Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion

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)

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)

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)