User:Sam/Promtus

This is a proposal that is under construction. Please feel free to jump in, edit and discuss. Thanks, -- ☑ SamuelWantman

The problem

Wikipedia has several policies and practices that negatively color the project related to how content gets deleted. There are two aspects to this problem. The first is that many deletion processes are negatively focused. Instead of considering the ways in which deficient articles can be made acceptable or finding an appropriate alternative home for information, the deletion processes are concerned with what should be deleted. The second is that the scope of the project is being unnecessarily constrained to articles that meet a very strict set of criteria. These two aspects make the culture of Wikipedia seem unfriendly (especially to newcomers) and thus discourage wider participation. The problems create unnecessary limitations on the content, and focus too much attention on contentious debating, both of which are detrimental to the growth of the project.

Most of the deletion procedures are a by-product of Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not along with honest, well-meaning efforts to improve the quality and accuracy of Wikipedia. For the most part, these efforts have been successful in improving the overall academic quality of articles in the mainspace. These improvements to quality will not be sacrificed if this proposal is adopted. It is hoped that this proposal will improve quality further while at the same time making Wikipedia a more useful and friendlier place.

The core proposal

The crux of this proposal is to abolish WP:PROD and WP:AFD and instead create a simple process that moves all but the most egregious offenders out of the mainspace and into userspace.

• Information should be kept whenever possible.
• Transparency is essential, Deficiencies should be clearly labeled instead of deleted.
• Everything that meets a minimum threshold of acceptability has the potential to improve.
• Instead of discussing "What Wikipedia is Not", we should focus on "What Wikipedia can be".
• Garbage is acceptable if it is labeled as garbage and put in a garbage receptacle.

Here's how it would work:

1. The worst offenders could continue to be speedily deleted. This would include pages that are profanity, libelous, patent nonsense, etc... There should be no controversy about what gets speedily deleted. If in doubt, it should be kept.
2. If there is any possibility that a page could become a viable article in the mainspace it would be tagged as PROMTUS -- meaning "PROposed Move To User Space". This would function almost identically to how PROD functions, except that the page will not be deleted, but moved. The page could be moved if it is not improved within a certain period of time. Any page that does not get brought up to the standards of the mainspace and has just a single contributor would be moved to that contributor's userspace. Articles with more than one contributor would be moved to a shared userspace. For example, User:Jimbo Wales creates List of jelly bean flavors and starts working on it. It gets tagged with PROMTUS and the necessary time period goes by without any improvement. At that point it gets moved to User:Jimbo Wales/List of jelly bean flavors.
3. There would be several shared userspaces. Each would be for a different class of article that falls short of meeting the criteria for inclusion in the main space. Some may improve in time to return to the mainspace, but some may be sufficiently flawed that they will never be able to become articles or lists in the mainspace. None the less, they may still exist in userspace with their non-fatal flaws. Examples are:
   • Articles tagged with PROMTUS that have more than one contributor.
   • Articles that would be acceptable except the subject fails a notability test. in the future the subject may become notable and can be moved to the mainspace
   • Articles that are glossaries, or are about words.
   • Articles that are uncited and often uncitable, but are a community creation and contents is either self-evidient or not often written about. These are usually collaboratively generated lists. These Wiki-lists are often the result of hundreds of edits by scores of editors. Many have been deleted in the past. An example is List of songs with numbers in the title
   • Articles that are about current events, and the notability of the event is yet to be determined.
   • Web directories
   • Trivia
   • Data
4. The articles moved to shared userspace would be arranged as subpages of a User page created just for this purpose. There would not be any actual person who edits as the user. I have created some potential user accounts for this purpose. Some examples are:
   • User:Wikilists -- for community created lists where citations are somewhat self-evident
   • User:Glossaries
   • User:Back files -- general catch-all for incomplete articles
   • User:Directories -- For web-directories
   • User:Less notable -- Not yet notable, and other notability problems
     • Other acounts that are inactive and could be usurped:
       • User:Lists unused -- account created 2006
       • User:Trivia unused
       • User:Words unused
       • User:Files one contribution 2004
5. Shared userspace pages can be categorized into their own set of categories. These categories can be linked to regular categories or be subcategorized in regular categories. No category should include pages from both the mainspace and userspace. Userspace categories should be clearly labeled as such with some variety of standardized template so that users will understand the deficiencies of the pages in the category.
6. Editors can request that pages be moved to the mainspace when appropriate. This can be as simple as making the request from any administrator, or posting the request on a noticeboard. Any administrator who thinks that the page is acceptable could make the move. For example, an article about Joe Blow gets written, and moved to userspace because Joe Blow is not notable. A few years later he gets elected to public office and gets moved back to the mainspace.

Changes to policy

This proposal implies many changes to policy. WP:NOT would have to be rewritten, though most if it could be kept if the title is changed from "What Wikipedia is not" to "What the mainspace is not". There would need to be guidelines for deciding which userspace account should be the new home for a moved page. AFD could be scrapped. Deleted pages could be undeleted and moved to userspace. A page to request these resurrections would need to be created. A page would also be needed to moves from userspace back to the mainspace, or Wikipedia:Requested moves could be used. Categorization guidelines would need to be created for Userspace pages. WP:BITE should incorporate instructions for using this new process. Speedy delete guidelines would need some tweaking.

A new namespace?

If this proposal is successful, it is possible to create a new namespace for all these shared userpages. It could be called "Backpages" or something similar. I've asked CTO Brion Vibber about the possibility of creating a new namespace for this purpose and his response was that he would create any new namespace that had community consensus. {His preference would be to only create new namespaces that had different technical needs.} In the case of this proposal, there is the possibility that every category would have a companion "Backpage" category, and that the companion category would be automatically populated with articles from the "Backpage" namespace. This way, articles would not have to be recategorized when they are moved between the mainspace and the new "Backpage" space.