suspiciously new users may be discounted by the closing admin. Please bear in mind that administrators will discount any obviously bad faith contributions to the discussion when closing the discussion. On the other hand, a user who makes a well-argued, fact-based case based upon Wikipedia policy and does so in a civil manner may well sway the discussion despite being anonymous.

Always explain your reasoning. This allows others to challenge or support facts, suggest compromises or identify alternative courses of action that might not yet have been considered. It also allows administrators to determine at the end of the discussion, whether your concerns have been addressed and whether your comments still apply if the article was significantly rewritten during the discussion period. "Votes" without rationales may be discounted at the discretion of the closing admin.

The purpose of the discussion is to achieve consensus upon a course of action. Individuals will express strong opinions and may even "vote". To the extent that voting occurs (see meta:Polls are evil), the votes are merely a means to gauge the degree of consensus reached so far. Wikipedia is not a democracy and majority voting is not the determining factor in whether a nomination succeeds or not.

Please do not "spam" the discussion with the same comment multiple times. Make your case clearly and let other users decide for themselves.

Experienced AFD participants re-visit discussions that they have already participated in. They are looking for new facts, evidence or changes to the article which might change their initial conclusion. In this situation, strike through your previous comment using <s>...</s> (if you are changing your mind) or to explicitly comment "no change" to confirm that you have considered the new evidence but remain unconvinced.

Do not remove or modify other people's comments even if you believe them to be in bad faith (unless the user has been banned from editing the relevant pages or is making a patently offensive personal attack). It is acceptable to correct the formatting in order to retain consistency with the bulleted indentation. It is also acceptable to note the contribution history of a new user or suspected sockpuppet as an aid to the closing admin.

Please do not refactor the discussion into lists or tables of votes, however much you may think that this helps the process. Both the context and the order of the comments are essential to understanding the intents of contributors, both at the discussion closure and during the discussion. Refactoring actually makes the job of making the decision at the closure of discussion much harder, not easier.

Closure

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Main articles: Wikipedia:Deletion guidelines for administrators and Wikipedia:Deletion process

After 5 days of discussion, a volunteer will move the day's list of deletion discussions from the active page to the /Old page. Depending on the backlog, it may sit there for several more days, during which it is still acceptable to add comments to the discussion. Another volunteer (the "closing admin") will review the article, carefully read the AFD discussion, weigh all the facts, evidence and arguments presented and determine if consensus was reached on the fate of the article.

The desired standard is rough consensus, not perfect consensus. Please also note that closing admins are expected and required to exercise their judgment in order to make sure that the decision complies with the spirit of all Wikipedia policy and with the project goal. A good admin will transparently explain how the decision was reached.

An AFD decision is either to "keep" or "delete" the article. That decision is "binding" in the sense that it represents our best understanding of the consensus and should not be casually overturned. Any decision can, of course, be challenged. An article that is "kept" can be renominated for deletion. An article that is "deleted" can be recreated. In practice, however, this should be done only with caution. If an article is renominated in the face of a recent and clear consensus to keep, it is likely to be shouted down as an abuse of the process. Likewise, the re-creation of substantially identical content to the deleted article is eligible for speedy-deletion. If you disagree with a decision, the best approach is to request a review at Wikipedia:Deletion Review.

Wikipedia considered and rejected strict limits for renominations, instead relying on the common sense of users. Unless you can show a substantial reason that will convince people to change their minds, you should not renominate until a reasonable time has passed. Note that this does not apply to a procedural renomination - for example, because a discussion was somehow overlooked and failed to reach consensus only through lack of participation.

AFD discussions which fail to reach rough consensus default to "keep". If, however, the fundamental concerns about the article remain unresolved after a reasonable period, it may be appropriate to renominate the article.

The AFD decision may also include a strong recommendation for an additional action such as a "merger" or "redirect". In many cases, the decision to "keep" or "delete" may be conditional on the community's acceptance of the additional action. These recommendations do represent the community consensus and also should not be overturned lightly. However, these are actions which can be taken by any editor and do not require "admin powers". If they are challenged, the decision should be discussed and decided on the respective article Talk pages. A second AFD discussion is unnecessary.

The discussion is preserved for future reference in accordance with the deletion process (both for consultation as non-binding precedent and for determining when a previously deleted article has been re-created). The closing admin will also perform any necessary actions to carry out the decision. Note: If the consensus is to merge the article and the merger would be non-trivial, it is acceptable for the admin to only begin the article merger process by tagging the article.

Shorthands

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As we discussed above, experienced Wikipedians use specialized jargon in an effort to communicate efficiently. Examples include:

  • "Merge" is a recommendation to "keep" the article's content but to move it to some more appropriate article. It is either inappropriate or insufficient for a stand-alone article. After the merger, the article will be replaced with a redirect to the target article (in order to preserve the attribution history).
  • "Redirect" is a recommendation to "keep" the article's history but to blank the content and replace it with a redirect. Users who want to see the article's history destroyed should explicitly recommend "delete then redirect".
  • "Speedy delete", "Speedy" or "CSD" mean that the user thinks the article qualifies for one of the narrow speedy deletion criteria. If there are no objections, the deletion discussion may be closed early. If the decision is contested, the AFD discussion continues.
  • "Copyvio" means that the user thinks the article is a copyright violation. In general, the copyvio deletion process takes precedence over the AFD process.
  • "BJAODN" means that the user is recommending deletion but thinks that the content is funny enough to cut-and-paste a copy to Bad Jokes And Other Deleted Nonsense.
  • "Userfy" is a recommendation to move the article to the author's user page. Wikipedia allows somewhat greater leniency in the userspace than the main article space. The resultant redirect is always deleted.
  • "Transwiki" is a recommendation to move the article to a sister project in Wikimedia (such as Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikibooks or one of the foreign language projects) and remove it from Wikipedia.
  • "Speedy keep" is rarely used. It implies that the user thinks the nomination was in bad-faith and that the deletion discussion can be closed early.
  • "-cruft" (for example, "fancruft", "gamecruft" or "forumcruft") is shorthand for "This article is trivia of interest only to hardcore fans of a specific film, television series, book, game, pop singer, web forum, etc."
  • "dicdef" is shorthand for "This is a dictionary definition and Wikipedia is not a dictionary".
  • "essay" and "original research" are opinions that "This article contravenes the no original research policy or is an essay that promotes a particular point of view, contravening the neutral point of view policy". Both policies are fundamental Wikipedia policies.
  • "neologism" means that the user considers this article to be about a word or phrase that is not well-established enough to merit a Wikipedia article. May be either a literal neologism (a very new word) or a vanity neologism (a word coined in a small community but not used outside it).
  • "Patent nonsense" refers to Wikipedia:patent nonsense
  • "non-notable", "nn" or vanity mean that the user thinks the subject is fails to meet Wikipedia's inclusion guidelines either due to its obscurity or lack of differentiation from others of its type.
  • "POV" means that the user considers the article's title and/or the article's mere existence to be inherently biased and to violate Wikipedia's neutral-point-of-view policy
  • "POV fork" is shorthand for "This article is on the same topic as an existing article and was created in an attempt to evade the spirit of WP:NPOV."
  • "WP:POINT" refers to the rule that one should not disrupt Wikipedia to make a point.

See also

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