Wikipedia talk:Guide to deletion/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

Editing restrictions

• Merging, redirecting, and transwiking content during the VFD process are valid processes of handling an article traditionally. There are a few nominations that get nominated for merging, redirecting, and transwiking when someone can already do that without the VFD process. -- AllyUnion (talk) 11:53, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • As the guide explains, merger causes GFDL problems if the decision is actually to delete. Essentially the person doing the delete has to remove all of the merged content from other articles in order to remain GFDL compliant. (I cannot, off-hand, remember where it was that I found, when looking at the various different places that have been consolidated here, one person mentioning a case where xe had to turn an overwhelming delete into a keep because one editor had merged the content during discussion.) Furthermore: Redirecting has not traditionally been valid during discussion. Indeed, traditionally in the overwhelming majority of cases where I've encountered this happening redirects are reverted "in order to keep the VFD notice", just as blankings are. As the guide explains, and as has been explained before in VFD discussions when this has come up, this is why "redirect" is a vote. Uncle G 15:37, 2005 Feb 24 (UTC)
    • Actually, I think that was me in the merger example. I overturned an "overwhelming delete" to a "redirect" because so many people in the discussion explicitly endorsed the merger but did so with logically inconsistent votes. If I remember correctly, they said "merge content but delete the article" and "good merge, now delete this". I'll try to find the discussion and link it in. If that is the one you were thinking of, I certainly did not consider the merger to be vandalism. Rossami (talk) 22:27, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)
      • Boy, I just can't find that discussion. In VfD/Mt. Ararat Middle School, GFDL was preserved via cut-and-paste. Rossami (talk) 23:57, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)
    • There are some cases where RickK redirected the article while it has been up on VfD. -- AllyUnion (talk) 21:38, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
      • Redirection isn't merger, though. It's the GFDL problems inherent in the copying text from one article to another that is the part of article merger that precedes the final redirection that are the difficulties. Uncle G 03:57, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)

Caution not to "helpfully" refactor as a list of votes

From User talk:CesarB:

• Good afternoon. I saw the addition you made to the Guide about refactoring. You specifically mentioned tables in addition to refactoring of the list. Is it your thought that we should preclude, for example, the recap table at the top of Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/La Shawn Barber? Even though I added that one, I'll admit that I've had second thoughts about whether or not those recap tables are really helpful. Their big advantage in my mind has been to give the "ambiguous" voters a chance to come in and clarify their position. On short discussion threads, it's not usually so important but on the really contentious issues, it seemed helpful. The downside is that the recap table tends to bias people toward vote-counting and away from discussion. I felt it was acceptable because the really long and argumentative discussion threads have almost always already degenerated into namecalling by the time they're that long so not much would be lost. Should I stop? Rossami (talk) 22:23, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • I think that the recap tables are better reserved for being aide-memoires to closers, which they can construct themselves in accordance with the "show your working" maxim, and discouraged from being a standard feature whilst the discussion is in progress. They encourage further development of the concept and we then end up with things like Template:vfd votes, which are a terrible idea. Uncle G 23:36, 2005 Feb 24 (UTC)

    I'd prefer not to have recap tables used. Pulling the votes away from their comments seems to diminish the idea of discussion, rather than straight voting. It seems just as easy to make a list on paper or in a WP window as it is to use a recap table. To "show my work," I'd rather type a few sentences of explanation when closing, as Rossami does so well. Joyous 04:24, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)

Most important thing to remember

• Your ego is not on the line. -- AllyUnion (talk) 21:40, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • I don't understand this comment. Are you suggesting that sentence as an addition to the section? Uncle G 03:57, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)
    • Wouldn't be a bad idea. -- AllyUnion (talk) 02:46, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The end of the discussion

deferred until the end of the discussion.

• Who decides the end of discussion? When is the end of discussion? Tradition (not to vote on VFD/Old) versus policy (not to vote until an administrator has reviewed it and closed it)? -- AllyUnion (talk) 21:42, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Well this article is written from a descriptive rather than a prescriptive viewpoint. And there are is a pointer to Wikipedia:Deletion process which I believe answers these questions, if perhaps not fully. (I think that it's up to an individual administrator to decide when the lag time has ended, on a case by case basis. It should be at least the published lag time, but there's no reason not to allow leeway for discussions that are clearly nearing consensus but aren't quite there yet.) Uncle G 03:57, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)

Merging

• Articles' information may be merged with another article during VFD, but the article itself should remain the same. This follows the be bold policy, where one person can effect a VFD vote process by demonstrating how well an action is. -- AllyUnion (talk) 21:44, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • This is discussed in the preceding section. Uncle G 03:57, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)

Closure exceptions

A debate may be closed if and only if an article has previously deleted by an administrator for speedy deletion due to the fact that it meets the criteria for speedy deletion. Should you see an article deleted due to these circumstances, follow these instructions:

Close the discussion by editing the top and bottom of the VfD discussion sub-page. (Together, these two edits will create a shaded box around the discussion thread confirming that it has been closed. See the example below.)

a. at the (very) top with {{subst:vfd top}} '''speedy deletion.''' ~~~~, above the section of the article. b. at the bottom with {{subst:vfd bottom}}.

• Note {{subst:vt}} and {{subst:vb}} are shortcuts.

-- AllyUnion (talk) 21:51, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• I don't think that "if and only if" is true. Closure of obvious keeps by anyone has often been accepted, and encouraged, in the past. Uncle G 03:57, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)

• • This is in the case of speedy deletion. Votes for deletion is not votes for undeletion. -- AllyUnion (talk) 05:12, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Wikisource, transwiki, etc

The most common transwiking should have its own section, including links to the templates for them. -- AllyUnion (talk) 21:55, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Refactoring

The article needs to be divided up further. A specific section should talk about sockpuppetry, new users, etc, so that it can be easily found. -- AllyUnion (talk) 22:01, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• I did at one point whilst drafting the original have a "new users" section. It was clunky, and ended up repeating too much of what logically belonged in various other sections. I instead settled on the current form, of emphatically drawing new users attention in the introduction to a couple of important things later on, as well as having the "most important things" section right at the top, because it flowed better. Uncle G 03:57, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)

3 restrictions

Doing any of these is automatically considered to be vandalism.

• Nothing is automatic. Should be reworded as can be considered... Also, there may be logical reasons of moving the article. Additionally, it would be best to create a redirect after the move to the old VFD subpage. -- AllyUnion (talk) 22:03, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • I'm happy with "can be", or "may be". The important thing is that there should be a caution to this effect, because such edits often are, in practice, considered to be vandalism. Uncle G 03:57, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)
  • Redirects after moves are created automatically. There is an "unless" qualification on the admonition against renaming pages. And the following text attempts to make it clear that it's the preservation of the link from the VFD notice to the discussion page that is the reason for this, with the implication that one must perform both of the page moves in order to avoid problems. Uncle G 03:57, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)

Notability guidelines

Some summary should include references for notability, what is considered in inclusion -- AllyUnion (talk) 22:07, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Prior VFD Consensus

There is also an archive of important debates and VFD decisions on notability. A summary of that would also be useful. -- AllyUnion (talk) 22:07, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Votes without rationales may be discounted

Since when? People have voted down the line as Delete, Keep, or what not. Usually a simple vote without a rationale could be a user's an agreement to a prior argument. Users may be asked, by other voters, to explain their rationale, but does not mean that they won't be counted when the votes are added. If we had that kind of system, several articles now would have to be re-sent to VFD process with each person specifying why the need for deletion.

Furthermore, considerations should be taken care that no one should vote without a good reason to do so. A vote for keep after a string of deletes without any explaination or rationale is not logical, however it is considered by some administrators to be a valid vote. Granted, this might seem as forcing the inclusion of the article, especially in cases of narrow margins, but the general policy is that when you're not sure, don't delete. -- AllyUnion (talk) 22:13, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

This is a long tradition. The wording at the top of the VfD page used to explicitly say "Explain your vote even if you think it is obvious." (I'm not sure when that comment got lost but it is still in the Deletion Policy pages.) Now I'm not saying that a vote without explanation is always ignored, but I do always give it less weight than the vote of someone who takes the time to lay out a logical and fact-based argument. Four unexplained "deletes" can be completely outweighed by a single "keep" argument that is solidly explained based on policy and precedent and is supported by verifiable facts (and vice versa). Rossami (talk) 23:19, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• A vote is a vote is a vote. Please keep things simple. Next thing in this chain of logic would be to ignore delete votes with invalid explanations, such as "Delete. Vanity" for the Albert Einstein article. (an extreme case, but I hope the point is clear). If you want to discourage malicious deletionists by this requirement, it will not help: they may easily cut'n'paste any rationale from elsewhere. So please respect the vote. VfD is an unpleasant burden I suspect for most of us (especially recent years, with slow load/save and huge influx of vanity pages). If I have something new to say in the vote, I will say it, just as I will write a missing stuff in an existing article. Therefore I strongly suggest to treat an uncommented vote as an agreement with previuosly expressed rationales. Mikkalai 20:11, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • A vote is a vote is a vote, true, but these aren't votes. ☺ The text is trying to be descriptive of what actually happens in practice. And what actually happens is that people closing the discussion are sometimes persuaded by compelling arguments even when a raw tally of votes would render the opposite conclusion. Uncle G 03:57, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)

Deletion: title or content

An important issue shall be clarified in the deletion policy. There are the following interpretations as for the meaning of the "deletion".

1. Articles with the given title are barred from wikipedia
2. Articles with the given topic are barred from wikipedia
3. Article with the given content are barred from wikipedia

The existing policies seem to speak for the "content" interpretation. Specifically, Speedy deletion policy (General, #4) says: "Reposted content that was deleted according to Wikipedia deletion policy." Nevertheless I remember at least two heated discussions, when the "deletionists" interpreted that as deletion of the "title" altogether, in particular, disallowing even replacement with a redirect to an article where the disputed topic was discused earlier.

Please comment on this issue. Mikkalai 20:28, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• It's a tricky one. And in the end it comes down to cases. The consensus might be to "Keep, Rename to a NPOV title, and delete the redirect", for example, which would naturally preclude the creation of a subsequent article by the old name. On the other hand, the consensus might be to "Delete but retain the redlinks", for example, which would preclude the same article content, but not necessarily preclude a different article by the same title. Uncle G 03:57, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)
  • I agree, it comes down to cases. Sometimes after deleting an article I de-red-link it (for example, if it's a non-notable person), and sometimes I don't. Of course, most people don't explicitly indicate what precise flavor of deletion they advocate, which is a good thing: the more choices there are, the harder it is to have consensus. dbenbenn | talk 20:28, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Vote to merge

Question - if an article should be merged according to VfD votes, who exactly does that? On the deletion history I've seen some admins who simply treat a merge (or transwiki) as a keep, and don't seem to add 'merge' or 'transwiki' tags to the relevant article. Radiant! 11:20, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

I try to look at how many "merge" votes there were. If there were just a few, I usually make a comment in the closing statement along the lines of "consensus to keep with suggestions to merge." In those cases, I probably wouldn't tag for merging. If there was a significant block of "merge" votes, then I do tag the article to be merged at the same time that I remove the VfD tag. If it's a short quick merge, I might do it myself, but I generally just tag it, hoping that someone who voted to merge will be bold and carry it out. Joyous 12:11, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

• In other words, it would be useful for VfD readers to help alleviate admin work, by reading closed votes and checking if there's any merging/transwikiing to be done? Radiant! 08:24, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

Even better, VfD readers who aren't admins can close discussions whose consensus is "keep," "merge," "transwiki," or "redirect." Many of the discussions end with a resounding and uncontroversial "keep," and can be closed in a few simple steps. If anyone was looking to "alleviate admin work," THAT would be a wonderful help. Joyous 09:22, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

Are you serious?!

Does anyone honestly believe, that a user who's just read a VfD notice on an article and surfed to VfD for the first time, is going to read any of this?! It is far, far too long, and is self-defeating. There's nothing magical or mysterious about VfD. There's the Wikipedia:Deletion policy, and the possible votes. Dan100 16:16, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

• Most people don't read any policies anyway. The purpose of this "guide" is to be the guide in tricky cases; in order not to repeat the very same arguments on each and every VfD page. Mikkalai 00:32, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Even if they just read the first section, telling them the most important things to remember, it's worth it. And yes, I do believe that people will read this. What they won't read is the top of WP:VFD. And that's because of the performance problems. They'll get frustrated waiting for the page to load and render. This page, in contrast, is relatively static, has just the two transclusions, and loads comparatively swiftly. This was explained at the top of this very talk page. Uncle G 14:10, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)

Merge and delete? What's "incompatible?"

What's incompatible about these?

Why can't the sysop merge histories when deleting the articles as described in Wikipedia:How to fix cut and paste moves?

And in the frequently encountered case of an article that, prior to VfD nomination, consists solely of a string of edits by a single contributor, why isn't it sufficient to place a note on the merged article's Talk page giving the final version of the text, the identity of the contributor, and the timestamp of the last edit?

If merge-and-delete is difficult, we should ask the developers for mechanisms to make it easier.

I looked into this carefully last year and was told by experienced Wikipedians that a marge-and-delete is perfectly acceptable under GFDL as long as the history is merged. At some point, people started saying "merge-and-delete is an invalid vote" in VfD discussions, but as best I've been able to determine, this is an urban legend.

I think this should be moved out of the "incompatible" section and placed somewhere else, with rephrasing along these lines:

• Avoid "Merge to Example and Delete". Article merger requires that editing history of the source article be kept, for attribution purposes as required by the GFDL. Doing this properly when the original source of the text is to be deleted requires the acting administrator to "merge histories," which is difficult and laborious. On the other hand, "redirects are cheap"—they are easy to do and consume neglible resources. Please do not vote "Merge and delete" unless you can give a very good reason why the original article, under its original title, should not be left in place as a redirect.

Dpbsmith (talk) 17:16, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• It's a fair point - yes, you can merge and delete, as long as you preserve the history somehow (either by merging it with that of the target, or by simply pasting the list of authors into the talk page of the target). However, merge and redirect is not only quicker, and technically easier, it doesn't need to go on VFD. Anyone, admin or otherwise, can merge and redirect an article without going through a discussion beforehand, so I'd like to see it continue to be promoted as a Good Thing, to help keep the length of VFD down. Plus redirects are cheap, considered non-harmful, prevent re-creation of deleted articles, give a useful indication of the article's history, etc, etc, etc. I love 'em. sjorford →•← 17:53, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• See also this old discussion. It's not technically impossible but it's a whole lot harder so you must go the extra mile to convince the deciding admin that it's worth the trouble. The process is enough harder and a true need to "merge and delete" occurs infrequently enough that I'd prefer to leave it in the "incompatible" section and deal with the rare exceptions as they occur. Rossami (talk) 23:14, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • OK, let's leave it in place but can we soften the language a bit to indicate that a merge and delete is not invalid or actually incompatible, just undesirable? Dpbsmith (talk) 13:57, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Rewritten to make the point that merge-and-delete is perfectly appropriate and not laborious in the special case where the edit history is trivial." That is, the case where all of the significant content was added in a single edit by the single editor who created the article. It is frequently the case that someone creates a tiny substub that is not worth an entry, but worth including within some other article. Dpbsmith (talk) 23:24, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Transforming articles into redirects during VfD?

Random babbling.

On a related topic: I agree with Sjorford above. And I'd go further: almost any truly bad article, one that falls in the category "there could be an article on this but this isn't it and this isn't a useful start to one" should become a redirect if there's even anything vaguely plausible as a redirect target. And it's quite effective, since clueless newbies who drop in a few lines of garbage are usually baffled by redirects and don't realize they can easily be reverted. On the other hand, everything is kept open and aboveboard for the inclusionists. The problem is that such articles are usually already on VfD. Would there be any support for the idea that during a VfD discussion that seems to be heading for consensus to merge, it is acceptable to replace the whole article, including the VfD notice, with a redirect? While leaving the discussion on VfD for the full five days.

The chief objection I can see is that this of course this effectively takes down the notice that says the article is on VfD and shuts off discussion.

Perhaps we need stronger language and more how-to in the VfD guides, suggesting that articles should be turned into redirects unless there is a) nothing reasonable to redirect them to, b) it's important to remove the text from the history, c) it's important to make the action irreversible, d) it's important for some reason to delete the article title itself.

On the other hand, there's a danger that redirects could become "stealth deletions" since replacing an entire article with a redirect is much less visible than a VfD nomination.

"Extreme" and "organic"

Two more pieces of lingo that come up often and let me a bit puzzled (and probably other people too, so should be explained in the Guide):

• Extreme keep/delete
• Allow for organic growth/decay

--cesarb 22:39, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• There's really only the one principal user of the second phrase. When I first saw it, I took it at face value. When I realised that it was the rationale for practically every single vote by solely that user, I started to suspect that it was a rote phrase, possibly bound as a macro to a function key, not actually related to the discussion as such, and effectively devoid of meaning. As for the first phrase, it appears to be hyperbole, and to be just a variation on "strong". Uncle G 00:10, 2005 Apr 1 (UTC)
• See also Wikipedia:Extreme article deletion. —Korath (Talk) 00:44, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)
• Also, Wikipedia:Extreme_article_inclusion.
  • "Organic growth" is a horticultural metaphor and refers to the process that a seed (stub) can grow (be expanded) to a tree (meaningful article) by the unregulated efforts of various users. Hence, the wiki principle. Since it applies equally well to just about anything, it is a rather meaningless phrase.
  • "Organic decay" is a parody of the above and refers to the idea that growth may be undesired for certain articles (e.g. vanity).
  • "Extreme keep/delete" is in effect a regular keep/delete, but it (usually) has the added meaning that the voter is unwilling to even consider changing opinions on the matter, something like "I don't understand how people can possibly disagree with this". The connotation can be said to be somewhat offensive.
• I do agree that these should be put in the guide. Radiant_* 11:15, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

Removing personal attacks

There has been some discussion recently about changing this text

Do not strike out other people's votes even if you believe them to be in bad faith. (But see Wikipedia:Remove personal attacks.) Multiple votes ...

to this text

Do not strike out other people's votes even if you believe them to be in bad faith. Do not edit or remove other people's comments, even if you find them offensive; instead, make a civil response. Multiple votes ...

Radiant! and Jayjg are correct that Wikipedia:Remove personal attacks is not official policy. Nevertheless, egregious personal attacks are routinely removed from the comments of others when they are irrelevant to the discussion. I believe strongly that we should and must continue to do so.

VfD discussions are already far too adversarial. Allowing violations of no personal attacks policy to remain in the current view of the discussion thread serves no purpose and has the effect of poisoning the discussion. As much as I would like to ask every subsequent reader to be superhuman and to exercise perfect civility, I do not believe that is reasonable. Good editors either lose their tempers and respond in kind or waste valuable time trying to respond rationally to the troll (which, too often, merely leads to more personal attacks). It is far more efficient and effective to replace the personal attack with the piped link (personal attack removed). The troll gets a polite but firm rebuke, future editors stay focused on the actual discussion at hand and anyone wanting to verify that the edit was made appropriately can do so by quickly checking the page history.

I want to add the original text back. However, even if you disagree, the replacement text is incorrect. We do want the helpful formatting edits - especially fixing the indentation of votes so that they all comply with the bulletted style and stay easy to read. Rossami (talk) 21:13, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Without speaking to your main point (which I agree with; I just have nothing to add to what you said), I'd like to point out reformatting isn't what's being referred to by "don't modify others' comments". I suppose this could be made clearer, though. —Korath (Talk) 04:15, Apr 8, 2005 (UTC)

One issue I have with the idea is that I have seen people define a "personal attack" as "anything critical of me or my position". A second issue I have with the idea is that deleting personal attacks does not give editors a fair understanding of the true positions of the parties on each side of the debate. Jayjg ^(talk) 14:14, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I have now realized that RPA does see extensive and legitimate usage in other areas. However, on VfD I have never seen it used except in bad faith. Precisely because what Jayjg says, people remove things that aren't attacks. Hence I do object to RPA'ing on VfD. Radiant_* 11:07, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

re: note on neologism

Stevietheman added this caveat to the section on neologisms. Note that some neologisms fast-track into becoming established and thus deserving of an article, e.g., e-democracy with the explanation "A neologism can have encyclopedic relevance before it's 'established'". I pulled sentence out. Maybe I'm splitting hairs but if the concept has encyclopedic relevance in a broad context, I do not believe that the concept would still be considered a neologism. Am I missing something here? Rossami (talk) 01:17, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The way neologism is typically used in VfDs is to indicate a new word or phrase used by a very limited group. However, others use it to mean a word or phrase that is of recent origin, even if widely used; for example, Bling bling. Jayjg ^(talk) 14:11, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

That's exactly my point. Thank you. Anyway, I wouldn't object to a rewording of what I was attempting to get across. We shouldn't be saying to Wikipedians that no neologisms can have articles for them. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 20:55, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Who gets to close debates?

I had long been under the impression that only administrators were allowed to close out VfD debates, as is reflected on this page, but during a tangential discussion on an RfC, other frequent VfD contributors noted that they had long been involved in closing out debates, needing an administrator's help only to "pull the trigger" on a delete result. My questions are these: if it is appropriate for non-administrators to close out VfD debates in which there is no conflict of interest (that is, the user did not vote in the debate and had no involvement in editing the article) then should that be reflected on this page? Would anyone have a problem if this became VfD policy? I know the VfD backlog is always a problem, and I'd be willing to help out, but as I don't have administrator status I want to make sure it's okay. android↔talk 02:56, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

Generally speaking, non-admins should only close debates that they can deal with without an admin's help - keep, redirect, merge and so on. If closing the debate requires deleting a page, then the admin who actually does the deletion will want to check everything anyway before they pull the trigger, so there's really no point in doing the work twice. Plus there have been a few cases of somebody closing a debate, but the article itself never actually getting deleted. sjorford →•← 08:22, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• I think there's no problem with a non-admin closing a debate (other than delete). However, a reason for not including that in the 'guide' is the fact that we don't want just any user to close VfDs. Newbies should not, at any rate. An established Wikipedian can easily realize that it's really ok to do, as long as it's done right - and after the realization, such a person (unlike a n00b) is likely to also do it right. Radiant_* 11:18, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

How-to guides

This page asserts that how-to guides should be transwikied to Wikisource; this is also frequently used as a reasoning on VfD. Should a paragraph be added to WP:WIN to reflect this? Radiant_* 11:24, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

Er. This should be to Wikibooks. See Wikisource:Wikisource:What is Wikisource? and b:How-tos bookshelf. —Korath (Talk) 12:57, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

• Er, yes. Sorry. Point is there seems to be a discrepancy between this and WP:WIN, so probably either should be modified a bit. Radiant_* 12:59, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

Merge and delete

According to the guide, merge and delete is a taboo vote because it is in violation of the GFDL. Usually people making such a vote do so because the content is useful, while the title is useless for a redirect. Why not treat merge and delete of article A to article C like this:

1. Move the article from A to B, B being a title of the admin's choice which is a useful redirect which has not yet been created.
2. Delete the subsequent redirect at A.
3. Then merge the content in B with article C in the regular manner, leaving a useful redirect at B which contains the page history.

Page histories are preserved doing moves are they not? Sjakkalle 11:44, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

That is an interesting suggestion. It should work, to the best of my knowledge. However, I think a vote for that should be more explicit. — Gwalla | Talk 02:18, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

Yes, it would work but it would be a lot of work to carry out. We have a terrible backlog of unclosed discussions on VfD/Old. The deciding admin can take a few minutes to do easy clean-up but you're really going to have to work in the VfD discussion to convince me that this complicated move is worth my time. (Your scheme also fails in two of the secondary goals of a redirect. Redirects are also useful for catching inbound links which have been missed and can be a polite but firm message to the original contributor about where he/she should have made the contribution in the first place.) Rossami (talk) 02:48, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

I see now that I was not the first one to come up with this. It is already mentioned in Wikipedia:Deletion guidelines for administrators. Sjakkalle 10:47, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

I don't know whether or not this should be in the Guide, but is there anything at all wrong with Weyes' suggestion that

It has been suggested that merge and delete is possible with proper attribution by moving the VfDed page to a subpage of the talk page of the article it's merged with and linking it from the talk page. This would preserve history and not leave behind a possibly meaningless (or worse) redirect.

I feel strongly that "merge and delete" is the best disposition of perhaps 5 to 10% of all VfDs, and if the only reasoning behind forbidding it is a technical issue, we should solve that technical issue. But why isn't the above a perfectly suitable solution? Dpbsmith (talk) 28 June 2005 14:59 (UTC)

I do find it to be a perfectly suitable solution. (Well, I guess I ought to, I posted on the Village Pump about it, though it hasn't gotten too much attention; I haven't the knack for advertising but the idea probably ought to be spread more widely.) Incidentally, as I found out later, Angela says that this used to be done before, as on Talk:Cardiff. I took that as suitable precedent to be bold and do so myself on some VfDs I've closed, but I haven't been closing that many lately. It is somewhat of a pain in the ass, but it fixes the attribution problem. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 28 June 2005 16:03 (UTC)

Reducing VfD load

There is an ongoing discussion at Wikipedia:Deletion policy/Reducing VfD load about ways that the size of VfD might be reduced. While there is still much discussion about possible new procedures and policies, there is a general consensus that one way to reduce the size would be to encourage editors to use other processes before or instead of nominating a page for deletion. Some of these other processes are:

1. Research the subject. A lot of articles are placed on VfD because of very little/poor content, but then kept because the subject is determined to be encyclopedic, even if the article in its current state is not. Nominators should put more effort into finding out if the subject of the article is keepable, and make sure it is correctly categorized/stub-tagged/cleanup-tagged.
2. Patience. Two applications of this -
   1. Give an article at least a little time to develop; It is understood that some RC patrollers feel they need to take action before an article disappears off the RC page, but nominating an article for VfD within minutes of its creation is often inappropriate. Use the "Watch" button - it won't kill us if a questionable stub is created and sits around for at least a couple of days until the author gets a chance to work on it.
   2. "A month" isn't exactly a long time either; many VfD's seem to be based on "this article's been around for a month (or 2 or 3) and nobody's worked on it!!!!!" Nobody knowledgeable about the subject may have found it (especially if it hasn't been categorized/tagged/listed) or had time to work on it. Not all editors are Wikipedaholics.
3. Categorize/Stub-tag/Listing on the appropriate "needs attention" page. In conjunction with the two points above, an article may not have been "placed" or linked to a place where an editor with knowledge of the subject can find it and fix it.
4. Merge and Redirect. Any editor can do this. See Wikipedia:Merge, Wikipedia:Redirect and Wikipedia:Duplicate articles. This would help with sending "cruft" articles/info to a place where the info will get attention from informed sources, and unnecessary/inappropriate stuff can get deleted without clogging VfD and requring admin attention. Also Move can be used by any logged-in user, when appropriate.
5. Use the article's Discussion page to raise questions about an article's appropriateness. Also, discussions on the talk pages of articles related to the subject can be especially useful in determining if an article should be merged with a larger article.
6. So fix it. While "write about what you know about" is certainly useful, it's definitely not a rule or requirement or anything. No reason that editors couldn't or shouldn't do some research (even if it's just online research) and make some improvements themselves rather than VFDing it.
   

Please note that this is not a suggestion about changing policy or procedure. This is simply "spreading the word" about some possible ways that we can reduce the size of VfD, and so this will be posted in several places around Wikipedia. Thanks for listening. Soundguy99 15:27, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

'Show your working'

I don't understand this phrase at all, is it British? (Teachers in America often say to students taking math tests, show your work.) From context, it seems to mean 'describe your reasoning.' Not certain, though. Want to see it made clearer. Any thoughts?

3 Month Rule for Relisting

Where did this come about, since it seems to be a debate about this at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Comunleng 2. Thanks. Zscout370 (Sound Off) 03:48, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

• There isn't any such rule. However, a relisting made too soon is likely to get a bunch of extra keep votes on principle, for that reason. Radiant_>|< 07:16, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
  • Just making sure. I am trying to get this set in stone, so people will not be trying to use a non-existing policy. Zscout370 (Sound Off) 07:19, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

HEY! "Votes have equal weight", when did THAT slip in?

"Votes" have equal weight? Never! Depending on the rationale, a single opinion can determine the outcome.

examples:

• Delete: COPYVIO from <insert location> ~~~~
• Keep: I totally rewrote it now ~~~~
• Keep: Hey! There IS a reference! and 10000 google hits besides. ~~~~
• Delete: Not referenced in pubmed at all (for a biomedical topic.) ~~~~

Has VFD become so separate from the rest of wikipedia?

Kim Bruning 14:24, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

• Er, what? I don't find what you refer to on the main page. But yes, VFD is rather messy. Usually, a rough vote count is done (necessary for sheer amount of discussions, and length of some) and the outcome thereof depends heavily on which admin does the closing. See recent debates on VFU, and such. I'd agree with David that it's a terrible process, only I can't think of anything better at the time. Radiant_>|< 14:39, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

It slipped in under Strong vs Weak votes, at least. And I can think up at least 5 superior alternatives to the current vfd at the drop of a hat, in my sleep, with both hands tied behind my back, with my eyes closed, while roasting over a pit of molten lava, and singing yankee doodle while immersed under 100 feet of water, drunk , sober, at 500 feet, and while morrisdancing all at the same time! ;-) Kim Bruning 16:24, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

• Wow, that is impressive. Can I take pictures? Please? Radiant_>|< 07:59, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

To me, that wording merely says that the addition of "Strong" or "Weak" to your vote means nothing to the deciding admin. Nothing I saw implied that "all votes are equal". I will always weight comments that are based solidly in verifiable facts and/or established policy more highly than mere opinions or "votes" without comments. Rossami (talk) 20:27, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

:-) Kim Bruning 20:54, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

By the way, I'm not sure I strictly agree with the current wording in the guide. While adding "Strong" to your vote doesn't really mean anything (except that it's a strongly held opinion), adding "Weak" can. If you're not fully convinced of your own factual argument, I think it's reasonable for the rest of us to share your skepticism. Rossami (talk)

• Ah, that part. Now that you mention it. Yes, the section says that 'strong' and 'weak' are basically meaningless, and that is not necessarily true. Although as far as I can tell, most closing admins do ignore such comments, they are not forced to. I believe the main problem for VFD is finding a balance between doing what seems common sense to closing admins (e.g. follow the discussion), and what everybody agrees on (e.g. a strict voting percentage). People doing either do tend to get flamed by adherents of the other. Ouch. Radiant_>|< 07:59, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Redirect

I think an unnecessary ambiguity has been introduced to the description of redirect. As far as I'm aware, redirect has always been taken by closers to mean "edit the article to insert a redirect". if historical examples of a redirect close being performed in another way, they should show up in the log, and so I'll look for them. But as far as I'm aware this is a new idea. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 10:30, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

VfD redirect examples

• Cannonization Jan 1
• Pioneer XLD-S0 Jan 1
• List of famous republicans Jan 2
• Marian Carr Know Jan 3
• Andrei Tjikatilo Jan 5
• Boxes Jan 5
• GMing Jan 5
• DMing Jan 5
• Juvenile Diabetes Jan 7
• Guestbook spamming Jan 7

From this sample of all redirect results I could find for the first week in January, all of them appear to have been performed in the usual way, by editing the article. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 10:46, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Redirect may mean delete or keep

I'm not sure what this means. It's not a revert, and the edits seem to do things I don't seem to have anything to do with? Did I do something wrong?

I'm confused.

Kim Bruning 10:53, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Oh to remove the headings, ah, that makes ... um, sense? Amazingly, more headers return than were removed!

Hmm, as to why I removed them in the first place: An opinion to keep is Keep, an opinion to delete is Delete, I guess. Continuing my sophisticated ruminations along this treacherous path ;-) , an opinion that states Do Something Else is likely an opinion to Do something else, which appears to me not to be a vote to keep or delete. I got reverted, so I take it there's some flaw in my impeccable logic. What gives? Kim Bruning 11:03, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Yep, sorry if it all came out funny. I had severe problems with Radiant's wordings, which reflected his belief that redirect is a delete, so I reverted his changed and then tried to restore yours. I think I was more-or-less successful. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 11:23, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

• It seems to me that you're right, Kim, and that Tony is once more attempting to make a WP:POINT. In particular, the removal of my paragraph that an article should not be relisted merely because it has few votes if they are all agreeing votes (as he's recently been doing a lot) strikes me as such. There is no quorum on VFD. 3d 0k = consensus to delete. Radiant_>|< 11:25, August 28, 2005 (UTC)

Radiant, we do things by consensus here. Just because someone disagrees with you, doesn't mean he's trying to make some kind of point, and if he makes an edit you disagree with it doesn't mean he's being disruptive. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 11:32, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

On whether there is or is not a quorum, that's immaterial. If there is no clear consensus then relisting is an excellent idea. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 11:33, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

No mind, Radiant reverted to a version that addresses both your concerns... from a certain point of view. :-) Kim Bruning 12:40, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Not quite. This is what redirect says in his version:

Redirect to Example" is a shorthand for pointing to Example". A voter who votes "Redirect" usually does so in the belief that whilst the article's content is discardable, a redirect should exist to redirect readers who use that article title to a more complete, more general, or simply pre-existing article. While "redirect" counts as a vote to delete, it's also a possible outcome to not delete the article and simply replace it with a redirect.

This is categorically wrong. A redirect is not a vote to delete. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 12:46, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Oops, an opinion to redirect is an opinion to redirect, I'll wager. You going to fix? Kim Bruning 12:56, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

It is not categorically wrong. It is simply something Tony disagrees with. But his opinion does not equal consensus. Several people use "redirect" as a shorthand for "delete and replace with redirect". Radiant_>|< 18:46, August 28, 2005 (UTC)

Ah ok. Well that's ambiguous at best then. Most of the time when you redirect a page, you don't first delete it, else how will people be able to check its history?

Fair deal though, but NPOV it then. "Some people use "redirect" to mean Delete and recreate as a redirect. However, people closing votes can get confused by this, it's better to spell it out." Would that do? Kim Bruning 12:52, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

When I close VFD debates, I almost always count "redirect" as "keep and redirect" unless the vote specifically says "delete and redirect". Sjakkalle (Check!) 12:58, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

• Well, deleting the edit history is not really the point. The problem stems from people forcing VFD to be binary, which it probably used to be when first conceived, but it has evolved so much that such is hardly tenable. It may make more sense to close a 6d/2k/2R VFD as consensus to redirect, than to close it as 'no consensus so keep it'. Radiant_>|< 13:11, August 29, 2005 (UTC)

I have discussed the 6d, 2k, 2r situation with Radiant!, and I think that my thoughts on the matter may have wider interest, so I am placing my response there, here as well. Sjakkalle (Check!) 13:37, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

In practise, almost all VFD closers will treat a nice string of pure "redirect" votes as a "keep and redirect". 6 delete, 2 keep and 2 redirect is a case where the comments need to be weighed up against eachother (comments always have to be considered, but this is a case where it is especially so). It would only rarely be a "delete", so the problem would usually be an "outright" keep or a "redirect". If I were a really lazy administrator I would say "no consensus to delete, defaults to keep". I do hold the opinion that this is the major administrerial choice, binary "keep" or "delete". The choice of whether to keep or redirect is an editorial choice, usually I will try to provide the extra service of determining that as well. In fact, in some cases, I might even call that a "merge" even though there were no such votes. Among other things, I consider these points:

• Is the suggested target for the redirect related to the subject of the debated article? If not, I will say that the content is completely discardable by 8-2, just a redirect no merge. I have some memories of Tolkien metal here... However, if the redirect votes suggest a target related to the subject, I might consider merging a little bit of the content, especially if the reasons provided by the "keep" votes are good and convincing.
• Do any of the "delete" votes say that redirecting is a silly idea? If so, I can hardly use that delete vote as an endorsement of a redirect.
• Were the redirect and delete votes because the article was a substub? Maybe it might be decided to "keep" and put an expand-tag on it.
• Is the suggested target for a redirect completely silly? If the debate on Heroin capital of the world has two redirect votes to Oslo, I would probably ignore them as joke votes, and say that there are 6 to delete, 2 to keep, and delete the article. (Yes, in spite of what I said earlier 6d, 2k, 2r can result in a delete, but my personal bar for doing so is pretty high, and that is why I closed Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Tolkien metal as a redirect. For anyone reading this, sarcastic votes like this are often counted literally as what was written, such votes can induce doubt in the mind of the closing admin who is required to "when in doubt, don't delete").

You might also want to ask Rossami's opinion on this, because he is very adept (read:more adept that I am ;-) ) at closing such highly ambiguous debates. Sjakkalle (Check!) 13:37, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

• I believe that what an editor means by "redirect" depends upon their level of experiance. Most would simply imagine that the article vanishes from mainspace, exactly as if deleted. An eloquent rational for why an article does not belong, but prefaced by "Redirect" is a more compelling argument for deletion than "D. Yawn" is. - brenneman^(t)(c) 13:17, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

WP:DP's precautionary principle means that a sysop would be going out on a limb if he assumed that a bare "redirect" meant "delete". As a rule I don't think it's ever safe to count a vote as a delete vote unless it's a clear expression of a wish to delete. Indeed it would seem positively perverse to adopt any other approach. While I understand that others may be able to see untold subtleties in these discussions, it's easy enough for those in a discussion to express quite nuanced opinions.

It's all very well to speculate about how "most editors" think. We should simply make sure that if they have read the guide to deletion they'll know precisely how sysops will interpret their words. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 03:05, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Relisting when no consensus because of few votes

We have for a long time had wording on this guide that says:

This does not apply if a VFD discussion had no consensus for a simple lack of interest (e.g. two or three votes total); those are sometimes relisted immediately, to draw people's attention to them.

Now I recently found quite a lot of votes that nobody else had gotten around to closing, and that I didn't feel comfortable closing because there had been so few votes and so little discussion. So I relisted them to give them more attention.

Another sysop objected strongly to this, for reasons that still are not clear to me, and has twice changed the wording to be far more prescriptive:

This does not apply if a AFD discussion had no consensus for a simple lack of interest (e.g. two or three votes total); those are sometimes relisted immediately, to draw people's attention to them. Of course, that does not mean that any AFD discussion with few votes should be relisted, esepecially if the votes all agree. Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy, and there is no quorum for AFD.

Now I don't know what the "quorum" thing is doing in there--of course there's nothing about relisting a VfD that stops a more bold sysop closing a discussion that's already gone on for a few days. As for not being a bureaucracy, it seems that the above change makes us more bureaucratic by saying that we've got to leave discussions on the old day log, unseen and undiscussed, until someone eventually comes along and closes them. We can't use our discretion, in other words. It seems to me that we'd need a more general agreement that relisting short discussions was a bad thing.

Now I suppose there may be a point if the "votes all agree". But if the word "all" only encompasses two or three votes plus a nominator it's obviously a different "all" than the one we would normally feel comfortable calling a consensus.

Still I think this should be left to sysop discretion. The guideline here is out of step with our existing policy, or at the very least seems to be an attempt to make it more rigid by the back door. I don't think it can ever be wrong to draw attention to a discussion. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 08:28, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

• It's not correct to say this guideline is out of step, as it introduces nothing new to the paragraph in question. What it does do is clarify that articles listed for deletion do not have to be re-listed. If you feel uncomfortable deleting an article with a clear nomination and two keep votes, re-listing seems an effective way of "sprucing up" debate. If this catches the attention of another admin who is not as reticent, they can delete that article then and there if it has been listed for more than five days. We all seem to agree on that. The new wording clarifies without instruction creep, which is a good thing. I also fail to see how this undermines your individual discretion. - brenneman^(t)(c) 13:01, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
• This paragraph clarifies the way everybody except Tony does VFD closing. For some unknown reason he believes that a unanimity for deletion can nevertheless constitute a consensus to keep. Of course he has been entirely unwilling to discuss the matter and has already declined or walked away from three attempted mediations. Admins are supposed to follow consensus, not ignore it in favor of their own opinion. Radiant_>|< 15:57, September 4, 2005 (UTC)

You still don't seem to be addressing the point. If a sysop doesn't think there is a consensus, he may decided to relist in order to bring the item to attention and hopefull get more discussion. This is not the sysop imposing his idea of consensus on anybody--any other sysop can still close the discussion. All it does is permit those who don't want to go guddling in the older day logs (going back more then five days, remember--we don't process AfD's younger than that) to find AfD's that may not have had much discussion.

Far from believing that "a unanimity for deletion can nevertheless constitute a consensus to keep", my actual belief is that in a very brief discussion unanimity in any direction may simply be a symptom of inadequate exposure. The solution to this is more exposure to discussion. This is quite different from what you wrote.

Your claim that "everybody but Tony" does closing the way you describe is beside the point. Your version actively proscribes anyone who doesn't believe that a consensus has been formed from relisting. This is quite incomprehensible. As usual I'm utterly baffled. What on earth are you up to? Why on earth shouldn't anyone who thinks that a an Afd could do with more discussion (whether admin or not) relist it on the current day log so as to draw more discussion? --Tony Sidaway^Talk 02:41, 5 September 2005 (UTC)sti

Aaron, on the basis of your understanding that sysop discretion should not be limited by this clause, I've rewritten to emphasize that its intention is to ensure that nobody feels that they must relist, especially if all votes are the same:

This does not apply if a VFD discussion had no consensus for a simple lack of interest (e.g. two or three votes total); those are sometimes relisted immediately, to draw people's attention to them. Of course, that does not mean that any AFD discussion with few votes must be relisted, especially if the votes all agree. Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy, and there is no quorum for AFD. It's quite acceptable to close a discussion in which there have been few votes.

I think it should be enough, as above, to ensure that nobody feels that they must not close a AfD discussion just because there are few votes. They can close on the basis of a brief discussion. In fact it used to be my belief that it was advisable to close a solo nomination without discussion as a delete; I no longer believe that this is consistent with deletion policy. However others may differ with me on this.

Looking back at it, now, Radiant's clauses about bureaucracy and quora seem to make sense in the light of the change from should to must. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 02:56, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Issues in focus

I'm pleased with the progress on the main page, and have tightened the wording slightly. - brenneman^(t)(c) 03:03, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

bot to list on VfD page?

I noticed that for the {{copyvio}} tag, a bot will list it on the main Copyvio page for others to scrutinize. However for {{vfd}}, it is necessary to manually create an entry on the Votes for Deletion page. Is there a way for the Votes for Deletion page to be automatically updated? -- Bubbachuck 14:38, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

There's a copyvio bot? Dmcdevit·t 03:54, September 5, 2005 (UTC)

Rewrite

I've attempted a top-to-bottom rewrite of the Guide. My goals were, in order, to:

1. Reduce the size of the page
2. Remove the references to "voting" and return the tone to one of discussion and consensus-seeking
3. Clean up the order and flow

Since the first draft of this Guide, we've said that it was much longer than desired. My current draft is just under 3000 words (down from about 6000 words in the "live" version). Printed, that works out to 7 pages (down from 13). Still longer than I'd have liked but a significant reduction. I think that it keeps all the relevant lessons, instructions and good advice. I did sacrifice some of what, in my opinion, were rare or secondary situations.

By more carefully describing the decision-process as discussion and consensus-seeking, I think that some of the lengthy commentary and the recent debates over, for example, the interpretation of a "redirect" vote during vote-counting and the question of a quorum become less relevant.

I'd like to invite comments at User talk:Rossami/GAFD temp before being bold. Thanks. Rossami (talk) 23:00, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

• By "comments" do you mean "edit this like you would the main page" or "please list anything you'd like changed below this line"?
  brenneman^(t)(c) 23:41, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
  • Edit if you think it might be usable. Comment on major weaknesses and I'll try to fix them. Rossami (talk) 08:23, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
• Oh, and a hearty "Well done, much needed" to you! - brenneman^(t)(c) 23:42, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

I have been bold and posted the re-write. There is one remaining to-do. This draft was written on the assumption that the Guide would be narrowly applied to the AFD process. The old version applied to both AFD and the Miscellaneous Deletion processes. We need to either amend this in places or (and this is my preference), create a companion Guide for the MD process. Rossami (talk) 03:53, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

"You should not turn the article into a redirect."

Under "You may edit the article during the discussion", it says you should not turn the article in a redirect. I certainly agree that this is generally true, but in some cases, a speedy redirect seems like the right thing to do. There was one yesterday that I redirected due to there already being a better article on the same topic, see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Horse the band. Are situations like this worth mentioning, or are certain exceptions just assumed? Or do people feel that speedy redirects are always bad? Friday (talk) 17:15, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

In a few cases, that can be an okay solution but they should be the exception, not the rule. And if anyone feels that the decision was overly bold, don't fight it when they revert it back. Having said that, I don't think it's worth mentioning. As long as it's the exception and that we let common sense prevail, I don't think we need to clutter up the instructions. Rossami (talk) 01:46, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Explanation of Tony Sidaway's revert of an edit by Texture

Texture reverted an edit by User:Reinyday which stated correctly:

"Note: Currently, lack of "notability" is not a criterion for deletion, though it is commonly used as such.

Texture's edit summary read as follows: "rm new note - please discuss on talk page and gain a consensus for change - notability has been established as a CSD"

I have restored the note because:

1. As i have noted earlier, it's factually correct.
2. It is relevant to the voting shorthands on AfD that, although it is often cited as a reason for deletion, non-notability is not a reason for deletion in Wikipedia:Deletion policy--indeed that policy states explicitly that an article that is "Such a minor branch of a subject that it doesn't deserve an article" is one of the Problems that don't require deletion'. It is in fact a merge candidate.

I have therefore reverted to restore a version that more correctly describes deletion policy. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 18:05, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree with your revert. One could argue that lack of notability IS a criterion for deletion, because it's commonly used as such. IMO, the percieved conflict between the A7 CSD and the deletion policy makes it arguable that the statement is "factually correct". (Here I'm assuming that "notability" and importance/significance are basically the same thing.) Friday (talk) 18:20, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

If notability is a valid reason for speedy deletion then I don't see how it can't be a valid reason for voting "delete". - Tεxτurε 18:56, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

You could argue that notability is a criterion for deletion, but you'd be arguing with the deletion policy which specifically states that it isn't. That a number of editors either are ignorant of the deletion policy or disagree with it doesn't mean that the deletion policy is no longer official policy. This document must comply with official policy--as indeed must we.

Notability isn't a criterion for speedy deletion, as I'm sure you're aware. One criterion for speedy deletion of one type of article is absence of an assertion of notability.

As the situation stands, you can vote "delete" for any reason you like; however this doesn't mean that in doing so you are complying with the deletion policy. People who hold non-consensus views are entitled to have their views taken into account, but it's appropriate to note that such views are not official policy. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 19:15, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Since you referenced it I went to Wikipedia:Deletion policy. It does not "specifically state that it isn't" a valid reason for deletion. If you would like to exclude notability as a reason for deletion I suggest that you make a proposal to change deletion policy and gain consensus. - Tεxτurε 19:33, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I have again reverted your removal of correct, relevant statement of Wikipedia deletion policy. Please stop doing this or give a proper reason why Wikipedia deletion policy must not be correctly stated in the Guide to deletion. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 19:18, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Please do not add new content that you have failed to gain consensus for. - Tεxτurε 19:33, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I see no justification for the continued reverting. The suggestion to talk about changes on the talk page before putting them in the article seems very reasonable to me. Friday (talk) 19:28, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I also had concerns about User:Reinyday's comment when I saw it this morning. Many users argue that notability is a valid proxy for "non-encyclopedic" - by which, those people mean the things discussed at, for example, WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Please remember that the list at WP:NOT was not intended to be all-inclusive. It is a set of examples chosen for their clarity and to address problems that were particularly bad at a point in our history. Being "non-encyclopedic" - something that would not normally be found in an encyclopedia - is and always has been a valid reason for deletion. Non-notability under that interpretation is an allowable argument for deletion and is compatible with the Deletion policy. Rossami (talk) 19:37, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Reinyday's comment is correct. The current wording allows that some editors use "notability", while noting that it is not part of deletion policy. Indeed the lack of consensus on notability (or even a widely accepted definition of the term) should as a matter of honesty be included in the guide to deletion. "Non-encyclopedic" is fine with me, but it has a distinct meaning from either "Notability" or indeed the ad hoc definition you give above. On Wikipedia "non-encyclopedic" has historically been used to mean not that encyclopedias wouldn't normally carry such an article (this would exclude a large proportion of our content) but that an encyclopedia article cannot be written on a topic.

We shouldn't remove this accurate and relevant declaration of the fact that notability is not in the deletion policy. Indeed, the only thing the policy has to say about notability is that if an article is on "Such a minor branch of a subject that it doesn't deserve an article", then it is a one of the "problems that don't require deletion". So it seems to me that the notability criterion can only ever be an argument for merging. And you know what? That's compatible with WP:NOT, too. An encyclopedia is about organizations. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 21:46, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

I've written a compromise that refers to WP:NOT on deletion and WP:DP on not deleting but merging. We should have a guide that reflects policy as accurately as is possible. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 22:01, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Please use the talk page, not edit warring, to resolve this issue. Friday (talk) 21:51, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Explanation of brenneman's revert of an edit by Tony Sidaway

Can we just leave the main page alone until we agree on something here, please?
brenneman^(t)(c) 00:31, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

"merge" is a problem

Article X is up for deletion. A notice is posted there, but not on article Y. Consensus is to merge X into Y. So this is done, but the regular contributers to article Y did not get a say in the matter. What recourse do they have?

I've seen it happen. The mergers show up at Y, insisting that the vote was legitimate and that article Y is now stuck with whatever gets dumped into it from X.

AlbertCahalan 04:24, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Not at all. Once an article is merged, it is immediately subject to the regular rules of editing and content evaluation. The presumption is that the people who have interest and expertise in both articles X and Y will now work together to figure out how to write the best possible article. Such a deletion discussion merely says that the article X's history may be kept in the history file. It does not create a mandate that all the content or even a specific subset of X's content or "golden prose" must be kept intact. I suppose someone could claim that "article Y is now stuck with it" but that's simply not true. Rossami (talk) 21:24, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Allow removal of "AFD" tag if AFD sub-page never made

I think the text "You must not modify or remove the AFD notice." should be changed, to say you can remove it *if* no AFD sub-page was created after 24 hours. There seems to be no harm, since somebody can easily re-add it, if that's what they wish. Once the sub-page is created, than obviously, the notice must stay, until closing. --rob 20:20, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Additions to the Guide.

Just an explanatory note. I've made several changes to the Guide. The changes do not alter the intent and scope of the various instruments mentioned in the text; they only clarify long-standing policy and practice concerning mainspace deletions. This edit was made at the encouragement of two respected editors following a discussion I had with another editor on VFU. Regards encephalon 20:52, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Speedy keep

Is there an established protocol for these? --- Charles Stewart 19:54, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Articles that are not frivolous

If someone cannot support a claim that an article is frivolous, especially if it refers to something that they do not know, then it is unjustified to place a deletion notice. M3Plus 01:52, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

• There's really nothing wrong with placing the notice, it'll improve the article if it's not frivolous. Bart133 01:55, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
  • So when the deletion notice is removed by another individual, then it is confirmed. M3Plus 02:14, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
    • The deletion notice must only be removed by the administrator who closes the AFD. In most cases this will be after seven days have passed, allowing the community to discuss the nomination properly. Premature removal by anyone else is considered vandalism. The JPS 10:53, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
    • Personal testimony of editors does not count as verification. Uncle G 15:27, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

google section

The reason given in the original revert was...

(Wikipedia:Google test is already well cited in the Deletion Policy. While we can cite that page here, attempting to boil the whole page down to a simplistic sentence does justice to neither.)

This is false. Google hits is not mentioned in the Wikipedia:Deletion Policy at all. Since this section in not meant to cover the issue in depth, it's simply part of "general advice" and the link to the more in depth article is given. Users are more likely to see this page and will not know that Google hits are not a be-all, end-all method of determining whether an article should be deleted (from experience many users do act this way). There is no reason given why it shouldn't be included here. This helps users know about the issue. -- MateoP

It shouldn't be included, in my opinion, because I don't think it would be that helpful to include it. Refer users who think that Google hits is the be-all, end-all to Wikipedia:Google test. I don't think there are that many users who are careful enough to read this Guide to Deletion but not careful enough to realize that there is a link saying there are some issues with using Google tests, or realize that by themselves. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 21:17, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

We seem to be entering a low-grade revert war over the paragraph below about the reliability of the google test. Rather than continue to argue in the edit history, I've pulled the proposed paragraph here so we can discuss it more fully. At the time of this edit, Mathwiz2020 and MateoP have put the paragraph into the Guide. Cryptic, Jitse Niesen and I have pulled it out using the argument that "Wikipedia:Google test is already well cited in the Deletion Policy. While we can cite that page here, attempting to boil the whole page down to a simplistic sentence does justice to neither." I'll add that we've had serious problems with the gradual bloat of this Guide. It is important that we be as concise as possible on this page. That means that we must be somewhat selective about what we choose to highlight here. Rossami (talk) 21:33, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Take Google hits with a grain of salt

The article's title might be a translation from another language, and therefore doesn't get much attention in the English Google search. Likewise a phrase might get many Google hits but those aren't necessarily related to the topic of the article. Remember to assume good intent and try and bring in people who know more about the subject and are better equipped to provide verifiable sources. Don't rush to delete or keep an article based solely on Google hits. See Wikipedia:Google test for more information on the strengths and weaknesses of using google as a test.

I wouldn't say that Mathwiz2020 put the paragraph in there; he/she only corrected the capitalization of the paragraph that MateoP put in. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 22:45, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Response to user Jitse Niesen and user Rossami arguments

To Jitse Niesen, I am a user who is careful enough to read Guide to deletion but was not aware of the Google test article. No reason it shouldn't be here to let people who only read this article know about the issue. To Rossami, your reason for the revert is simply not true. Google hits is not even mentioned in the Deletion Policy. Furthermore, if your worry is about the page not being concise, my google hits section was very concise and contained a link to the more in-depth article. There are many other sections which are not concise. Perhaps you should break them down.

Anyways, I'm willing to compromise. I would be willing to allow 1 short sentence that does nothing but direct people to the Wikipedia:Google test article, but only if it remains in a header and only if the other sections are reduced also. --MateoP 21:58, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

"People who only read this article" know about the issue because it is mentioned in the "See also" section. The issue is one of balance. I think one sentence in the "See also" section is enough. What other sections do you want to make more concise? -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 22:45, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

All of them. The previous user said that he had an issue of the article being not concise enough. Removing my (small) addition does little to that end.

Also by placing it in the see also section it gives the impression that it isn't part of the Guide to Deletion, it should be. Make an argument why the other sections are more deserving than the section on google hits. For now I'm putting it back in. --MateoP 16:53, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

You've failed to convince me. Your "small" addition is the proverbial camel's nose. It encourages the next person to add another "small" paragraph about their own pet peeve. In very short order, we get back to the 15 page version that everyone complained about. The Google Test is no more (or less) relevant than every other policy or guideline page we have. We don't and can't have a paragraph on each of them. I want the paragraph back out and still think that a "See Also" link is sufficient. Rossami (talk) 20:59, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

If you don't think it's less relevant then delete one of the other current sections and leave the google one in. --MateoP 21:39, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

The other policy pages (for example, WP:NOT, WP:BIO, WWP:MUSIC and WP:CORP) are mentioned in single bullets - the maximum that is appropriate for Wikipedia:Google test. Rossami (talk) 01:45, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Short guide to deletion for meatpuppets

I agree that external users are very unlikely to read the whole guide to deletion. I've written a quick FAQ here which attempts to specifically address the questions an external user is going to have when he comes on Wikipedia and sees his or his friend's article up for deletion. I thought something like this would be good to link to from the {{vfdvoting}} template. It was written somewhat stream-of-consciousness style as a response to some of the meatpuppet contributions I've seen recently, so naturally there are gaps - I'm wondering at this point what other editors think of the general idea. --Last Malthusian 19:43, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Easing server load, shortening the notice, and consolidating the guides

• I've seen the following concerns expressed in various quarters:
  • The {{vfd}} tag is too long, and is suffering from instruction creep.
  • The VFD notice directs users to WP:VFD, which is slow to load, and mainly comprises raw VFD discussions, with a few notes at the top and nomination instructions at the bottom. This places a load on the servers that is unnecessary, when in the main people looking at VFD notices will be more interested in each specific article's own discussion and a guide to the jargon and what it all means, and not all of the currently outstanding VFD discussions in toto.
  • The explanation of VFD is scattered across the VFD notice, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion phrases, the notes at the top of WP:VFD, and several talk pages. And there is some good advice and information that is simply VFD "oral tradition", that would benefit from being written down elsewhere than in various specific VFD discussions.
• Therefore, as promised at the end of last week, here's my idea, which I will put in place in the absence of reasonable objections:
  • A short VFD notice, containing the bare minima of instructions, and hyperlinks pointing to three places:
    • The article's VFD discussion entry
    • The deletion policy
    • A guide to VFD
  • The elimination of much of the explanatory text from the top of WP:VFD, leaving just the navigational items. WP:VFD becomes "the page that you visit only if you want to see all of the outstanding discussions at once, navigate to a particular day's VFD log, or perform a nomination", and not "the page that you visit for anything to do with Votes for Deletion" nor "the page that novices first see when they try to find out more about a VFD notice applied to their article".
  • The aforementioned Wikipedia:Guide to Votes for Deletion (WP:GVFD), comprising a merger of the (secondary) instructions from the VFD notice, the instructions and warnings at the top of WP:VFD, various comments on various talk pages, and Wikipedia:Votes for deletion phrases.
• Uncle G 18:06, 2005 Feb 23 (UTC)

• The guide is in place, and has received attention. The top of WP:VFD has been shortened. A redirect is now in place at the old Wikipedia:Votes for deletion phrases page, and links to that have been modified to point directly to the guide instead where appropriate. The only remaining part of the original task left is to modify {{vfd}} as per the above. That template is (or at least was, the last time that I checked) protected because of repeated vandalism. There's a suggested replacement, as per the above, on Template talk:vfd#Easing_server_load.2C_shortening_the_notice.2C_and_consolidating_the_guides. Uncle G 03:30, 2005 Mar 8 (UTC)

Some thoughts

Wow! You have done some incredible work. I think this consolidation of our rules and traditions makes a great deal of sense. Thank you. I do have a couple of thoughts that I'd like to get a reaction on before I am bold. Rossami (talk) 05:31, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

1. I can't find a single topic that I think can be dropped but we should work on tightening up the wording over time. It's a long read.
2. I do not consider a merge of content during the discussion period to be inappropriate. An attempted merger of good content can make subsequent votes much easier since it has shown whether or not a successful merger was possible. The merger can always be reverted (by any editor) if it turns out to have been a bad idea.
3. I would like to bold the sentence Votes without rationales may be discounted.
   • Done by UncleG
4. Should we add a comment to this general effect? "Every so often, someone will refactor a vote into "keep", "delete" and "other" sections, thinking that they are helping the process. Please refrain. The context and the order of the comments are essential to understanding the voters' intent. Refactoring actually makes the deciding admin's job much harder."
5. Even though the BEEFSTEW guideline on schools is still in Dpbsmith's user space, is it getting enough use to be considered a viable guideline to include in the list in Rationales?
6. On a purely stylistic note, the Xe (pronoun) style isn't working for me. I'd rather have the traditional (and I think still grammatically preferred) he/she.
   • I've reworded the neologisms to avoid the issue entirely; see the rant on my user page. (And echo the "wow". I'd been considering something similar (the past few 14-hour days of mindless work leaves plenty of room for such mulling), though I hadn't much progressed past "link Template:VfD header inside Template:vfd". This works much better.) —Korath (Talk) 12:43, Feb 24, 2005 (UTC)

• Yes, it's a long read. But I did try to put the information that novices were most likely to need, or at least strong pointers to it, at the top. I've approximated, although not slavishly followed, summary style in the relative positioning of the sections (i.e. the detailed lists of shorthands are at the bottom), and within the sections. Uncle G 15:37, 2005 Feb 24 (UTC)
• The caution against merger was taken from a discussion on merger during deletion, and its effect on GFDL compliance, on one of the many talk pages. See the following section. Uncle G 15:37, 2005 Feb 24 (UTC)
• Upon re-reading the article yesterday, I wasn't convinced myself that I'd been positive enough on the topic of rationales. I've improved the wording, and emphasized that very sentence. I've also added a note about the refactoring. See what you think. Uncle G 15:37, 2005 Feb 24 (UTC)
• I looked at Dpbsmith/BEEFSTEW. I left it out because it doesn't yet appear to have the widespread support that the WikiProject Music, biography, and Web comics guidelines have. This is not to say that I wouldn't like to see guidelines on schools. Radiant! seems to be working on this. See User talk:Radiant!/Schools. Uncle G 15:37, 2005 Feb 24 (UTC)
• I see that Korath and I disagree on xe. I use it because, having discovered it (as something that fills what I've long seen to be a hole in the language), that now is my grammatical preference. (I used to use "him/her" and, on occasion, "they".) I find it most amusing that Korath's edits aimed solely to eliminate "xe" and "xyr" have in fact altered the meaning in several places, and thus make a good case against the oft-propounded argument that this deficiency in the set of pronouns can be worked around by rephrasing. I'll try to fix this. Uncle G 15:37, 2005 Feb 24 (UTC)

Anons making nomination

The following text has a problem:

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

Now that anons can't create a page, they can't complete a nomination. Either we should:

• a) Tell anons they can't make a nomination (my preferred choice)
• b) Explain how they can, which means telling them to put a tag, and have User:Crypticbot do it for them, or suggest some other approach, I might not be aware of.

Currently, the wording implies that anon nominations are no different from others, but this is clearly not the case. Regardless of how it should be reworded, it clearly does need rewording. --Rob 19:08, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

• I prefer the first, personally. We shouldn't encourage people to make broken nominations. I did a quick correction on the guide itself [1]: , so it's at least accurate now; we could possibly put in the usual 'registration is free, do it here' line as well. --Malthusian (talk) 19:15, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
• Anons have been permitted to nominate pages for deletion since at least the very first version of this guide. I see no reason to prevent them merely because of a side effect of a largely irrelevant policy change elsewhere. (Inspection of Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Archives shows that I'm hardly alone in that.) Trying to speedy-keep autobiographies of bit-part actors merely because an anon found it first is putting process over product to an unacceptable extreme. —Cryptic (talk) 19:42, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

The policy is that anons can't make new articles, right? Why not just see if developers are willing to implement this more precisely? A project-space page is not, after all, an article. Friday (talk) 19:57, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Or they can put their nomination on the article's talk page. (I have moved many such to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ subpages.) The restriction on anon page creation was to prevent low-quality material from being added to the encyclopedia, not from being removed. —Cryptic (talk) 20:02, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

"Redirect" option

Your opinion please in Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy#"Redirect" option. Mukadderat 23:47, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

For the record, archived at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy/Archive 6#"Redirect" option. —⁠andrybak (talk) 21:57, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Why does this have to be so complicated?

OK look I made a page within my user space that needs to be deleted. It's "User talk:Nerd42/talk", which was replaced by [[Talk:User:Nerd42]]. So I have looked at, like, seven different pages and none of them seem to have a simple way to tell admins to delete the page. They're all about "the deletion process" and full of irrelevent links to "be nice to newbies" policy pages and all have more templates for dofferent reasons for deletion than a swiss army knife has blades. I just want to get a page deleted quick - and the "speedy deletion process" looks like it takes longer than the regular one. It's like, way too many lawyers hang out on Wikipedia, you know? A simple task like this has to become so complicated! :( --Nerd42 (talk) 04:32, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Add the text "{{db|Mistakenly created by user}}" at the very top of the page and an admin will hopefully delete it within a day or so. --Rob 05:26, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Rob, it's nice that you told Nerd42 that. BUT the point remains - I came here for the same reason and I found the answer in a talk page, which is subject to being archived. There should be a better place to go to for advice on how to remove pages from user space (specifically, your own user space). I know - I can ignore the page for ever... but really it would be nice to be able to find the answer to how to get your own user subpages / talk subpages deleted!Garrie 23:56, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

It is covered in the deletion policy through reference to speedy deletion criteria. See: WP:CSD#U1 by "{{dbuser}}". Seems straight forward enough to me. JERRY ^talk _contribs 00:31, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

While Google section is absolutely necessary

The deletion template points specifically here to give me advice on deciding the fate of articles. Add to that the fact that a whole lot of people use google hits as their sole decision whether to vote delete or keep, and that signals me that a google section is absolutely necessary here. People are not adhering to this advice. Since the template points here, it should be here.

The arguments against the google section are all flawed. The only real argument that has been made is that google hits already has it's own article. But so does sockpuppets. So does assume good faith. Yet you are not deleting those sections. So, my question is, why is google hits less deserving of a section in this article? --MateoP 02:11, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Consistency and clarity

I understand the position we're in now resulted from the above 2005 discussion about instruction creep. As a new Admin and a user since 2004, I have found it massively unclear how to navigate the AfD process. A new user above mentions the same thing, visiting three or more pages about about about AfD but not really explaining what to do. I have been editing the instructions at WP:AFD for brevity and I have found an enormous amount of duplication here. I am trying to cut that down, hopefully making the whole process much more transparent and easy for the new user to understand. Kaisershatner 16:04, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

AFD notice removal

Can someone point me to the policy and proper action for an author removing the AFD notice? TIA. - Keith D. Tyler ¶ (AMA) 17:49, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

The proper action is to revert the removal and add a notice to the user's Talk page. The escalating templates {{drmafd}}, {{drmafd2}}, {{drmafd3}}, {{drmafd4}} and {{drmafd5}} can be helpful. They can be found at Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace along with an equivalent series for the inappropriate removal of speedy-deletion templates. I don't know of anyplace where the practice is formally documented. Wikipedia works as much through tradition and social controls as through formally documented procedures. Rossami (talk) 19:57, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Why is deleting articles so hard?

Why is it that any fool can create an new article in 30 seconds, but to delete an article takes a week of discussion? I understand that erasing an article and it's entire edit history should be hard. But why isn't there a simpler delete process that would leave the edit history in place? For example, why don't we simply blank inappropriate articles, or replace them with a template that would say something like 'Wikipedia does not currently have any such article. Click here to add content."? The closet we currently have (So far as I can tell, the closest current procedure would be to replace the page with a redirect, but that's only useful for redundant pages.

I rant because I keep running into pointless, obscure pages, and the entire AfD process is a pain. (Add this template here, then that template there, create this page, add that text, wait a week...) Nonsuch 22:32, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Proposed deletion, Wikipedia:Transparent_deletion, Wikipedia:Pure wiki deletion system, and related discussions. There are many who wholeheartedly agree. ∴ here…♠ 20:33, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Bullet re considerationof speed and prod before AfD nomination

I have added a bullet to the nomination section requesting people pleasee strongly consider if speedy or prod would be a better option. This is based on discussions raised on the AfD talk page about the ever increasing number of AfD that could/should have been done through one of the other processes. There are, on a regular basis, over 200 AfDs per day.--Gay Cdn (talk) (email) (Contr.) 12:58, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

• Interesting point. When in doubt, I usually go straight to AfD because I know people will actually look at what I put there. When I see people nominating AfD and writing "contested ProD", I wonder, why bother going through ProD? I'm not saying ProD shouldn't exist, but I don't find it useful. (YechielMan) 129.98.212.69 23:37, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Merge Wikipedia:Help, my article got nominated for deletion! here?

On Wikipedia talk:Help, my article got nominated for deletion! there is a discussion about merging that page into this one. // Habj 08:48, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I think it would be a good idea to merge it, because the few times I've been trying to get around to editing anything, it's been a real headache. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mercynre (talk • contribs) 00:30, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Informing the creators is being ignored

This was crossposted and has little to do with the specific workings of this page. Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy#Informing the creators is being ignored. The comments have already been moved. Please do not spam such complaints across multiple pages. Rossami (talk) 18:54, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

For the record, archived at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy/Archive 7#Informing the creators is being ignored. —⁠andrybak (talk) 21:59, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Don't use the word "vanity"

I put in this edit per the discussion at WT:AFD and WT:BLP - in short, deletion discussions now get media attention, and despite robots.txt they seem to show up in searches anyway. Please rephrase less clunkily - David Gerard 11:42, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Need a request for admin help in AFD closure template

Hypothetical: Suppose I am the creator of the The New Way Forward article. It gets put up for AFD, and as the discussion happens at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The New Way Forward, a consensus emerges to keep. Do I have to wait around for an administrator to come by, or is there a way to request an admin's help? The guide to deletion needs to address this. Incidentally, this wasn't really a hypothetical. Will somone please help? MPS 21:26, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Be patient. Except in a few exceptional cases, deletion discussions run for 5 days. At the end of the 5 day period, the discussion is moved into a closure queue where it may wait for a few more days until an admin volunteer comes along to close the discussion. Most times, that's fairly short but sometimes we get a backlog. Either way, there is no pressing need to prematurely close any given discussion. You can continue to edit and improve the article, link to it from other articles, etc. If the decision really was an unambiguous "keep", it will get closed out soon.

By the way, the Guide already says all this. See the Closure section. Rossami (talk) 01:44, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

TOO COMPLICATED

Too many long pages to read when one simply wants to propose a deletion. Can't some expert rewrite this mess? Gbnogkfs 19 January 2007, 1:56 (UTC)

This guide isn't specifically focused on the process of starting an AfD, more on the general policy and process behind deletion. Instructions for starting an AfD can be found at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion. --Sam Blanning^(talk) 22:59, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

I think so,too.Contre-boutant-ex (talk) 17:48, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Do not delete the socom 4 page please

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Randomoss (talk • contribs) 21:26, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

 Courtesy link: SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy SEALs. —⁠andrybak (talk) 22:06, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Absurdity is often complicated and ridiculous

This is absurd:

You may edit the article during the discussion 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 copyright infringement).

This is being interpreted to mean that any sort of crap that might wind up in a Wikipedia article, must remain if the article is proposed for deletion. If it's not proposed for deletion, apparently I can blank anything that isn't appropriate for Wikipedia, but any sort of worthless garbage, calling other users name, posting a personal address on Wikipedia, posting my resume for a few days, as long as it is proposed for deletion, it cannot be blanked. Only copyright violations must be blanked. This is just crying out for WP:POINT. KP Botany 01:07, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, it would be helpful if you gave some specific examples where you think this clause is being misused but I'll tell you that it was added to stop abusive edits.
Let me also clarify that pageblanking anything in Wikipedia other than a copyright violation or personal attack is almost always considered a form of vandalism. This clause does not prevent you from cleaning up the article. In fact, that's what the first section is intended to encourage. But complete pageblanking is almost never in good faith and is prohibited regardless of whether the page is under an active deletion discussion or not. The clause was specifically added because pageblanking is a frequent problem for nominated pages. Rossami (talk) 14:57, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Orphaned AfD page

An inexperienced user tried to nominate an article for deletion. He/she managed to make its AfD page, but not properly. It lacks the general structure of a typical afD page and is not transcluded, although the nominated article has an AfD template. I don't know how to deal with this case. Should the AfD page be deleted or should someone finalise the nomination? The nominator's argument are hardly met anymore, since I did edit the article and is now in much better shape than before the AfD template was was placed on it. Julius Sahara 18:01, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

A bot fixed it, so this is not an issue anymore. Julius Sahara 08:23, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Trivial Articles for Deletion Nominations

There should be an easier way to remove Articles for Deletion notices if a "Keep" consensus quickly develops. What's to stop vandals or annoying curmudgeons from nominating numerous articles for deletion and forcing everyone to view the notices for the long discussion periods? All these unhelpful and unsightly banners in Wikipedia seem like a way for power trippers for complain -- instead of fixing the articles. The "stub" notice at the bottom of short articles is nice because it is discrete and useful for categorizing: imagine if all short articles had an ugly banner at the top saying, "This article needs to be longer". Anthony717 21:24, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

We should keep a good faith and focus on expanding any newly written stub articles first, unless the newly written article is bluntly about advertisement. Chongkian (talk) 03:47, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Cruft in Shorthand

I'm concerned about the presence of the term "cruft" in the Shorthand section. I think it should either be removed, or modified to note that many people object to the use of the term as biased opinion, or otherwise do not find it acceptable. FrozenPurpleCube 15:05, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

New suggestion:

I suggest the inverse: that Wikipedia:Help, my article got nominated for deletion! be merged with Deletion.-Marcus 17:26, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

help

hello guys, my article 2 years old is suddenly about to be deleted i read but i couldnt understand why or what to fix. if anyone could help me, i'll be grateful. my article is Beirut_IRC. thanks. stef —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Douaihy (talk • contribs) 11:32, 12 April 2007 (UTC).

Actually, your article has not yet been nominated for deletion. It's been tagged with a question about whether or not the subject meets our generally accepted inclusion criteria. In this case, I think the relevant criterion is WP:WEB.
If after reading up on that page you are sure that the subject meets our inclusion criteria, explain why on the article's Talk page (and maybe improve the article to make that clearer to future readers). If no one objects after a few days, remove the "notability" tag.
If you can't find evidence or if others dispute your evidence (or interpretation of WP:WEB), the article might then be nominated for deletion. You'll still have a chance to present more evidence during the deletion discussion if it gets that far. Good luck. Rossami (talk) 15:17, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Deletion without discussion?

Several of the Max Headroom (TV series) episode articles were deleted. These are pages that I watch; however, I don't recall ever seeing a debate take place before the were deleted. Can articles be deleted without debate? How can I find if a debate occurred so that I can review it?--P Todd 22:49, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, pages that meet the Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion may be deleted on sight. The deletion reason should be logged, see Wikipedia:Why was my page deleted? on how to find out what happened. Femto 14:55, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Editing during {{afd}}

This document currently has a section entitled: You may edit the article during the discussion.

IMO this section has a serious weakness. IMO it should warn the wikipedians who actually nominated the article they should keep their hands off, for the duration of the {{afd}}.

This last year or so I have participated in several {{afd}} where, after nominating an article for deletion, the nominator then went and made significant editorial changes, reverting my attempts to improve these articles.

I tried to point out to a few of these wikipedians that their nomination was a signal that they thought the article was beyond fixing, so further attempts to fix it could be perceived as bad-faith attempts to sabotage the efforts of those trying to improve the article.

Those nominators who made extensive edits after making their nominations, who were willing to respond to civil queries, claimed Wikipedia:Guide to deletion didn't proscribe their editing, or even recommend against it. This is, IMO, a weakness.

I raised this issue on WP:AN/I a couple of months ago. Most respondents repeated that the policy didn't explicitly prohibit nominators from editing. Some respondents suggested that I merely provide a link to the version of the article I favored. There are a couple of problems with this:

1. This suggestion is totally unworkable for people who are trying to makes new changes to address the concerns expressed by those favoring deletion.
   • To follow this suggestion they would have to revert the article back to the last version they liked, then make their change, then record that diff in the {{afd}}. This is a lot of extra work. It would appear to be a violation of the 3RR.
   • And how would interested readers who were waiting to see how the improvements turned out know which version is the one they should look at? Far better if those who nominated the article for deletion refrained from making "improvements".
2. This suggestion overlooks the extra level of effort this requires of {{afd}} respondents. And it overlooks that many {{afd}} participants don't read most of the other comments.

I am not questioning that nominators are entitled to delete personal attacks, or similar. But, IMO, they should not be making "improvements" to articles they gave up on. I have no problem with nominators who change their mind about whether an article they nominated for deletion can be improved. But, in that case, shouldn't they then withdraw their nomination to delete?

My suggested wording:

Remember, you should only nominate an article for deletion if you think the article cannot be improved. So, please be very careful about making edits to article being considered. Those edits can look like vandalism; like attempts to subert the efforts of those who have made efforts to change the article to a state that clearly merits preservation. If, after making a nomination for deletion, you change your mind, and see ways in which the article can be improved, consider withdrawing your nomination prior to making those improvements.

Cheers! Geo Swan 19:27, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Support: I have recently had a similar experience (nominator removing material from article that was added during AfD discussion, and partly on the grounds that it was added during AfD discussion). (I was going to say that I cannot see any reason for someone editing an article if they think it should be deleted, but I can actually see some reason: added content will be visible in the article at least temporarily, and more ideas keep coming top me. Now I think about it, it is more complicated than I first thought - it quite of is with WP!) Anyway, I still support your wording. I see that nothing has happened about it here - at this point in this talk page - for about 5 years. I am wondering if this has been discussed elsewhere. I have never edited a Guide page and I am not sure how much consensus needs to be gathered first, and how? FrankSier (talk) 21:08, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Deletion request notification

Currently, this guide states:

It is generally considered civil to notify the good-faith creator and any main contributors of the articles that you are nominating for deletion.

This wording makes it dependent on each nominator's goodwill. Consequently, particularly the nicest editors end up spending the most time with menial tasks. (From my experience, depending on where you draw the border between "main" and non-main contributions, this can take more than an hour for a medium sized article.) I don't think that's fair. More importantly, we are creating a detrimental contradiction: If any deletion requests need notification, it would be the hasty ones. The current wording just achieves the opposite: It ensures that the more hasty a notification is, the less it will be reported!

I thought a bot could solve this dilemma, but when I brought it up on WP:BOTREQ#Deletion request notification, one of the bot specialists pointed out that "since it is [only] an optional step [...], I'd like to see more of a community mandate for such a bot before considering working on it." How does the comunity feel about it - Does the community agree on such a mandate?

If not, then I feel we should cut that step from our guide altogether. It simply doesn't make sense to ask a menial chore of our editors if we don't do our part to make that chore easier, fairer and more effective. Please let's discuss this here. — Sebastian 03:08, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I do not like the idea of bot-notification but that's on general principle - other than the reversion of extremely obvious vandalism, I see more problems with bots than good generally. On your more specific point of making the notification effectively mandatory, we've avoided that requirement not because it would be hard or time consuming but because it can have very negative effects on some discussions. For one thing, it reinforces a sense of ownership in the article, a tendency which we are strongly advised to resist as much as possible. It also brings into question the fairness of notification for any article with more than perfunctory edits after the first draft - do you notify the first drafter or the subsequent editor who added lots of detail. (Some have proposed solving that by notifying every editor to a page when it's nominated but that annoys the editors who made trivial wikification edits but who don't otherwise have a stake in the article and who don't want to be bothered by the subsequent edits.)
Relying on edit history also fails in that some people reading the page may feel they have a stake in the article even if they didn't make major edits to it. What makes the original author's opinion any better than theirs?
Then there's the mechanical question of anon editors - do you notify them or not. If not, the ones who edit from a stable IP cry foul. But if you do, you confuse the subsequent editors to shared or dynamic IPs.
Ultimately, however, all the prior discussions about notification boiled down to one observation. If you care that much about an article that you want to have a say in its fate, you should watchlist it. Watchlists are one of the first things new users learn and they're heavily "advertised" within the Wikipedia system. If you don't care enough to watchlist the page, why would you care any more with a Talk page notification? If you care enough about the page to have it watchlisted, then whether you authored, edited or merely read the page, you'll be automatically notified of any normal deletion tagging. Rossami (talk) 03:57, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Relying on watchlists is an attitude very unfriendly to new users, who may very well not know about this system--and it is them in particular who are the problem. It is truly incredible to me and has been since the say I joined WP, that WP has a policy that does not absolutely automatically notify everyone when action is being taken to delete an article they have written via any process. Basic fairness requires notifying people of advice actions against them. Failing to do so is BITE, and i urge the community to disavow to require at least this very minimal level of politeness.

I would be perfectly willing to support absolutely required manual notification.. The wording to should immediately be changed to require it, and the simplest way to require it is to have the failure to do so lead to invalidation of the afd nomination. . Any editor who fails to notify people when he is taking actions they affect their work adversely does not have enough consideration for other editors to remain on wikipedia.

The various tools for placing afds could easily be adapted to do this. But some people think it too much work, and if that is the general feeling, then we need a bot, and will learn to tolerate its occcasional excess and inconvenience. Details about anons, many multiple authors, etc. could be worked out later.

The first step is to immediately change the wording to replace "It is generally considered civil to notify the good-faith creator and any main contributors of the articles that you are nominating for deletion." with "It is absolutely necessary to notify.... Failure to do so invalidates the nomination. The only reasonable question is to we prefer to require it manually, or must we use a bot.

And I would say just the same for all other deletion processes. DGG (talk) 04:34, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

You raise one interesting point: WP:BITE. IIRC, then our default for newbies is indeed that both "Add pages I create to my watchlist" and "Add pages I edit to my watchlist" are turned off. I think we should solve problem at the root by changing these defaults, rather than by adding yet another layer of complexity. — Sebastian 20:33, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Having examined the technical aspects involved in coding such a bot as well as the "applicability" of such a bot, I've come up with a few thoughts for your consideration regarding this matter.

First, I look at what is likely the most important question: Is an AFD notification bot acceptable or unacceptable? There are a couple of "compromise" answers to this question. In all, I can think up the following responses to the question:

1. A notification bot is not only acceptable but it is necessary.
2. A notification bot is acceptable but not necessary.
3. A notification bot is unacceptable.

If the consensus of the community follows the first answer, then it naturally follows that the wording of our deletion procedures must be changed to reflect the fact that notifications are mandatory and automatic.

If the consensus follows the last answer, then nothing need change. — Arkyan — continues after insertion below

I disagree. In that case, the wording needs to change, since it is counterproductive, as pointed out at the beginning of this section. — Sebastian 20:42, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I bring up the second "compromise" possibility because there are a couple of other approaches. A bot could be written to do AFD notifications with an opt in/opt out feature. If the bot were set to run by default, a nominator could place an opt-out template in the nomination instructing the bot not to issue notifications, to allow the nominator to do it manually or to skip it altogether. The bot could also be set to not notify by default, but allow a nominator to place an opt-in template in the nomination and instruct the bot to issue automated notifications.

Naturally, if a bot is made to do this, it must include a global opt-out "blacklist" to which a user could add their name and request not to be notified of AFD's via bot at all.

Finally, if there is consensus for such a bot, it needs to be decided as to what scope the bot will notify people. Shall it be anyone who has made a non-trivial (not marked minor) edit? Should it include IP contributors? Should it just be contributors from the last 500 edits? Should it always include the original author?

Adding this functionality to my bot would not be difficult and I'd be up to the task if there is consensus as to its utility. If it hasn't already been done, those interested in such a bot should consider bringing this up at Wikipedia talk:Deletion process, Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy and/or Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) to generate a broader dicussion - I'm not sure how many watch this talk page. ɑʀкʏɑɴ 18:18, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you again for your thorough reply. I brought it up on the various locations. — Sebastian 20:28, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't see much point in having this bot-operated. How will the bot determine who is a "significant contributor?" What if the original author hasn't touched the article since? What about a new user who just did some work on the article? There's going to be a lot of variables there. And would the "opt in/opt out" process be on a per-user basis or a per-page basis? The former would generate a lot of "false hits" for notifying, while the latter might be a more heavy burden on the bot/servers -- Kesh 20:06, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Why is notification required for the creator or major editors? If they are interested in the article it should be on their watch list so they are already informed about the deletion request. Vegaswikian 20:15, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree with you, personally - but the request had been made so I brought up some thoughts about it here. ɑʀкʏɑɴ 20:19, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Android Mouse used to run a bot that would inform article creators of speedy-deletion nominations. Unfortunately, he's left Wikipedia.--Father Goose 01:36, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Making it deliberately harder to request deletions

(Headline was inserted after the following message)

I concur with mandatory notification, though with some limits to keep the task manageable. There are too many users out there making ill-considered nominations, and requring them to spend a little extra time can help weed out the frivolous nominations. As an option, we can require the nominee to inform just the creator, one or two major contributors from recent months, and then the projects involved. THis will only be about 4-6 notifications total, which should be manageable for anyone serious editor. Re: the watchlists, I lost my entire watchlist a couple of months back, and have still not foud all the articles I was originally watching before the inadvertant list clearing. Also, there have been times where I've cleared a watchlisted page by accident, and then realized it afterward, so it's possible there were some I never caught. Still, my experience in the deletion process is that courtesy is generally extremely lacking among many regular deleters; if it were not, this wouldn't be an issue. Anyone who lacks the courtesy to discuss a matter before proposing a deletion that affects a well-edited page, or a template on 4000 articles, or who AFDs an article 2 minutes after its creation (I have seen all these examples, and can provide proof), is not likely to voluntarily take the time to notify anyone if they are not required to do so. - BillCJ 23:43, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Interesting idea, to deliberately not use a bot in order to weed out the frivolous nominations. I'm inserting a subheadline before your reply to highlight it. I think it deserves discussion, and I'm afraid that discussion could get complicated, since there are two groups of questions:

Detail and execution questions such as

Who will check this for every deletion request? What are the sanctions if someone doesn't do it? Will we simply delete the request or warn the editor, or are there better ideas?

There are also bigger picture questions, such as

Do we really want to make it hard to request normal deletions? (Some people may say we already have too many bad articles.) Should they be harder to request than speedy deletions, or should speedy deletions also become harder to request? If so, will they remain speedy? Are there other ways to achieve the same goal? Maybe we could demand something else from the requester that's less of a boondoggle, such as research where text comes from, or spending some time backing up the case for deletion.

— Sebastian 00:30, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I oppose mandatory notification. AfD is an open discussion for the whole community. An article must be judged on its own merits. Notifying the creator, major contributors, and/or involved Wikiprojects, is far more likely to create a one-sided number of participants (those with a predefined interest in keeping the article), instead of attracting a number of uninvolved, more neutral editors. For a process that is based on consensus building, having mainly non involved editors in the discussion is a plus. If people want to take the effort to notify the creator and so on anyway, I'll not stop them of course, but I don't see the need to do so, and I don't think making the deletion of articles any harder (and every step added will stop some people of making nominations, both the frivolous and the very worthy ones) is the way to go. For a ProD, notification is the right thing to do because there is no open discussion of these articles, and the chance is that no one takes a look at them except the nominator and the closing admin. An AfD is open for everyone to see, and that should be enough. Let's not make this any more bureaucratic. Fram 07:34, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I've seen a bot create user notifications for speedy deletions. That appears sensible, because the article usually has only one contributor, and they could be new to Wikipedia. Bots for AfD notifications seem excessive and unwise. Keeping an article on your watchlist says that you care enough about it to monitor it. If you don't, why should you be notified? I'm also concerned about the possible vote-stacking effect mentioned above, that contributors may be summoned back to defend something they had lost interest in. Also, this is going to fill up a lot of people's Talk pages with AfD notices. If you are tired of wading through zillions of image notices in other people's Talk pages, wait till this bot starts its work. EdJohnston 15:05, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I'd still support a mandatory notification of the article's creator during an AfD, but no other authors. The initial contributor may be new and doesn't know how to watchlist pages; nobody should be blindsided by the disappearance of their contributions. If we notify page creators of a speedy or prod, we should do the same for an AfD.--Father Goose 17:06, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I assume your last sentence was not meant as a logical "if ... then" clause, but as a mere figure of speech. You can very well do one without doing the other, as Fram just pointed out nicely in their undisputed point above. However, I think your point about newbies merits further consideration; let's start another section for it. — Sebastian 18:18, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I am strongly opposed to any mandatory notification of creator, major contributor, etc. It just opens up a silly process loophole if people forget to notify. The creator, if not notified, even if they know about the AFD can just wait until its over, the article gets deleted and the creator goes to DRV - "I was never notified" - the article gets undeleted and we have to go through the whole AFD again or we have to go through a DRV debate. This is a volunteer project, we can't make people do anything; we have a hard enough time getting people to not do things. Also, as far as a notification bot goes, that would be a good idea and I believe we had something like that in the past but it broke or its creator left. Someone may want to check the list of bots and their tasks to see if the creator can be contacted to get the code to save time in making a new bot. Mr.Z-man 18:33, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

The bot, as I noted above, was User:Android Mouse Bot 2, but Android Mouse has left the project. As for the "if...then", what I'm saying is that if we think it's reasonable to notify page creators of speedies and prods, we should notify them of AfDs as well. But no auto-notification of anyone besides the page creator -- everyone else should just watchlist the page if it's important to them.--Father Goose 20:56, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I stand in strong opposition to any mandatory requirement for notification. It is just an invitation to wikilawyering. Encouragement of notification is fine. Community consensus as demonstrated by practice is that there is no requirement to notify anybody. Until the community actually starts demonstrating routinely notifying people, it simply is not a policy or guideline, regardless of any pages that may now or in the future say otherwise. Civility is a guideline, but the practicality of figuring out who the main editors are makes notification of principle editors impractical of implementation for many articles. (On the other hand, the "SPA removed the PROD" sub-category of AFD noms it is both fairly obvious that 1) the SPA is the main editor and 2) they are watching the article and don't need a notice.) Projects that want to monitor pages in the project can do what Wikiproject Mathematics does, namely have a bot that monitors articles in their topical area and logs the nominations on a central page. Editors (and read only users) can watchlist. GRBerry 20:10, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Android Mouse Bot was for speedy deletion, that bot has since been taken over by one of ST47's bots. Jayden54Bot was the bot I was thinking of, inactive since May. Mr.Z-man 21:32, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Ah, good. Would there be opposition to extending User:CSDWarnBot's mission to notifying creators of AfDed and prodded articles? (Or running a similar bot which would do just prods and afds?) This would take care of the newbie-biting issue without creating extra bureaucracy.--Father Goose 22:44, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I remain uncomfortable with it on the philosophical grounds that it incorrectly reinforces a false sense of ownership. Creators of the article have no greater (or lesser) say in the fate of the article than any other editor. Singling the first editor out for special notification seems inconsistent with the philosophy of a wiki. I also think it would be unnecessary if we changed the watchlist default as was previously suggested. (I suspect that the watchlist approach would have the added benefit of consuming fewer system resources than the notification approach.) Rossami (talk) 00:27, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

WP:OWN is I not think relevant--people should have a chance to defend their work. At AfD, the community decides. More important, the ideal Afd results in a challenged article being substantially improved. Usually for the sort of articles that show up at Afd, the best person to do that is the original creator. Do we want primarily to get rid of articles, whether or not they are improvable, or to give them the best chance for improvement? And failing to find sources after a challenge and fair opportunity is the best way to make it clear that deletion is necessary. Every reasonable way to involve editors should be encouraged. DGG (talk) 01:28, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Hear, hear.--Father Goose 03:11, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

"Reinforces a sense of ownership"? I'd have to describe that as speculation. Is there even a means by which that would happen?

It would be ridiculous to inform all editors, and difficult to consistently determine who the "primary contributors" were. So informing only the first editor is a practicality. In cases where there was only one primary contributor, the first editor is exactly the person we want to inform, as other editors are not likely to have the page watchlisted, and it also helps to avoid biting the newbies. In cases where there were many editors, informing the first editor will be less necessary, but it still won't hurt.--Father Goose 01:41, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

WP:BITE

We haven't found agreement on what to do about the argument "The initial contributor may be new and doesn't know how to watchlist pages; nobody should be blindsided by the disappearance of their contributions." Indeed, since our default for newbies is that both "Add pages I create to my watchlist" and "Add pages I edit to my watchlist" are turned off, we get a lot of such disappointments. Wouldn't it be an easier solution if we changed these defaults, rather than working around the problem with additional policies or bots? — Sebastian 18:18, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I think at the very least flipping the page creation default to the opposite would be helpful, probably also the "pages I edit". It won't actually matter until they click on the "my watchlist" link, but at least the pages would be on the watchlist when they do. GRBerry 20:12, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

By "It won't actually matter", I assume you just mean that they have to be aware that they have a watchlist. This gives me an idea: I know the idea of a welcoming bot was not welcome (excuse the pun), but how about a "page creator notification bot"? This bot could add an unassuming, neutral message along the following lines: "This is an automatic message. You just created article X, and since you seem to be a new user, you may find the following tips helpful ...". This would serve two purposes: It could help newbies by covering such bits of information as a tip to check the watchlist and set the preferences accordingly, and, if the newbie's first creation was some vanispamcruftisement, it would alert other talk page visitors to that fact. (This would e.g. have helped me yesterday when I made a bit of a fool out of myself by first greeting a newbie, then cleaning up after their most recent changes (thus to some extend "legitimizing" the article) before realizing that the whole article was created by that same account, which was only created for that purpose.) — Sebastian 21:14, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

A new idea and a good one. why dont we try it--along with changing the watchlist default. (and without prejudice to other things, because notification is a boon to all occasional users)DGG (talk) 02:55, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Automated help for newbies is a very big plus, there are simply too many gaps at the moment between real life civility and wiki culture. Anything would be a help, and Sebastian you have a brilliant idea. Penyulap _talk 12:57, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Conclusion

The discussion has died down, so let me summarize what I gathered from it so far:

• There is no consensus for a deletion request notification bot; the majority opposes such a bot.
• There is no consensus for mandatory notification; the majority opposed it.
• The need to help newbies in some way has been stressed by several editors, with no objection.
• A helper bot for newbies that just created a new article has been proposed; one supporter, no opposition. Since this is only indirectly related to the topic of this page, I will try and find a better place for it - how about WT:Wc/WEL?
• There is no consensus for the current wording; it seems to be the result of a compromise between those who want mandatory notification and those who oppose it. To me, this seems a false compromise since it takes the worst of both extremes, so I would like to find a better solution. — Sebastian 06:09, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

I do not conclude from the limited discussion here that there is no consensus more generally. DGG (talk) 01:20, 2 November 2007 (UTC).

Category:Guantanamo Bay detainees

Posted to Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion as well, simply because I'm not sure where this is appropriate.

Hello, I've been looking through Category:Guantanamo Bay detainees, and I'm fairly concerned about it. Virtually all of these people are allegedly "notable" for a sole event: having been captured by the United States government for alleged terrorism or terror-related activities. Nearly every single article, hundreds of them, is the same. I sent three to AfD yesterday (I could have merged them all into one AfD but I wanted each reviewed independently in case I was mis-reading things):

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Abdullah Gulam Rasoul
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fahed Nasser Mohamed
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zahid Al-Sheikh

I would venture, from reviewing at least 50 casually today, that

1. WP:BLP1E applies in virtually all cases. The articles are not biographical in any real sense.
2. Each is allegedly "notable" for having been captured by the US government.
3. All sourcing is functionally primary-only.

I compared it on the AfDs to, "the article is functionally a reprinting of the US allegations towards this man who may or may not be a terrorist, who may or may not be guilty of something. We can't tell, since there are no 3rd party RS about him, just primary sources from the US government. In essence, this is the equivalent of writing an article about a crime suspect, sourced to nothing at all but official documents about the crime released by the prosecuting state attorney."

I think that per our policies as I've read them, we could conceivably delete hundreds of these BLP violating articles on non-notable people under AfD. However, I'm not sure how best to approach this. Virtually every single article was created by User:Geo Swan, and he already seems somewhat annoyed at me for having processed AfDs on a few of these articles. I'm not sure if launching an AfD with over 600+ articles is the right way to do this, but these articles seem to be inappropriate for us to have.

My questions: what should we do with this? Sending them off to AfD a few at a time each week would be pointlessly slow, repetitive, and just lead to hours of repeated statements (again, each article is the same basically--insert a new name, with a minority having different traits and sources). Speedy deleting out all articles in the category would be bad, as I would venture something like 5%-10% would certainly pass AfD and would require inspection. Should I just review each, make a massive list, and then send them all (easily over 200-400 articles) to one very long-running AfD? Any advice would be appreciated. • Lawrence Cohen 17:39, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Please keep the discussion in one place. This page is the discussion page for our guide to deletion, and your question is not about something in the guide, but about articles you want deleted. Therefore, Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_deletion#Category:Guantanamo_Bay_detainees is the more appropriate place. — Sebastian 17:51, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I looked at the three AfDs that Lawrence mentioned above. They are attracting the same comments from a number of editors. Opinions appear to be split. I think it would be better if you would extract the common concerns, summarize them, then start a Wikipedia:Centralized discussion that would be widely advertised, for example at WP:VPP and WP:AN. Ask people to respond to the concerns in detail and try to converge on a solution. If there is apparent consensus that all similar articles should be deleted, at that point you could ask on WP:AN how best to do it. If there is no consensus that the articles are inappropriate, then give up your plan and allow the articles to exist. EdJohnston 17:57, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. I'll begin drafting up something along these lines this week. • Lawrence Cohen 15:54, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

All Too Eager

You harpies and vultures are in far too big a hurry to tag for deletion, to pounce on every infraction - even while someone is actively editing the story! In doing so, you create edit conflicts that cost us our efforts. (a flaw in the way Wiki's editing works, to be sure.) I suggest there be at least a day or two before you folks can even start in with your razors. This wouldnt' exist at all without our contributions, so back up a bit and give us some room to work, will ya? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Falc (talk • contribs) 00:34, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

While I concur with your sentiments, having seen a page nominated after existing only two minutes, there is a way to recover your work in edit conflicts. (It took me a few times to figure this out, and a bunch of lost work too!) On the edit conflict screen, there are two separate text/edit boxes - the first one is the other edit, and the second one has your work. Just go into the second box, and copy your changes, then go back to the main edit page, and paste in your work. Ta-da! THis may be a little more complicated if you made changes in several places, but at least all your work is thee. - BillCJ 00:48, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Proposed template change

I'm proposing an additional category in the Template:Editabuselinks to reduce the number of posts at WP:AN and WP:AN/I, please feel free to comment here User:Mbisanz/TemplateSandbox. MBisanz ^talk 13:13, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Guide to deletion, or list of rules when to delete?=

This page does not give a clear guide for moving an article on its way to deletion. I found an article that clearly needed to be deleted but could not figure out how to go about doing it from this page, which was the first that came up when I searched through Wikipedia. I only learned bunch of classifications of when an article should or should not be deleted. Could someone please redo this article so it is more clear how to go about nominating an article for deletion. Either that or rename the article something more appropriate to its content like when articles should be deleted. I'm just saying this page isn't a guide to deletion. Mathman1550 (talk) 20:53, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

If you have already decided that a page clearly does not meet Wikipedia's goals and should be deleted, then you need the section titled Deletion process which will give you some sense of the three basic processes. I'm guessing that this is your first nomination and that you probably want the Articles for deletion process. The mechanics of starting that process are on the bottom of the AfD page.

This page was never meant to be a pure mechanics page. It's commentary about the deletion process that has grown up over time but which would overwhelm the page if you tried to cram it all back into the AFD page header. It covers everything from an overview of the entire process (of which the nomination is a remarkably small part) through what should or should not be deleted to proper ettiquette during deletion discussions. If you can improve it, be bold. But please don't cut content down to just the mechanics. For one thing, there are too many variations depending on which process you need. For another, those are already better stated elsewhere. Rossami (talk) 21:16, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

For a first-time deleter, this article is way too much to swallow, and yes all I really needed was the section 'deletion process'. I just think the title guide to deletion would make more sense as guidelines for deletion, since that is mostly what this page is about, IMO. Mathman1550 (talk) 23:39, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

yekishim

please, give me an idea wh the article of such impotance gets repeatdlya deletion tag? thank you87.160.195.139 (talk) 14:07, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

I think you want Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Yekishim. Rossami (talk) 03:28, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Probably there were not enough citations to support the notability of the article's topic. Chongkian (talk) 03:48, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Minor grammar suggestion: "an particular option" > "a particular option"

In Wikipedia:Guide to deletion#Shorthands section describing "Without prejudice," should the article be "a" in place of "an" preceding "particular option" Newportm (talk) 22:07, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion. When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the edit this page link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes — they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 22:10, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Done. I wanted to tread respectfully and carefully on this page. Newportm (talk) 22:48, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Outcomes subsection

	Delete	Redirect	Merge	Keep
Page history	Delete	Keep	Keep	Keep
Article state	Deleted/None	Redirect	Redirect	Full article
Stand-alone article	No	No	No	Yes
Content	0%	0%	0-100%	100%

---

I propose adding an Outcomes subsection in Wikipedia:Guide to deletion#Deletion process. It would describe the most common AfD !votes/closing outcomes (delete, redirect, merge, and keep). I would also like to include the table at Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion#Outcome table. Flatscan (talk) 04:39, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

• We used to have an outcomes section, that discussed incompatible outcomes. Uncle G (talk) 16:29, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
  • I m not totally sure there is as much consensus as there used to be on the role of merge and redirect closings at afd. This will be consequently a little tricky to deal with.DGG (talk) 18:34, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
    • What rôle are you referring to? Uncle G (talk) 18:57, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
      • Uncle G, thanks for the historical revision. It looks like a separate section makes sense too – I'll look into this guide's history more. DGG, would you clarify your comment? Flatscan (talk) 06:06, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm considering a !Votes and outcomes section immediately following the Deletion process section, similar to the historical revision. Wikipedia:Guide to deletion#Shorthands already contains brief descriptions for !votes; I intend to move those to the new section, leaving links at their alphabetical placeholders. Userfy and Transwiki don't fit in the table neatly, but they can be represented. I think they're uncommon enough to be given a bullet entry only and left out of the table. Flatscan (talk) 00:45, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

After further consideration, Delete then Redirect is also quite uncommon and could be removed from the table. Flatscan (talk) 23:29, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

I created a new section WP:Guide to deletion#Recommendations and outcomes. Flatscan (talk) 04:32, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Definition of "Speedy keep"

In the 3 years and 9 months that this article has existed, the definition of "Speedy keep" has been "that the user thinks the nomination was based on an obvious misunderstanding and that the deletion discussion can be closed early" for more than three years, until today. The presumption of bad faith, while in Uncle G's original definition in February 2005, has only been part of the definition for two brief periods (the initial period from 23-Feb to 14-Jun-2005, and again from 16-Sep to 12-Nov-2005. Logically, it is hard to see the benefit of not having a shorthand for "error" or "obvious misunderstanding", nor is it clear why forcing an editor to impugn the motives of the nominator when suggesting a quick close is a helpful step in resolving an AfD. Add this to the current common useage of the term, and the likelihood of misinterpretation as the definition is radically changed, and it seems clear that the previous definition should be restored. Any comments? Bongomatic 18:12, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

• agreed. "obvious misunderstanding" will do for anything, not matter how ill-inspired but does not specifically push the point of motivation; if motivation is so bad that further discussion on that point is needed, it would usually best be done elsewhere. DGG (talk) 18:33, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
• See Wikipedia:Speedy keep and its talk page. This is not my definition. It's what the common usage (such as it is, given that because of its very nature "speedy keep" is a rarity) actually is. Bongomatic has it backwards. People are not forced to impugn the motives of the nominator. Indeed, they are encouraged not to impugn the motives of the nominator, and not to use "speedy keep". That's why it is rare. Uncle G (talk) 18:46, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
  • I don't think that it is in fact the common usage. I just looked through all of Category:AfD debates (Biographical), and there were three debates that included "Speedy keep" !votes: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Neil Patrick Carrick, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Osama Malik, and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John Bridgeland.

    Only one of them suggests bad faith. One of them makes an argument that seems to be a winner for immediate termination of the AfD in favor of keep—a bright-line notability test that ought to be observed as soon as noted. This sort of situation (as well as WP:SNOW ones) ought to be able to be pointed out with a reasonable and intuitive shorthand (like "Speedy keep"). Moreover, WP:Speedy keep ought to be updated to permit immediate closure in such circumstances. Bongomatic 19:18, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

    • Then think up another shorthand and start using it. "Speedy keep" already has a meaning. Two of them suggest bad faith, in fact. And AFD is a deliberative process. It's not a rush to closure. Stop trying to add rushing into it. Uncle G (talk) 20:44, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
  • But where in the current guideline for WP:Speedy Keep does it say that opining such is an automatic assumption of a bad faith nomination? To voice that it is might then itself be seen as an assumption of bad faith in the actions of the editor voicing the speedy keep opinion. I much prefer the use of a qualified snow keep. It also does in no way impune the editor voicing such or the nom's good faith. Your making this change to guideline diff only supports your recent AfD opinion and was no way reflected in the WP:Speedy Keep guideline itself... kinda like saying the world is burning and then starting the fire that did not previously exist. I feel your modification of the guideline should have been discussed and a consensus reached befor it being changed. Schmidt, ^{MICHAEL Q.} 19:02, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
    • I was the person who originally documented "Speedy keep", back when this Guide was originally written in 2005. This is not a modification to something new. This is the definition as it originally was. It was only changed because of the sensibilities of one editor, who (according to xyr edit summary at least) didn't like the idea of "building bad-faith accusations into our policy pages". Documenting what "speedy keep" means isn't doing that; it is merely documenting how people already state that they think that something is in bad faith. Uncle G (talk) 20:44, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
      • Errr.... are you now asserting an ownership of the Guide to deletion? With respects, my perhaps faulty understanding of Wikipedia is that once on mainspace, articles belong to ALL of Wiki and no longer to the author or contributing editors. I can understand your wishing the guideline to better reflect your opinion (even after-the-fact) at the AfD, but wouldn't your change have needed a consensus now that the article belongs to all of Wiki, despite your wonderful contributions to its creation? Specially in light that your recent change underscores any use of WP:Speedy Keep to be an automatic presumtion of bad faith? That seens to fly in the face of WP:AGF and WP:Civil. I would suggest that if the good faith use of WP:Speedy Keep automatically creates a presumption of bad faith, that it be deleted entirely as being at odds with Wiki's core policies. Schmidt, ^{MICHAEL Q.} 21:36, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
• Actually, WP:Speedy keep needs adjustment too. The enumerated reasons to speedily keep (and they are inclusive, not exclusive, so there is some basis for other justifications) include only two (the first and last ones) that doesn't imply bad faith, and the first one requires the nominator to go along with the speedy. It seems to me that WP:SNOW is implicitly a reason to speedily keep based on the concepts in WP:SNOW itself, though this could be made explicit. Another valid reason to speedily keep an article is if a bright-line test is demonstrated (e.g., an actor whose article didn't note that s/he won an Oscar). This should also be added to WP:Speedy keep. Bongomatic 19:18, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
  • The snowball clause is a rationale for speedy closure, not speedy keeping. Discussions can be subject to the snowball clause either way. The Guide does (now) say this. I didn't put that bit in just to exercise my fingers. You are still erroneously conflating the twain. Uncle G (talk) 20:44, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Summary up to now

A few facts:

• WP:Speedy keep enumerates—as examples, not an exhaustive list—five reasons for speedily closing in favor of keep, three of which obviously relate to bad faith nominations, two of which do not.

• For the past three years, the guide to deletion has not suggested bad faith is required for the "Speedy keep" shorthand.

• Actual uses of the "Speedy keep" shorthand in AfD discussions do not generally indicate editors' intentions to impute bad faith to nominators.

• Uncle G insists that despite the longstanding definition of the shorthand, and actual usage, the "meaning" of "Speedy keep" is the one in effect for various periods up to November 2005.

My opinions are:

• "Meaning" is based on consensus usage—what one editor means and other editors understand something to mean—even if that is inconsistent with an officially articulated definition, and that in such cases definitions should be brought in line with meaning (see, for example, current dictionary definitions of "presently", which used to mean "soon" and now, due to usage, means "currently").

• In this case, the usage has in fact been consistent with the officially articulated definition in place for more than three years.

• There is no practical reason to have a shorthand for an ascription of bad faith to nominators; there is a practical reason to have a shorthand for "keep and speedy close", which is what the usage has been and is consistent with the official definition in place for three years until yesterday.

• Thus, the definition of the shorthand should be reverted to match actual and desirable usage, and possibly WP:Speedy keep should be adjusted to clarify that other "speedy close" keep outcomes are consistent with the policy.

Is there a consensus on this either way? Bongomatic 01:15, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

• • comment. Perhaps we should make as little use as possible of statements that something is not being done in good faith. It is really an extremely negative thing to say, and very hard to actually prove. Admins (including once or twice myself) have justly encountered negative criticism for being a little too free with this. DGG (talk) 04:55, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

• I think that Speedy keep does not imply bad faith in current usage. However, I think that it is abruptly dismissive of the nomination and perhaps even rude. Flatscan (talk) 23:29, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

SNOW is SK?

Is "Speedy keep, per WP:SNOW" a correct closing rationale? WP:Non-admin closure#Appropriate closures lists them as separate bullets and gives a recommended set of relaxed criteria for SNOW. I didn't find any other AfD documentation that mentioned them together after a quick scan. Flatscan (talk) 05:50, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

I started a more general discussion at WT:Speedy keep#Applicability. Flatscan (talk) 04:36, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Merging during live AfD

I have started a discussion at WT:Articles for deletion#Merging during live AfD to clarify whether WP:Guide to deletion#You may edit the article during the discussion's guidance to avoid merging during an AfD is supported by consensus. Flatscan (talk) 05:06, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

RfC closed December 2009, archived to WT:Articles for deletion/Archive 58#Merging during live AfD. Flatscan (talk) 04:03, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

You may edit the article during the discussion

Wikipedia talk:Guide to deletion#You may edit the article during the discussion says "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 requirements of Wikipedia's licensing)."

I don't think this is true.

I think the only thing that is true is that the edit history be preserved. This is easy enough to copy the edit history of the article that is going down in AFD to the talk page of the destination article, preferably as a collapsible section or even a talk sub-page, to preserve licensing compliance.

I would like to use this wording instead:

• You should exercise caution before merging any part of the article. If you are bold but the community ultimately decides to delete the content, care must be used to comply with Wikipedia's licensing. This may involve re-writing the material, or temporarily un-deleting the page long enough to copy the relevant parts of its edit history to the destination article's talk page or a talk sub-page. It is usually far better to wait until the discussion period is complete unless there is a strong case for merge under the deletion policy.

Compare with what is there now:

• 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 requirements of Wikipedia's licensing). It is far better to wait until the discussion period is complete unless there is a strong case for merge under the deletion policy. This is not an issue, however, if the merged content is not merely copied and pasted, but instead completely rewritten so that only uncopyrightable facts are transferred, not copyrightable expression.

davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 03:24, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

• While the new wording appears factually correct on a quick review, I think the changes, especially the removal of "extreme", weaken the guidance while discussion appears to uphold it. I suggest waiting for the time being, pending a resolution to WT:Articles for deletion#Merging during live AfD and the development of explanatory guidelines (currently in progress). Flatscan (talk) 03:55, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

• For the issue of live merges, see WT:AFD#Review of my close of the WP:RFC on live merges. Since an RfC was opened on 16 October as to the community's current position on live merges, I've prepared a closing summary for that discussion. My plan is to update the language about live merges in the Guide. The new text is included in the linked item over at WT:AFD. I would welcome comments over at WT:AFD as to whether this is a correct summary of the thinking of the RfC participants. EdJohnston (talk) 05:41, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Closing rationale

I removed the following text from the Closure section of the page: "A good admin will transparently explain how the decision was reached." Wolfkeeper reverted with an edit summary that we need transparency. I removed the text because mandatory closing rationales have been rejected at WT:DELPRO and the language here is intended to be a summary of WP:DGFA where no such language exists. It implies that an admin who does not explain the decision with a closing rationale is not a "good admin". I have no objection to the word "transparency". I strongly object to the suggestion that an explanation is always necessary or one is not a good admin. The text should be removed.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 00:01, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Closed the RfC on live merges, opened at WT:AFD on 16 October

See WT:AFD#Review of my close of the WP:RFC on live merges. Per the result, I've updated the paragraph in WP:Guide to deletion about the advisability of live merges. If any further discussion is needed, the thread at WT:AFD might be the best place for it. EdJohnston (talk) 18:37, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

I reverted the change; I think the close is improper, and I see no consensus to change policy, much less on what to change it to. This needs further discussion. Perhaps the best course would be to reopen the rfc and advertise it more widely. DGG ( talk ) 20:09, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Surely you jest. The process of determining consensus was one of the most thorough I have ever seen, with EdJ seeking input from others at every step of the way. The consensus against merging during an AfD was overwhelming. Your reversion of a thoroughly discussed change has been reverted. You need to make a case that there is some issue with some part of the process before you blithely undo the hard work many others did. ++Lar: t/c 21:54, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

I support Lar's revert; I would have done it myself in a day or two after giving DGG the opportunity to justify. In case anyone is considering another revert to the historical version, the rewrite was applied after discussion and does not fall under WP:BOLD. Flatscan (talk) 04:28, 21 December 2009 (UTC)