Wikipedia:Extreme article deletion

(Redirected from Wikipedia:EAD)

Extreme article deletion is an extreme sport of Wikipedia. The goal is to reduce the number of articles in Wikipedia as much as possible, with inventive and original AfD candidates and rationales. With enough purging, eventually Wikipedia can be the perfect size, just like Citizendium.

The key tool in extreme article deletion!

Points are awarded to each player for the reasons they give to justify article deletion. Standard arguments include "unencyclopedic", "too short", "no significance", "irreparably (not my) POV", "fancruft", "non-notable", "non-notable fancruft", "is a secondary school", "vanity", and "WP:I just don't like it", "Never seen that source", "That source is not available online", "no hits on Google, which means it doesn't exist"; generic concerns about server space. Every deletion proposal with these reasons earns one point. Additional points are awarded for especially original proposals or rationales, or when strategies are developed to get the article deleted despite proof of encyclopedic suitability (e.g., giving examples of other similar articles that have successfully been purged).

Blatant deletion of a valid encyclopedic article gives points based on how long the article remains deleted before being recreated; deleting and protecting against re-creation (known as "salting") such a page acts as a bonus multiplier.

If an article is only changed into a redirect, this may not score as highly as a deletion, except in certain cases, where more points are awarded. For conversions to a redirect instead of deletion, scoring is as follows:

Achievement Score
Page is redirected to something relevant and informative ½ point
Page is redirected to something in the same category, but too general to be of any use to whoever would have looked up the deleted article ¾ point
Page is redirected to something completely irrelevant. 1 point
Page is redirected to something that has been vandalized. 2 points

Combinations are possible: getting the article on Red redirected to H;A;G;G;E;R;??????? on wheels! would give you ¾ of a point for redirecting to something too general to be of any use, and 2 points for redirecting to something that has been vandalized, for a total of 2¾ points. Extreme article deletion were awarded from 2003 until 2016 on the German Wikipedia as an April Fools 2004 joke by Dingo. On 1 April every year, the overall standings of the German deletion champions were assembled. The original German article was deleted in less than five minutes by an over-audacious administrator, restored in less than two by another and moved here in its purest form.