Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion/Archive 68

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Speedy deletion of user sandboxes

G1 states it does not apply to sandboxes. No other criteria states whether they do apply to sandboxes or not. I thought they didn't, and that sandboxes have to go to WP:MfD. But what are the rules here? Looking at WP:UP#DELETE it seems that speedy can be used on sandboxes under (G10, 11 and 12 - attack, spam, copyvio). Wouldn't it make more sense to mention sandboxes in those three cases, and remove the mention from G1, since it seems it is G10-12 that are exceptions, not G1, with the default rule being 'speedy does apply to user sandboxes outside G10-12'? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 20:02, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

• Well G4, G5 and G7/U1 might apply, and if the sandbox is some kind of draft article than G3, G6 and G13 might apply as well. That's a few too many for a simple rule like this. (G2 also doesn't apply to user sandbox as it's fine to have tests in a user sandbox.) Hut 8.5 20:14, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

• • U2, U3 and U5 might also apply. Hut 8.5 20:18, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Update to G12

Just as a note, I've updated {{G12}} to include a |checking= parameter. If set to "yes" it will display a notice that an admin is actively checking the copyright violation. I know there aren't many admins that patrol the G12 cat but I've had a few instances now where I'm removing the cvs (i.e. there's not enough for a full deletion) and another admin deletes it out from under me. Primefac (talk) 18:36, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Don't we have {{CSD5}} for this? Adam9007 (talk) 21:58, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Didn't know it existed. Primefac (talk) 22:05, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

More than 5 minutes are probably needed to check a copyvio manually though. Adam9007 (talk) 22:21, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

G6 on "empty" categories?

Once again, we see a crusade run to blank a set of articles (18 ten-year-old articles in 5 minutes), the then-empty category tagged as CSD G6 for being "empty", and the category deleted.

This should not happen. Apart from the article issue, we should not be using CSD on categories because they're "empty", when that emptiness has only arisen five minutes earlier, and is itself highly dubious.

So what can we do about it? Deleting empty categories is not BLP, there's no rush over it. There is no justification that they must be removed, and without further checks, within minutes. Yet it's such an easy piece of serious admin bizzness, that throughput on such a workqueue is far faster than anything useful, like AIV. It is overall disruptive, given that empty categories are not a particularly common issue and so many of them like this are being emptied for the wrong reasons.

What additional constraint should we apply in this case? Check if they've only just been suddenly emptied, and if that was valid? Check editor contribs history? Require a "declaration of interest" of CSDs (CfD and TfD too, certainly in this case) where "delete as empty category" must be qualified as "delete as empty, because I've just emptied it myself"?

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Automobiles#Bandini Andy Dingley (talk) 14:19, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Seems like there may be a technical issue that we can't track effectively how categories are emptied or filled. One thing would be to check the edit history of the tagger to see if they removed instances themselves, or to check the history of articles that you'd expect to see the category to contain, and if you don't know where to look or can't find anything then to check the edit history of the category creator. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:51, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Agreed. The presumption though seems to be that an empty category should be deleted on sight as an abomination, rather than the (far more likely) questioning of whether it ought to have been empty at all. I don't see a "flood of empty categories" as being a problem for us in general. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:07, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

WP:G6 only applies to empty dated maintenance categories. WP:C1 is for "unpopulated" categories but only after 7 days. The deletions seem to have been out of process. Thincat (talk) 15:30, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

I can't see the deleted cat history - was this tagged as G6, or was that just added when it was deleted? Andy Dingley (talk) 16:09, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

I don't know either. As you say it may have been properly deleted with an improper reason. Thincat (talk) 16:14, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

The deletion tag in Category:Bandini vehicles was G6 not C1. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:22, 13 January 2018 (UTC))

I don't think the category was empty for 7 days so C1 would have been wrong also. Thincat (talk) 16:30, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

On a side note, one cannot help but notice that both the editor tagging this incorrectly nor the admin deleting this have a long track record of handling speedy deletion incorrectly. Regards SoWhy 15:23, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

A7 for books

Right now we have A7 for real people, individual animals, organizations, web content or organized events, and A9 for music, but no speedy criterion for books (especially self-published books) which make no assertion of notability (see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Champion Maker). We can A7 pretty much any product other than a book, by the looks of it. That seems inconsistent. Guy (Help!) 17:02, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

I can't remember exactly where the discussion was, but IIRC there were issues in the past with people nominating obviously-notable books because they hadn't heard of them, so it was explicitly removed. DGG will probably remember where the discussions were. ‑ Iridescent 17:13, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

As I mention in User:Ritchie333/Plain and simple guide to A7, CSD A7 originally came from Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion/Proposal/1, more specifically Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bob Burns (for those interested, the meat of the article as it arrived at VfD was "Mr. Burns is probably one of the most popular teachers in school. He is famous for putting quotation marks in his notes and his affectionate, grandfatherly manner. He always says that he will retire when teaching is longer fun for him. Based on his everyday persona, they will most likely have to rip the chalk from his cold, dead, hand.") Unlike people, bands and events, publishing a book, even a non-notable self-published one on Lulu / iUniverse, is quite a bit of effort and I doubt most people directly know an example of one they or their friends have made. So I don't believe we get enough SNOW AfDs to justify this. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 17:23, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

The specific argument for books is not that books take a lot of effort--a totally non-notable career in high school sports also takes a lot of effort, and most people know a few high school athletes, but we use A7 for these without hesitation.

The reason is that the speedy criteria need to be those which any admin can reasonably apply without knowledge of the subject or extensive investigation,and need to more carefully avoid erroneous deletions than erroneous keeps--there are other available channels for deletion. There have been many articles written by beginners about quite notable books which do not provide enough information that they seem to be making a claim for significance unless one recognizes the book. No admin has a wide enough background to do this--the most frequent problems have been children's books, where even the most notable may not be recognized except by those who know them as children or parents. (This is basically the same argument as the reason we do not have A7 for products--it may well not be clear whether there is actually a claim for significance) Prod for these is much safer, because at least a few people will look through them, and if an error is made the article can be easily restored.

People, even authors, are easier. We often do use A7 for bios of people whose most significant claim is to have written a self-published book, under the assumption that if there were anything more, it would have been included. We normally regard a claim of significance for authorship of a book from a regular publisher as sufficient to defeat A7, because it requires investigation.

Thus has been discussed several times over the years both for books and for products--I can probably find them, but we need a better way of searching these discussions DGG ( talk ) 19:33, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

• Fifteen months ago there was an unsuccessful attempt to produce a set of objective criteria which could be applied in specific circumstances of self-publication. See Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Archive_60#Speedy_deletion_for_books. AllyD (talk) 21:02, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

• Which (correctly) ended with no consensus to implement such a change, given that the volument of such articles is generally low enough for PROD and AFD to handle them. Regards SoWhy 15:27, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

should deleting admins and nominators be checking articles?

This mainly applies to G13, but I am looking for policy guidance here. G13 applies to drafts older than 6 months that haven't been touched since then. Many of these are nominated regularly. So my question is is there an expectation or guidance for the CSD submitters or deleting admins to be checking these CSD noms, or can they simply delete them without seeing what is being nominated? Egaoblai (talk) 05:13, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

• Nominators should be at least glancing at the old drafts before tagging G13. A glance by a single editor is sufficient, there are too many to ask admins to double check. Nominators should not be nominating pages with worthy content, but they are being trusted to apply their own judgement. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:40, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
  • I agree that the admin should check that G13 technically applies. --SmokeyJoe (talk)

09:34, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

SmokeyJoe My impression was the same as yours, that nominators and admins should be at least taking a glance at a CSD and making a judgement call. However I have been told that admins don't need to do this and can delete anything over 6 months without a glance. Is there any documentation on this? Egaoblai (talk) 20:53, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

No. The content quality judgement call on abandoned Drafts is a unilateral call by the tagger. Admins may double check, but are not asked to do so every time. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:50, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

• Actually admins should always check if criteria apply. Its just sometimes we are either lazy, or we do know the nominator's work to be excact from experience. If a draft gets deleted under G13 that for example had been edited a few hours before being nominated, I'd expect the admin to get a trout. Probelem is, that once deleted Joe Public has no opportunity to check. For the admin it would have only been a rightclick history in new tab prior to deleting, or the use of some popup gadget. Agathoclea (talk) 08:53, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
• Per Agathoclea. No one should delete a draft without checking it first. -- Euryalus (talk) 09:04, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

there is a huge backlog of G13 eligible pages of which this report User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report covers the Draftspace one (but not userspace ones). If one uses the AFCH (required for Articles for Creation reviewing) tool on AfC tagged pages there is a G13 option that only shows when there is 6 month no edits. The non-AfC pages are best tagged with twinkle. If the page is on the report in either case or in a similar tracking category it is definately G13 eligible. I'd guess that every editor nominating groups of G13 pages is working from a tracking category or report comprised only of G13able pages so Admins would just be wasting time checking that each of the dozens of G13 CSDs in a row are eligible.

Generally the shorter pages lack cites or enough info to justify an attempt to save the page. The longer ones are often duplicates of mainspace pages or there are other reasons to delete. Very very rarely does an admin decline (postpone) one of my G13s, and only presumably because they see merit in keeping a Draft page. I postpone some or submit to AfC to encourage effort on the page or maybe see it moved to mainspace. Any help in managing G13 drafts is much appreciated. Legacypac (talk) 14:00, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Agathoclea Sorry I should have been clearer with the question, I'm not asking about the 6 month time frame, but more if the deleting admins should look at the G13 CSD noms for quality reasons to consider alternatives to deletion for old drafts. For example, let's say that a pretty good draft was sent to CSD by a nominator, and then the admin saw it was 6 months untouched and deleted it without looking at the draft content itself. I've been getting different answers on this from different people and it concerns me because some drafts with good potential can be deleted in a matter of minutes through CSD, and if the admins are only checking for time, then we may be losing some drafts that are perfectly salvageable. If the only thing an admin needs to check for g13 is that the article hasn't been touched in 6 months, then surely a bot could do the job? Egaoblai (talk) 20:49, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

• I do not think "I'd guess that every editor nominating groups of G13 pages is working from a tracking category or report comprised only of G13able pages so Admins would just be wasting time checking that each of the dozens of G13 CSDs in a row are eligible. " is the right approach here--every administrator or other person nominating for G13 is capable of making mistakes, and every one of them who has done more than a few has undoubtedly actually made them. I think about 2% is the practical limit, though my own error rate is perhaps twice that, because I tend to work on the borderline. There are still admins & other editors who rather frequently nominate or delete without sufficient checking, though their number is very much smaller than in the past--most have responded to criticism by becoming much more cautious. I know that when I review G13 nominations I delete perhaps 9/10 of them, but not 10/10. In particular, anyone who would try to attempt dozens of deletions at a time of any sort is risking a very high error rate from fatigue, from boredom, and from the imbalance of judgment that inevitably comes from working mainly with junk. DGG ( talk ) 23:03, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

If the nomination is being brought exclusively under G13, that's all the admin has to consider. Obviously in the perfect world where we have an infinite pool of time to give to every candidate we'd consider all the potential CSD we could nominate under, but at the end of the day that makes the reviewing admin's job harder as they have to consider the content in addition to the G13 eligiblity. Personally I would ask nominators to either nominate for G13 and it's soft restore or go for other applicable CSD rules and invoke the discretion check. Most of the G13 nominators are known quantities to patrolling admins. They know which nominators need to be watched closely and which ones are safe to rubber stamp. Hasteur (talk) 00:34, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

• We should never tell editors that it's OK to act in an automatic, bot-like way. In the G13 case both nominators and deleting admins should ensure that any draft page they target appears to have no significant value to Wikipedia: Noyster (talk), 09:58, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
• If a page has survived its most recent deletion discussion G13 does not apply even after six months. Thincat (talk) 12:45, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

where is that requirement found User:Thincat?

It to be found at WP:Criteria for speedy deletion, " If a page has survived its most recent deletion discussion, it should not be speedy deleted except for newly discovered copyright violations and pages that meet specific uncontroversial criteria; these criteria are noted below." and the list of specific criteria is at WP:CSD#Pages that have survived deletion discussions. Have your nominations not been compliant with this aspect of policy? Thincat (talk) 08:06, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Well if you read policy that way i should be changed. The only deletion doscussion a draft if likely to see is an MfD. sometimes people argue keep for now and it can go G13 if no one works on it. Legacypac (talk) 10:43, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

User:DGG I regularly clear 100+ G13s in a sitting properly evaluating for any good reason to keep. Especially when working with very short pages and AfC rejects plus being able to read extremely fast it is not hard to have a 100% error free session. YMMV. Legacypac (talk) 23:16, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

I was trying not to mention names. DGG ( talk ) 01:20, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

• Absolutely For every speedy deletion criteria, it is incumbent upon the nominator to verify both that 1) the appropriate speedy deletion criterion applies, and 2) that no other option under WP:ATD is appropriate, and it is again incumbent upon the deleting administrator to verify the same two things. Now, 2) is completely irrelevant in many cases, such as G3-5-10-11-12, and is impractical for most of the A CSD criteria, because if they applied, there's nothing really to do with them. G13 is a special case, because it only applies based on timing, not content, so that a FA quality article could be deleted just based on being unedited in draft space for six months. That's a ludicrous outcome, of course, and not one that we need to IAR to prevent: CSD, just like all other deletions, are subject to the WP:ATD filters. So yes, one has to look at them to nominate them, and yes, one has to look at them to delete them. Doesn't have to be a long look, but it's against policy for it not to happen. Jclemens (talk) 00:15, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

I agree it's ludicrous Jclemens, but not all admins do and some have pointed out that the current guidelines don't say they must check. Where might a policy that talks about this be? Egaoblai (talk) 21:21, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

It's right there in WP:DELPRO, which states every speedy deletion candidate must have its history checked and alternatives to deletion explored, even though it doesn't reference WP:ATD, a part of WP:DELPOL, by name. Jclemens (talk) 21:40, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

For G13, that burden has fallen onto the nominator. I believe that admins accepting G13 tag requests should do some spot checks and have confidence in the taggers. The threshold is lower because there is so much hopeless stuff there. I am disappointed that the suggested {{Promising draft}} tag, which will forever mark a draft as G13-ineligible, has not been implemented. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:01, 18 December 2017 (UTC) Well there your go,thank you User:Calliopejen1. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:03, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

It's not like drafts that are deleted are wiped from Wikipedia forever. They can always request a refund on the page, just as easily as it is requested to be deleted, per WP:G13. Boomer Vial^{Happy Holidays! • Contribs} 07:02, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

I disagree. The technical process might be comparable but once it's deleted, no non-admin can assess whether a draft should be restored and thus cannot make an informed request. That's why it's important to be careful when deleting things - once they are deleted, they are most likely to stay deleted. Regards SoWhy 09:05, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

"once they are deleted, they are most likely to stay deleted" I've seen enough draft restorations that I know this isn't true. I think it would be best if all G13'ed articles are checked by the nominator, and double-checked by the reviewing administrator. Considering the enormous workload that G13 nominators face, it's only fair to split the work up. Unfortunately, G13'ed articles could never go unchecked. Boomer Vial^{Happy Holidays! • Contribs} 00:19, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Well, the numbers say something else. 11,727,658 log entries are deletions, while only 286,265 entries are restores, which - based on these numbers - means only 2.44% of all deletions are reversed. This sounds more realistic. Personally, for example, I have 11,601 deletions and 171 restores (1.47%) and even the most active(!) admins at WP:REFUND (Graeme Bartlett, Anachronist and Tokyogirl79 have only a ratio of 17.3%, 13.6% and 3.5% respectively. Regards SoWhy 14:14, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm sure there was a community decision that led us to the current state of affairs, but regardless of that, I feel that a bot should handle all G13 nominations, notifications, and deletion of drafts older than 6 months. I don't see the need for either nominators or admins to be involved, except to handle restoration requests as needed. Wikipedia has grown too fast for the population of admins to keep up, so we really need to automate things that are, for the most part, non-controversial actions. ~Anachronist (talk) 22:33, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

@Anachronist: There is a bot that goes through and does a 5 months unedited "Your page XYZZY could be nominated for G13 in the near future" notification process, and used to do a nomination process one month after the page was notified on (and does meet the 6 months unedited) to procedurally execute the G13 nomination and let the author know it's been nominated. Automated bot deletions are very contraversial and require Adminbot privileges. There might have been a case for them when we were deleting 2000 G13 nominations a day, but we've significantly reduced the backlog (I believe). Hasteur (talk) 02:13, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

• This is an open unresolved problem, since I personally know of four administrators who have continued to defend G13 deletions even after being notified that they were in violation of CSD, and after either having policy explicitly cited or being told to read the policy: [1] [2]

In the later case, [3], the deleting administrator went on to assert that G13 could also be applied to an article in mainspace that survived AfD and had not been edited for six months diff.  Notifying @Sphilbrick, Kudpung, Anthony Bradbury, and Primefac:  As for the editors who added the CSD tags, the talk page indicates that User:Hasteur added the tag in the first case, and in the second case I have no records and no access to the edit.  Unscintillating (talk) 16:58, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

I realise that getting a bot to do the whole thing is a very appealing solution, but as DGG has repeatedly demonstrated, there is occasionally a salvagable gem among all the rubbish. Of couse, nothing is undoable, but if we can cope with the quantity (which is now hopefully reduced since ACTRIAL and the Wizard) I do feel a set of human eyes would be best before consigning to the bin. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:10, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

If you would care to re-read the diff you quote, I do not say that an article-space edit can be deleted as G13 after surviving AfD, just that it can be speedy-deleted in rare circumstances. I concede that my meaning could be misinterpreted, G13, of course, only applies to draft; this is implicit in the wording of the relevant template.--Anthony Bradbury^"talk" 22:55, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Ok, but when I examined the post earlier I concluded that the ambiguity was resolved by the context of the second sentence.  Anyway, I haven't looked at the templates, as I am relying on what the policy states, which gives the exact applicable post-AfD set: G5, G6, G8, G9, G12, A2, A5, F8, F9, U1; which as I read it applies equally to mainspace and draftspace without allowance for G13 as an exception.

FYI, today, I cited a passage at WT:N that refers to a post at WT:Verifiability/Archive 64#Minimum third-party sources in an article, below which the content fails WP:DEL7.  Just below that section is the subsection WT:Verifiability/Archive 64#Suggestion for new DEL-REASON, which states, "See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2015–16 Alaska Anchorage Seawolves men's basketball team for an article with no sources that survived AfD.  I've made a subsequent bold move to draft space."  Editors right now cannot look at that article.  Unscintillating (talk) 01:49, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

@Unscintillating: it's HasteurBot not Hasteur. The accuracy you expect Admins to follow is well above and beyond the level of accuracy you're demonstrating in your posts. Again, since you're willfully misreading the issue, go back and read the exact text of G13. G13 is a very simple test to determine if it's valid to be nominated: Is the page unedited in more than 6 months? Is the page in Draft namespace or submitted to Articles for Creation? If both of these are yes, nominate for G13. If not conduct a more through content evaluation to see if other CSD may be appropriate. In the case of the Bot, it only looks at the G13 rule as that's something that a bot can do (i.e. straight facts instead of judgement calls). Hasteur (talk) 12:34, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

User:Hasteur, Your edit comment reads, "Raking Unscintillating over the coals for the double standard of 'accuracy' expected of admins, but not of themselves."  I'm sorry that you think my posts have been inaccurate and are willful misreading, but in fact the two ideas contradict themselves, and along with the word "raking" your viewpoint comes across as venting for the sake of venting.  And what is there here to vent about?  If your bot made a mistake, that is called a bug, and so you need to own it to stop it from happening again.

Your post was unclear about why you mention "HasteurBot".  Are you saying that it was User:HasteurBot that applied the CSD tag to one or both of the drafts being discussed here?  I've already explained that I lack the resources to verify the editor or editors who added the CSD tag.  I had hoped that an administrator would volunteer to provide that level of detail, but that has yet to happen.

You want people including myself to read the G13 text, so I have posted it below, but if you read it yourself you should note that it is not directly relevant to the discussion at hand; for example it does not say, "Do not use G13 out of context with disregard for the remainder of WP:CSD."  Unscintillating (talk) 14:38, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

In my experience, when I've restored articles (several per week) a couple years ago I was restoring many articles that had been nominated for CSD 13 deletion by HasteurBot. Now when I restore one, it's rarely one that HasteurBot nominated. I thought maybe HasteurBot had been shut off because I'm not seeing much from it anymore. ~Anachronist (talk) 21:26, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

• The following quote is from WP:Criteria for speedy deletion, oldid=820375694.

==== G13. Abandoned Drafts and Articles for creation submissions ==== Further information: Wikipedia:Articles for creation This applies to any pages in the draft namespace, as well as any rejected or unsubmitted Articles for creation pages with the {{AFC submission}} template in userspace, that have not been edited (excluding bot edits and maintenance actions such as tagging) in over six months. Redirects are excluded from G13 deletion. Drafts deleted in this manner may be restored upon request by following the procedure at Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion/G13. {{Db-g13}}, {{Db-afc}}

• The following quote is an extract from the policy template used in oldid=820375694.

This page documents an English Wikipedia policy. It describes a widely accepted standard that all editors should normally follow.

• The following quotes are from WP:Criteria for speedy deletion, oldid=820375694.  The first quote is from the lede:

...Speedy deletion is intended to reduce the time spent on deletion discussions for pages or media with no practical chance of surviving discussion. Administrators should take care not to speedy delete pages or media except in the most obvious cases. If a page has survived its most recent deletion discussion, it should not be speedy deleted except for newly discovered copyright violations and pages that meet specific uncontroversial criteria; these criteria are noted below. Contributors sometimes create pages over several edits, so administrators should avoid deleting a page that appears incomplete too soon after its creation. Anyone can request speedy deletion by adding one of the speedy deletion templates. Before nominating a page for speedy deletion, consider whether it could be improved, reduced to a stub, merged or redirected elsewhere, reverted to a better previous revision, or handled in some other way. A page is eligible for speedy deletion only if all of its revisions are also eligible. Users nominating a page for speedy deletion should specify which criterion/criteria the page meets, and should notify the page creator and any major contributors. . . .

== Footnotes ==

== Introduction to criteria == . . . Use common sense when applying a speedy deletion request to a page: review the page history to make sure that all prior revisions of the page meet the speedy deletion criterion, because a single editor can replace an article with material that appears to cause the page to meet one or more of the criteria.

=== Pages that have survived deletion discussions === When applicable, the following criteria may be used to delete pages that have survived their most recent deletion discussions: G5, creation by banned or blocked users, subject to the strict condition that the AfD participants were unaware that the article would have met the criterion and/or that the article creator's blocked or banned status was not known to the participants of the AfD discussion. G6, technical deletions G8, pages dependent on nonexistent pages G9, office actions G12, unambiguous copyright violations A2, foreign language articles on other Wikimedia projects A5, transwikied pages F8, images on Commons F9, unambiguous copyright infringement U1, user requests deletion within their own userspace These criteria may only be used in such cases when no controversy exists; in the event of a dispute, start a new deletion discussion. However, newly discovered copyright violations should be tagged for G12 if the violation existed in all previous revisions of the article. G5 may be also used at discretion subject to meeting the criterion outlined above.

== Procedure for administrators == See also: Wikipedia:Deletion process Make sure to specify the reason for deletion in the deletion summary. Also, in general the article's creator and major contributors should have been notified. Before deleting a page, check the page history to assess whether it would instead be possible to revert and salvage a previous version, or there was actually a cut-and-paste move involved. Also: The initial edit summary may have information about the source of or reason for the page. The talk page may refer to previous deletion discussions or have ongoing discussion relevant to including the page. The page log may have information about previous deletions that could warrant SALTing the page or keeping it on good reason. What links here may show that the page is an oft-referred part of the encyclopedia, or may show other similar pages that warrant deletion. For pages that should not be re-created, incoming links in other pages (except in discussions, archives and tracking pages) should be removed.

Posted by Unscintillating (talk) 14:38, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

@Unscintillating: The bot takes the more conservative view that any edit (even a bot edit) resets the clock on G13. I believe the AfC submission template doesn't have exceptions for bots so while the text of G13 may grant an exception for minor edits and bot edits, the two largest sources (the AfC template and HasteurBot) of notice adhere to the more conservative interpretation. Having taken some time out this morning to poke at the Nominate for Deletion script, I discovered a strange oddity in that pages that were edited within a few hours of being notified on were blocking the potential list of nominations HasteurBot could process. I've added a bit of code to fix that if the page is edited after the notification goes out, the bot drops the future potential and lets the page go around for another cycle of 6 month aging. Bot should start doing nominations as usual (up to 50 nominations in the G13 category (so that admins aren't flooded with nominations), every half hour 24/7 if the 6 month and 5 months + 1 month of notify are both valid). In the next few days it should be taking the mantle back up. Hasteur (talk) 15:36, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

I assume you agree here that your bot is not compliant with policy.  Unscintillating (talk) 15:59, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Unscintillating, if you have an issue with the bot, it needs to go to WP:BOTN, not debated here. This particular task was approved (and then re-approved, if I remember correctly) so if you feel light fighting that battle it should be done over thataway. Primefac (talk)

I do not agree with that assertion and question if you're out looking for a fight. Hasteur (talk) 16:11, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Speedy deletion - availability of deleter for comment?

Hello all. I recently moved a newly created page from user space to articles, and it was flagged for speedy deletion. I responded to this quickly, but (as far as I can tell from the logs) the page was then quickly deleted by another admin as I tried to take the page out of the article space. I wrote a message on the users talk pages, but so far haven't heard back (admitted just under 24 hours). However, it did make me think that perhaps some a guideline could be added somewhere, that where pages are speedily deleted without discussion, the deleting admin should be available for comment for a reasonable time of the deletion, e.g. via their talk page?

In my case, I think there's a good case to be made that the speedy deletion nomination and actual deletion were perhaps applied hastily (see User_talk:RHaworth, User talk:Diannaa), and I now have to wait for a response. I am sure that the actions by the admins were in good faith and this is ABSOLUTELY NOT A COMPLAINT to those admins. I'd just like to put forward the contributors perspective: For myself, as contributor to Wikipedia (with a fair understanding of Creative Commons and promoting open equitable processes), it feels frustrating that the page has been pulled without a copy, and my agency in improving the page, or at least discussing the page in proximity to the nomination/deletion, has been removed.

This post IS NOT about arguing whether the page should have been deleted or not, but whether there a community guideline somewhere might be useful that says: "If you speedy delete a page, then (if at all possible) please be available for comment to discuss the issue with the page editors. If you are speedily deleting a new page or a recently edited page, please take into account the reasons for the deletion and opportunities for amendment, and consider forwarding the page content to the last editor of the page."

What do others think? Bjohas (talk) 15:23, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

Per our admin accountabiity policy, "Administrators are expected to respond promptly and civilly to queries about their Wikipedia-related conduct and administrator actions and to justify them when needed." I typically interpret this as giving an administrator 24 hours after their first edit that postdates your query on their talk page to respond substantively, but that part is just my opinion. Tazerdadog (talk) 16:34, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

• Hello Bjohas. Assuming your query is only about wanting to know about the community guideline, I'll keep this to the point. What Tazer says is correct. However, does it apply in this case? Not at all. Not that administrators need to be available every waking second, but you posted on Dianaa's page at 11.00 and 11:46, 14 January 2018 (UTC) and Dianaa responded at 12:44, 14 January 2018 (UTC). In all probability, you missed it. And RHaworth hasn't edited Wikipedia since 13 January. Additionally, you've been instructed by Dianna on why we're extremely strict about copyright violations – which is what you posted. So my suggestion would be, be careful about such copyright violations in the future. And try to give editors reasonable time to respond (1-2 days is quite reasonable). Thanks, Lourdes 16:37, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

That's very helpful thanks. (Btw. have now responded to Dianaa's answer, which I hadn't seen. Dianna hadn't actually deleted the page, but RHaworth.)

In any case, my suggestion "If you speedy delete a page, then (if at all possible) please be available for comment to discuss the issue with the page editors." is taken care of. by existing guidelines as Tazerdadog points out.

What about the recommendation: "If you are speedily deleting a new page or a recently edited page, please take into account the reasons for the deletion and opportunities for amendment, and consider forwarding the page content to the last editor of the page." - I had added a section to the page that was my own, creating links to other articles, free of copyright infringement. Sure, that wouldn't have left a feasible article, but if I'd been sent what I had done, then I could have built on this by removing the copyrighted elements. What do you think? Bjohas (talk) 16:56, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

Admins are under no obligation to send problematic material to an editor before they delete a speedy delete a page. If a user wants an old copy of a page, all they have to do is ask the deleting admin. Primefac (talk) 17:10, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

I guess my proposal is to consider this as an additional guide (not before deletion, but after deletion). In my case, I had set time aside to work on the page, but after deletion the admin wasn't available (though I messaged minutes after the deletion). So I'd like to put this forward as an additional consideration, but it's jsut an idea Bjohas (talk) 18:03, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

Here's a second idea. How about recommending posting to the last editors talk page, at least saying that the page was deleted? This happened with the speedy deletion notice, but not with he actual page deletion. I think that would be helpful too. Bjohas (talk) 18:03, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

I think it's a reasonably nice suggestion to inform the creator of the page (not the last editor) that their page has been deleted (something akin to, for example, how article authors are informed before a GA review starts and then again once the review ends). I say nice, because I understand the perspective that you have. But I don't think there will be consensus to include this, even as a suggestion. I myself would consider it an additional unnecessary step to put into the deletion process, specially when the author of the article has already been informed of a pending deletion in advance. Lourdes 14:52, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments, yes, that sounds fair. Bjohas (talk) 20:56, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

New redirects

Ok, I made F7 into a bullet list because of the subcriterion identification at WP:HNFC as well as four redirects to these points:

• WP:F7a
• WP:F7b
• WP:F7c
• WP:F7d

LaundryPizza03 (talk) 00:17, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Merge A10, F1, F8, and T3 into one criterion.

They're all about duplication of existing pages. Just name the new category G14 and put

This can apply to a article that is part of a content fork, a lower-quality or different-extension version of a file, a template that duplicates functionality, and more.

in the section. Care to differ or discuss with me? The N^th User 18:40, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

The four criteria in the proposal

A10. Recently created article that duplicates an existing topic This applies to any recently created article with no relevant page history that duplicates an existing English Wikipedia topic, and that does not expand upon, detail or improve information within any existing article(s) on the subject, and where the title is not a plausible redirect. This does not include split pages or any article that expands or reorganizes an existing one or that contains referenced, mergeable material. It also does not include disambiguation pages. (When the new title is a reasonable term for the subject, converting the new article to a redirect may be preferable to deletion.) {{Db-a10|article=Existing article title}}, {{Db-same|article=Existing article title}} This deletion rationale should only be used rarely. In the vast majority of duplicate articles, the title used is a plausible misspelling or alternate name for the main article, and a redirect should be created instead. This criterion should be used only if its title could be speedy deleted as a redirect. F1. Redundant This applies to unused duplicates or lower-quality/resolution copies of another Wikipedia file having the same file format. This excludes images in the Wikimedia Commons; for these, see criterion F8. {{Db-f1|replacement file name.ext}}, {{Db-redundantfile|replacement file name.ext}}, {{isd|replacement file name.ext}} F8. Images available as identical copies on Wikimedia Commons Provided the following conditions are met: The Commons version is in the same file format and is of the same or higher quality/resolution. The image's license and source status is beyond reasonable doubt, and the license is undoubtedly accepted at Commons. To avoid deletion at Commons, please ensure the Commons page description has all of the following: Name and date of death of the creator of the artistic work represented by the file, or else clear evidence that a free license was given. If anonymous, ensure the page description provides evidence that establishes the anonymous status. Country where the artistic work represented by the file was situated, or where it was first published. Date when the artistic work represented by the file was created or first published, depending on the copyright law of the origin country. All image revisions that meet the first condition have been transferred to Commons as revisions of the Commons copy and properly marked as such. The image is not marked as {{Do not move to Commons}} or as {{Keep local}}. All information on the image description page is present on the Commons image description page, including the complete upload history with links to the uploader's local user pages (the upload history is not necessary if the file's license does not require it, although it is still recommended). If there is any information not relevant to any other project on the image description page (like {{FeaturedPicture}}), the image description page must be undeleted after the file deletion. If the image is available on Commons under a different name than locally, all local references to the image must be updated to point to the title used at Commons. The image is not protected. Do not delete protected images, even if there is an identical copy on Commons, unless the image is no longer in use (check what links here). They are usually locally uploaded and protected here since they are used in the interface or in some widely used high-risk template. Deleting the local copy of an image used in the interface does break things. More about high-risk images. {{C-uploaded}} images may be speedily deleted as soon as they are off the Main Page. {{Db-f8}}, {{Now Commons}}, {{Now Commons|File:name of file on Commons.ext}} T3. Duplication and hardcoded instances Templates that are substantial duplications of another template, or hardcoded instances of another template where the same functionality could be provided by that other template, may be deleted after being tagged for seven days. <noinclude>{{Db-t3|~~~~~|Other template}}</noinclude>, <noinclude>{{Db-duplicatetemplate|~~~~~|Other template}}</noinclude> References

Ultimately, those four criteria each have quite a bit of subtlety, and mashing them into one would create a monster kludge of a criterion. My best attempt is below, where I sacrifice a good bit of information to minimize this kludge.:

G14. Duplicate pages

Pages that substantially duplicate the functionality of another page on English Wikipedia or Wikipedia Commons may be deleted subject to the following conditions:

• The page to be deleted does not improve on, or provide functionality in addition to, the page to be retained in any way (more information, higher resolution, etc)

• There is no relevant contribution history in the page to be deleted.

• For articles, consider the possibility of converting the page to a redirect instead of deleting.

• For all files, ensure that the file format is the same, and the resolution is the same or lower prior to deletion.

• For files that duplicate a file on Commons, ensure that the page is not protected, has a solid license and source status so that it is not at risk of deletion at commons, and is not marked with {{Do not move to Commons}} or {{Keep local}}.

• Templates should be tagged for 7 days prior to deletion

Ensure that all pages that link to or use the page being deleted are updated to use the remaining copy of the page.

Cheers, Tazerdadog (talk) 02:06, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

• No. No. Please no. These criteria are only superficially similar, and their merger substantially broadens all of them. —Cryptic 02:43, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Who says that that's a bad thing? If someone makes a category titled Category:North Atlantic tropical cyclones, moves all of the subcategories of Category:Atlantic hurricanes to it, then makes it a subcategory of Category:Tropical cyclones by basin, that's a duplicate category of Category:Atlantic hurricanes that could be covered under G14, but there's currently no category-specific criterion for deleting duplicate categories. Care to differ or discuss with me? The N^th User 03:18, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

• There are plenty of cases where two pages have duplicate functionality which are absolutely fine. For instance if I decide to work on an article I can start by copying the article to a draft version. That draft version is a duplicate of the article and would qualify for speedy deletion under this criterion. We have portals which consist of text from articles, the portal could be deleted as a duplicate of the articles. I'm sure there are others. The idea is good but in practice I don't think it would help. Hut 8.5 07:40, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
• New criteria should be both "objective" and "uncontestable". The proposal is, as mentioned above, neither. Regards SoWhy 14:20, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Draft That Duplicates Article

I recently encountered a situation in draft space where an author had created two copies of drafts on the same person. Creating two or more drafts on the same subject is common, as any of various sorts of good faith errors. Most commonly it happens because the author creates the draft in a sandbox, and a reviewer moves it to draft space, and the author then creates it again in the sandbox in good faith. Anyway, in this case one of the drafts was accepted, and I tagged the other one for miscellany for deletion. A comment was made that there should be a speedy criterion. So the question is: Should there be a way to speedy delete a draft that duplicates an article? An article that is on the same subject as an existing article (and is usually a stub that is inferior to the original article) qualifies for A10. Should there be a draft criterion, such as G14 for drafts that duplicate either an article or a draft? Robert McClenon (talk) 02:33, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

If a draft is a direct copy of an existing article, and no attribution is provided, it should be G12'd as a copyvio. With attribution, I suppose it could just be redirected back to the article as a duplicate. If it's merely "this draft already exists as an article" then the creator should be notified (there's a very good chance they're "sandboxing" changes they want to make). In other words, at the moment I don't see a need for a specific "duplicate draft" speedy criteria. Primefac (talk) 02:51, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

What's wrong with having two drafts on the same topic? Maybe two editors want to work on the article separately, or somebody wants to try out two different ideas. We don't allow that in mainspace but it's fine in draftspace. There's nothing wrong with having a draft which duplicates a mainspace article either, people use it when they want to work on the article without having their changes go live immediately. I don't see any need for this and it would get in the way of people doing useful work. Hut 8.5 07:44, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Nothing wrong with duplicate drafts (I don't think my above post made that clear) but we should at the very least notify the duplicate-draft creator(s) about it; a lot of the time they don't realize they've made a duplicate (hell, I had one person request the creation of a draft that was already an article!). Primefac (talk) 12:50, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

I tend to request a WP:HISTMERGE where the sandbox is created around the same time the draft was and the editor hasn't reappeared, or appears to have moved on to other things. --Izno (talk) 15:06, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Draft Criteria

I will ask another question. Should we define a set of speedy deletion criteria, beginning with D1, for drafts, where D1 would be the current G13, which is draft-specific? Robert McClenon (talk) 02:33, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Other than extending "D1" to the user space (because "old abandoned drafts" that are submitted via the AFC process can be G13'd) I see nothing wrong with this, but what other speedy criteria would we have? The only thing I can think of is "no way no how this will ever be an article" but for that we have MFD and (if it's abandoned) G13. Primefac (talk) 02:51, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

+1 Tazerdadog (talk) 03:07, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Well, MfD is too slow for the deletion of obvious trash, and G13 is it's own set of problems, in my opinion. Support for Draft criteria.

• I think we need a set of D* criteria, largely matching a few of the A* criteria. However, duplicating an existing article? Why delete it? Why not redirect? Redirecting preserves the authors presumably small edit history and will be less confusing if they come back to look for what they previously did. In the first instance, a redirect will send the author, and any similarly thinking authors, straight to the mainspace page which is the page they should be improving of they are interested in the topic. Why require an admin action for something that can be done by any editor? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:13, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

  Genuinely out of curiosity, which A* criteria would we duplicate? I could maybe see an A11 analogue for the "no way no how" pages, but for just about everything else either the G* categories will fit or they would fall under "that's the whole point of the draft space" (e.g. A7). Primefac (talk) 12:52, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

  • • True, the CSD#G* criteria cover most of what could be Speedy deleted from DraftSpace, although the time allowed in mainspace, ~ hours, would correspond to a week in draftspace. G1, G2, G3 can be applied more liberally that people think, but allow the editor at least a week to return. G10, G11 and G12 should be applied immediately. With G11, if a draft is started using unsuitable sources, it is better to delete immediately and tell the author to start again with only independent sources, as per WP:TNT.
      CSD#A* criteria? Arguably, A1 when old, A3 when old, A7&A9 to loosen application of G11, this would cover a lot of definitely hopeless stuff. A11, yes. A2 in draftspace calls for a soft redirect. A10 should *always* be immediately redirected. Forking in draftspace only causes problems, and redirecting is always a sufficient answer, there’s never a need to suppress the history from its author. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:03, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
• If the article was copy-pasted then the draft should be histmerged. If there are two copies of the draft and only one was moved to article space, the other will become eligible for G13 after six months. If there is an actual problem to fix (e.g. POV fork) then it can be XfDd. What cases are not covered by these three existing outcomes please? Guy (Help!) 10:50, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

G13

I am aware of the massive numbers of drafts and all the trash in the draft namespace. However, those would be better eliminated with DraftPRODs, draft-specific CSD, and Drafts for Discussion/Deletion. The fact is, G13 as a deletion criterion is extremely arbitrary. 6 months is not by any means a sign of quality or lack of it. I am aware of the G13 refunds, but the fact that the drafts are invisible to normal users in the meantime, and the fact that the original author is most likely gone, means that much useful or salvageable ideas and content are deleted. It is for this reason that I propose we eliminate G13 as it is used now. Opinions? Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 06:04, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

• A. Work the cream An alternative approach, of identifying the drafts that should not be deleted, is more oriented towards productivity. Template:Promising draft exists for doing this. I think this templating of the better stuff could be improved by categorising, and sub-categorising by a quality and topic. This would provide a reservoir of drafts more tempting for editors to look at. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:15, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Also not a bad idea. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 07:23, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

• B. CSD#D* DraftPROD is no good because the pages are not watched. If you collect the worst of the draft pages, why would anyone want to read them? It would be a de facto CSD, and as such, it would, de facto, need to satisfy the CSD new criterium criteria. Let's just talk about CSD#D* criteria. I suggest D* criteria can be drafted from the following A* criteria:

2.2.1 A1. No context

2.2.3 A3. No content

2.2.5 A7. No indication of importance (people, animals, organizations, web content, events)

2.2.6 A9. No indication of importance (musical recordings)

2.2.7 A10. Recently created article that duplicates an existing topic

2.2.8 A11. Obviously invented

All should be required to be applicable to old pages, say > 4 weeks. A7 and A9 would want to be much tighter for drafts, and I suspect the community won't accept it. A10 in draftspace, just redirect to the mainspace article. A11 definitely. Also, be more liberal in using G2 (tests)(if old) and G11 (unusable promotion)(tag immediately). --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:15, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Actually, that's a pretty good idea. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 07:23, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

It's an old idea, and I don't hope much hope for it, except maybe "Obviously invented", which be better fitted into G3. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:14, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

• C. Empower the reviewers I also suggest a new CSD#D criteria: "Agreed to be hopeless by any two Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Reviewers". Both reviewers must have the permission, and carry the responsibility for what they tag. NPReviewers who misuse this function make lose the permission. I believe that all AfC reviewers should be NPR qualified. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:15, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

  Well, some drafts look pretty bad in their early stages, to be fair. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 07:23, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

  Agreed. I've seen a draft start out as a hopeless mess of promotional fluff and evolve into a nice neutral article that got accepted into main space. And the editor who started out as a company PR rep ends up working productively in non-COI areas. It happens. Rarely, but it happens. ~Anachronist (talk) 08:03, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

  • You pointed at the new criterion criteria just above, in the very same edit. How is this at all objective or uncontestable? —Cryptic 08:22, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Sure, some drafts start off pretty poor, but as long as someone works on them they rarely are deleted. G13 covers Abandoned drafts.

I've tagged many blank Drafts as G2 Test Page and never had an Admin reject the tag.

Tagging drafts as no indication of significance will be controversial.

There is already G3? For Hoaxes. I'd like to see that expanded to cover "obviously invented".

Currently we tend to redirect topics that duplicate mainspace topics. Some people like to use a Draft copy to rework or experiment with a mainspace page, so getting a CSD for that will be tough.  :::Legacypac (talk) 08:57, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Drafts that were previously articles

Has there been discussion on whether G13 should apply to drafts which were previously moved from mainspace? Many valid stubs are unilaterally draftified without anyone noticing, and G13 tagging would result in them being deleted without going through the due process of AfD. --Paul_012 (talk) 07:59, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Yes, that is a valid problem, that has been mentioned before by other editors (including myself). Unfortunately, consensus back then was that we should just trust editors and admins not to tag/delete such articles. I'd be happy if G13 was amended to exclude such drafts. Regards SoWhy 08:21, 19 January 2018 (UTC)\

As a note, all G13 pages can be immediately refunded, for any reason. Thus, if for some reason an "incubated" article-turned-draft is deleted improperly, all that's required is to ask for it back. Primefac (talk) 12:48, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Maybe we need a radical rethink of G13. How about moving all G13 eligible drafts into mainspace and then triaging them again just like any new mainspace page? Anything speedily deletable under an A criterion could be speedily deleted, other things could be WP:PRODded, and any page that doesn't meet AFC reviewer's criteria but doesn't clearly need to be deleted could either be left alone or at least qualify for AFD instead of MFD. —Kusma (t·c) 12:10, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

This is a genuine question (not trying to be an ass) but do you know how many pages are G13-deleted every day? If instead of deleting garbage pages in the draft spaces, we move them to the article space and then delete them, we might as well just get rid of the draft space altogether. Primefac (talk) 12:48, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Not sure how much you remember pre-2013 Wikipedia, but interesting enough, Wikipedia worked well enough without Draft-space for ten years, so basically we'd just go back to how things were before. As for the question, give me a minute and I'll see if I can whip up a database query to answer it. Regards SoWhy 13:03, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

No need for a d-base, it was asking if they knew the numbers. Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions currently has 906 pages in it. Hasteur could confirm, but I seem to recall that the bot only puts up something like 30 per day to avoid flooding. Either way, if we dumped all 900 pages into Article space, TonyBallioni would have my hide. Primefac (talk) 13:10, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

the Category:G13 elegible AfC submissions is always less than 1/2 the actual G13 ready count. There is usually a 2000 plus page backlog in User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report and the report does not list Userspace pages tagged AfC and stale. This category [4] has 4100 pages but does not break out by age of the draft. Legacypac (talk) 18:48, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) To put some further numbers through - about 250 drafts are submitted for review each day. Of those about 50 are accepted, (the following are very rough numbers) so even assuming a 75% resubmission rate (after initial decline) we're talking about at least 50 pages per day being G13-eligible (and I suspect the resub rate is a lot lower, probably around 50% for 100 new G13-able pages per day). Primefac (talk) 13:10, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Okay, according to this, there were 1649 G13 deletions in 2018 so far (or approx. 87 each day). I think NPP could handle an additional 87 pages a day. Regards SoWhy 13:13, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Huh, I was actually pretty close. Neat. Primefac (talk) 13:17, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Mind you though, those 87 are all deletions, not just pages that were previously moved to draft-space without discussion. That number is still likely quite high but not as high as that one (when I last ran that query in August, it gave us 20,700 moves to draftspace in approx. 4 years or ~14 moves per day. Those are the pages the OP doesn't want to see G13'd and I think we could agree that those 14 pages are day can really be handled by MFD or by moving them back to article space. Also, as a concession of sorts, I could imagine that we can agree that in return the A-criteria can be allowed to be applied if the page could have been deleted under them while in mainspace. Regards SoWhy 13:37, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia worked well enough without Draft-space for ten years No it didn't, it was dysfunctional and utterly shit. Nick (talk) 13:34, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

@Nick: Do you think it is less dysfunctional now, and if yes, how is that connected to the existence of draft space? —Kusma (t·c) 15:04, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

• I think in all the discussions that have been had about draftifying I can recall, G13 was seen as a positive less bitey alternative to PROD or AfD (where if we are honest, most of these drafts would end up), and it was explictly discussed as a feature of draftifying by many supporting the practice (and on the flip side, was one of the main objections of those opposing). Based on the current monthly averages, an extra 87 pages would still have us under the pre-ACTRIAL levels. We've currently been reducing the backlog at about 1900 a week for the last two weeks, but as a project we are in a backlog drive, so I'm not sure how long that will last. I'd oppose simply dumping the G13s from mainspace back into mainspace as a matter of course (we can assume that at least some new page reviewers have sense about them and that they were draftified for a reason). At the same time, I don't think that anything should be G13'd as a matter of course: as with all deletions, admins need to actually read the content and look at the history. If it was a draft with potential that someone (incorrectly) sent to draft space only because of formatting, the G13 at the very least should be declined. I also think that admins shouldn't be G13ing things they have sent to draft space on their own, as it would amount to a unilateral deletion.
  tl;dr: I don't think there is consensus to exempt draftified articles from G13, but I also think that admins need to look at the content before deleting. I also think that wholesale moving back to mainspace after 6 months is a bad idea. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:37, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Also, I just re-read the suggestion: from an entirely unrelated to the NPP backlog perspective, I strongly oppose mainspacing all G13 eligible drafts. The amount of undetected copyvio passing the NOINDEX threshold alone is enough to make that idea bad. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:57, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

  Yeaaaah, but that's not how it works, is it? If I'm reading the query I posted above right, Fastily alone has deleted 30 such drafts within 2 minutes, which would mean they had ~4 seconds per page to "actually read the content and look at the history". I'm happy to assume good faith that they read all them before and then just deleted them in one go but somehow I doubt that. Regards SoWhy 14:16, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

  Well, the thing is, they're not required to "actually read the content and look at the history", because we talked about it at length and decided that "a draft that's six months stale" is a universal and uncontroversial criterion for immediate deletion. And as you all keep pointing out, it's no big deal because G13'd drafts can be automatically REFUNDed. So what's the problem? Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 14:24, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

  Well the policy does say ".A page is eligible for speedy deletion only if all of its revisions are also eligible." (emphasis added) and only by checking the history can an admin ensure that this was actually a draft for six months, no? Also, when we discussed this last, I distinctly remember people arguing that we should not worry about semi-automated bot-like G13 deletions because admins will still check whether alternatives to deletion (which still is a policy last I checked) exist. Not sure how you can check for alternatives without considering the whole history. Regards SoWhy 14:45, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

  To address (once again) the high-speed-deletion fallacy - there's nothing inherently "wrong" with deleting multiple pages in a short span of time. Now, in this particular instance I cannot comment, but it is possible (and I've done it myself) that all of the pages were checked first, and then deleted in rapid succession. Primefac (talk) 15:00, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

@Primefac: (your 13:10, 19 January 2018 comment): The bot runs every two hours and nominates pages that it has warned on at least one month prior that are still eligible for G13 until Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as abandoned drafts or AfC submissions is at 50 members. Wanting to be crystal clear for you. Hasteur (talk) 01:16, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Facepalm not this bullshit again. G13 is explicitly simple and makes ZERO judgements about the content of the page. It's the single most objective criterion out there: Is the page in Draft namespace or has the {{AFC submission}} template? Has the page been unedited (excluding bot edits and maintenance actions such as tagging) in over six months? If the answer to both is yes, then you can go ahead and nominate for G13 as the page meets the requirements. There is no obligation to consiter alternatives to deletion. It might be nice, but there is no obligation. I (and my bot) take the more conservative view in that six months unedited means six months unedited as even a single maintenance or bot edit could trigger renewed interest in the page. Admins have been willing to rubber stamp my bot's nominations as it goes for the very narrow criterion instead of trying one of the many other discretionary measures which require the admin to fully engage and consider the content. Just as G13 is usually rubber stampped, the way to get the content back WP:REFUND is usually rubber stamped barring the G13 deletion followed by refund request cycle being abused multiple times or the admin exercising discretion in chosing not to restore bad content. In short, G13 is a well established and endorsed community standard and doesn't need any more hoops to have to run through. If individual editors want to run over pages to pull out discretionary CSD reasons, take a look at Category:AfC G13 eligible soon submissions as those are AfC pages that are between 5 and 6 months unedited that could be nominated for G13 soon. Hasteur (talk) 01:29, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

• I agree with Hasteur. G13 was implemented to deal with backlog so large it was unprocessable. As for draftified mainspace articles, see the restrictions at Wikipedia:Drafts#Draftification_of_pages_from_Article_Space. Basically, articles can only be speediable if: mainspace speediable; or recognized as inadequate during NPP by a New Page Reviewer. Authors have a right to refuse draftification, which means AfD instead. There is a fear that draftification can be used as a back door deletion process. There have been few examples of poor draftification moves, I think it is largely a theoretical fear. The documentation at Wikipedia:Drafts#Draftification_of_pages_from_Article_Space is intended to give recourse should someone find someone draftifying unreasonably. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:50, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

It is interesting how editors with no evident history dealing with the mountain of crap in Draft space come trying to restrict how these Drafts get cleaned up by attempting to layer on extra criteria to G13. For example, Several editors wanted a promising draft template and made a lot of noise about it. Template exists and would respected if those editors ever used it. In the end it was obstructionist backseat driving from users with no real interest in doing the work of sorting abandoned drafts for gems (or maybe the imagined gems could not be found?).

From the abandoned Drafts moved from mainspace I've seen that hit G13 nomination, they are no better or special than other abandoned drafts. The fact some inexperienced editor started the page in mainspace instead of draft does not give the page any halo. Therefore this is a very unnecessary restriction. Legacypac (talk) 14:11, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Legacypac, if you are replying to Hasteur or me, you are very unclear. We are defending the simply applicability of G13. Do you have an issue with the template {{tl:Promising Draft}}? Do you have a problem with restrictions on unilateral draftification of old mainspace pages, as opposed to their G13 deletions if left abandoned? —SmokeyJoe (talk) 20:50, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

I was commenting on the original proposal to add a carve out on G13 for pages that started in mainspace. I strongly oppose that as unhelpful and unnecessary. I have no issue with "promosing draft" but note the people that made a lot of noise about that proposed restriction on G13 have not implemented it except in a few example pages. While opinions are of course free to give, some actual experience dealing with a meaningful number of drafts leads to more informed opinions. Legacypac (talk) 21:15, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

• Hasteur, there are always alternatives to deletion. For G13 there are quite a few: some common ones are that the admin can decide to:

1. accept the article.

2. fix the article and accept it.

3. accept it as a redirect

4 accept it for merging some or all of the contents

5 say it needs further time to see if it is fixable, and postpone it

6 fix it partially, thus defeating the G13 by having made an edit.

7. delete it under another criterion that is applicable. (which has the effect of preventing automatic restoration on request)

8. delete it under both G13 and another criterion (which also has the effect of preventing automatic restoration on request)

I have personally done every one of these options when I think it warranted,some of them many dozens of times. In each case, the decision about what might be done is a matter of judgment and will vary between different admins, just as with other speedy criteria.

I'm not objecting to G13. We need this criterion, because about 90% of the G13s should simply be deleted, and that's what I do with them. (my actual % is lower, because I try to work on only the possibly disputable cases, not monopolizing the process)

What we need most is a way to index materialthat has been deleted by G13, so people can see if there is a potentially useful draft. without that it is not just a choice, but a unambiguously bad choice directly contrary to fundamental principles to delete without consideration, because the goal is to make an encyclopedia , not to expeditiously remove material for technical reasons that could be used to improve the encyclopedia.

We do not permit deletion by bots. We therefore should not permit deletion by admins acting as bots. Since this is apparently not completely understood, we may have to adjust the wording of G13. DGG ( talk ) 19:10, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

All true, which is why I check every page I nominate to see if it is worth saving. Legacypac (talk) 19:14, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

@DGG: Your entire thesis is predicated on someone doing work on the page before it gets to G13. If you were doing items 1-4 before it even got to G13, this wouldn't have been a problem. 5 and 6 are kicking the issue down the road 6 months in which we get to ask the question "Was there any real improvement in the last 6 months when someone decided to dodge the question?". and finally Items 7 and 8 are really the same thing, only that you're suggesting that people look for other CSD (which should have been addressed before it got to 6 months). In short: G13 is an easy tool to reach for because it requires little effort that by the nature of being eligible makes the criterion incontravertable. Hasteur (talk) 21:42, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

the only people notified are the ones who have worked on it before. The listing at CSD exposes it a several hundred people who att least occasionally patrol there. When I say I have rescued dozens in each category, I indeed meant dozens that had already been tagged G13. And this is only among the ones I look at--there are manThere have probably been at least 50 thousand G13s--I have checked perhaps 1/10 of them, and rescued 1/10 of those. There are many subject areas where I do not look, those where I am not competent to either fix or know what is worth fixing. DGG ( talk ) 01:37, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

DGG, Legacypac, is there an easy to find log of your rescued G13-eligible pages? User:DGG/CSD log and User:Legacypac/CSD log are both impressive records of your work getting things deleted, what about things saved? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:43, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Disagree that "G13 is fine just the way it is". No, it's not fine, it is an unhappy necessity, and it only continues because we cannot think of any viable alternative. Well, I can think of a possible alternative, it is extending WP:ACTRIAL to draftspace. Stop all non-autoconfirmed accounts from creating *any* page. The one in a million cases where a newcomer has a valid new topic that should be created immediately, can't wait a few days, they can use {{help me}} or any number of other ways of asking for help. But let's wait for the ACTRIAL in mainspace results.
Agree with Hasteur that DGG is presuming the implausible. There are far too many to-be abandoned drafts for the limited community of editors to realistically review, especially considering the extremely low average value of the abandoned drafts compared to other project work that is waiting. The best we can do is encourage editors to glance at them while G13-tagging them. A necessary part of the encouragement is the empowerment that comes from trusting their effort and decision. In this task, Legacypac is doing an extremely valuable task and deserves considerable thanks. Legacypac glancing at each draft before tagging G13 is far better that Hasteur's bot's taggings, but if Legacypac weren't doing it, then it would have to fall to the bot, or some other bot, because we all agreed that the old drafts can't be left to pile up endlessly. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:25, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

@User:SmokeyJoe I use the AFCH Comment tool to "save" some seeming valid topics. There must be way to track that. I also submit pages to AfC so some show up as "accepted" on my talkpage. My move log used to show pages I found and promoted but Some ____ users managed to ban me from moves to mainspace - which is utterly stupid because any user with 10 edits in 4 days can start any garbage in mainspace, yet a skilled user like me working in draft space is restricted.

I'd wholeheartedly support expanding ACTRIAL to all spaces, or at least draft space. It is rare indeed random brand new users find topics that demand a new page right now. Heck in my coin forum you need your acount confirmed by email, approved by an Admin and 10 posts before you can do very much includimg starting a new thread. We cut out nearly all our spam that way. It's pretty absurd that the threshhold to start a page is SO LOW on such a big site. It shows Wikipedia does not value existing volunteers very much because we have to clean up after the random new users. Legacypac (talk) 03:52, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

You do realize that there are plenty of articles that are accepted at AfC that were created by non-AC users right? Even the occasional IP. You don't have to dig through Wikipedia:Articles for creation/recent for very long to determine that fully restricting article creation to only the "worthy" people who have gotten their first flag is a horrible idea that will put off an huge amount of people. Sure there is crap but there will always be crap regardless of what you do. At what point does this end? Why don't we just require registration and a user right to create pages? That would solve all our (perceived) problems. --Majora (talk) 04:01, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

The problem is very real. It broke New Page Patrol and AfC can't keep up with the flood if crap. 4 days/10 edits is a userright called auto confirmed, is VERY easy to get, and it is working wonders in reducing the flood of pages we have to delete. Legacypac (talk) 04:41, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Not even going to address the entire first part huh? The part about non-autoconfirmed and even IPs creating numerous acceptable drafts that would be lost? No? Ok. As for the user right that was sarcasm (reductio ad absurdum if you will by proposing that only those editors with a specific user right can create articles, not just confirmed people). Should have included some sort of indicator. My mistake. And AfC is doing fine. Always has been. There was a time pre-ACTRIAL where it was sitting permanently at 3,000 articles waiting to be reviewed. It waxes and wanes like anything. --Majora (talk) 04:51, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Yes, Majora, new accounts and IPs can and do write acceptable pages in their first 4 days. These are the exceptions. I suggest that they are capable of understanding the restriction and using the {{help me}} tool if they don't want to wait. Why don't we just require registration and a user right to create pages? I support that. Register and autoconfirmed to create pages. Anyone can edit, but four days and ten edits to create pages. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:54, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

It's fairly common for people in education programs to do the composition of the article offline, and only add it to WP when finished. (I'm not sure that's the best way, but it seems now to be the usual way.). There has to be some way of allowing for this. There also has to be some way of allowing for editathons, where people write simple but acceptable articles ( that isn;t the only way to run an editathon, but it's one of the ways used.) I further think it perfectly feasible for any reasonably competent editor to study the basic rules, and write a straightforward biographical article using as a model existing articles--and it was possible even before the visual editor for a WP beginner with any knowledge of html. Not all WP beginners are beginners at accurate writing. Not all are promotional. Many, probably most, are promotional or less than adequately skilled, of course, but it would discourage any competent beginner to not be able to write immediately. It's a balance; we have to allow for both sides.

To see what I've done with drafts other than delete, look at by contributions in draft space. The ones that remove a small number of characters (e.g, -37) are likely to have been removals of G13. I don't usually do that via AFCH. My acceptances can be seen most easily in my move log, and are done with AFCH except those in the past when it wasn't working fast enough. DGG ( talk ) 05:27, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

DGG, I think that doesn't work, because your edits to draftspace pages now in mainspace now look like mainspace edits. Am I wrong? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:47, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

From the Draft space contributions, you can see where I removed the G13 tags for deletion but left the article in draft space; from the moves you can see those I accepted. You ar eright it may not show the edits where I removed the G13 tags, and someone else moved them to mainspace. (You can also see the edits to Draftspace talk--almost all of these will be moves to mainspace). But all these will leave out a lot, and if anyone wants to set up something that will get them all together, I would be grateful. Looking at these all, I am a little startled--I thought I was primarily trying to save, and I am primarily trying to save, but there is nonetheless much more that needs to be deleted than rescued. This is a well-known class of problem: anything that reduces the errors made by not deleting inappropriate articles will increase the errors made by deleting inappropriate ones. We cannot reach perfection in either direction without making many errors in the other. It's a matter of balance, which is why all deletion activities here must be carried out with judgment. Our judgment may be inadequate, but it offers the opportunity to improve on automatic operations. (to be fair, it also offers the opportunity to do worse than a well-constructed automatic rule). There's an addition I would suggest to the basic pillars: WP cannot not be expected to be perfect. DGG ( talk ) 09:12, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

The balance shown in the stats worked up was roughly 80% of new pages created by non-autoconfirmed users get deleted vs about 20% deleted for auto-conformed users. Anything is possible but a little bar to jump keeps out massive amount of junk. Legacypac (talk) 06:21, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Someone organised enough to write up a full draft, with references, surely they can manage to get autoconfirmed, or ask for help? Four days to get autoconfirmed compares very well with months to get a draft reviewed. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:45, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

• To address the original question, drafts that were originally in mainspace can and should be treated exactly the same as drafts that weren't, IMO. Moving to draft space is a common thing where an article is headed for deletion, and leaving them in draft space indefinitely is basically an end-run around deletion. G13 is a housekeeping thing, predicated, I think, on the view that we're not a web host. Moving to draft space is fine if peple are going to fix the article, but it's not indefinite leave to remain. Most G13 articles I have seen are adverts or resumes. That's the plain truth of it. Guy (Help!) 11:14, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Drafts that were not previously articles

I think the issue is not specific to drafts that were previously articles (given that they weren't submitted via AfC, are they even eligible for G13 anyway?). True, a lot of garbabe gets created via AfC and it's probably nice to have an easy fix like G13 that enables the easy disposal of that garbage, but with the way this process works, what gets thrown away isn't only the garbage.

The trouble is that it's in effect an automated process: the tagging is accomplished by a bot, and the deletion itself comes with no strings attached: even though an admin can review what they delete, there's no requirement to do so and the overwhelming majority of G13 deletions I've seen are performed by one admin who doesn't seem to look at what they delete (I arrive at that conclusion because of their speed – several dozen deletions per minute – and the fact that they don't otherwise have edits to the draft namespace which would have attested to them ever having taken an action different from deletion).

Now, there wouldn't be anything wrong with such automatic deletions if there existed some process of filtering out the good stuff. There is no such thing. Let's start with the review itself: most reviewers are doing their job well, but their decisions are made based on the state of the draft and not on the notability of the topic (they aren't required to do WP:BEFORE, a few do, most don't seem to). The result is that drafts on notabe topics get rejected because of suboptimal sourcing. Of course, draft creators can always resubmit, but my impression is that it's normally only the ones with strong personal motives (=COI) who do that – precisely the people we don't want around. Most creators don't resubmit: they either leave wikipedia for good, or simply accept the decline as the last word on the matter and then proceed to edit elsewhere: if the draft is then deleted, they won't request its undeletion.

Another issue is that the occasional WP:WHACAMOLE-minded editor can do disproportionate damage: declining a draft takes less effort than accepting and the small number of reviewers who go as fast as they can in their enthusiasm for reducing the backlog (or for ramping up their edit count) can amass an enormous amount of declines. If they did something comparable in mainspace, it would annoy enough people and the person would be dragged to ANI. But in the draft namespace no-one seems to be watching (see here for an example and further details).

After that, a month before a draft becomes G13 eligible, it's added to a category and so theoretically, people could trawl for anything worth keeping. I've seen some people do that, but I've also seen that all of the mainspace-worthy declined drafts I had on my watchlist were deleted – the coverage is sketchy and again, there's no systematic process.

In short: from the moment a draft is declined to the time it's deleted, there are several things that could in principle stop good content from being thrown away, but in practice none do. The deletion of a draft is virtually decided the moment it's declined. – Uanfala (talk) 22:56, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

@Uafala: Did you even bother to read the above commentary because it seems like your entire post could do with some BEFORE yourself. G13 is applicable to any page in the Draft namespace and any page that has a {{AFC submission}}. The AFC pages get cleaned out fairly well via the Bot nominating task. The second source for editors to sort through pages that are G13 eligible is User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report which generates 1x a day. Before is not required in draft space (nor is it in articlespace). Your entire post seems to be predicated on a WP:ABF position that the nominators are willy nilly nominating things. I'm fairly certain that the nominators are doing their due diligence on the page prior to nomination including trying to avoid a G13 as it's annoying to see it come back. Hasteur (talk) 01:16, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, I wasn't aware of G13's extended applicability: I've only ever looked at drafts that were created via the AfC process. Still, this is beside the point. Apologies for making my post unclear: I wasn't suggesting that reviewers were failing in their required duty of doing BEFORE, my point was that the very absence of such a requirement (combined with everything else I'm trying to draw attention to) leads to a situation where acceptable texts on notable topics get deleted on a large scale. I'm not sure what nominations you're referring to. – Uanfala (talk) 01:32, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Your whole post is based on assuming reviewers are incompetant and don't accept good topics, CSD nominators are just looking for edit count and Admins are too dumb to postpone deletion or recognize worthy content. There is a process that saves the gems from the garbage. It works. Join in reviewing drafts and promoting the good ones rather than backseat driving from a position of ignorance. There is NO situation with G13 where "acceptable texts on notable topics get deleted on a large scale" Legacypac (talk) 08:45, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Again, I'm sorry for not making myself clear enough, but I encourage you to read my post: I'm not asserting any of the things you allege I'm asserting. My whole point was that with the current system, the collective outcome of well-intentioned and acceptably competent AfC activity is that an unacceptably large amount of good content gets thrown down the drain. I welcome criticism of individual points of what I had written above (and will be happy to provide further details and examples), but I don't think the overall attitude of outright refusal to acknowledge the existence of a problem is serving the community well. – Uanfala (talk) 19:54, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

I take issue with your unsubstantiated assertion that an "unacceptably large amount of good quality content gets thrown down the drain". Too many incorrect assumptions posted and I disagree with your conclusion. Legacypac (talk) 06:42, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Exactly, G13 is just far too broad. Too much quality-ish workable content is trashed. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 07:21, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

We had strong support to expand G13 not too long ago, and I see no evidence good content is being trashed. I suggest reviewing the discussion on that. If abandoned marginal pages keep piling up it gets harder and harder to identify and eliminate the try problematic pages There is strong support for the idea Drafts are temporary pages and need to either be improved to mainspace or be removed after a period of inactivity. Legacypac (talk) 07:34, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Clarify R3

Under R3, redirects from page moves are not eligible unless the moved page was also recently created. Shouldn't there also be an exemption for pages that were recently moved, since sometimes a redirect might need to be deleted after a page move aimed at fixing unambiguous errors in a page name? ToThAc (talk) 16:06, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Some selected previous conversations showing how we got here. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 17:07, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

The issue is that if a page was at some title for a significant amount of time then there may be other people on the internet who have linked to that article at the former title. If we move it to another title and delete the redirect then we break their links and contribute to link rot. If the moved page wasn't at that title for very long then this problem doesn't arise. Hut 8.5 20:43, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

G7 query

Hi, let's say a page is taken to XfD, someone comes along and !votes Keep, then the creator of the page !votes Delete. Does G7 apply here as the creator now wants the page deleted, or should the XfD run to closure as someone wants to keep it? Iffy★Chat -- 09:21, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

• Note that G7 requires the tagged to be the sole author, ignoring bot edits, usually ignoring minor edits, including gnoming. Adding categories doesn’t make an author. If these conditions are met, there is usually a good reason to let it be deleted, such as a COI and inclusion of private information. I would ping the keep !voter and EnquiriesNZ as to whether they might change their mind given the new information of the sole author !voting delete. If the keep !voter intends to recreate following G7 deletion, do not G7 delete as it will lead to copyright non-compliance. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:32, 6 February 2018 (UTC)
• In my view, the moment someone says to keep at AfD, G7 is done with. There's no harm in letting the AfD finish its seven days. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 02:03, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
• G7 is a speedy deletion criterion and those usually require that deletion is not controversial (G10 and G12 excepted to a limited amount). If someone argues to keep an article, G7 is moot because now the deletion is controversial. If there are other reasons for deletion, like private information, these can usually be handled by revision deletion without deleting the whole article if the subject itself is found worthy of inclusion and the information was removed by editing, so I have to disagree with SmokeyJoe on that. Regards SoWhy 07:56, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
• This just happened with 'Murica. Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2018 January 31#'Murica was closed earlier today with a "retarget" close even though the creator supported deletion. A couple hours later, a random IP slaps a a {{db-g7}} tag on it and RHaworth deleted it. -- Tavix ^(talk) 22:12, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

  Yes, but that's an issue with the patrolling admin not actually looking into the situation and simply clicking "delete". I've had a number of G12s deleted out from under me when (I assume) they just looked at the copyvios report, saw a high number, and didn't investigate further. Also, for what it's worth, it's only happened once since I made this change, which is why I haven't said anything to RH directly. Primefac (talk) 01:05, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

  To wit, I've restored it. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 01:55, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

• Agree with all the above. G7 should be halted once someone even starts asking if should be kept. As SoWhy points out, "non-controversial" is the operative phrase. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 01:55, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Draft Space Comment

Well, I tagged an article in draft space for G3, and it was deleted as G3. I am reasonably sure that this is the first time I have tagged a draft as a blatant hoax, but it was incredible in that (without references) the story wasn't worthy of belief by a reasoning H. sapiens. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:14, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 8 February 2018

Can we bold or put "note" in all caps here -> Note: Not all numbers are used, as some criteria have been repealed.

TaxAct2018 (talk) 20:41, 8 February 2018 (UTC) TaxAct2018 (talk) 20:41, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Not done: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{edit semi-protected}} template. Primefac (talk) 21:08, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

WP:A11 obviously invented

This should be expanded to a G to catch User and Draft space pages. Legacypac (talk) 19:37, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Are drafts of obviously invented subjects really created so frequently that MFD/G13 can't handle them? Regards SoWhy 20:12, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Yes, they are numerous. They waste MfD time. G13 requires 6 months unedited, which is 5 months and 29 days longer than these type of pages should be allowed to exist. Unless there is an argument that "obviously invented" content is desirable in parts of the site, there is no good reason not to broaden this CSD's coverage Legacypac (talk) 21:33, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Do you have any examples? I've just looked through all the drafts currently nominated at MfD and I didn't see any I thought would qualify. That suggests that either there aren't many of these things or that they aren't being sent to MfD. A11 also has a significance test borrowed from A7, which isn't a good idea in draft space. Draft space is intended as somewhere articles can be developed until they are suitable for mainspace, it isn't appropriate to apply all mainspace standards (such as significance/notability) to them. Hut 8.5 21:50, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

• I would trust Legacypac to tag pages as obviously invented. Obviously invented by the author and involving no others. Having made that assessment, it would be better deleted promptly to give a quick clear message to the author, and to prevent other editors wasting time on it.
  To trial the idea, someone could make a categorising tag for Legacypac to use. Later, we can review the pages he would tag, and if agreed all should be speedied, start deleting them then. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:47, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

"This applies to any article that plainly indicates that the subject was invented/coined/discovered by the article's creator or someone they know personally, and does not credibly indicate why its subject is important or significant." The "test" excludes pages with a credible claim of significance from being CSD'd, which seems a fine exclusion in Draft Space as well. I'll post some examples from decliend AfC submissions (they exist in userspace and non-AfC Draft too) Legacypac (talk) 22:05, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Examples:

• Most everything that lands here: Category:AfC submissions declined as jokes
• Many pages that land here: Category:AfC submissions declined as a neologism like Draft:Meaf, Draft:Millenimony, Draft:Wuzy,

Legacypac (talk) 22:08, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

• • Actually there aren't many pages in the first category I'd be prepared to delete under A11. Quite a few qualify as vandalism (and I've deleted some as such) but there aren't many where the author invented some new concept and then decided to write about it. Drafts are intended as a safe space where it's OK to write something that doesn't have to be acceptable straightaway. That includes writing about a topic without having to demonstrate that it's notable, which means that applying significance-related tests isn't a good idea. Hut 8.5 22:24, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Note that these categories might over-represent borderline cases, as clear cut cases might have been squeezed into other criteria. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:39, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
    • And various editors patrol these categories and seek deletion (vandalism etc) so there are many more cases then the cats suggest. Legacypac (talk) 00:51, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
      • If people are able to get these pages deleted as vandalism or some other speedy deletion criterion then we don't need to expand A11 to cover this case. A large portion of those neologisms were declined on notability grounds and make it very clear that the concept wasn't invented by the author (such as by providing citations). Hut 8.5 07:41, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
• User:R.prasanna2892/Prasanna Venkatesh's Crazy equation Legacypac (talk) 07:02, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Proposed CSD:G14 WP:NOTEVERYTHING

"Pages that clearly are not encyclopedic content except for Dictionary definitions"

Rational:

• WP:NOTEVERYTHING is Policy not just a guideline. It is hard to argue we need to preserve content that fails WP:NOT.
• A G criteria would cover Draft and Userspace (where this is most needed) as well as Article and other spaces where it is still useful (though overlaps with some A type CSDs).
• This fits with User:DGG's idea of "not encyclopedic" several sections up. It does not cover Duplicate topics (which may be hard to get consensus on a CSD for).
• As NOT policy evolves the CSD will always match.
• While this covers a wide range of inappropriate content, if the reviewing Admin can't immediately see which type of NOT content it is, it's probably not a clear NOTEVERYTHING CSD case and should be sent to a discussion.
• We should not need an XfD to delete a clear NOTEVERYTHING case.
• We should not be wasting time rereviewing NOTEVERYTHING AfC submissions. Currently the page is declined (often multiple times) than reviewed for G13 eventually, then deleted, which means at least three editors review it.
• I suggest carving out DicDef because these drafts may be expandable or mergeable. I don't see valid DicDefs as a problem in Drafts. Legacypac (talk) 18:59, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
• Make CSD A criteria apply to draft space instead, for the same reason. Draft space is for drafting articles; if content in draft space is not relevant to the building of an article it should be deleted, and any of the A criteria are suitable for this. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 19:20, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
• (edit conflict)Far too broad and far too vague for a speedy deletion criterion. It would also allow me to speedily delete your userpage. Not that it's an objectionable userpage or anything, but it clearly isn't encyclopedic content. Hut 8.5 19:22, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Good point - how can we narrow to allow acceptable content? Legacypac (talk) 19:48, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

I'm not sure you can without making it something completely different. Look at A11: it only considers a small case within WP:NOT, it's a case where everyone agrees the article should be deleted and it imposes a relatively objective test on the article. A criterion considering the whole of WP:NOT, by contrast, is always going to be extremely broad and depend heavily on subjective judgements. Editors frequently argue about whether some article violates WP:NOT and if so whether the problem is serious enough for deletion. I don't think this G14 would be much better than having a criterion of "anything the reviewing admin doesn't think is appropriate for the encyclopedia". Hut 8.5 20:30, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

agreed. not all the A criteria should apply. A7 for example, because the draft may just need expansion for this. but A3 might:

I adjustedthe wording a little to clarify this. DGG ( talk ) 19:30, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Consider also the wording of A3:

"This applies to articles (other than disambiguation pages, redirects, or soft redirects to Wikimedia sister projects) consisting only of external links, category tags and "See also" sections, a rephrasing of the title, attempts to correspond with the person or group named by its title, a question that should have been asked at the help or reference desks, chat-like comments, template tags, and/or images. This may also apply to articles consisting entirely of the framework of the Article wizard with no additional content." I think this is just as applicable to drafts. I'm not sure it applies to everything in userspace, though, so either we could add that it applies to drafts as well as articles, or add it as a Drafts criterion. DGG ( talk ) 19:30, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Also consider G6 blank draft."db-blankdraft - For userspace drafts containing only the default Article Wizard text, created by users who have been inactive for over a year." G2 test pages is also used to delete blank or nearly blank (ie repeat of title is only content) Drafts. Legacypac (talk) 19:48, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

DGG, I would not think a category A CSD would apply to the draft space. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 20:22, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose per Hut 8.5. This proposal fails both the "objective" and the "uncontestable" requirements for new criteria. Whether a page meets WP:NOTEVERYTHING or not is frequently a debtated question in many XFDs (especially the WP:NOTPROMO, WP:NOTDIR, WP:NOTCRYSTAL sections which would all be covered by this proposed criterion). What is or is not encyclopedic is not a question admins should be allowed to judge without discussion. There is a reason why WP:NOTCSD mentions Reasons based on Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. Wikipedia is not: "a dictionary", "an indiscriminate collection of information", "a crystal ball", "a how-to list", etc. as the first item on a list of invalid reasons for speedy deletion. This proposal would also violate both WP:WHATISTOBEDONE (a part of WP:NOT!) and WP:PRESERVE, as well as many other policies that clearly state that most WP:NOT violations can and should be handled by editing, not deletion, whenever possible. Regards SoWhy 20:06, 8 February 2018 (UTC
• (edit conflict)Fairly strongly against this, in particular the G aspect. The concept of "encyclopedic content" mostly only refers to actual content, so this would at best be an A criterion. Beyond that, though, most CSD are supposed to be routine, noncontroversial, and fairly straightforward (some, like copyvio, can be complicated, but likewise must be dealt with speedily). While the lists at WP:NOTEVERYTHING isn't controversial, whether something applies could easily be subjective. Many articles are not created fully-formed, and may be built in stages by new editors. That's why A7 doesn't apply if something claims importance, even it doesn't have verifiable, reliable sources proving notability, despite WP:V and WP:NPOV being policy all the same; we send them to AfD. AfD is the proper venue for this sort of thing, and it can handle it just fine. I fear this proposal would be used to WP:BITE newcomers, be quite subjective, and isn't even necessary. I do not share the fears of clutter in Draft space. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 20:21, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

As per SoWhy, I don't see G14 being made objective or uncontestable. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:20, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

I will comment in passing that I, for one, think that the guideline not to Bite the newcomers does at least as much harm as good, at least as it is applied. I won't disagree with any proposed criterion only because it is bitey. A few newcomers need to be bitten. But I disagree with proposed A14. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:20, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Draft Space Criteria Again

I think that I will propose something that has been discussed above, and that is two (or possibly more than two) Draft criteria. If there are to be Draft criteria, G13 obviously should become D1, because it is only applicable in Draft space, and is a case of using G because anything else would be worse. The other criterion that I am proposing is D2, which would be drafts that substantially duplicate an existing article. I am aware that some editors say that this should not be a deletion criterion, but that the draft should be redirected to the article. My counter-question then is why is A10 available for articles that duplicate an article? Sometimes the deleted title is the wrong title (and the judgment that it duplicates an article is based on content). If we have A10, and we do, we should have D2, which is not an uncommon use of MFD, and is unambiguous and not redundant. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:21, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

NO G13 does not only apply to Draft namespace. If a page substantially duplicates an existing article (and it's a temporary content fork to work out improvements) redirect it to the existing article and merge any useful content to the already mainspace article. Hasteur (talk) 04:30, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

• G13 by design applied to userspace and WT:AFC subpages AFC drafts. We could now close of G13 of userspace and WT:AFC subpages, now that drafts are more clearly directed to go into DraftSpace. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:18, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
• I oppose the suggested "CSD#D2 drafts that substantially duplicate an existing article". Redirecting is superior, more efficient, less troublesome for making sure the action is always right, and provides for the remaining redirect to point the author to the right place, and to contain the newcomers edit history. Any editor can do the redirect, and a mistake is just as easily undone. WP:ATD is policy for a reason, and all the reasons apply equally or more so for drafts. Does A10 even get much used? I guess that it is needed for when the the new title is not a plausible redirect. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:18, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
• G13 applies to drafts and rejected/unsubmitted AfC submissions, the latter aren't necessarily in draft space and can be in user space. It is perfectly fine to have a draft which is substantially a duplicate of an existing article, people sometimes do that so that they can work on modifications to the article without their modifications going live immediately. There is no reason to stop people from doing that. The difference with A10 is that we don't allow content forks in mainspace and A10 only applies when the article is not a suitable redirect target. Hut 8.5 07:37, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
  • I don't think content forks should be allowed in draftspace either. People forking to draftspace typically don't let others know what they are doing, and content forks create attribution hazards, for example. Instead, I think WP:SPINOUTs should be discussed on the article talk page, and then done, all at once, to a new mainspace page with the spunout material cut from the article at almost the same time. Article wholesale re-writes are usually done on talk subpages. I think there should be a clearly stated rule: no forking to draftspace. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:55, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
  • There's no reason we couldn't move G13 to a D1, with the understanding that D* criteria applied to drafts no matter their namespace, if we had more than just the one Draft criterion. I can't see any admin declining to delete "{{db-a7}}[[John Doe]] is [[Pakistani] Humanitarian,[[Internet activist]], Was born in [[Johi,Dadu]].an [[E-Hacker]]." solely because it was created in Wikipedia: or Template: or Category: or whatever namespace. —Cryptic 07:57, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
• Hello, @Robert McClenon:. What other draft CSDs were you thinking about establishing? To my mind, we definitely need a draft equivalent of WP:CSD#A7 so that the community does not need to waste its time with obviously hopeless cases like this. Or perhaps a kind of hybrid of A7 and U5, since I know that some draft articles don't contain any assertion of importance yet but the author eventually intends to correct that. What do you think? Pinging @Legacypac: and @Zyc1174: because they brought the issue up initially. Reyk _YO! 08:48, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Also, for the benefit of future readers of this talk page, the entire content of the Lokender draft was this: Lokender Singh Adhikari, an Avid Traveler, a Day–Night Dreamer and a Passionate Lover of Himalayas who has a high zest for driving whilst exploring new places in Himalayas & sharing back those Himalayan Travel experiences with the other fellow Travelers. Reyk _YO! 08:51, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
    • I agree with you on that. Now to convince someone to draft _{(pun intended)} this up for review as a new CSD criteria. However, this brings up another issue: We already have close to 50 CSD criteria, which isn't exactly handy, so maybe we can merge some other criteria to make way for the draft category? Zyc1174 _chat? ^{what I did} 09:40, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Well, since you ask, I would support D3 for drafts on persons that have no references and that are not do not look like encyclopedic draft articles but directory entries or social media profiles. That sort of submission really only has to do with people. Similar submissions about companies aren't common enough to be frequent and can either just be declined or tagged G11. Robert McClenon (talk) 11:37, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

I also think that "Duplicating an existing article" should be a valid deletion reason in ANY space. In userspace almost all are copy paste of the mainspace version with no attribution or changes usually by an account with less than three edits. Redirecting adds no value, does not help the long gone user and clutters up the "what links here".

Another group of articles are Draft space Dups which you can evaluate in Category:Declined_AfC_submissions specifically Category:AfC_submissions_declined_as_already_existing, Category:AfC_submissions_declined_as_needing_to_be_merged, and here: Category:AfC_submissions_declined_as_a_duplicate (duplicates another submission). We typically decline these pages and G13 them eventually, not redirect them.

The biggest problem Category:Declined_AfC_submissions is Non-notable Bios (6500 in last edited the last 6 months, plus more specific types like music, academic, etc. and many of the "lacking reliable 3rd party sources" There are borderline cases where the creator can add refs to demonstrate notability, but in many cases it is VERY obvious that the subject does not merit an article or even a mention on Wikipedia.

The second biggest issue is organization declined as non-notable (3200 pages) or advertisement (1500 pages). Legacypac (talk) 17:14, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Comments

I have taken a trek through Miscellany for Deletion. I don't think that the volume of MFD can be significantly reduced, only slightly reduced, by adding CSD criteria. Nearly all of the pages that are nominated for MFD are in draft space or user space, and nearly all of them are drafts in the general sense of being apparently intended for article space. Most of them have been tagged because they are crud, but I can't write an objective unambiguous definition of crud. I would suggest three Draft criteria:

The first, D1, is the current G13. All of these should be applicable in Draft space or User space, so the D doesn't refer exclusively to draft space, but to drafts that could be in draft space.

The second, D2, is drafts that duplicate or substantially duplicate existing articles.

The third, D3, should, in my opinion, be a carefully written subset of drafts that would be A7 in article space: A draft page about a person that has no references and does not make a credible claim of significance. In my experience, drafts of this type, which are usually one sentence, are common, and have no references, and are social media directory entries, but Wikipedia is not a social medium or a directory, and the submitter usually doesn't have a clue what Wikipedia is and is not.

Robert McClenon (talk) 03:40, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

One of the most well written "D3 No credible claim" Drafts I've seen in a while Draft:Christine_Liu. Legacypac (talk) 06:31, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Are you kidding me? You postponed a G13 of a non-notable person just so you could make a point? Primefac (talk) 14:26, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Commenting on the need to delete it and using as an example of something that could have been deleted earlier under a new CSD does not prevent G13 in a few days. There are 1000 plus more pages ready for G13 right now. Legacypac (talk) 14:36, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

First point is organizing deck chairs on the Titanic. It's just renaming/moving the identifier to help justify the creation of the category. If all of these are applicable in multiple namespaces, they belong in the G series CSD. No for me.

On the second, you keep trying to argue that we should delete instead of spent a little time looking for alternatives after being fed this advice by multiple editors. No for me.

On the third, you seem to have forgotten the point We don't test notability/significance in draft space. I note the CCS you links is an essay on the A series notability CSD criteria. Draft space is supposed to be where people have a place to start developing articles without the excitable main space police looking at every nook/cranny to try and delete an article. As long as the author is improving the draft we grant them wider latitude in what they can have in draftspace.

TLDR: None of these would get my support at this time Hasteur (talk) 14:15, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

User:Hasteur - I'll point out that I took the trek through MFD in response to the thinking of some of the other editors here who thought that we needed more criteria for CSD in order to reduce the need to use MFD. In particular, some editors thought that we needed criteria to get rid of crud. I am in favor of getting rid of crud, but 'crud' isn't an unambiguous criterion. The proposed G14, hopelessly non-encyclopedic, isn't an adequate unambiguous criterion for crud. I didn't see any criteria that would significantly reduce the use of CSD. If you don't agree with my D2 and D3, then maybe you also disagree with the more general complaints that we need a G14, which I don't think can pass. Comment? Robert McClenon (talk) 22:57, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon: I disagree with the thesis that we need a G14 as well. Go back to the criteria list and show how these are Objective, Uncontestable, Frequent, and Nonredundant. Frequent I can see is reasonable, non-redundant is reasonable, but the way that this is phrased I don't think it meets the first two criterion as a few I've been seeing do seem to benefit from the discussion that MFD provides. In one specific case it raised visibility of an editor disrupting Wikipedia to prove a point (regarding draft namespace) after they had been sanctioned for disrupting wikipedia to prove a point (regarding draft namespace). That MFD is being snowed under many candidates is unfortunate (and perhaps Legacypac could reduce the rapidity at which they nominate into MFD) but it's not overwhelming as far as I can tell Hasteur (talk) 02:36, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Proposed New "Not Notable/Hopeless" CSD

(Follow on from discussion above)

• Cryptic, this "empower the reviewers" idea is objective on the following points: (i) Two reviewers hold the opinion that the draft is hopeless; (ii) The two reviewers hold the NPR right that can be easily removed if others don't trust them; and (iii) in DraftSpace/AfC, the two reviewers' opinion is to be trusted.
  RE (iii): I think a formal rejection and deletion process for drafts that are hopeless but don't fail a subjective criteria is unworkable. There are simply far too many compared to the number of experienced editors prepared to independently review the nominations, the process costs far outweigh the average value of a draft. Anyway, currently there is no process, WP:NMFD and its RfC is worth a re-reading. Currently, reviewers are not empowered/trusted to formally reject any draft; they just give advice or make empty threats of repeated rejection if problems aren't fixed, and so the hopeless drafts accumulate, until discarded under G13. The authors of the hopeless drafts get no clear timely message that their draft was hopeless. Thus, I suggest empowering the reviewers to be decisive with their decisions. Yes, it depends on two reviewers subjective opinion that a draft is hopeless, but that is not really any different to G10 relying on a single admin's opinion of what is an attack. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:11, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

User:SmokeyJoe two reviewers is a very nice idea but would require building some new system. CSD already includes two sets of eyes the nominator and the Admin who does the actual deletion.

CSD Gxx "Unsuitable/Not Notable Topic Draft". Any draft tagged for AfC on an evidently non-notable topic. If an AfC approved user and the patrolling Admin agree => delete. That would cut way down on the resubmissions of hopeless pages to AfC and reduce the wait. The submitter would get a CSD notice like "Welcome to Wikipedia. Standards exist that guide which topics are considered "notable" and suitable for a stand alone topic in the encyclopedia. The draft topic you submitted does not appear to meet these standards and may be removed. We encourage you to read ___ and ask any questions at the help desk."

Current we reject thousands of pages a year as not notable but we encourage the submitter to fix the page and resubmit. You can't fix notability. Legacypac (talk) 06:12, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Two NPR qualified AfC reviewers, and an admin to do the actual deletions, yes. WP:NPR approved, not AfC approved. There is no AfC approval system. The NPR right must be requested, and can be removed if the reviewer does bad.

The two reviewers would have to agree that the draft is hopeless, the topic is not notable, as in definitely not notable. Such pages should be deleted immediately, the author should not be invited to fix the page. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:33, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Ok, we can almost do that within the existing system:

• Reviewer 1 rejects as Not Notable.
• Reviewer 2 sees the resubmission and agrees it's Not Notable - they CSD it under a new criteria
• Admin sees it, and if they agree, deletes. It's a 3 strikes system with three different people reviewing.

AfC is esentially a user right as you must be Admin approved to use the script and various user's have access revoked from time to time. No need to tie to NPR.

abusing the new CSD and doing real damage would be hard as three users are required. That's more participation than many MfDs amd AfDs get. Legacypac (talk) 06:55, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Reviewer 1, in the normal course of reviewing AfC submissions, tags the draft "Rejected, not even close to notable". Steer clear of the borderline notable topics, it is a huge task to evaluate all sources that exist.

Reviewer 2, who likes to review the rejected drafts, marks all for deletion that he agree with. He ignores the others.

CSD backlog working admin, who gets to know which reviewers are trusted and reliable, deletes all, with just a cursory look.

More than enough checks. An advantage is that nonsense submissions can be caught and deleted within the hour. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:40, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Yup that works well. Create a new Decline Reason (or use the existing ones?), a new subCat under Category:Declined_AfC_submissions (or use existing ones?) and a new CSD "Non-notable AfC Submissions" I think a new decline reason for the hopeless ones is better to separate out the most obvious ones to delete. Legacypac (talk) 08:04, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

It calls for some stronger declined templates. I see many hopeless rejected drafts where the message is too soft, not clearly telling the author that fixing is probability not an option. Short of speedy deletion, the harshest would be, say, “{{hopeless1}}. When agreed by a reviewer2, they tag it {{hopeless2}}, which categorises the draft category:Hopeless drafts seconded. We could populate this category and review its contents before agreeing that everything out in it should be speedy deleted from now on. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:58, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

I've just nominated Draft:Lilybella Bayliss for MfD. Perhaps a useful case in point? Why can't AfC reviewers end the pain sooner - reducing the backlog and avoiding the author making the 'hopeless little tweak-and-resubmit' cycle? Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 15:46, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

• "you can't fix notability" is the wrong concept entirely. You can show something notable by finding more references. The only way to be sure there are not mroe references to be found is to look for them, and the only method we have here for getting people to to that is XfD. There are, to be sure, some subjects which are clear on the face are extremely unlikely to be referenceable, but actually specifying them tends to require some knowledge of the general subject area. DGG ( talk ) 21:40, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

However, a stronger decline message is a very good idea. I have been saying "Please do not submit again unless you can find good references."but it could be a little stronger than that. DGG ( talk ) 22:29, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

By "you can't fix notability" I mean that every topic is either notable or not notable before a word is written. We instinctively know some topics are notable and that others are not. In between are many topics were searching for sources sorts out notability, the cases DGG is talking about. I see this CSD path as for the clear cut cases, like how all CSD criteria work.

Typical examples where nothing about the Draft suggests notability:

• Joe is a youtuber with 25 subscribers
• Jane is an aspiring singer who hopes to record someday
• Xyz.com was founded in 2017 to market widgets
• Mr Black teaches 8th grade science in Springfield

Legacypac (talk) 23:01, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

So why not extend the A7/A9 "credible claim of significance" filter so that it becomes applicable to AfC drafts, say at second time of submission?: Noyster (talk), 11:21, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Since the A7 use in NPP is considerably wider, we will confuse them. There might be a possible wording tha twould not be confusing-- I'm thinking of a rather general "altogether non-encyclopedic". DGG ( talk ) 00:16, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

"No indication topic qualifies for inclusion" ?Legacypac (talk) 00:25, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

"altogether non-encyclopedic" makes sense. I agree with DGG on the fact that A7 use in NPP is considerably wider and therefore this might have the potential to confuse NPP editors (like me). (But the caveat is that "no indication" for NPPrs is a condition met only when both the material within the article or sources presented within the article and sources available through reasonable research of the deletion requesting editor don't indicate notability; I know A7 doesn't mandate research by the deletion editor; but most NPPers I know follow the mentioned good form). Lourdes 02:49, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

I'm sorry if I'm speaking a little out of turn, but I find it hard to believe that we can see if a topic is notible purely on the text written. We base a topic for notability by its references. Using one of the examples above; "xyz.com was founded in 2017 to market widgets", in itself isn't notible, and the subject isn't. But we can't guarentee that there isn't a high-media level coverage regarding the subject for something else. Maybe the company got media attention due to copywrite infringement or similar. I think some topics are clearly more likely to pass WP:GNG, so maybe different strengths of wording for different submissions would be suitable.

On another note, is there a suitable way to automatically decline articles that are re-submitted without any changes? Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 10:43, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

(regarding your final point) That was discussed and rejected in a discussion at AFC. Long debate short, we don't want a bot doing a human's work (i.e. there are too many valid exceptions to make it realistic to implement). Primefac (talk) 12:53, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

I think you can (and we do) decline (and could CSD) many pages based solely on what is written. It is up to the submitter to put in the info that makes the topic notable, which instinctively everyone does. Some even embellish. If a submission comes in about a Nobel Prize winner that does not indicate their significance and it gets deleted, the page was junk and should be TNT'd anyway. Legacypac (talk) 17:31, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Our goal here is to improve the encyclopedia. It is unlikely that we will get to consensus on a proposal to make it easier to delete what will be seen by some editors as work in progress. The whole WP:DEMOLISH thing is unresolved an unlikely to be resolved with a proposal like this. ~Kvng (talk) 17:32, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

• This is rather defeating the point of drafts. It's fine if a draft doesn't adequately demonstrate notability, that's part of the reason why the page is a draft and not a mainspace article. There's a huge difference between "not notable" and "doesn't demonstrate notability", and it's perfectly possible to write an article about a notable subject which doesn't demonstrate that the subject is notable. The reviewers for this criterion will be focusing on what's in the article rather than what the subject is, and I highly doubt an AfC reviewer is going to conduct a detailed search for sources. Hut 8.5 21:40, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Proposal: apply all article speedy deletion criteria to pages intended to be articles in any other namespace

Clearly not happening; withdrawn. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 14:28, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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What I'm proposing at summary level is that the A-series criteria should apply to any namespace in which encyclopedic content is expected to be produced (i.e. sandboxes and userspace drafts) but I'll accept that this is likely more palatable as a proposal only to apply the A-series criteria to the Draft: namespace. Reviewing the currently active criteria (A1, A2, A3, A5, A7, A9, A10, A11) I see none that should not also apply to qualifying content posted as a draft. I've suggested this several times in other places but never myself as a formal proposal, so I'm doing it now.

The rationale is that the Draft: namespace is intended to develop content meant to publish as an article, and for no other reason. Drafts, like articles, that show no indication that their content will be of use in constructing the encyclopedia should not be hosted even temporarily. While we're lenient with drafts that are of poor quality that show some indication of future utility (and we should be) we needn't keep around content so obviously unsuitable that it could never contribute to an article or part of an article. As one example from today, Draft:Bryce Morgan is a new draft about a high school athlete with approximately 0% chance of notability. Were this article posted as an article it would have already been deleted, but since it's been posted as a draft it will remain there for seven days while an MfD discussion proceeds to attract nothing but "delete" !votes, unless the creator comes back around. We should be able to skip this process.

• Support as proposer; as usual I am open to suggestions on how to improve the language of the proposal, although I think this one is pretty simple. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 22:11, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
• As written Oppose. Again we have the same arguments. There are some CSD that I would like to apply to Draft space without having to go through MFDs for (A1, A2, A3, A5, A10 (though you could argue that a protected redirect to the mainspace would be better), and A11). A7 and A9 I have a very hard time on. A7 and A9 touch at the heart of notability and verifyability that Draft space is supposed to protect nacent articles from in mainspace. I could see a deferred A7/A9 (if after X period there isn't a Credible claim of significance) but the problem is if there's a tool out there, it runs the risk of being misused. cc @Ivanvector: Hasteur (talk) 02:51, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
• I advocated a variant of this (any A-series criterion on a draft that hadn't been edited in 6 months) for a long time, but it was made redundant by G13's expansion to non-AFC drafts. I don't follow MFD much; is it really that urgent that these can't sit for six months and get a totally-routine G13 deletion? Or do we see enough of these high-school athlete drafts that get continuously edited and/or re-re-re-submitted enough that they're never G13s?
  At a minimum, I'd much rather see an A3 analogue used for blank/essentially-blank drafts, instead of watching people continue to abuse G2 and G6 for those. —Cryptic 04:12, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
• Oppose The G criteria already sufficiently deal with non-mainspace pages. The A criteria are rightly only applied to mainspace articles; draft space and user space drafts of articles should be given a LOT more leeway, because we encourage users to use that space to build future articles over time. Speeding deleting such work defeats the whole purpose of allowing new article work the space to breathe outside of the mainspace. --Jayron32 04:20, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
• Oppose the fact that a draft would meet, say, A7 doesn't mean the draft has no value to the encyclopedia, because draft space is intended for developing content which isn't suitable for mainspace right now. Applying all mainspace standards to drafts defeats the point of having draft space. Hut 8.5 07:42, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
• Oppose per Jayron32 and Hut8.5. We created the possibility to have "safe" spaces exactly so people can develop articles in peace. Considering the rush to delete already evident in mainspace, I don't see how driving people from Draft- or userspace is going to be in the best interest of the project. With WP:ACTRIAL we already force new users to create articles outside mainspace. Let them at least develop their articles there in peace. Regards SoWhy 07:54, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
• No You cannot easily tell the purpose of the sandbox or draft. Draft space does not have to be for whole articles, and some people develop fragments, lists of helpful information or templates there, which are not ever going to be articles. Some sandboxes are basically junk, and are used to practice editing or markup. There is no need to delete these with any article criterion. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:46, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
• Not to pile on but oppose per above. G covers what it needs to just fine, and applying A criteria to drafts and userspace defeat the whole purpose of drafts and userspace. Do some folks abuse those areas? Yes. But the goal is to work on projects without the quick and harsh scrutiny given to articles in mainspace, hopefully encouraging creation. It is too much to expect folks to create articles whole cloth. Drafts are cheap and as GB says, we cannot know what a draft will become. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 13:11, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
• Per SoWhy and others. Piling on to oppose this proposal seems prudent to me, as variations needn't recur. Logic fails any suggestion that editing space given as sanctuary from the expectations of mainspace editing can be regulated to the same stringent standards while delivering any respite at all. The end escapes me that calls for such contrary means, without justification (please do tell)?--John Cline (talk) 04:06, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
• Oppose - the draft space is intended for users to be able to write their articles out of the way, gradually, over time. Requiring users to ive up to mainspace standards in the first revision is unreasonable. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:32, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
• Not a good idea for draft or user namespace. I do admit I have applied something like this in some other namespaces (mostly the Template namespace, most other namespaces are hard to reach accidentally), but I am not sure this is worth codifying for these namespaces. —Kusma (t·c) 22:29, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

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The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Template:Promising draft

{{Promising draft}} (edit talk history links # /subpages /doc /doc edit /sbox /sbox diff /test)

Around the time G13 was expanded to include all old drafts, the template "Promising draft" was created to flag drafts that showed enough promise that they should preserved. Some viewpoints on the template at the time, ie [5], [6] assumed that such a template would amount to a delay, similar to an AFC comment or a dummy edit to give the draft another 6 months of time for improvement. Others were of the opinion that a mere delay in speedy deletion was insufficient, ie [7], and drafts with the template would be permanently immune to speedy deletion under G13.

The discussion here touched on the topic, but the focus was not really on the wording or finality of the tag, and discussion was somewhat distracted by the fact that the G13 expansion was still under discussion.

In practice, we are around 6 months after the G13 expansion so a couple hundred of these drafts, which generally were tagged and then not improved in the last half year, are coming up for G13 again and being consistently (though not unvaryingly) deleted at MfD ie:

• WP:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Delta Force (film series)
• WP:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Charles do Vale de Souza
• WP:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Ali Anjum
• WP:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Julius Espat.

I suggest that it would be a better use of Wikipedia's collective administrative time to advise stale draft patrollers to do a sanity check on tagged drafts and promote to mainspace or AfC if acceptable and otherwise tag for G13 (leaving MfD as the exception rather than the rule), as opposed to forcing ~100% of such tagged articles through a rubber-stamp MfD. My proposed rewording would match the "delay" practice, while the existing wording corresponds to an "indefinite" practice. Since the template talk page is probably poorly-watched, bringing it here for discussion more focused on the template's workflow. Thoughts? VQuakr (talk) 23:08, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, my intention as the closer of that discussion was that the delay on G13 should be indefinite for articles tagged this way. That said, I'm saying this after only a brief look at the discussions, and consensus can change. Tazerdadog (talk) 23:20, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

• Comment as a heavy processor of G13 pages I've encountered many of these tags. I even did a search for them to quantify the amount of use. Quality varies from "the tagger should have moved the page to mainspace" to "whay the heck did they tag this??" I'm currently extrememly inappropriately restricted from moves to mainspace so I've been submitting the semi worst to MfD, the beter ones to AfC and a few of the worst directly to G13 (after the template changed to not require MfD). A few dozen were SvG draftified pages that got wacked recently. Someone changed the template back to the original version which requires MfD, which I don't support. If someone thinks a draft is worth preserving, postpone deletion 6 months or even better actually work on it or even move it to mainspace yourself. Just leaving a template that is supposed to insulate the draft from normal deletion process without even adding a comment about why the topic is worthy or doing anything to move it forward is a little annoying. Legacypac (talk) 23:54, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Legacypac, I think you should not send any {{Promising draft}} tagged pages to any CSD criterion, but instead list them at MfD, noting your opinion of the promising tagging, and pinging the tagged to the discussion. CSD criteria are for cases where there is no conceivable plausible reason for discussion. If any editor has asserted that the page should not be deleted, they have self-nominated as a defender of the page. One useful outcome of the MfD discussion could be the education of an editor who too easily applies that tag. Misuse of the tag is disruptive, and MfD is the appropriate forum to review its use in specific cases. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:25, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

My bottom line: I think this template would work best as a sort of reverse prod. The rationale: When G13 was expanded to all drafts, the consensus seemed to be that if a draft is promising, it should not automatically be deleted after six months; administrators should use their discretion. This just creates a mechanism for that to be formalized. (By the way, when editors were simply leaving AFD comments about a draft being promising, drafts with these comments were routinely deleted. I can provide examples on request.) I see no problem with "insulating the draft from [the] normal deletion process", where the normal process is everything gets thrown in the trash after six months. Some articles may not be ready for mainspace but could be improved by future editors, which is what this template is for (and originally what the draftspace was for). The rationale for the creation of G13 was that garbage was piling up, and this template is designed for drafts that aren't garbage. If someone disagrees with a tag, what is the problem with exposing the draft to the light of day at MfD for other editors to review? Is there too high a volume of tags for the drafts all to go through MfD? If someone is applying the template indiscriminately, that's a behavior issue to bring up with the tagging editor. We don't have a problem with dealing with PRODs this way. Is something different here? (Is the fundamental problem that some editors think no drafts should be hanging around >6 mos without active improvement? If so, that's a whole different can of worms.) Calliopejen1 (talk) 00:09, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

No one is proposing here that G13 be automatic. The problem is that a significant portion of the drafts tagged with this template and unedited for the last six months quite clearly are garbage, and running them through a token MfD is a waste of time (and yes, a not insignificant burden on MfD). VQuakr (talk) 00:22, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

How do you propose that truly promising drafts be insulated from deletion? Calliopejen1 (talk) 00:30, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

I described that in my proposal above. VQuakr (talk) 01:03, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Also, it appears that this tag is being used on ~120 drafts.[8] I clicked through some and most seemed like reasonable drafts. Even if 50% were to be nominated at AfD, that is only 60 drafts we're talking about. Am I missing something? Calliopejen1 (talk) 00:34, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

As near as I can tell, of the 17 drafts that have been brought to MfD and closed in the last month, 14 were deletes. Of the three that were not deleted, two were lists of refs (not really drafts) that were determined to still be useful and one was a rather unusual special case involving a recently-indeffed user. That's a pretty poor keep rate. Typical load at MfD is only ~3-5 pages per day so giving patrollers and admins discretion will make a difference and let MfD focus on the stuff that actually merits discussion. VQuakr (talk) 01:03, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Sure, but there is not necessarily a reason to think that those 17 are representative. Perhaps the worst of it is getting nominated for deletion first. I'm not terribly concerned about the workload associated with 17 MfD discussions... Calliopejen1 (talk) 06:30, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

As best I could tell there were about 220 pages tagged but a lot were SvG pages which I applied the widely agreed to mass delete (using G13) as the pages were way past the allotted review salvage time. Some have been deleted G13 or under other CSD and some were sent to main-space as is, which should have been done 6 months ago instead of tagging.

Normally when I look at a Six month stale draft I have discretion. If I CSD it, the reviewing Admin also has discretion. This tag proports to remove every other editor's discretion and overturn the widely agreed to G13 process for selected drafts - just because a single editor exercised their discretion without giving any rational. @User:SmokeyJoe why should we need to ping the tagger?They should have these pages on their watchlist, but since the taggers are not showing up to defend the pages, maybe they don't. Legacypac (talk) 01:24, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Legacypac, it is important to overtly ping the allegedly inept tagger because the MfD discussion is the forum that reviews inappropriate tagging. Either you or they are wrong, and it is very bad for different editors to be working at cross purposes in ignorance of each other. You can’t rely on watchlisting, you can’t rely on pinging either, but both are useful tools. Explicit pinging also ensures that others coming to the discussions, such as me, can see immediately who you allege is tagging inappropriately. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:18, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

This tag ensures that there is a discussion before the unilateral deletion of a draft that at least one user believes is promising. We're talking about less than 100 articles passing through MfD, given the current tagging situation. To be honest, this has to be one of the more depressing discussions I've encountered on Wikipedia. It's too much of a hassle to discuss less than 100 articles, so we are going to expose all of them to the threat of unilateral deletion? Let's not kid ourselves, if CSD says something can be deleted after six months, eventually some administrator is going to look at it while moving too quickly and delete it. I guess I'm too old-school in terms of eventualism (no room for that even in draft space these days, apparently!). Maybe I just need to be much more aggressive in terms of moving marginal articles to mainspace, where they at least will need to pass through AFD. Calliopejen1 (talk) 06:28, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

There are currently 127 drafts that are tagged with {{promising draft}}. Spot-checking a handful of them, I see that many look to be nearly acceptable as articles. These 127 drafts represent only a tiny percentage of all draft articles. I have no problem with them existing indefinitely in draft space and I don't see how this could be detrimental to Wikipedia in any way. Unfortunately, some of them will just linger there, but some will become useful articles. Any that have been inappropriately tagged as promising drafts can be sent to MFD without overwhelming it (or even affecting the throughput there in any meaningful way). -- Ed (Edgar181) 14:23, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

I don't mind the tag too much, but I'd prefer the tagger just move the best pages to mainspace amd try to avoid tagging the worst pages. Legacypac (talk) 08:54, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

G2 applying to AFC

I just reverted a change that seems to be completely contrary to what G2 was meant to be used for in the first place. The change made is that it was expanded to include anything submitted to AFC, even that in userspace. The original text stated that the userspace was exempt from this criterion. I have brought it here for discussion to obtain opinions on the issue. -- Amanda (aka DQ) 09:26, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Good job reverting that. Userspace is the place you can make your tests. That's why we have it. If a test page is submitted to AFC, don't delete the page, just remove the AFC submission tag. Regards SoWhy 10:06, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

(+1) to what SW said.Just remove the AFC tag!~ Winged Blades^Godric 17:05, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

This is an AfC draft management issue and the minor change steams from many doscjssions at AfC amd a lot of practical work with draft management. See Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation#G1,_G2,_and_AFC and other discussions at AfC. Removing the tests increases the average quality of G13able pages, which makes reviewing them for useful controbutions more worthwhile and less depressing. It helps reduce the number of pointless resubmit & declines at AfC. It also closes off WP:REFUND busywork on blank and obvious testing. Clearing AfC decline categories helps identify pages that editors wamt reviewed again (perhaps ghey broke the submit template), or which should be reviewed again, but the accumulated clutter makes screening much harder. Legacypac (talk) 10:54, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Good revert. If someone has a problem with the AFC template, remove it rather than deleting the sandbox which is there to make tests. I missed when this was added earlier this month and declined a G2 nomination for a test page that had been submitted to AFC. It is now at MFD, Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Linton.zeng/sandbox. ~ GB fan 11:21, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

From the various discussions, might one possible approach be to simply blank these troublesome userspace pages? That way they are no longer in the realm of AfC. Anyone can do it (or undo it). It would be too BITEy to do it on the very first time the nonsense is submitted, but, on any subsequent submission or repeats by the same user, fair game? I'm not sure if there would need to be some adjustments at WP:User pages. — jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 16:54, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

I already blank rgular sandboxes to remove the decline. The issue is named userspages, many of which have spammy names. Legacypac (talk) 17:05, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Then use G11, don’t abuse G2. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:28, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

• Good revert. It was a pretty bad sneak huge expansion of CSD. Userspace is for testing. AfC templates do not, any more, get to userspace by themselves. Any still there are there by design. Old legacy AfC pages should have been moved. If there is an AfC templating issue in Userspace, it is better fixed by clever template coding than by userspace deletions. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:26, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Going to take a slightly controversial view. If the user submits their work for AFC review it means that their happy with the state and want it to be promoted to main space. If they are still working on it, then it should not be submitted for AFC review. I am opposed to hasty G2 nominations, however if the user has received 3 or 4 of the This submission seems to be a test edit and not an article worthy of an encyclopedia. declines without improving the submission then I could see CSD:G2 being in order to dispose of the disruption with less investment by AFC/NPP volunteers. Hasteur (talk) 17:43, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

If the user submits their work for AFC review it means that their happy with the state and want it to be promoted to main space... or they don't understand what AfC is, or the difference between an AfC submission and a user sandbox. If someone submits something to AfC which is fine as a user sandbox but will be rejected by AfC as a test submission then you can just remove any AfC templates and explain the difference to the user. There isn't any reason to use G2, and sandboxes are the one place where it's OK for people to make test edits. Hut 8.5 19:08, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

@Hut 8.5: Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is willful nonsense (paraphrased from The Moscow rules and Goldfinger (novel)). Pleas read my comment again. I said if they've received 3 or 4 of the "G2 warning" declines on their draft then they deserve the G2 nomination. Hasteur (talk) 01:51, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

What you're talking about here is a behavioural problem: somebody doesn't understand what the AfC template is and is using it inappropriately as a result. It should get the same treatment as other behavioural problems, by educating the user so they don't do it again, and escalating if they don't. The suggested policy change doesn't impose any requirement on the number of declines, and people clearly aren't going to interpret it that way, as several people have already tried to use it to get sandboxes deleted which have only been declined once. Hut 8.5 11:28, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Wow, your willful ignorance astonishes me. I am opposed to hasty G2 nominations, however if the user has received 3 or 4 of the This submission seems to be a test edit and not an article worthy of an encyclopedia. declines without improving the submission then I could see CSD:G2 being in order to dispose of the disruption with less investment by AFC/NPP volunteers. What I propose (and you repeatedly overlook) is the finesse of the rule so that G2 is not in order after a single or few declines, but when the message is not being recieved by the submitter, we have to break out the tough love to communicate the message. Your "If you make a tool, someone might misuse it" bogeyman argument is so laughable to the point of exdending (by Argumentum ab Absurdum) that we should take away Twinkle, XFDcloser, CSDs entirely because they might be misused and cause harm to editing. Remember that a CSD (in usual cases) takes at minimum 2 editors agreeing in the deletion, the nominator and an admin. Under your argument, the nominator is abusing the rationalle, but it still takes an Admin to decide if the nomination is valid. Hasteur (talk) 13:31, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Um, no. I'm not suggesting this as a hypothetical situation, let alone a "laughable" "bogeyman argument" deserving ludicrous comparisons. As I've said, several people have already tried to use this to get userspace sandboxes deleted under G2 in the brief time it was in the policy. Take a look at this MfD, or this one, or this one. These were all editing tests where the author added an AfC template once and it was declined once, but someone nevertheless tried to get it deleted under G2 and then MfD. These are just the cases where the admin declined the deletion, and in each case the admin declined because they were applying the previous version of the policy. Funnily enough if we write a policy saying that editing tests in userspace can be deleted under G2 if they are submitted to AfC, then people will use that to delete editing tests in userspace submitted to AfC, and we can't really blame them. In your example of a user repeatedly adding AfC templates to an sandbox we can do what we always do when a new user repeatedly does something they shouldn't: tell them not to do it again and proceed with sanctions if they continue. Hut 8.5 18:39, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

PROFANITY REDACTED.... how hard is it to get it into your head. I am not advocating for one AFC decline arming the G2 button (quite the opposite in fact). What I am saying is that when one user repeatedly wastes AFC/NPP volunteer time sorting through nonsense that would never cut it in Mainspace we should use the finesse of G2 to dispose of the page instead of having to waste more time with MFDs that have no outcome besides Delete. If these pages had 3 or 4 declines for "Testing", then I would rule G2 in order. Personally I think going directly from one AFC decline to MFD is unnecessarily BITEy, but because we're arging from peaks of involatile principle, I'm going to continue pointing out how all of your responses to my original reasoned view are setting us up for storing content that does not have a hope in hell of making it to mainspace and signing us up for endless wastes of time having to argue out MFDs for which there is a foregone conclusion of deletion. Hasteur (talk) 20:31, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

I really don't see why you need a G2 expansion to deal with these pages. There is nothing wrong with them other than the fact they have an AfC template, and they aren't tolerated for any mainspace potential. You can deal with them by removing the AfC template and explaining to the user that AfC isn't for editing tests. If the user puts the template back then they are being disruptive and they can be dealt with in all the normal ways that we deal with disruptive editors. I haven't seen any examples of people repeatedly sending a test page to AfC, and none have been presented here. Certainly MfD does not have a tidal wave of such pages. Hut 8.5 22:11, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

• Good revert. In WP:UPYES there is a table; in that, the third row covers "Work in progress or material that you may come back to in future" and the ninth row of the same table covers "Experimentation". In the same page there is WP:STALE which gives a number of suggestions as to what to do with abandoned drafts in user space - only two of them may result in deletion: one ("if the material is promotional, or otherwise unsuitable, and the author was never a serious Wikipedia contributor") where WP:CSD#U5 may apply; and the other ("if of no potential and problematic even if blanked") is by filing a case at WP:MFD.
  These indicate to me that attempting to expand WP:CSD#G2 to cover drafts in user space and tests in user space is the wrong thing to do, and may even be WP:CREEPy. First get Wikipedia:User pages amended to move those kinds of activity from WP:UPYES to WP:UPNO, and then we can expand G2 accordingly. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:17, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Expand G1 to include userspace AfC submissions

Patent nonsense in userspace that is submitted to AfC no longer affects only the user that wrote it. I propose that G1 be slightly broadened to contain the caveat "unless submitted to WP:AfC" to the exclusion from userspace, similar to WP:G2. Proposed modified text of WP:G1 would be:

This applies to pages consisting entirely of incoherent text or gibberish with no meaningful content or history. It does not cover poor writing, partisan screeds, obscene remarks, implausible theories, vandalism or hoaxes, fictional material, coherent non-English material, or poorly translated material. Nor does it apply to user sandboxes or other pages in the user namespace, unless submitted to WP:AfC. In short, if it is understandable, G1 does not apply.

VQuakr (talk) 08:32, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

• Support these pages show up in AfC tracking categories and require MfD or G13 to get rid of currently. Make your own userspace nonsense on your own but when you force others to review it, expect to see the nonsense deleted. Legacypac (talk) 08:51, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
• @VQuakr: Just so your aware, the insertion of "unless submitted to WP:AfC" of G2 is being challenged (and reverted) below, as it was not brought up for change properly, like you are doing so yourself. -- Amanda (aka DQ) 09:28, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Or maybe the open edit with a good clear summary on one of the most heavily watched project pages was the correct way to tweek policy. Legacypac (talk) 09:49, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

• Oppose Valid G1 deletions are rare. While back in The Good Old Days™, G1 was often used as a carte blanche, today admins know that G1 should almost never be used and rightfully so (as far as I can tell, there have only been 18 such deletions this year so far and most all of them were incorrect (which is not surprising considering the admins who performed them)). Expanding a criterion that should almost never be used makes no sense because such changes certainly fail the "frequent" requirement for new or expanded criteria. It also does not make sense for another reason: The existence of a submit-template does not imply that the draft is finished. Oftentimes new users don't realize that they should not submit articles for AFC before they are done with it and will submit unfinished drafts. Before proposing this change, please elaborate with examples why you think this change makes sense. Regards SoWhy 10:04, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

  One of the deletion was truly "incorrect", but all of the other pages should have been deleted. I believe most admins these days know that "nonsense" is not the same as "patent nonsense". Deletions under "wrong" rationales are common, but that is true for many of the CSD. A10 is one that pages that do not need to be deleted are often wrongly tagged with (half of the duplicate titles make plausible redirects). —Kusma (t·c) 16:27, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

  As I said, I don't contest that most of those deletions were correct per se, just that G1 did not apply. Regards SoWhy 17:12, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

• Oppose Instead as pointed out below, remove the afc template to keep it out of the system. It is very likely the submitter did not realise what would happen with the test. Deleting the page would like increase their lack of knowledge. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:54, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
• Support - the rationale for excluding the userspace is that a user, to a limited degree, owns his/her userspace; however, once a user calls a page in his/her userspace an AFC article, it ceases to belong to that user. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 12:51, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
• Oppose per Graeme Bartlett. Just remove the AFC template. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 13:50, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Delete G1

As I've long suspected G1 has become so narrow it is completely useless. If SoWhy's review is correct there is zero reason to keep a CSD that has zero correct applications in who knows how long. Legacypac (talk) 10:37, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

It's not become narrow, it's always been so narrow. I do agree with you though. I considered a removal of G1 but I wanted to check more examples first. The set I checked was from this year and it's possible that there are actually valid deletions happening. So some more research is certainly needed before we consider removing a criterion that has existed for more than a decade. Regards SoWhy 10:55, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Could be from ACTRIAL; there have been 695 G1 since 2017 January 1st. 60, 78, ~90, and ~90 were the counts for the first four months in 2017.(just searching 201703 etc) Looks like a cut down of 10x since ACTRIAL.

However, many of them, pre and post ACTRIAL have coherent titles, and while I can't view the pages they are seem like they would be more of the very confusing rather than incoherent text/gibberish. Galobtter (pingó mió) 10:57, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

either the criterian has narrowed or the application and understanding of it has narrowed. The ones I've seen in draft/afc generally have coheriant titles but garbage content. Legacypac (talk) 11:03, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

That was my point. Since only admins can view the deleted pages, one needs to check a larger sample (the DB lists 677 such deletions in 2017 total). I'll see if I can find the time (and any interested admins can feel free to help of course). Regards SoWhy 11:27, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

All 695 are in this table, User:GB fan/G1 Deletion 2017 through 22 Feb 2018. ~ GB fan 13:36, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Heh, I had the same idea and added them to User:SoWhy/G1 but yours is more elegant, so good job. Mind if I add some notes there? Regards SoWhy 13:39, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

I don't mind, better to have them all in one place. ~ GB fan 13:41, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. Btw, don't know how you extracted them but you seem to have problems with encoding. Compare the first line of your table with the first line of mine to see what I mean. Might want to fix that before people add notes. Regards SoWhy 13:46, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Something went wrong with the non-latin characters, I have fixed some of them. ~ GB fan 14:07, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

• As a CSD, it is not among the least commonly used (that honour goes to P1 and P2, the most useless criteria ever). —Kusma (t·c) 16:27, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
• It's not the least commonly used CSD, in mainspace A5, A2 and of course G9 should be less used. There are valid G1 deletions and those are not situations where you want to have to wait for PROD or AfD. I don't think removing it would be a good idea. Hut 8.5 18:45, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
• G1 is still used quite frequently outside of the article namespace: only 20 out of 151 total in 2018 were in mainspace, and 789 out of 1392 in 2017. ACTRIAL is almost certainly the reason for the drop in articlespace percentage, and we're still on track to match the 2017 non-main-namespace numbers in 2018. Anecdotally, most of my own G1 deletions weren't actually tagged as G1, but as some other criterion that was a worse fit. —Cryptic 02:43, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
• No, G1 is fine. It doesn't need to be removed at all. It is still valid. --Jayron32 03:13, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
• No. Nonsense still gets posted in article space on a regular basis, this is a perfectly valid criterion. Beeblebrox (talk)
• No. New Criteria Criterion #3 "Frequent" is a good and proper requirement for going throught the hassle of making the case and approving a new CSD criterion, but that doesn't mean it is a reason to retire an old criterion. Its infrequency of application may be a consequence of its long good practice. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:13, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
• No, per above comments. Even if it's not being used even at all right now, it still describes a situation in which speedy deletion would be warranted. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 14:32, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Proposal: limit G13 on discussed drafts

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Proposed: that any draft which has been discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion with a "keep" result is exempt indefinitely from WP:G13. This would not exempt such a draft from being tagged in good faith under any other speedy deletion criterion, nor being listed again at MfD in good faith if other reasons for deletion come to light, nor even being listed at MfD in the future under the "should not be kept indefinitely" rationale.

This is intended to eliminate speedy deletions of drafts which have been accepted through discussion as useful for content development. It's not intended to prevent such a draft from being removed if nobody is working on it over an extended period, only that there should be a new discussion prior to that occurrence.

• Support as proposer. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:09, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

• G13 doesn't apply in this case anyway. G13 is not one of the criteria which can be used to delete a page which has survived its most recent deletion discussion. That includes MfD. Hut 8.5 18:34, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

  Ah, well this proposal is moot then. I guess some admins need to be reminded. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 20:15, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

  Don't they ever? Regards SoWhy 20:24, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

  Please note: "moot" is a bad word to use, since it can mean "subject to discussion (originally at a moot); arguable, debatable, unsolved or impossible to solve". --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:43, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.