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Tutorial

Discussion

New page feed

Reviewers

Curation tool
Suggestions

Coordination

Backlog drives

NPP backlog

Articles: 11598 ↑140
Oldest article: 3 years old
Redirects: 34946
Oldest redirect: 5 months old
Article reviews: 1406
Redirect reviews: 2179

There is a very large articles backlog
The articles backlog is growing very rapidly (↑1124 since last week)
There is a very large redirects backlog

Reading time ~35 minutes

Welcome!

GLOSSARY

AfD: Articles for deletion

PROD: Proposed deletion

CSD: Criteria for speedy deletion

BRD: BOLD, revert, discuss cycle

BLPPROD: Proposed deletion of biographies of living people

Links

Instructions for the Curation Tool

New Page Reviewer permission

Deletion process

Notability guidelines,

Reliable sources

Guide to proper speedy deletion

Draftifying

Thank you for your interest in becoming a new page reviewer. Reviewing new pages is one of the most important maintenance tasks on Wikipedia. It's what keeps bad pages out and, equally important, it helps new, good faith users creating their first genuine articles. Reviewing new pages needs a near-admin knowledge not only of deletion processes and notability guidelines but also a good understanding of reliable sources. If you are reading this, most of the terms are already familiar to you, everything in this introduction is fully explained in the tutorial below and you must also read the instructions for using the Curation Tool, after which you can consider applying to use the tools.

Designed for processing newly submitted articles, New Page Patrolling is almost as old as Wikipedia itself—21 years in 2023. The system we currently use, Page Curation, was specially designed and rolled out in 2012. The user right, New Page Reviewer, was introduced in 2016 to ensure quality of reviewing. The system is the front line of interaction between new authors and the community's volunteers who maintain the quality of Wikipedia's articles. Page Curation has a variety of detailed, easy-to-use actions for patrolling pages in all namespaces. New page reviewers can mark pages as 'Reviewed', which releases them for indexing by search engines such as Google and Bing. Pages can be reviewed and can be tagged for additional attention and can also be tagged without passing them as reviewed with an option to inform the creator. Pages can also be listed for deletion processes or moved to draft space.

New page reviewing is mainly about deciding whether a new article will be marked as approved and accepting it into Wikipedia, or initiating one of several deletion procedures. Uncontroversial deletions can be proposed using PROD while most other deletion proposals are resolved in a discussion at Articles for deletion (AfD). In a very narrow set of cases, an expedited speedy deletion| (CSD) can be requested, or a BLPPROD can be placed to delete material which is unambiguously not an improvement to Wikipedia. When subpar articles are about subjects that are related to other existing articles on Wikipedia, according to policy merging content or simply redirecting the page to an existing article may be preferable to deletion, in which case editors should follow BRD and escalate the discussion to AfD if contested.
Moving pages to the draft namespace is sometimes used for articles that may have been created by an editor with an undeclared conflict of interest, or to preserve material that may have potential as an article but cannot be accepted in its current state. As you work through this tutorial, special attention is required to the explanation of draftifying.
If an article is accepted, new page reviewers may choose to apply maintenance tags for significant problems. Reviewers are not expected to 'fix' articles but may do so if they wish.

It is paramount to review correctly and seriously. Because of the high volume of articles created each day, even a few wrong or bitey reviews can adversely affect hundreds of articles and deter many new users from staying on and becoming regular editors. It is critical that editors review with care and diligence. New Page Patrolling values quality over speed and quantity—something to remember during backlog drives.

Use the flowchart on the right until you become comfortable and knowledgeable with all of the aspects of reviewing new articles. For quick reference, you may wish to keep it open in separate window or desktop on your computer (attempting to review new pages from a smart phone is not recommended). Reviewing is entirely voluntary and carries no obligation. Sometimes patrolling new pages can be stressful. If this happens, the best thing to do is take a break. If you're not enjoying patrolling, then it is time to take a break—don't become addicted to it and don't hesitate to suggest changes or improvements to the system. The New Page Patrol community does listen to you.

If you have a specific question or concern, post a message at the New Page Reviewer Talk, and an experienced reviewer or editor will be along soon to help you. For other help using the tools, see the related tabs above or enroll for a course at the New Page Review School.

The purpose of reviewing new pages

Watch a quick video tour

New Page Patrol is responsible for finding articles which do not follow Wikipedia's policies and guidelines and also for supporting and nurturing new editors. Fast attention is given to articles which may be eligible for speedy deletion, particularly if they might be obvious hoaxes, copyright violations, defamatory material about living persons, pages that exploit Wikipedia for money (think spam, promotion, and undisclosed paid editing). Other pages need to be deleted for other reasons but may be less urgent—unpatrolled pages are not indexed by Google or other search engines for 90 days.

Reviewers work with editors of a wide range of skills and motivations. Excellent communication is an important part of the new page patrol process. Reviewers should make use of Page Curation to post short messages to the creator, provide informative edit summaries, and otherwise appropriately engage with other editors. Reviewers are encouraged to make frequent use of the existing message to creator tool. It is essential that good faith new creators be encouraged to continue creating articles and editing Wikipedia.

Reviewers are not obligated to mentor new users or complete their articles, but may wish to direct new users to the Teahouse question forum, help desk and Articles for Creation for assistance. Wikipedia:Your first article, Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia, the Wikipedia:Tutorial, The Wikipedia Adventure, and other help pages are also available. When drafts are approved at AfC and moved to the mainspace they will be checked again by new page patrollers in many instances.

Triage

New page review is the only firewall against totally unwanted content and the place to accept articles that may not be perfect but do not need to be deleted.

If the content is marginally poor, do not be too hasty to nominate contributions by new editors for deletion, or to draftify them or redirect them. If you are uncertain, leave the page unpatrolled, and another volunteer can review it later.

It is often helpful to review the oldest pages in the NPP queue, rather than the newest, as these may have even been indexed by search engines. When reviewing from the back of the queue, you may come across pages that were created long ago but that recently were changed from being a redirect to an article (or vice versa). These articles pose a distinct challenge, as they are often the result of edit wars, other forms of tendentious editing, or paid editing and spam. You can find a guide to additional concerns and suggestions related to these types of pages here.

Care

Care should be exercised when reviewing very new pages. Tagging anything other than attack pages, copyvios, vandalism or complete nonsense for deletion shortly after creation may stop the creation of a good faith article and drive away a new contributor. Outside these exceptions, articles less than an hour old should not be nominated for deletion, blanked and redirected or moved to draftspace. It is often appropriate to tag problems and allow several hours or days for improvement. Articles must nevertheless be reviewed within 90 days otherwise they will be released for indexing by Google and other search engines whatever state they are in.

Maintenance tags

If the page is not a candidate for a deletion process but has other problems or needing to be draftified, add appropriate tags and use the message feature of the curation tool to inform the creator of the issues (see the patroller checklists section below for more information). If the article has potential but is not yet suitable for mainspace, consider draftifying it - but draftifying is not a catch-all for not knowing what to do with it. Note however that moving an article with a copyright violation to Draft space is not permitted. See section § Drafts below.

User names and vandalism

In serious cases, the creator of a new page may need to be blocked to prevent further disruption or damage to Wikipedia's reputation. Familiarise yourself with the WP:UAA and WP:AIV systems and their policies and report such cases as necessary.

Wikipedia forensics

Page reviewers are in a good position to detect policy breaches such as sockpuppetry, promotion, serial copyright violations, undisclosed paid editing, and child protection issues. Learn about these policies and what to do. For example, check the content of new articles for inline external spam links. Many of these topics are covered in more detail on this page.

Monitoring the system

Other editors, particularly those who are interested in fighting vandalism, also regularly check newly created articles to tag them for maintenance or deletion. Although they don't have access to the features of the Page Curation Toolbar, all editors, even IP users, can tag pages. Tagged pages remain listed in the feed until patrolled by a reviewer, enabling New Page Reviewers to identify and isolate poor patrolling. Use the 'Unreview' feature for good faith errors and see the templates that can be used to encourage users to do less demanding maintenance tasks until they have more experience. If you find inappropriate new page patrolling, you can use the template {{Stop NPP}} as a supportive ask. In persistent cases however, it will be necessary to escalate through the warning levels and might need administrator attention at a place like ANI or by getting help on the NPP discussion page.

Tools

The most important tool is the page curation toolbar, which appears on all pages in the new pages feed. It contains the actual button to mark a page as reviewed. It also contains an information summary about the page and its creator, tools for tagging articles with maintenance tags, and a tool to send barnstars and other nice things to editors that have worked on the article. A copyright violation detector can be added to the toolbar with this user script. There are many other useful tools available to make doing NPP easier. You can find many of them on the resources page or linked throughout this page.

Special:NewPagesFeed

Special:NewPagesFeed is the central motor for reviewing new pages and drafts. It logs new pages immediately after the first version is saved. While it is a good idea to reduce the backlog of unreviewed pages by working from the back of the list, it is nevertheless important that serious breaches of policy such as spam and attack pages be deleted very quickly. A comprehensive preferences panel lets you select what kind of new pages you want to review. The system remembers your preferences each time you open the feed. A list daily created by a bot at sorted list classifies all unreviewed articles by topic, along with a short excerpt of the article. Use this list if you prefer to work on articles in your own sphere of knowledge. A system called ORES inserts alerts of possible problems with the article. Other information will easy help you identify if the article creator is a beginner.

This useful script conveniently adds a "Page Curation" link to your top toolbar that loads the NewPagesFeed. The feed also has a "New pages feed" link in the side column of every page on Wikipedia.

Sourcing issues and notability

Notability is key to Wikipedia inclusion. Sources are the foundation upon which all of our inclusion policies converge. The notability rules are complex, especially SNGs and require special understanding. New articles rarely meet our sourcing requirements and so should be tagged specifically for that issue. There are two kinds of sources:

Sources that establish notability,
Sources that corroborate the content.

Do not overload the article with every sourcing template that could possibly be relevant. Typically, one sourcing tag should be added to address lack of sources entirely or depth of those in place, and if others, to address the manner of sourcing, such as no footnotes, the poor attribution of those cited, the use of only primary sources and related issues.

If an unsourced article would generally be appropriate for an encyclopedia and if sourced it would probably survive an AfD, consider moving it to draft and customising the default message if required. Remember however, that draftification is not a catch-all if you don't know what to do with the article
If the article does not cite any sources, consider adding {{unreferenced}}, or if they are insufficient, {{refimprove}} (for articles on living person, {{BLP unsourced}} and {{BLP sources}}), but do not pass it as reviewed.
Other common tags include {{no footnotes}}, {{more footnotes}}, {{primary sources}}, ({{BLP primary sources}}), {{one source}}, {{self-published}}, {{citation style}}, {{cleanup-bare URLs}} and others.
If you do not believe the subject is notable based on having looked outside the article for the existence of sources, then PROD or AfD may be warranted.

Copyright violations (WP:COPYVIO)

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WP:NPPCV

A COPYVIO alert is often displayed in an article's entry in the feed. This must immediately be investigated. Some alerts may be false positives, such as properly sourced quotations.
Copying material without the permission of the copyright holder from sources that are not public domain or compatibly licensed (unless it's a brief quotation used in accordance with Wikipedia's non-free content policy and guideline) is likely to be a copyright violation. Content on other Wikimedia projects is free content, and may be copied, subject to attribution statements that are part of Wikipedia's licensing terms.

Wikimedia projects

All content contributed to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-SA), and may be reused and built upon by anyone. This includes copying material from one Wikipedia article to another, or translating material from another language Wikipedia. Wikipedia's licensing requires that attribution be given to all users involved in creating and altering the content of a page. This requirement is fulfilled by adding an attribution statement to the edit summary, for all copied or translated material.

If you notice an article containing a translation from another Wikipedia and there is no attribution in an edit summary, you should add one. You may use this model:

NOTE: The previous edit of 22:31, October 32, 2020‎, contains content translated from the French Wikipedia page at [[:fr:Exact name of French page]]; see its history for attribution.

This is per Wikipedia's licensing which requires such attribution. For further details, please see Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia#Repairing insufficient attribution.

Other sources

Although we have a system in place to automatically detect copyright violations, it misses a large number of them. 100% reliance should never be placed on bots, which can also produce false-positives. Copyright infringement is a pervasive problem and it is not only important that we not host such material, but it often leads to significant additional work when not caught early. Accordingly, please check all new pages for copying from pre-existing material. Articles about organizations and music groups are especially prone to 'borrowing' content from other sources.

It is not a copyright violation to copy material that is in the public domain or has a compatible license if the material is properly attributed. (Templates are available but are not required.)

It is important to remember that any text that is a copyright violation should be removed from the article and the revisions deleted, even if the text doesn't qualify for G12 deletion.

Hallmarks of copying include:

The addition of a large portion of text in a single or few edits – especially when coupled with other criteria listed below
Single reference articles, or ones with large sections of text without inline references
Articles with text that seems too good to be true
Articles whose text resembles that of a news report, press release, blog, or a book, that rarely occurs outside of a specific, invariably copyrighted use, or that has a strange tone of voice, such as an overly informal tone
First-person pronouns and possessives (I, we, my, our), and contractions (I'm, we're, they're, can't, didn't, aren't, won't, etc.)
The inclusion of a slanted marketing voice with weasel words and other puffery; explicit or implicit claims of ownership of the text added and insider status as to the topic (inclusion of intellectual property symbols [©,™,®] is highly correlated)
Out-of-context and out-of-place words or phrases, smacking of an existing source or the navigation structure of an original website: "this site/page/book/whitepaper"; "top", "go to top", "next page", "click here", etc. and non-standard characters (e.g., Microsoft "smart quotes")
Articles whose style of referencing appears to be that of a book or other pre-existing source, not corresponding to the actual references in the article – such as reference numbers or author names in the text, including in-line footnote links such as "[1]", especially when no footnotes are given

Methods to check for copyright violations:

Use filters in the page curation feed to see if any edits on a particular page has been flagged as a copyright violation.
To see if content has been copied from pre-existing writing, copy and paste a limited but unique portion of text from the page into a search engine such as Google (between quotation marks), and try a few such snippets from each paragraph.
Compare the article's content with the references and external links and look for copy/pastes or close paraphrasing. In some cases, a search engine can find close paraphrasing if you copy a unique portion of text from the page, but without quotation marks.
Even if not given as a reference or link, see if the person or organization has a dedicated website (it is often fruitful, once located, to look for an "about", "history" or other narrative section, which will not necessarily appear in Google). If you have access to them, Facebook and LinkedIn are also widespread sources of copying.
Earwig's Copyvio Detector and the Duplication detector are useful tools to find copyright violations. However, do not treat a negative result by either as conclusive – both are hit-and-miss, being unable to read some web content and are poor at finding closely-paraphrased content. Positive results too must be checked by a human, including to see whether the source is in the public domain or bears a suitable free copyright license. This user script can be added to create a link in your tools that will run the current page through Earwig's tool.
Some copyright violations are from PDF files. To read them you will need to open them in your browser or download them.
Copyright violations can also come in the form of machine translated text from sources; these can either be manually checked by reading the translated source, or pasting the text into a text comparison website such as Copyleaks.
It is important to understand "backwards copyvios" – that Wikipedia content gets quickly picked up and duplicated by outside sources, and false-positives may be triggered by searches finding content copied from the Wikipedia article. The Wayback Machine is an invaluable tool in sorting these. If needed, look for organic development of content over multiple edits by combing though the diffs in the page history.

What to do if you find a copyright violation:

If substantially the entire page is an unambiguous copyright violation, and there's no non-infringing revision to revert to (which will usually but not always be true for new articles), tag the page for speedy deletion under CSD G12 using {{db-g12}}. Don't forget to warn the user with the warning notice template that will be provided to you in the text of the speedy deletion tag (If you are using Page Curation, it will do this for you, if you are examining an older page that has already been reviewed, Twinkle will also do it).
Note: for copyright violations where the content is copied from multiple sources, you can put more than one URL into Twinkle, but page curation only has a single field. To get around this, simply put a space and write "and" between the URLs and enter them both in the single field.
Where you have not marked the page for speedy deletion – for example, because removing the infringement found would still leave substantial content – then:

remove all of the copyrighted infringing material from the page, noting in your edit summary where it is from ("Remove copyright violation of http://www...."). Where the copying is from more than one source, it is often easiest to remove each infringement in a separate edit.
post to the article's talk page {{subst:cclean|url=URL(s) copied from}}; just place a space between the URLs if there's more than one (note: this template automatically signs for you so place no tildes).
if you are an administrator, revision delete the span of edits containing the copyright violations, and if you are not, mark the revisions in the page history (typically the first edit and second to last edit) for redaction by an administrator by placing and saving at the top of the page this template: {{copyvio-revdel|start = earliest revision ID (that is, the number at end of the revision's URL after "oldid=") | end= end revision ID}} Please be careful to search for the oldid and not the diff number when requesting revision deletion. You may use a script that semi-automates the requesting of revision deletion and helps speed up the process.

Where you have not marked the page for speedy deletion, and cannot clean it up yourself, or believe your suspicion of copying warrants further looking into, send the page for investigation to Wikipedia:Copyright problems, by marking it with {{copyvio|url=insert URL}}, and then follow the instructions in the copyright investigation notice to list the page at "today's" copyright violations page and to warn the user.

What not to do:

Note that moving an article with a copyright violation to Draft space is not an option. See section § Drafts below.

Conflict of Interest (COI), paid editing

Shortcut

WP:NPPCOI

Many articles are created by users with a conflict of interest in editing, resulting in a tendency to favour the topic. Such users find it very difficult to write in a neutral and balanced manner. For example, this includes people attempting to write about themselves, their business, band, family, friends, clients, employers, favourite charity, or anyone they have a financial or personal relationship with. Paid editing is a subset of COI editing and comes in three flavors. Most common are people who simply have a financial stake in a topic, such as a person writing about their own business. The second, paid advocacy, is an especially egregious type of COI, referring to people specifically paid to insert an article into Wikipedia. The third kind are users who sell a service to write Wikipedia pages about people and organizations.

A common indication of paid advertisements masquerading as articles, possibly written as works for hire by public relations experts, or sometimes by sophisticated insiders, are: Articles That Look Too Good To Be True: Well-written, perfectly formatted articles with lots of neat references submitted by users with low edit counts. Such articles are often patrolled as okay by inexperienced patrollers, but they are classic examples of the need to thoroughly research an article and its user when patrolling it. See: WP:COI, WP:Paid, and the detailed description of what to look for at Long Term Abuse. To understand the extent of this problem, see Orangemoody. Note that sometimes we do get articles by people who sit down, read up on how to create an article, and produce a near-B level article in less than 50 edits. If there doesn't seem like there could be an ulterior motive for writing the article, it is unlikely to be undeclared paid editing. Articles about living people and companies that are still in business are the most common topics for COI and paid editing.

Other hallmarks of COI editing include:

Multiple references to company, B2B, or financial listings, staff lists, interviews
Articles with inline external links
Articles whose style of text appears to come from a news article, press release, blog, or a book
Articles whose style of referencing includes many references to the subject's own publications
Article posted in one or a very few edits, denoting meticulous offline preparation.
Author has posted several single edit new articles that are related
Author has a corporate sounding username or a name that is otherwise reminiscent of the subject
Text written in first or second person (I, we, my, our, you, your)
Biographies with photos that look like professional headshots, especially when attributed to the same editor that wrote the article as "own work"
WP:REFBOMBed articles with an absurd amount of references that are trivial and redundant

What to do if you suspect a COI

An understanding of context is important in responding to COI editing. The COI guideline only "strongly discourages" editing by those with a conflict of interest. Conflict of interest editing is thus not prohibited. However, many of the behaviors exhibited by those with a COI are prohibited or are otherwise actionable. If the editor can be confirmed as a paid editor, their submission may be moved to draft space, as the COI guideline clearly states that any new articles should be submitted through Articles for Creation (make sure to use the move to draft tool or else add the AfC submission template).

1) Responding to paid editing

The WMF Terms of Use require all paid editors to disclose their "employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which they receive, or expect to receive, compensation". Disclosure requirements are casually ignored by the majority of paid editors. We can seek deletion of articles containing blatant advertising or promotion of individuals; users with corporate names can be blocked on that basis. You can tag articles for COI for added scrutiny and take other indirect actions explained below; generally the only direct action we can take to address paid editing is to enforce disclosure compliance. If you are able to confirm that the editor is a paid editor (based on their username being connected obviously with the company, or perhaps some other evidence such as their LinkedIn page) you can move the article directly to draft space. Paid editors are expected to submit their articles through Articles for Creation. Moving to draftspace and requesting that editors submit through AfC is also an appropriate response for articles that have hallmarks of COI and are overloaded with an unnecessarily large amount of references that would make it extremely time-consuming to review, as this comprises an attempt to game the system.

If you have a good faith basis to suspect a user of paid editing, add to the user's talk page the template:

{{subst:uw-paid1}} which asks the user to state whether they have a financial stake in their edits, asks them to not edit further until they respond, and instructs them on how to post the required disclosure.
{{subst:uw-paid2}} if they continue to edit without responding
{{subst:uw-paid3}} if they still don't respond
{{subst:uw-paid4}} if the final notice is ignored, and seek a block at WP:AIV or contact an admin directly.

2) General COI actions

COI editing strongly correlates with copyright violations. Therefore, follow the prior instructions to identify and address copyvios.
Articles written by editors with a COI are often blatant advertisements and may also contain no credible assertion of importance or significance. Thus:

If the page meets CSD G11, tag it for deletion using {{db-g11}} / {{db-spam}}.
If the page meets CSD A7, tag it for deletion using {{db-A7}} / {{db-corp}}, or other applicable A7 deletion tag.
Mark the page for speedy deletion under such other criteria as may apply.
Speedy deletion under multiple criteria can be requested using {{Db-multiple|G11|A7|etc.}}
Don't forget to warn the user with the warning notice template that will be provided to you in the text of the speedy deletion tag (if you are using Page Curation, it will do this for you, if you are examining an older page that has already been reviewed, Twinkle will also do it).

If the article is promotional, but not sufficiently-so to meet G11 (and no other criterion applies), add applicable promotion-related maintenance tags to the article. Do not overload the article with every template that could possibly be germane.

These might include (non-exclusively): {{COI}}, {{advert}}, {{POV}}, {{original research}} and {{autobiography}}. Many new articles will also need some type of tagging regarding the status of the sources cited (or the entire lack thereof). That is addressed later in this page.
If possible, use {{multiple issues}}, so the issues identified are presented in a single, compact notice.
It is important that you familiarize yourself with how to locate applicable templates. Explore Wikipedia:Template index, which provides a break-down of templates by type.

If the article makes a credible claim of importance or significance, so that A7 does not apply, but you believe the subject of the article may not be notable^{[note 1]} – and after first performing a minimum check for existence of sources using a normal Google, Google Books, a Google News, and a Google News archive search – you might add the tag {{notability}} to the article.
An indication of lack of notability also implies other actions you might take – tagging for lack of sources, prodding the article, taking it to AfD, etc. – all of which are covered in later sections.
If an article on a company, group, or product is clearly promotional (and only if it is clearly promotional), check whether the creator's name violates WP:CORPNAME. If it does, you might post to their talk page: {{subst:Uw-username|it appears to unambiguously represent the name of a company, group, institution or product; see WP:CORPNAME}}. If that is ignored, and there is further promotional editing, follow the instructions at Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention (WP:UAA).
You might leave a message on the user's talk page regarding their conflict of interest, including (non-exclusively): {{subst:welcome-COI}} and {{subst:uw-coi}}.

Recreations

Always check the history and the talk page. A new page might be a recreation of a previously deleted article; it might have been created by a 'different' user to evade a block or prevent detection of a particular pattern of editing. With other articles, someone may have removed a tag. The talk page may contain a notice that indicates that the article has already survived, or was previously deleted, at an AfD (possibly under another title). A script can also add a button which appears when there has been a previous deletion or AfD for an article.

If previously deleted (at the most recent AfD held), and if the recreated page is sufficiently identical to the previously deleted content, it may be subject to CSD G4 (tag to use:{{db-g4}} / {{db-repost}}). G4 only applies to articles deleted after discussion – not to prior speedy deletions or PRODs.

Deletion

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WP:NPPDEL

Reviewers must fully understand Wikipedia's deletion policy and remember it. A page can be speedy deleted only if it meets one of the strict criteria. From the policy:

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.

If a reviewer thinks a page should be deleted, but it is not a candidate for speedy deletion, AfD, PROD or WP:BLPPROD must be used instead. Spurious nominations for speedy deletion, even if the article is later deleted at AfD, are damaging to Wikipedia and may quickly result in the reviewer losing their 'reviewer' flag.

Criteria for speedy deletion (CSD)

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WP:NPPCSD

Speedy deletion candidates (CSD). Carefully read through the major speedy deletion criteria. In most cases you can only use the fixed criteria; there is no catchall—so if you are not sure what criterion to use, but are sure the article should be speedied, leave the page for another reviewer. Do not be too hasty to use CSD A1 (no context), CSD A3 (no content), or CSD A7 (no indication of importance for people, animals, organizations, web content, events); per § Care, wait at least an hour to give time to the creator to add content and/or references.

Speedy deletion is a tool which can easily be overused. Since speedy deletion removes a page without discussion, an article should not be tagged for speedy delete if there are plausible reasons that it should be kept and it is not a copyvio, attack page, a hoax, empty or sheer nonsense.

Make sure you understand what CSD A7 applies to, and in particular, that it does not apply to schools or educational establishments. An article should not be tagged for speedy delete under CSD A7 simply because an article is not notable, or does not prove notability by the references included. This is a common misunderstanding. The standard under A7 is solely whether the content contains a credible assertion of importance or significance (whether it actually is notable is a subject for an AfD discussion, not for speedy deletion). Consider using a Notability tag instead of a speedy deletion tag.

Pay attention to the policy "Contributors sometimes create articles over several edits, so try to avoid deleting a page too soon after its creation if it appears incomplete." Wikipedia articles do not have to be 100% perfect the instant they are first posted; that's why they can be edited.

If the article creator removes a CSD tag, restore it and warn them on their talk page using the warning series starting at {{subst:uw-speedy1}}.

When tagging pages for speedy deletion do not mark the page as reviewed. CSDed pages should be left 'unreviewed' so that in the case the author inappropriately removes the tag, it will be sent back to the new page feed to be checked again (previously, when CSDs were marked as 'reviewed', these articles could fall through the cracks if the original reviewer didn't check up on them). Similarly, if the CSD is declined by an admin or other user, it should also be re-reviewed; declined CSD articles may be candidates for AfD instead.

Redirect

The deletion policy and its associated guideline clearly emphasise that not all unsuitable articles must be deleted. In many cases a redirect may be more appropriate. Converting an article to a redirect without prior discussion is allowed and is not tendentious editing so long as proper BRD procedure is followed. Non notable schools, for example, can be redirected to the school district article (US), or to the locality article (rest of the world), with a very brief mention. Convincing the creator is however occasionally challenging; in the case of a redirect reversal, the solution is either draftify or AfD.

Proposed Deletion (PROD)

PROD is a way to suggest an article for uncontroversial deletion. It is designed to be a less time-consuming method than nominating at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion (AfD), and is meant for uncomplicated deletion proposals that do not meet the strict criteria for speedy deletion. PROD must only be used if no opposition to the deletion is expected. To nominate an article, place {{subst:Proposed deletion|concern=reason for proposed deletion}} at the top of the page – the Page Curation tool will do this for you and notify the creator automatically.

Note: A PROD removed by anyone—including the article creator, and even without any explanation for the removal or attempt to address the issue(s)—must not be restored. If you believe the article should still be deleted, you should nominate it for removal through a deletion discussion at AfD.

When tagging pages for proposed deletion do not mark the page as reviewed. PRODed pages should be left 'unreviewed' so that it will remain in the new page feed and be re-reviewed if somebody removes the tag.

Proposed deletion of biographies of living people (BLPPROD)

BLPPROD is used to propose articles for deletion on living persons, where the article contain no sources in any form whatsoever (as references, external links, etc., reliable or otherwise). To nominate a biography using this process, place {{subst:prod blp}} at the top of a page—the Page Curation tool will do this for you and notify the creator automatically.
Note: Unlike a PROD, if a BLPPROD is removed by the creator or another user without adding a relevant, reliable source, it must be restored. If however the creator persists in removing the tag, it might be a good idea to send the article for discussion at AfD. You may wish to add the {{subst:uw-blpprod1}} warning to the user's talk page.

When tagging pages for proposed deletion do not mark the page as reviewed. BLPPRODed pages should be left 'unreviewed' so that in the case the author removes the tag, it will be sent back to the new page feed to be checked again.

Articles for deletion (AfD)

If neither the strict speedy deletion criteria nor PROD/BLPPROD are applicable, but you think an article should still be considered for deletion, you can nominate it for removal on its merits through a deletion discussion held by the community at AfD. Outside of rare, early closings, Articles for Deletion discussions are held over a minimum seven-day period (longer if relisted), after which the discussion is closed (usually by an administrator).

Include in your nomination rationale a link to the applicable policy and/or guideline under which you are proposing deletion
If you are AfDing a dePRODed article, mention this in your rationale: DePRODed by creator without addressing the issue(s). Concern was:.......
You should mention in your nomination rationale what attempts you made to look for sources and the results of your efforts.

Most AfD nominations focus on notability (existence, or not, of reliable, secondary, independent sources for a topic), though AfDs focused on verifiability, original research and What Wikipedia Is Not issues also occur. Notability is targeted to existence of sources (out in the world), rather than what sources are currently in an article. Thus, searching first for sources before nominating an article for an AfD discussion is crucial.

You must read and follow WP:BEFORE before nominating an article at AfD. The minimum searches expected (to the extent they are appropriate for the subject) are a normal Google search, a Google Books search, a Google News search, and a Google News archive search; Google Scholar is suggested for academic subjects or using this script to have an "Search Google" link show up. As a supplement to the above searches, a narrow Wikipedia Reference Search (WP:WRS) can be performed using this script.

Unlike CSDs and PRODs, you can mark AfDed pages as 'reviewed' after tagging them, as their fate will be decided via discussion and they can't fall through the cracks if tags are removed (a bot will restore them so long as the AfD discussion is open).

Content forks

To aid reader navigation and make efficient use of editor resources, Wikipedia prohibits having multiple articles on the same or an extremely similar topic, which is known as content forking.

If you encounter a broad or popular topic that you are surprised didn't already have a page, there is a high chance that it has been forked. Authors sometimes also link to pages they have forked from the "see also" section.

When you encounter a fork, you have two options. If the new page has content the existing page does not, nominate the pages for merging; otherwise, just convert the new page into a redirect.

Drafts

Shortcut

WP:NPPDRAFT

Wikipedia's 'Draft' namespace was created to provide a 'safe harbour' from deletion for pages under construction. This does not apply to copyright violations and attack pages, which should be addressed or deleted immediately in any namespace. Drafts allow new articles to be developed before being moved to Wikipedia's mainspace. Drafts are also a way for people to create an article who are not (yet) authorized to create an article directly in the mainspace. Registered users can also create user space drafts. Moving an article to draft should not be used as a back-door route to deletion. Moving to draft is not a catch-all for not knowing what to do with an article.

To move an article to draft space yourself, you should:

First tag it for any obvious issues
Read the full instructions for installation and use on this page
Notify the author. The tool has preloaded selectable message criteria to send to the creator. This message can be added to by leaving a further rationale in the 'Other' field. Check the preview before sending.
Be accountable for your draftification decisions per the standard described at Wikipedia:Administrators#Accountability.

Moving to draft does not necessarily increase the workload at AFC. While backlog drives may obviously cause a temporary slight increase in the number of articles moved to Draft, draftification is not AfC and does not oblige an article creator to avail of the AfC process. Draftification is nevertheless a standard procedure that can be used by New Page Reviewers as and when they consider appropriate. There is no shame in having one's article draftified. Quite to the contrary in fact, it can be a far more friendly process that having an article marched immediately to AfD or PRODed, and if/when a draft is submitted to AfC, a lot of help might be forthcoming - which is not in the remit of NPP. NPP also has deadlines - AfC does not..

As part of the review of new pages, an unreviewed page may be moved to draft if:

the topic has some potential merit, and
the article does not meet the required standard, and
there is no evidence of active improvement (at least one hour since the last constructive edit), and
the article does not contain copyright violations.
or when the author clearly has a conflict of interest (per WP:COIEDIT).

Expanding on the above:

Has some merit

. for example, the topic is plausibly notable (if not, it should be speedy-deleted under A7 or nominated at AfD; do not draftify junk).

Does not meet the required standard

. The page is obviously unready for mainspace, for example:

. is not a reasonable WP:STUB (e.g. has very little verifiable information, or is interchangeable with a short dictionary entry, but the definition is not good);

. or it would have very little chance of survival at AfD;

. or it meets any speedy deletion criterion.

. The topic appears unimportant, is possibly not worth the effort of fixing, and no great loss if deleted due to expiring in draftspace.

. The topic is not a new topic likely to be of interest to multiple people (such as current affairs topics).

. The page is a recent creation by an inexperienced editor. As a rule of thumb, articles older than 90 days should not be draftified without prior consensus at AfD or another suitable venue.^{[note 2]}

No evidence of active improvement

. There is no evidence of a user actively working on it. Wait at least an hour after the last constructive edit to see if the page is likely to be expanded in the immediate future.

. There is no assertion that the page belongs in mainspace, such as a clear statement to that effect in the edit history, or on the talk page, or a revert of a previous draftification.

Does not contain copyright violations

. Articles with copyright violations must be addressed, and may not be moved to any namespace.

When the author clearly has a conflict of interest

. The article has some merit but is written with a promotional tone that makes it clear that the author has a conflict of interest with the topic (exclusively promotional articles should instead be tagged with G11).

. Whenever this is done, the draftifier must inform the author that COI editors should submit new articles through Articles for Creation (fourth bullet point of WP:COIEDIT).

Reviewing drafts

Reviewing drafts is usually the domain of the AfC team. Submitted drafts are displayed in the Articles for Creation list at the New Pages Feed. In a similar way to the process at Articles for Creation (WP:AfC), if they are suitable for publication they can be moved to the mainspace

In progress articles

If a new article (not a 'Draft') contains a {{newpage}}, {{inuse}}, or {{underconstruction}} template, a good rule is to wait about an hour after the last edit before tagging the article.

Pages in languages other than English

Shortcut

WP:NPPNE

If the article is a mere copy of (all or part of) an article in another language's Wikipedia which is often the case, it can just be tagged with {{db-foreign}} to get added to Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion: we want to discourage people who cut articles from one Wikipedia and paste to another without translating. You can leave a message on the contributing user's talk-page in their own language, using the templates from WP:PNT/Templates for user talk pages or using {{UE}}. For other non-English articles, follow the instructions at Pages needing translation into English/Procedures. If such articles have not been translated within two weeks they will be deleted.

Do not tag articles written in another language with G1 Patent nonsense – languages are not gibberish. If you are not sure what language an article is written in, Google Translate will generally auto-detect the language. If you know or can guess the language, place the {{notenglish}} template, e.g., {{notenglish|Spanish}}. This provides a link to the relevant foreign language Wikipedia and to Google Translate – which will show you a machine translation; rough and ready, but often good enough to tell you that the article is about a non-notable band, person, company, organisation, or is nonsense, and thus whether it can be speedy tagged without bothering to list it at WP:Pages needing translation. You can paste a Google translation to the article talk page, but not on the article main page.

The reason {{notenglish}} is suggested – which is not a speedy template – is that these articles are sometimes worth translating. When that expands on the article page, it gives you a message and a link to the place to paste it on the list of pages needing translation at WP:PNT, where someone who knows the language may pick it up and translate it or place PROD, BLPPROD or take other appropriate action. The Page Curation tool does this automatically and will notify the creator.

Non-English articles eligible for speedy deletion

If an article is a copyright violation it may be nominated for G12.

{{db-foreign}} or {{db-a2}} should only be used in the rare situation where an existing article from a non-English-language Wikipedia has been cut-and-pasted here. That is not allowed because it disconnects the source of the content from its editing history, which we have to maintain for attribution to the original authors. The message generated for the author points them to the correct procedure at Wikipedia:Translation. The foreign Wikipedia reference should be included in the tag, e.g. {{db-foreign|source=es:Warekena}}.

Titles and redirects in other languages

Articles should be titled based on the name most commonly used in reliable English-language sources. In some cases this may be a non-English title, even though an English translation may exist (e.g. Niños Héroes), and may contain characters not present in the English alphabet (e.g. Aşk-ı Memnu (novel)), but will never be entirely in a non-Latin alphabet.

Redirects from titles in languages other than English are allowed if there is a significant connection between the language in question and the target subject. Examples include non-English titles for creative works originally written in those languages such as Cien años de soledad, or regional names for foods such as kebapcinja. These are allowed even in alphabets other than Latin, such as Москва or 日本. However, names for common objects that have no particular association with any culture despite global use (e.g. Bahnwagen, German for Railroad car) or even use with a sufficiently broad subset of countries (e.g. Bidé, Italian for bidet), are discouraged and generally deleted at RfD.

Article titles

Mistitled articles can't be edited but must, rather, be moved to a new title using the "move page" function. This preserves the page history, which is required to be maintained under our copyright licenses. Moving an article to a more appropriate title is an important patrolling task. Your move will automatically create a redirect. If the prior name, now a redirect, was an implausible typo or misnomer, request its deletion using {{Db-r3}} / {{Db-redirtypo}} / {{Db-redirmisnomer}}. Otherwise, it is fine to remain. There are technical limitations that may restrict you from moving to a better title, such as where the title is protected from creation, or already exists and cannot be moved over a redirect. In such cases, ask for a technical move or, if potentially controversial, see Wikipedia:Requested moves for more information.

In order to understand whether an article title is or is not appropriate, and what title a page should be moved to, please familiarize yourself with Wikipedia:Article titles. This can be a complex area. Here is a summary of titling issues commonly encountered with new pages:

The common names section of the policy provides that topics are generally given their common name – the name that is most commonly used for the topic, as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable English-language sources.
The precision and disambiguation section of the policy provides that usually, titles should be precise enough to unambiguously define the topical scope of the article, but no more precise than that. We usually only include parenthetical disambiguation (a title like Mercury (planet) or Windsor, Berkshire) when there is an existing Wikipedia article (or plausible one) on a topic with an identical or confusingly similar name. See also the disambiguation policy. Unnecessary disambiguation or precision can also be a warning sign of an editor trying to avoid scrutiny (i.e. the article at the correct title was deleted at AfD).
The WP:TITLEFORMAT section of the policy provides that titles take sentence case – proper nouns are capitalized, and other words that would not be in running text, are not.
We generally do not include honorifics in titles (Sir, Dame, The Most Noble, Saint, CH, etc.), nor educational degrees, certifications or social social titles (PhD, Esq., Dr. Doctor, Professor, etc.). In names of companies, we generally do not include Inc. Corp. Ltd. etc. – except where they are needed for natural disambiguation.
Using an ALL CAPS title is a common mistake seen at new pages: We capitalize acronyms (NASA, FAQ, SQL) – except when the acronym is no longer typically treated as an acronym but was originally ("Laser", "Scuba") – and ignore all pure caps stylization [(Carquest (not: CARQUEST) (Ridgid (not: RIDGID)], unless the capitalized part of the title is pronounced by each letter (ATI Technologies, EVGA Corporation). We ignore most other matters of trademark stylization: Pink (not: P!nk) Toys "R" Us (not: Toys Я Us).
Where a title should be displayed as italicized (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles#Italics), italics will be automatically placed by any infobox you add to the page if it's dedicated to the type of topic (e.g. {{infobox album}} for articles on albums). If not placing a dedicated infobox, you can italicize the display of the entire title by placing at the top of the page {{Italic title}}. If only part of the title should be italicized, use the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} magic word, e.g. {{DISPLAYTITLE:Lorem ''ipsum'' dolor}}

Addressing cut-and-paste moves

Finding they cannot change a typo in the title, or being unaware of redirects and wanting a topic found at another title, new users sometimes create new pages with the content of existing articles – 'cut-and-paste moves'. Doing so severs the edit history, required under copyright. In such situations, request deletion using {{Db-a10|article=Existing article title}} / {{Db-same|article=Existing article title}}. Though these templates have their own warnings, separately warn the user using {{subst:Uw-c&pmove}}. In the rare situation that the user has added significant content to the copy they posted that is worth merging, list the page for a history merge (note: not the same as a merge) at WP:SPLICE.

Where an existing page or redirect has been used as the target of a cut-and-paste move the edit should be reversed, restoring the original page content.

Duplicate articles with separate origins

If you come upon an article on a duplicate topic but that has a separate origin (not copied from the existing article, addressed above), this also can be asked to be deleted under CSD A10. However, here, if the article has content that warrants merging, perform a merge (do not ask for a history merge) and redirect to the existing article. Be sure to provide mandatory copyright attribution when you do so. See WP:MERGETEXT.

Optional steps

Categorizing

Categorization: Check that the article has been assigned to one or more useful categories, and if not, either tag it with {{uncat}} or try to find a category for it. You can check similar articles for potentially relevant categories. The Hotcat gadget can help in adding or changing categories.

Stub tagging

If the article is a stub, then tag it as such. You can use the generic {{stub}} tag, but consider choosing a more specific one, like {{England-school-stub}}. More information is available at Stub types, but don't spend too much time attempting to find the right tag; there are dedicated stub sorters at WikProject Stub Sorting who can frequently figure out how to sort them quickly. User:Danski454/stubsearch is a script available to easily find stub tags.

WikiProject Sorting

Ensuring that Talk pages are tagged with relevant WikiProjects is an important way to get additional eyes on new articles and it can help get interested editors involved in expanding stubs and in copy editing and fact checking. You can add WikiProjects either manually or using a script. Evad37's Rater is one current tool, and another, no longer actively developed one, is Kephir's Rater.

Maintenance tags

If needed, add maintenance tags to the article. This can be done via the Page Curation toolbar or via Twinkle. Examples of maintenance tags include {{Copy edit}}, {{Orphan}}, {{POV}}, {{Advert}}, tags related to sourcing, {{COI}}, {{UPE}}, {{Dablinks}}, {{Bare URLs}}, {{Underlinked}}, {{No footnotes}}, {{More footnotes}}, {{Over-quotation}}, {{Criticism section}}, and many others.

Disputes and consensus

Shortcut

WP:NPPCON

As a new page patroller, any action you take other than marking an article as reviewed is not likely to be welcomed by the page creator. In the best case scenario, they will simply listen to your feedback and address the issue promptly. However, disputes are common. Whether it is about a cleanup tag, a deletion nominations, a move to draft, or something else, try to approach these disputes with humility and empathy. Avoid the temptation to "pull rank" over a user who probably knows a lot less about our processes than you do. Even if you are completely correct in your judgement of an article, it is not surprising that the creator might be offended if you tell them that there is something wrong with their contribution, or threaten to remove it. New editors might be unfamiliar with our practice of not asking permission to fix problems – or its obverse, not being offended when somebody fixes or points out a problem with your work. Experienced editors might be reluctant to acknowledge that they aren't immune to making mistakes. All reviewing disputes are more likely to be resolved amicably if you try to understand the other party's point of view before putting forth your own.

It is especially important to remember that the new page reviewer right gives you the technical ability to mark pages "reviewed"; it does not give you any special decision-making powers over new articles. Like all advanced rights holders, from page movers to bureaucrats, the way you use your tools is subject to the consensus of other editors. For example, if you move a page to draftspace, and the creator of the article objects to this, there is no consensus on where the page should be. The recommended course of action here is to return the page to the state it was in before the dispute begin (i.e. in mainspace), and then attempt to solve it through discussion, for example by opening an AfD.^[1] You should not simply insist that the page remains in your preferred namespace because you are a new page patroller and the other editor is not.

NPP professionalism

Shortcut

WP:NPPNICE

Throughout the entire process of new pages patrol, it is important to remember not to bite the newbies. Far from being a monolithic horde of vandals, trolls, and spammers, the available evidence seems to indicate that newcomers write most of Wikipedia's content. If you see a new user or IP address contributing significantly, post a welcome template to their talk page, such as {{subst:welcome}} or {{subst:welcomeg}} or, for IPs specifically, {{subst:welcome-anon}} or {{subst:Anonwelcomeg}}, and include a pointer or two of feedback about how they can make their contributions even better. Most will gladly welcome the support.

It is also important to assume good faith as much as possible, or, minimally, to assume incompetence instead of malice. For example, remember not everyone is as computer-literate as you; some people will accidentally blank or damage pages when attempting to cut and paste material from Wikipedia. Others may not understand that, yes, their changes really are visible to the entire world immediately; consider using {{subst:uw-draftfirst}} to suggest that new users work on their article as a userspace draft.

Please do not be too hasty with speedy deletions for "non-egregious" (other than attack pages, copyvios, vandalism, or complete nonsense), especially those lacking context (CSD A1) or content (CSD A3). Writers unfamiliar with Wikipedia guidelines should be accorded at least an hour to fix the article before it is nominated for speedy deletion. If you see a page that has been tagged too hastily, please notify the tagger about their hasty deletion with {{subst:uw-hasty}}. The template {{hasty|placed above existing speedy tag to inform admins to of hasty tagging and to wait}} can also be added to the tagged article to flag that it was hastily tagged.

If you tag an article written by a newcomer, consider leaving a friendly note on their talk page, pointing them to Help:Maintenance template removal (WP:MTR), which is dedicated to explaining the process of addressing and removing maintenance tags and including that anyone can remove them (except for AFD and CSD tags) after the problems have been addressed (or if they were truly added in error). Most new editors don't know that they are permitted to do this.

Unreviewing

Page Curation also includes a feature to 'unreview' a new article. Nobody is absolutely perfect and errors can happen. If you come across an article that appears to have been wrongly or inappropriately tagged, consider clicking the checkmark icon in the Page Curation toolbar ("Mark this page as unreviewed") and leave a friendly note for the patroller.

If you notice a patroller making frequent errors, tagging too quickly, or tag-bombing, offer friendly support or direct them to a specific section of this or another help page. In extreme cases you may need to inform an administrator, an NPP coordinator, or post at WP:ANI, but always try to help your colleague first.

Reviewer checklists

Shortcut

WP:NPPCHK

Using the NPP flowchart is an excellent way for new reviewers to ensure that they complete all primary New Page Patrol tasks.

Tutorial

Discussion

New page feed

Reviewers

Curation tool
Suggestions

Coordination

Backlog drives

NPP backlog

Articles: 11598 ↑140
Oldest article: 3 years old
Redirects: 34946
Oldest redirect: 5 months old
Article reviews: 1406
Redirect reviews: 2179

There is a very large articles backlog
The articles backlog is growing very rapidly (↑1124 since last week)
There is a very large redirects backlog

Reading time ~35 minutes

Welcome!

GLOSSARY

AfD: Articles for deletion

PROD: Proposed deletion

CSD: Criteria for speedy deletion

BRD: BOLD, revert, discuss cycle

BLPPROD: Proposed deletion of biographies of living people

Links

Instructions for the Curation Tool

New Page Reviewer permission

Deletion process

Notability guidelines,

Reliable sources

Guide to proper speedy deletion

Draftifying

Thank you for your interest in becoming a new page reviewer. Reviewing new pages is one of the most important maintenance tasks on Wikipedia. It's what keeps bad pages out and, equally important, it helps new, good faith users creating their first genuine articles. Reviewing new pages needs a near-admin knowledge not only of deletion processes and notability guidelines but also a good understanding of reliable sources. If you are reading this, most of the terms are already familiar to you, everything in this introduction is fully explained in the tutorial below and you must also read the instructions for using the Curation Tool, after which you can consider applying to use the tools.

Designed for processing newly submitted articles, New Page Patrolling is almost as old as Wikipedia itself—21 years in 2023. The system we currently use, Page Curation, was specially designed and rolled out in 2012. The user right, New Page Reviewer, was introduced in 2016 to ensure quality of reviewing. The system is the front line of interaction between new authors and the community's volunteers who maintain the quality of Wikipedia's articles. Page Curation has a variety of detailed, easy-to-use actions for patrolling pages in all namespaces. New page reviewers can mark pages as 'Reviewed', which releases them for indexing by search engines such as Google and Bing. Pages can be reviewed and can be tagged for additional attention and can also be tagged without passing them as reviewed with an option to inform the creator. Pages can also be listed for deletion processes or moved to draft space.

New page reviewing is mainly about deciding whether a new article will be marked as approved and accepting it into Wikipedia, or initiating one of several deletion procedures. Uncontroversial deletions can be proposed using PROD while most other deletion proposals are resolved in a discussion at Articles for deletion (AfD). In a very narrow set of cases, an expedited speedy deletion| (CSD) can be requested, or a BLPPROD can be placed to delete material which is unambiguously not an improvement to Wikipedia. When subpar articles are about subjects that are related to other existing articles on Wikipedia, according to policy merging content or simply redirecting the page to an existing article may be preferable to deletion, in which case editors should follow BRD and escalate the discussion to AfD if contested.
Moving pages to the draft namespace is sometimes used for articles that may have been created by an editor with an undeclared conflict of interest, or to preserve material that may have potential as an article but cannot be accepted in its current state. As you work through this tutorial, special attention is required to the explanation of draftifying.
If an article is accepted, new page reviewers may choose to apply maintenance tags for significant problems. Reviewers are not expected to 'fix' articles but may do so if they wish.

It is paramount to review correctly and seriously. Because of the high volume of articles created each day, even a few wrong or bitey reviews can adversely affect hundreds of articles and deter many new users from staying on and becoming regular editors. It is critical that editors review with care and diligence. New Page Patrolling values quality over speed and quantity—something to remember during backlog drives.

Use the flowchart on the right until you become comfortable and knowledgeable with all of the aspects of reviewing new articles. For quick reference, you may wish to keep it open in separate window or desktop on your computer (attempting to review new pages from a smart phone is not recommended). Reviewing is entirely voluntary and carries no obligation. Sometimes patrolling new pages can be stressful. If this happens, the best thing to do is take a break. If you're not enjoying patrolling, then it is time to take a break—don't become addicted to it and don't hesitate to suggest changes or improvements to the system. The New Page Patrol community does listen to you.

If you have a specific question or concern, post a message at the New Page Reviewer Talk, and an experienced reviewer or editor will be along soon to help you. For other help using the tools, see the related tabs above or enroll for a course at the New Page Review School.

The purpose of reviewing new pages

Watch a quick video tour

New Page Patrol is responsible for finding articles which do not follow Wikipedia's policies and guidelines and also for supporting and nurturing new editors. Fast attention is given to articles which may be eligible for speedy deletion, particularly if they might be obvious hoaxes, copyright violations, defamatory material about living persons, pages that exploit Wikipedia for money (think spam, promotion, and undisclosed paid editing). Other pages need to be deleted for other reasons but may be less urgent—unpatrolled pages are not indexed by Google or other search engines for 90 days.

Reviewers work with editors of a wide range of skills and motivations. Excellent communication is an important part of the new page patrol process. Reviewers should make use of Page Curation to post short messages to the creator, provide informative edit summaries, and otherwise appropriately engage with other editors. Reviewers are encouraged to make frequent use of the existing message to creator tool. It is essential that good faith new creators be encouraged to continue creating articles and editing Wikipedia.

Reviewers are not obligated to mentor new users or complete their articles, but may wish to direct new users to the Teahouse question forum, help desk and Articles for Creation for assistance. Wikipedia:Your first article, Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia, the Wikipedia:Tutorial, The Wikipedia Adventure, and other help pages are also available. When drafts are approved at AfC and moved to the mainspace they will be checked again by new page patrollers in many instances.

Triage

New page review is the only firewall against totally unwanted content and the place to accept articles that may not be perfect but do not need to be deleted.

If the content is marginally poor, do not be too hasty to nominate contributions by new editors for deletion, or to draftify them or redirect them. If you are uncertain, leave the page unpatrolled, and another volunteer can review it later.

It is often helpful to review the oldest pages in the NPP queue, rather than the newest, as these may have even been indexed by search engines. When reviewing from the back of the queue, you may come across pages that were created long ago but that recently were changed from being a redirect to an article (or vice versa). These articles pose a distinct challenge, as they are often the result of edit wars, other forms of tendentious editing, or paid editing and spam. You can find a guide to additional concerns and suggestions related to these types of pages here.

Care

Care should be exercised when reviewing very new pages. Tagging anything other than attack pages, copyvios, vandalism or complete nonsense for deletion shortly after creation may stop the creation of a good faith article and drive away a new contributor. Outside these exceptions, articles less than an hour old should not be nominated for deletion, blanked and redirected or moved to draftspace. It is often appropriate to tag problems and allow several hours or days for improvement. Articles must nevertheless be reviewed within 90 days otherwise they will be released for indexing by Google and other search engines whatever state they are in.

Maintenance tags

If the page is not a candidate for a deletion process but has other problems or needing to be draftified, add appropriate tags and use the message feature of the curation tool to inform the creator of the issues (see the patroller checklists section below for more information). If the article has potential but is not yet suitable for mainspace, consider draftifying it - but draftifying is not a catch-all for not knowing what to do with it. Note however that moving an article with a copyright violation to Draft space is not permitted. See section § Drafts below.

User names and vandalism

In serious cases, the creator of a new page may need to be blocked to prevent further disruption or damage to Wikipedia's reputation. Familiarise yourself with the WP:UAA and WP:AIV systems and their policies and report such cases as necessary.

Wikipedia forensics

Page reviewers are in a good position to detect policy breaches such as sockpuppetry, promotion, serial copyright violations, undisclosed paid editing, and child protection issues. Learn about these policies and what to do. For example, check the content of new articles for inline external spam links. Many of these topics are covered in more detail on this page.

Monitoring the system

Other editors, particularly those who are interested in fighting vandalism, also regularly check newly created articles to tag them for maintenance or deletion. Although they don't have access to the features of the Page Curation Toolbar, all editors, even IP users, can tag pages. Tagged pages remain listed in the feed until patrolled by a reviewer, enabling New Page Reviewers to identify and isolate poor patrolling. Use the 'Unreview' feature for good faith errors and see the templates that can be used to encourage users to do less demanding maintenance tasks until they have more experience. If you find inappropriate new page patrolling, you can use the template {{Stop NPP}} as a supportive ask. In persistent cases however, it will be necessary to escalate through the warning levels and might need administrator attention at a place like ANI or by getting help on the NPP discussion page.

Tools

The most important tool is the page curation toolbar, which appears on all pages in the new pages feed. It contains the actual button to mark a page as reviewed. It also contains an information summary about the page and its creator, tools for tagging articles with maintenance tags, and a tool to send barnstars and other nice things to editors that have worked on the article. A copyright violation detector can be added to the toolbar with this user script. There are many other useful tools available to make doing NPP easier. You can find many of them on the resources page or linked throughout this page.

Special:NewPagesFeed

Special:NewPagesFeed is the central motor for reviewing new pages and drafts. It logs new pages immediately after the first version is saved. While it is a good idea to reduce the backlog of unreviewed pages by working from the back of the list, it is nevertheless important that serious breaches of policy such as spam and attack pages be deleted very quickly. A comprehensive preferences panel lets you select what kind of new pages you want to review. The system remembers your preferences each time you open the feed. A list daily created by a bot at sorted list classifies all unreviewed articles by topic, along with a short excerpt of the article. Use this list if you prefer to work on articles in your own sphere of knowledge. A system called ORES inserts alerts of possible problems with the article. Other information will easy help you identify if the article creator is a beginner.

This useful script conveniently adds a "Page Curation" link to your top toolbar that loads the NewPagesFeed. The feed also has a "New pages feed" link in the side column of every page on Wikipedia.

Sourcing issues and notability

Notability is key to Wikipedia inclusion. Sources are the foundation upon which all of our inclusion policies converge. The notability rules are complex, especially SNGs and require special understanding. New articles rarely meet our sourcing requirements and so should be tagged specifically for that issue. There are two kinds of sources:

Sources that establish notability,
Sources that corroborate the content.

Do not overload the article with every sourcing template that could possibly be relevant. Typically, one sourcing tag should be added to address lack of sources entirely or depth of those in place, and if others, to address the manner of sourcing, such as no footnotes, the poor attribution of those cited, the use of only primary sources and related issues.

If an unsourced article would generally be appropriate for an encyclopedia and if sourced it would probably survive an AfD, consider moving it to draft and customising the default message if required. Remember however, that draftification is not a catch-all if you don't know what to do with the article
If the article does not cite any sources, consider adding {{unreferenced}}, or if they are insufficient, {{refimprove}} (for articles on living person, {{BLP unsourced}} and {{BLP sources}}), but do not pass it as reviewed.
Other common tags include {{no footnotes}}, {{more footnotes}}, {{primary sources}}, ({{BLP primary sources}}), {{one source}}, {{self-published}}, {{citation style}}, {{cleanup-bare URLs}} and others.
If you do not believe the subject is notable based on having looked outside the article for the existence of sources, then PROD or AfD may be warranted.

Copyright violations (WP:COPYVIO)

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WP:NPPCV

A COPYVIO alert is often displayed in an article's entry in the feed. This must immediately be investigated. Some alerts may be false positives, such as properly sourced quotations.
Copying material without the permission of the copyright holder from sources that are not public domain or compatibly licensed (unless it's a brief quotation used in accordance with Wikipedia's non-free content policy and guideline) is likely to be a copyright violation. Content on other Wikimedia projects is free content, and may be copied, subject to attribution statements that are part of Wikipedia's licensing terms.

Wikimedia projects

All content contributed to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-SA), and may be reused and built upon by anyone. This includes copying material from one Wikipedia article to another, or translating material from another language Wikipedia. Wikipedia's licensing requires that attribution be given to all users involved in creating and altering the content of a page. This requirement is fulfilled by adding an attribution statement to the edit summary, for all copied or translated material.

If you notice an article containing a translation from another Wikipedia and there is no attribution in an edit summary, you should add one. You may use this model:

NOTE: The previous edit of 22:31, October 32, 2020‎, contains content translated from the French Wikipedia page at [[:fr:Exact name of French page]]; see its history for attribution.

This is per Wikipedia's licensing which requires such attribution. For further details, please see Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia#Repairing insufficient attribution.

Other sources

Although we have a system in place to automatically detect copyright violations, it misses a large number of them. 100% reliance should never be placed on bots, which can also produce false-positives. Copyright infringement is a pervasive problem and it is not only important that we not host such material, but it often leads to significant additional work when not caught early. Accordingly, please check all new pages for copying from pre-existing material. Articles about organizations and music groups are especially prone to 'borrowing' content from other sources.

It is not a copyright violation to copy material that is in the public domain or has a compatible license if the material is properly attributed. (Templates are available but are not required.)

It is important to remember that any text that is a copyright violation should be removed from the article and the revisions deleted, even if the text doesn't qualify for G12 deletion.

Hallmarks of copying include:

The addition of a large portion of text in a single or few edits – especially when coupled with other criteria listed below
Single reference articles, or ones with large sections of text without inline references
Articles with text that seems too good to be true
Articles whose text resembles that of a news report, press release, blog, or a book, that rarely occurs outside of a specific, invariably copyrighted use, or that has a strange tone of voice, such as an overly informal tone
First-person pronouns and possessives (I, we, my, our), and contractions (I'm, we're, they're, can't, didn't, aren't, won't, etc.)
The inclusion of a slanted marketing voice with weasel words and other puffery; explicit or implicit claims of ownership of the text added and insider status as to the topic (inclusion of intellectual property symbols [©,™,®] is highly correlated)
Out-of-context and out-of-place words or phrases, smacking of an existing source or the navigation structure of an original website: "this site/page/book/whitepaper"; "top", "go to top", "next page", "click here", etc. and non-standard characters (e.g., Microsoft "smart quotes")
Articles whose style of referencing appears to be that of a book or other pre-existing source, not corresponding to the actual references in the article – such as reference numbers or author names in the text, including in-line footnote links such as "[1]", especially when no footnotes are given

Methods to check for copyright violations:

Use filters in the page curation feed to see if any edits on a particular page has been flagged as a copyright violation.
To see if content has been copied from pre-existing writing, copy and paste a limited but unique portion of text from the page into a search engine such as Google (between quotation marks), and try a few such snippets from each paragraph.
Compare the article's content with the references and external links and look for copy/pastes or close paraphrasing. In some cases, a search engine can find close paraphrasing if you copy a unique portion of text from the page, but without quotation marks.
Even if not given as a reference or link, see if the person or organization has a dedicated website (it is often fruitful, once located, to look for an "about", "history" or other narrative section, which will not necessarily appear in Google). If you have access to them, Facebook and LinkedIn are also widespread sources of copying.
Earwig's Copyvio Detector and the Duplication detector are useful tools to find copyright violations. However, do not treat a negative result by either as conclusive – both are hit-and-miss, being unable to read some web content and are poor at finding closely-paraphrased content. Positive results too must be checked by a human, including to see whether the source is in the public domain or bears a suitable free copyright license. This user script can be added to create a link in your tools that will run the current page through Earwig's tool.
Some copyright violations are from PDF files. To read them you will need to open them in your browser or download them.
Copyright violations can also come in the form of machine translated text from sources; these can either be manually checked by reading the translated source, or pasting the text into a text comparison website such as Copyleaks.
It is important to understand "backwards copyvios" – that Wikipedia content gets quickly picked up and duplicated by outside sources, and false-positives may be triggered by searches finding content copied from the Wikipedia article. The Wayback Machine is an invaluable tool in sorting these. If needed, look for organic development of content over multiple edits by combing though the diffs in the page history.

What to do if you find a copyright violation:

If substantially the entire page is an unambiguous copyright violation, and there's no non-infringing revision to revert to (which will usually but not always be true for new articles), tag the page for speedy deletion under CSD G12 using {{db-g12}}. Don't forget to warn the user with the warning notice template that will be provided to you in the text of the speedy deletion tag (If you are using Page Curation, it will do this for you, if you are examining an older page that has already been reviewed, Twinkle will also do it).
Note: for copyright violations where the content is copied from multiple sources, you can put more than one URL into Twinkle, but page curation only has a single field. To get around this, simply put a space and write "and" between the URLs and enter them both in the single field.
Where you have not marked the page for speedy deletion – for example, because removing the infringement found would still leave substantial content – then:

remove all of the copyrighted infringing material from the page, noting in your edit summary where it is from ("Remove copyright violation of http://www...."). Where the copying is from more than one source, it is often easiest to remove each infringement in a separate edit.
post to the article's talk page {{subst:cclean|url=URL(s) copied from}}; just place a space between the URLs if there's more than one (note: this template automatically signs for you so place no tildes).
if you are an administrator, revision delete the span of edits containing the copyright violations, and if you are not, mark the revisions in the page history (typically the first edit and second to last edit) for redaction by an administrator by placing and saving at the top of the page this template: {{copyvio-revdel|start = earliest revision ID (that is, the number at end of the revision's URL after "oldid=") | end= end revision ID}} Please be careful to search for the oldid and not the diff number when requesting revision deletion. You may use a script that semi-automates the requesting of revision deletion and helps speed up the process.

Where you have not marked the page for speedy deletion, and cannot clean it up yourself, or believe your suspicion of copying warrants further looking into, send the page for investigation to Wikipedia:Copyright problems, by marking it with {{copyvio|url=insert URL}}, and then follow the instructions in the copyright investigation notice to list the page at "today's" copyright violations page and to warn the user.

What not to do:

Note that moving an article with a copyright violation to Draft space is not an option. See section § Drafts below.

Conflict of Interest (COI), paid editing

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WP:NPPCOI

Many articles are created by users with a conflict of interest in editing, resulting in a tendency to favour the topic. Such users find it very difficult to write in a neutral and balanced manner. For example, this includes people attempting to write about themselves, their business, band, family, friends, clients, employers, favourite charity, or anyone they have a financial or personal relationship with. Paid editing is a subset of COI editing and comes in three flavors. Most common are people who simply have a financial stake in a topic, such as a person writing about their own business. The second, paid advocacy, is an especially egregious type of COI, referring to people specifically paid to insert an article into Wikipedia. The third kind are users who sell a service to write Wikipedia pages about people and organizations.

A common indication of paid advertisements masquerading as articles, possibly written as works for hire by public relations experts, or sometimes by sophisticated insiders, are: Articles That Look Too Good To Be True: Well-written, perfectly formatted articles with lots of neat references submitted by users with low edit counts. Such articles are often patrolled as okay by inexperienced patrollers, but they are classic examples of the need to thoroughly research an article and its user when patrolling it. See: WP:COI, WP:Paid, and the detailed description of what to look for at Long Term Abuse. To understand the extent of this problem, see Orangemoody. Note that sometimes we do get articles by people who sit down, read up on how to create an article, and produce a near-B level article in less than 50 edits. If there doesn't seem like there could be an ulterior motive for writing the article, it is unlikely to be undeclared paid editing. Articles about living people and companies that are still in business are the most common topics for COI and paid editing.

Other hallmarks of COI editing include:

Multiple references to company, B2B, or financial listings, staff lists, interviews
Articles with inline external links
Articles whose style of text appears to come from a news article, press release, blog, or a book
Articles whose style of referencing includes many references to the subject's own publications
Article posted in one or a very few edits, denoting meticulous offline preparation.
Author has posted several single edit new articles that are related
Author has a corporate sounding username or a name that is otherwise reminiscent of the subject
Text written in first or second person (I, we, my, our, you, your)
Biographies with photos that look like professional headshots, especially when attributed to the same editor that wrote the article as "own work"
WP:REFBOMBed articles with an absurd amount of references that are trivial and redundant

What to do if you suspect a COI

An understanding of context is important in responding to COI editing. The COI guideline only "strongly discourages" editing by those with a conflict of interest. Conflict of interest editing is thus not prohibited. However, many of the behaviors exhibited by those with a COI are prohibited or are otherwise actionable. If the editor can be confirmed as a paid editor, their submission may be moved to draft space, as the COI guideline clearly states that any new articles should be submitted through Articles for Creation (make sure to use the move to draft tool or else add the AfC submission template).

1) Responding to paid editing

The WMF Terms of Use require all paid editors to disclose their "employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which they receive, or expect to receive, compensation". Disclosure requirements are casually ignored by the majority of paid editors. We can seek deletion of articles containing blatant advertising or promotion of individuals; users with corporate names can be blocked on that basis. You can tag articles for COI for added scrutiny and take other indirect actions explained below; generally the only direct action we can take to address paid editing is to enforce disclosure compliance. If you are able to confirm that the editor is a paid editor (based on their username being connected obviously with the company, or perhaps some other evidence such as their LinkedIn page) you can move the article directly to draft space. Paid editors are expected to submit their articles through Articles for Creation. Moving to draftspace and requesting that editors submit through AfC is also an appropriate response for articles that have hallmarks of COI and are overloaded with an unnecessarily large amount of references that would make it extremely time-consuming to review, as this comprises an attempt to game the system.

If you have a good faith basis to suspect a user of paid editing, add to the user's talk page the template:

{{subst:uw-paid1}} which asks the user to state whether they have a financial stake in their edits, asks them to not edit further until they respond, and instructs them on how to post the required disclosure.
{{subst:uw-paid2}} if they continue to edit without responding
{{subst:uw-paid3}} if they still don't respond
{{subst:uw-paid4}} if the final notice is ignored, and seek a block at WP:AIV or contact an admin directly.

2) General COI actions

COI editing strongly correlates with copyright violations. Therefore, follow the prior instructions to identify and address copyvios.
Articles written by editors with a COI are often blatant advertisements and may also contain no credible assertion of importance or significance. Thus:

If the page meets CSD G11, tag it for deletion using {{db-g11}} / {{db-spam}}.
If the page meets CSD A7, tag it for deletion using {{db-A7}} / {{db-corp}}, or other applicable A7 deletion tag.
Mark the page for speedy deletion under such other criteria as may apply.
Speedy deletion under multiple criteria can be requested using {{Db-multiple|G11|A7|etc.}}
Don't forget to warn the user with the warning notice template that will be provided to you in the text of the speedy deletion tag (if you are using Page Curation, it will do this for you, if you are examining an older page that has already been reviewed, Twinkle will also do it).

If the article is promotional, but not sufficiently-so to meet G11 (and no other criterion applies), add applicable promotion-related maintenance tags to the article. Do not overload the article with every template that could possibly be germane.

These might include (non-exclusively): {{COI}}, {{advert}}, {{POV}}, {{original research}} and {{autobiography}}. Many new articles will also need some type of tagging regarding the status of the sources cited (or the entire lack thereof). That is addressed later in this page.
If possible, use {{multiple issues}}, so the issues identified are presented in a single, compact notice.
It is important that you familiarize yourself with how to locate applicable templates. Explore Wikipedia:Template index, which provides a break-down of templates by type.

If the article makes a credible claim of importance or significance, so that A7 does not apply, but you believe the subject of the article may not be notable^{[note 3]} – and after first performing a minimum check for existence of sources using a normal Google, Google Books, a Google News, and a Google News archive search – you might add the tag {{notability}} to the article.
An indication of lack of notability also implies other actions you might take – tagging for lack of sources, prodding the article, taking it to AfD, etc. – all of which are covered in later sections.
If an article on a company, group, or product is clearly promotional (and only if it is clearly promotional), check whether the creator's name violates WP:CORPNAME. If it does, you might post to their talk page: {{subst:Uw-username|it appears to unambiguously represent the name of a company, group, institution or product; see WP:CORPNAME}}. If that is ignored, and there is further promotional editing, follow the instructions at Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention (WP:UAA).
You might leave a message on the user's talk page regarding their conflict of interest, including (non-exclusively): {{subst:welcome-COI}} and {{subst:uw-coi}}.

Recreations

Always check the history and the talk page. A new page might be a recreation of a previously deleted article; it might have been created by a 'different' user to evade a block or prevent detection of a particular pattern of editing. With other articles, someone may have removed a tag. The talk page may contain a notice that indicates that the article has already survived, or was previously deleted, at an AfD (possibly under another title). A script can also add a button which appears when there has been a previous deletion or AfD for an article.

If previously deleted (at the most recent AfD held), and if the recreated page is sufficiently identical to the previously deleted content, it may be subject to CSD G4 (tag to use:{{db-g4}} / {{db-repost}}). G4 only applies to articles deleted after discussion – not to prior speedy deletions or PRODs.

Deletion

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WP:NPPDEL

Reviewers must fully understand Wikipedia's deletion policy and remember it. A page can be speedy deleted only if it meets one of the strict criteria. From the policy:

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.

If a reviewer thinks a page should be deleted, but it is not a candidate for speedy deletion, AfD, PROD or WP:BLPPROD must be used instead. Spurious nominations for speedy deletion, even if the article is later deleted at AfD, are damaging to Wikipedia and may quickly result in the reviewer losing their 'reviewer' flag.

Criteria for speedy deletion (CSD)

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WP:NPPCSD

Speedy deletion candidates (CSD). Carefully read through the major speedy deletion criteria. In most cases you can only use the fixed criteria; there is no catchall—so if you are not sure what criterion to use, but are sure the article should be speedied, leave the page for another reviewer. Do not be too hasty to use CSD A1 (no context), CSD A3 (no content), or CSD A7 (no indication of importance for people, animals, organizations, web content, events); per § Care, wait at least an hour to give time to the creator to add content and/or references.

Speedy deletion is a tool which can easily be overused. Since speedy deletion removes a page without discussion, an article should not be tagged for speedy delete if there are plausible reasons that it should be kept and it is not a copyvio, attack page, a hoax, empty or sheer nonsense.

Make sure you understand what CSD A7 applies to, and in particular, that it does not apply to schools or educational establishments. An article should not be tagged for speedy delete under CSD A7 simply because an article is not notable, or does not prove notability by the references included. This is a common misunderstanding. The standard under A7 is solely whether the content contains a credible assertion of importance or significance (whether it actually is notable is a subject for an AfD discussion, not for speedy deletion). Consider using a Notability tag instead of a speedy deletion tag.

Pay attention to the policy "Contributors sometimes create articles over several edits, so try to avoid deleting a page too soon after its creation if it appears incomplete." Wikipedia articles do not have to be 100% perfect the instant they are first posted; that's why they can be edited.

If the article creator removes a CSD tag, restore it and warn them on their talk page using the warning series starting at {{subst:uw-speedy1}}.

When tagging pages for speedy deletion do not mark the page as reviewed. CSDed pages should be left 'unreviewed' so that in the case the author inappropriately removes the tag, it will be sent back to the new page feed to be checked again (previously, when CSDs were marked as 'reviewed', these articles could fall through the cracks if the original reviewer didn't check up on them). Similarly, if the CSD is declined by an admin or other user, it should also be re-reviewed; declined CSD articles may be candidates for AfD instead.

Redirect

The deletion policy and its associated guideline clearly emphasise that not all unsuitable articles must be deleted. In many cases a redirect may be more appropriate. Converting an article to a redirect without prior discussion is allowed and is not tendentious editing so long as proper BRD procedure is followed. Non notable schools, for example, can be redirected to the school district article (US), or to the locality article (rest of the world), with a very brief mention. Convincing the creator is however occasionally challenging; in the case of a redirect reversal, the solution is either draftify or AfD.

Proposed Deletion (PROD)

PROD is a way to suggest an article for uncontroversial deletion. It is designed to be a less time-consuming method than nominating at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion (AfD), and is meant for uncomplicated deletion proposals that do not meet the strict criteria for speedy deletion. PROD must only be used if no opposition to the deletion is expected. To nominate an article, place {{subst:Proposed deletion|concern=reason for proposed deletion}} at the top of the page – the Page Curation tool will do this for you and notify the creator automatically.

Note: A PROD removed by anyone—including the article creator, and even without any explanation for the removal or attempt to address the issue(s)—must not be restored. If you believe the article should still be deleted, you should nominate it for removal through a deletion discussion at AfD.

When tagging pages for proposed deletion do not mark the page as reviewed. PRODed pages should be left 'unreviewed' so that it will remain in the new page feed and be re-reviewed if somebody removes the tag.

Proposed deletion of biographies of living people (BLPPROD)

BLPPROD is used to propose articles for deletion on living persons, where the article contain no sources in any form whatsoever (as references, external links, etc., reliable or otherwise). To nominate a biography using this process, place {{subst:prod blp}} at the top of a page—the Page Curation tool will do this for you and notify the creator automatically.
Note: Unlike a PROD, if a BLPPROD is removed by the creator or another user without adding a relevant, reliable source, it must be restored. If however the creator persists in removing the tag, it might be a good idea to send the article for discussion at AfD. You may wish to add the {{subst:uw-blpprod1}} warning to the user's talk page.

When tagging pages for proposed deletion do not mark the page as reviewed. BLPPRODed pages should be left 'unreviewed' so that in the case the author removes the tag, it will be sent back to the new page feed to be checked again.

Articles for deletion (AfD)

If neither the strict speedy deletion criteria nor PROD/BLPPROD are applicable, but you think an article should still be considered for deletion, you can nominate it for removal on its merits through a deletion discussion held by the community at AfD. Outside of rare, early closings, Articles for Deletion discussions are held over a minimum seven-day period (longer if relisted), after which the discussion is closed (usually by an administrator).

Include in your nomination rationale a link to the applicable policy and/or guideline under which you are proposing deletion
If you are AfDing a dePRODed article, mention this in your rationale: DePRODed by creator without addressing the issue(s). Concern was:.......
You should mention in your nomination rationale what attempts you made to look for sources and the results of your efforts.

Most AfD nominations focus on notability (existence, or not, of reliable, secondary, independent sources for a topic), though AfDs focused on verifiability, original research and What Wikipedia Is Not issues also occur. Notability is targeted to existence of sources (out in the world), rather than what sources are currently in an article. Thus, searching first for sources before nominating an article for an AfD discussion is crucial.

You must read and follow WP:BEFORE before nominating an article at AfD. The minimum searches expected (to the extent they are appropriate for the subject) are a normal Google search, a Google Books search, a Google News search, and a Google News archive search; Google Scholar is suggested for academic subjects or using this script to have an "Search Google" link show up. As a supplement to the above searches, a narrow Wikipedia Reference Search (WP:WRS) can be performed using this script.

Unlike CSDs and PRODs, you can mark AfDed pages as 'reviewed' after tagging them, as their fate will be decided via discussion and they can't fall through the cracks if tags are removed (a bot will restore them so long as the AfD discussion is open).

Content forks

To aid reader navigation and make efficient use of editor resources, Wikipedia prohibits having multiple articles on the same or an extremely similar topic, which is known as content forking.

If you encounter a broad or popular topic that you are surprised didn't already have a page, there is a high chance that it has been forked. Authors sometimes also link to pages they have forked from the "see also" section.

When you encounter a fork, you have two options. If the new page has content the existing page does not, nominate the pages for merging; otherwise, just convert the new page into a redirect.

Drafts

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WP:NPPDRAFT

Wikipedia's 'Draft' namespace was created to provide a 'safe harbour' from deletion for pages under construction. This does not apply to copyright violations and attack pages, which should be addressed or deleted immediately in any namespace. Drafts allow new articles to be developed before being moved to Wikipedia's mainspace. Drafts are also a way for people to create an article who are not (yet) authorized to create an article directly in the mainspace. Registered users can also create user space drafts. Moving an article to draft should not be used as a back-door route to deletion. Moving to draft is not a catch-all for not knowing what to do with an article.

To move an article to draft space yourself, you should:

First tag it for any obvious issues
Read the full instructions for installation and use on this page
Notify the author. The tool has preloaded selectable message criteria to send to the creator. This message can be added to by leaving a further rationale in the 'Other' field. Check the preview before sending.
Be accountable for your draftification decisions per the standard described at Wikipedia:Administrators#Accountability.

Moving to draft does not necessarily increase the workload at AFC. While backlog drives may obviously cause a temporary slight increase in the number of articles moved to Draft, draftification is not AfC and does not oblige an article creator to avail of the AfC process. Draftification is nevertheless a standard procedure that can be used by New Page Reviewers as and when they consider appropriate. There is no shame in having one's article draftified. Quite to the contrary in fact, it can be a far more friendly process that having an article marched immediately to AfD or PRODed, and if/when a draft is submitted to AfC, a lot of help might be forthcoming - which is not in the remit of NPP. NPP also has deadlines - AfC does not..

As part of the review of new pages, an unreviewed page may be moved to draft if:

the topic has some potential merit, and
the article does not meet the required standard, and
there is no evidence of active improvement (at least one hour since the last constructive edit), and
the article does not contain copyright violations.
or when the author clearly has a conflict of interest (per WP:COIEDIT).

Expanding on the above:

Has some merit

. for example, the topic is plausibly notable (if not, it should be speedy-deleted under A7 or nominated at AfD; do not draftify junk).

Does not meet the required standard

. The page is obviously unready for mainspace, for example:

. is not a reasonable WP:STUB (e.g. has very little verifiable information, or is interchangeable with a short dictionary entry, but the definition is not good);

. or it would have very little chance of survival at AfD;

. or it meets any speedy deletion criterion.

. The topic appears unimportant, is possibly not worth the effort of fixing, and no great loss if deleted due to expiring in draftspace.

. The topic is not a new topic likely to be of interest to multiple people (such as current affairs topics).

. The page is a recent creation by an inexperienced editor. As a rule of thumb, articles older than 90 days should not be draftified without prior consensus at AfD or another suitable venue.^{[note 2]}

No evidence of active improvement

. There is no evidence of a user actively working on it. Wait at least an hour after the last constructive edit to see if the page is likely to be expanded in the immediate future.

. There is no assertion that the page belongs in mainspace, such as a clear statement to that effect in the edit history, or on the talk page, or a revert of a previous draftification.

Does not contain copyright violations

. Articles with copyright violations must be addressed, and may not be moved to any namespace.

When the author clearly has a conflict of interest

. The article has some merit but is written with a promotional tone that makes it clear that the author has a conflict of interest with the topic (exclusively promotional articles should instead be tagged with G11).

. Whenever this is done, the draftifier must inform the author that COI editors should submit new articles through Articles for Creation (fourth bullet point of WP:COIEDIT).

Reviewing drafts

Reviewing drafts is usually the domain of the AfC team. Submitted drafts are displayed in the Articles for Creation list at the New Pages Feed. In a similar way to the process at Articles for Creation (WP:AfC), if they are suitable for publication they can be moved to the mainspace

In progress articles

If a new article (not a 'Draft') contains a {{newpage}}, {{inuse}}, or {{underconstruction}} template, a good rule is to wait about an hour after the last edit before tagging the article.

Pages in languages other than English

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WP:NPPNE

If the article is a mere copy of (all or part of) an article in another language's Wikipedia which is often the case, it can just be tagged with {{db-foreign}} to get added to Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion: we want to discourage people who cut articles from one Wikipedia and paste to another without translating. You can leave a message on the contributing user's talk-page in their own language, using the templates from WP:PNT/Templates for user talk pages or using {{UE}}. For other non-English articles, follow the instructions at Pages needing translation into English/Procedures. If such articles have not been translated within two weeks they will be deleted.

Do not tag articles written in another language with G1 Patent nonsense – languages are not gibberish. If you are not sure what language an article is written in, Google Translate will generally auto-detect the language. If you know or can guess the language, place the {{notenglish}} template, e.g., {{notenglish|Spanish}}. This provides a link to the relevant foreign language Wikipedia and to Google Translate – which will show you a machine translation; rough and ready, but often good enough to tell you that the article is about a non-notable band, person, company, organisation, or is nonsense, and thus whether it can be speedy tagged without bothering to list it at WP:Pages needing translation. You can paste a Google translation to the article talk page, but not on the article main page.

The reason {{notenglish}} is suggested – which is not a speedy template – is that these articles are sometimes worth translating. When that expands on the article page, it gives you a message and a link to the place to paste it on the list of pages needing translation at WP:PNT, where someone who knows the language may pick it up and translate it or place PROD, BLPPROD or take other appropriate action. The Page Curation tool does this automatically and will notify the creator.

Non-English articles eligible for speedy deletion

If an article is a copyright violation it may be nominated for G12.

{{db-foreign}} or {{db-a2}} should only be used in the rare situation where an existing article from a non-English-language Wikipedia has been cut-and-pasted here. That is not allowed because it disconnects the source of the content from its editing history, which we have to maintain for attribution to the original authors. The message generated for the author points them to the correct procedure at Wikipedia:Translation. The foreign Wikipedia reference should be included in the tag, e.g. {{db-foreign|source=es:Warekena}}.

Titles and redirects in other languages

Articles should be titled based on the name most commonly used in reliable English-language sources. In some cases this may be a non-English title, even though an English translation may exist (e.g. Niños Héroes), and may contain characters not present in the English alphabet (e.g. Aşk-ı Memnu (novel)), but will never be entirely in a non-Latin alphabet.

Redirects from titles in languages other than English are allowed if there is a significant connection between the language in question and the target subject. Examples include non-English titles for creative works originally written in those languages such as Cien años de soledad, or regional names for foods such as kebapcinja. These are allowed even in alphabets other than Latin, such as Москва or 日本. However, names for common objects that have no particular association with any culture despite global use (e.g. Bahnwagen, German for Railroad car) or even use with a sufficiently broad subset of countries (e.g. Bidé, Italian for bidet), are discouraged and generally deleted at RfD.

Article titles

Mistitled articles can't be edited but must, rather, be moved to a new title using the "move page" function. This preserves the page history, which is required to be maintained under our copyright licenses. Moving an article to a more appropriate title is an important patrolling task. Your move will automatically create a redirect. If the prior name, now a redirect, was an implausible typo or misnomer, request its deletion using {{Db-r3}} / {{Db-redirtypo}} / {{Db-redirmisnomer}}. Otherwise, it is fine to remain. There are technical limitations that may restrict you from moving to a better title, such as where the title is protected from creation, or already exists and cannot be moved over a redirect. In such cases, ask for a technical move or, if potentially controversial, see Wikipedia:Requested moves for more information.

In order to understand whether an article title is or is not appropriate, and what title a page should be moved to, please familiarize yourself with Wikipedia:Article titles. This can be a complex area. Here is a summary of titling issues commonly encountered with new pages:

The common names section of the policy provides that topics are generally given their common name – the name that is most commonly used for the topic, as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable English-language sources.
The precision and disambiguation section of the policy provides that usually, titles should be precise enough to unambiguously define the topical scope of the article, but no more precise than that. We usually only include parenthetical disambiguation (a title like Mercury (planet) or Windsor, Berkshire) when there is an existing Wikipedia article (or plausible one) on a topic with an identical or confusingly similar name. See also the disambiguation policy. Unnecessary disambiguation or precision can also be a warning sign of an editor trying to avoid scrutiny (i.e. the article at the correct title was deleted at AfD).
The WP:TITLEFORMAT section of the policy provides that titles take sentence case – proper nouns are capitalized, and other words that would not be in running text, are not.
We generally do not include honorifics in titles (Sir, Dame, The Most Noble, Saint, CH, etc.), nor educational degrees, certifications or social social titles (PhD, Esq., Dr. Doctor, Professor, etc.). In names of companies, we generally do not include Inc. Corp. Ltd. etc. – except where they are needed for natural disambiguation.
Using an ALL CAPS title is a common mistake seen at new pages: We capitalize acronyms (NASA, FAQ, SQL) – except when the acronym is no longer typically treated as an acronym but was originally ("Laser", "Scuba") – and ignore all pure caps stylization [(Carquest (not: CARQUEST) (Ridgid (not: RIDGID)], unless the capitalized part of the title is pronounced by each letter (ATI Technologies, EVGA Corporation). We ignore most other matters of trademark stylization: Pink (not: P!nk) Toys "R" Us (not: Toys Я Us).
Where a title should be displayed as italicized (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles#Italics), italics will be automatically placed by any infobox you add to the page if it's dedicated to the type of topic (e.g. {{infobox album}} for articles on albums). If not placing a dedicated infobox, you can italicize the display of the entire title by placing at the top of the page {{Italic title}}. If only part of the title should be italicized, use the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} magic word, e.g. {{DISPLAYTITLE:Lorem ''ipsum'' dolor}}

Addressing cut-and-paste moves

Finding they cannot change a typo in the title, or being unaware of redirects and wanting a topic found at another title, new users sometimes create new pages with the content of existing articles – 'cut-and-paste moves'. Doing so severs the edit history, required under copyright. In such situations, request deletion using {{Db-a10|article=Existing article title}} / {{Db-same|article=Existing article title}}. Though these templates have their own warnings, separately warn the user using {{subst:Uw-c&pmove}}. In the rare situation that the user has added significant content to the copy they posted that is worth merging, list the page for a history merge (note: not the same as a merge) at WP:SPLICE.

Where an existing page or redirect has been used as the target of a cut-and-paste move the edit should be reversed, restoring the original page content.

Duplicate articles with separate origins

If you come upon an article on a duplicate topic but that has a separate origin (not copied from the existing article, addressed above), this also can be asked to be deleted under CSD A10. However, here, if the article has content that warrants merging, perform a merge (do not ask for a history merge) and redirect to the existing article. Be sure to provide mandatory copyright attribution when you do so. See WP:MERGETEXT.

Optional steps

Categorizing

Categorization: Check that the article has been assigned to one or more useful categories, and if not, either tag it with {{uncat}} or try to find a category for it. You can check similar articles for potentially relevant categories. The Hotcat gadget can help in adding or changing categories.

Stub tagging

If the article is a stub, then tag it as such. You can use the generic {{stub}} tag, but consider choosing a more specific one, like {{England-school-stub}}. More information is available at Stub types, but don't spend too much time attempting to find the right tag; there are dedicated stub sorters at WikProject Stub Sorting who can frequently figure out how to sort them quickly. User:Danski454/stubsearch is a script available to easily find stub tags.

WikiProject Sorting

Ensuring that Talk pages are tagged with relevant WikiProjects is an important way to get additional eyes on new articles and it can help get interested editors involved in expanding stubs and in copy editing and fact checking. You can add WikiProjects either manually or using a script. Evad37's Rater is one current tool, and another, no longer actively developed one, is Kephir's Rater.

Maintenance tags

If needed, add maintenance tags to the article. This can be done via the Page Curation toolbar or via Twinkle. Examples of maintenance tags include {{Copy edit}}, {{Orphan}}, {{POV}}, {{Advert}}, tags related to sourcing, {{COI}}, {{UPE}}, {{Dablinks}}, {{Bare URLs}}, {{Underlinked}}, {{No footnotes}}, {{More footnotes}}, {{Over-quotation}}, {{Criticism section}}, and many others.

Disputes and consensus

Shortcut

WP:NPPCON

As a new page patroller, any action you take other than marking an article as reviewed is not likely to be welcomed by the page creator. In the best case scenario, they will simply listen to your feedback and address the issue promptly. However, disputes are common. Whether it is about a cleanup tag, a deletion nominations, a move to draft, or something else, try to approach these disputes with humility and empathy. Avoid the temptation to "pull rank" over a user who probably knows a lot less about our processes than you do. Even if you are completely correct in your judgement of an article, it is not surprising that the creator might be offended if you tell them that there is something wrong with their contribution, or threaten to remove it. New editors might be unfamiliar with our practice of not asking permission to fix problems – or its obverse, not being offended when somebody fixes or points out a problem with your work. Experienced editors might be reluctant to acknowledge that they aren't immune to making mistakes. All reviewing disputes are more likely to be resolved amicably if you try to understand the other party's point of view before putting forth your own.

It is especially important to remember that the new page reviewer right gives you the technical ability to mark pages "reviewed"; it does not give you any special decision-making powers over new articles. Like all advanced rights holders, from page movers to bureaucrats, the way you use your tools is subject to the consensus of other editors. For example, if you move a page to draftspace, and the creator of the article objects to this, there is no consensus on where the page should be. The recommended course of action here is to return the page to the state it was in before the dispute begin (i.e. in mainspace), and then attempt to solve it through discussion, for example by opening an AfD.^[2] You should not simply insist that the page remains in your preferred namespace because you are a new page patroller and the other editor is not.

NPP professionalism

Shortcut

WP:NPPNICE

Throughout the entire process of new pages patrol, it is important to remember not to bite the newbies. Far from being a monolithic horde of vandals, trolls, and spammers, the available evidence seems to indicate that newcomers write most of Wikipedia's content. If you see a new user or IP address contributing significantly, post a welcome template to their talk page, such as {{subst:welcome}} or {{subst:welcomeg}} or, for IPs specifically, {{subst:welcome-anon}} or {{subst:Anonwelcomeg}}, and include a pointer or two of feedback about how they can make their contributions even better. Most will gladly welcome the support.

It is also important to assume good faith as much as possible, or, minimally, to assume incompetence instead of malice. For example, remember not everyone is as computer-literate as you; some people will accidentally blank or damage pages when attempting to cut and paste material from Wikipedia. Others may not understand that, yes, their changes really are visible to the entire world immediately; consider using {{subst:uw-draftfirst}} to suggest that new users work on their article as a userspace draft.

Please do not be too hasty with speedy deletions for "non-egregious" (other than attack pages, copyvios, vandalism, or complete nonsense), especially those lacking context (CSD A1) or content (CSD A3). Writers unfamiliar with Wikipedia guidelines should be accorded at least an hour to fix the article before it is nominated for speedy deletion. If you see a page that has been tagged too hastily, please notify the tagger about their hasty deletion with {{subst:uw-hasty}}. The template {{hasty|placed above existing speedy tag to inform admins to of hasty tagging and to wait}} can also be added to the tagged article to flag that it was hastily tagged.

If you tag an article written by a newcomer, consider leaving a friendly note on their talk page, pointing them to Help:Maintenance template removal (WP:MTR), which is dedicated to explaining the process of addressing and removing maintenance tags and including that anyone can remove them (except for AFD and CSD tags) after the problems have been addressed (or if they were truly added in error). Most new editors don't know that they are permitted to do this.

Unreviewing

Page Curation also includes a feature to 'unreview' a new article. Nobody is absolutely perfect and errors can happen. If you come across an article that appears to have been wrongly or inappropriately tagged, consider clicking the checkmark icon in the Page Curation toolbar ("Mark this page as unreviewed") and leave a friendly note for the patroller.

If you notice a patroller making frequent errors, tagging too quickly, or tag-bombing, offer friendly support or direct them to a specific section of this or another help page. In extreme cases you may need to inform an administrator, an NPP coordinator, or post at WP:ANI, but always try to help your colleague first.

Reviewer checklists

Shortcut

WP:NPPCHK

Using the NPP flowchart is an excellent way for new reviewers to ensure that they complete all primary New Page Patrol tasks.

Template loop detected: Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Article namespace checklist

File namespace checklist

Special:NewFiles logs all files as they are uploaded. This includes uploads over existing files. PageTriage and Special:NewPagesFeed do not work in this namespace. To mark a file as patrolled, use the "Mark this file version as patrolled" link that appears at the bottom right of the licensing section of unpatrolled files.

Check each for the following problems:

Copyright tag Check that an appropriate image copyright tag has been added. If not, leave a note on the contributor's talk page and tag the image with {{subst:nld}}.
Source The image description must say how the image was obtained, for example if the uploader took it himself. Tag unsourced images with {{subst:nsd}}.

For non-free files:

Check to see if the file meets the non-free content criteria. Common situations to watch out for:
- Images used to illustrate living people, unless the person is in jail or a free image could otherwise not be created: notify the uploader and tag with {{subst:rfu|reason=As the person this image depicts is still alive, a free image could be taken}}.
- Similarly, use {{subst:rfu}} for other replaceable images. Common examples include charts, graphs, tables, and maps (where the map is used to show something and is not itself discussed)
- Make sure a fair use rationale exists for each use of the image. Remove the image from all non-mainspace pages. If the file was not uploaded extremely recently (a few hours), tag orphaned non-free files with {{subst:orfud}}.
- If the upload is over an existing image, tag the page with {{subst:orfurrev}}.
  - If the new file is merely a higher-resolution version of the existing file, the upload should be reverted unless there is good reason not to.
- Double-check that the copyright tag is appropriate for the image (i.e. {{Non-free logo}} should only be used on logos, etc.) If not, either fix the tag yourself or notify the uploader and apply {{db-f7}} for immediate deletion. Only do the latter in egregious scenarios, such as calling an entire song a sample.
- If the source cited is Getty Images, a news agency, or other commercial stock photo agency, check to see if the image itself is being discussed in the article. If not, tag with {{db-f7}}.
If you are sure that the image and rationale are proper, append |image_has_rationale=yes to the copyright tag.

For free files:

If a source is cited other than the uploader, and there is no evidence of the license claimed at the website provided, tag it with {{subst:npd}} and notify the uploader.
Run a reverse image search to see if the image is a copyright violation. If it is, notify the uploader and tag with {{db-f9|url=}}. Remember that a blatant copyright violation requires that the image you find online be of the same or greater resolution than the uploaded version. If the file exists at lower resolution on many websites, or you have other doubts about authorship (professional quality, web resolution, missing EXIF data) consider sending it to WP:FFD.
If it is clearly an image for a userpage (i.e. a selfie), tag it with {{userspace file}} so it does not get transferred to Commons.
Only mark these files as patrolled if you are sure they are free.

Copyright is a serious matter. Do not mark files as patrolled if you have any doubt as to whether it is acceptable. This is especially true for complex situations such as freedom of panorama, copyright renewals, and non-US works.

Wikipedia namespace checklist

Common reasons for speedy deletion of new Wikipedia namespace pages:

G2: Pages consisting of test post. {{db-test}}
G6: Page unambiguously created in error. {{db-g6|rationale=page unambiguously created in error since (reason)}}

Note: The descriptions above are brief summaries of these speedy deletion criteria. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the exact criteria before tagging a page for speedy deletion. See WP:CSD.

Page specific check list:

Wikipedia:

Essay pages - (i) is it instead a strictly personal viewpoint about Wikipedia or does not contain enough advice or opinions (User essay); (ii) does it supplement or clarify communal consensus through impartiality (Information page) - (see WP:WES)
"Fun" pages - judge on a case by case basis; consider userfying

Wikipedia:Ambassadors -
Wikipedia:Articles for creation - Normally pages should be created under "Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation".
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion page - Is the nomination in the Articles for deletion page complete?- If someone else besides the AfD nom posted on the page, then the nomination likely is complete. If only the nom has posted 1. Check "What links here" - the article page should be linked and a Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/ page should be listed as (transclusion); 2. Was {{subst:afd2}} used to post the nomination (Step II. see WP:AFDHOWTO)? Fix these as needed.
Wikipedia:Featured list candidates -
Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates -
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion - Check to see whether the page is transcluded
Wikipedia:Peer review - Check to see whether the page is transcluded
Wikipedia:Requests for feedback -
Wikipedia:School and university projects -
Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations - Check to see whether a sockpuppet created the page.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost - Signpost editors will usually remove any unneeded or bogus articles from this space
Wikipedia:WikiProject - Subpage proposals for WikiProjects sometimes need to be transcluded to a higher-up page. If only the noms post is on the page, check "What links here" to see if the page was transcluded.

General check list

Does the page qualify for speedy deletion? - If so, usually {{db-test}} will be the appropriate template to add to top of the page. Also, notify the page creator. Generally see WP:CSD.
Is the page in the wrong namespace (e.g. an article in Wikipedia namespace) - can simply be moved and then tag the redirect for speedy deletion using {{db-reason}} using the reason: Redirect left after a cross-namespace move - G6 Housekeeping. Notify the author of the original page of the cross-namespace move.
Does the page belong on Wikipedia? If you think the page qualifies for deletion, follow How to list pages for deletion at MfD. If an experienced editor posted the page, consider asking about the Wikipedia namespace page before listing it at MfD.
Is the page categorized? If the page is not assigned to any categories, add some appropriate categories to the bottom of the page. It is usually fairly easy to find at least one appropriate category.

Template namespace checklist

Common reasons for speedy deletion of new templates

G2 - test pages. {{db-g2}}
G6 - for pages created in the wrong namespace. If useful, consider moving the page to the correct namespace without leaving a redirect. {{db-g6|rationale=created in the wrong namespace}} or {{db-wrongnamespace}}. Notifying creator with {{db-wrongnamespace-notice}} can be helpful (Twinkle does not notify for G6 deletions, so this must be done manually).^[a]
G11 - adverts. You'd be surprised at how common these are, in template-space for some reason. Usually eligible for G6, but this is faster.

Common easy template types

Did you know nominations: if the nomination is properly formatted and transcluded, simply mark as patrolled, otherwise, if more than a few minutes old, consider contacting the author.
Taxoboxes: if not obviously broken, just mark as patrolled, these are usually fine.
Documentation subpages, sandboxes, and test cases: generally mark as patrolled unless there are glaring problems - even while evaluating the parent template's suitability (if they were created at the same time). If orphaned, consider talking to the author or nominating for WP:G8 (subpages with no parent page).
Attached KML: it's kinda silly that this is in template-space, but just mark it as patrolled.

Otherwise

If the template has already existed for a few days, check if it has any transclusions (or if it is subst-only). If it has no transclusions, but is not subst-only, consider nominating it for deletion at templates for discussion.

Common cleanup/maintenance tasks for new templates

WikiProjects - tag as normal^[b]
- CLASS = template
- IMPORTANCE = N/A, not low
Add documentation, if it doesn't exist.
- Use <noinclude>{{doc}}</noinclude> at the bottom of the template, then create a documentation subpage. If the documentation is just noincluded on the template, move it to the subpage.
- Add template categories on this subpage.
Add categories
- Category names for templates usually end with "navigational boxes" or "templates".
- Do not put templates in article categories.{{efn}|Wikipedia:Categorization#Template categorization}}
- Don't use HotCat on templates.
- Put template categories the documentation subpages in the appropriate location (usually, between <includeonly> tags).

Notes

^ It's recommended to provide more details, if the deletion reason is not apparent.
^ Do not tag with the banner for WikiProject Templates.

Disambiguation page checklist
Template loop detected: Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Disambiguation checklist

Redirect checklist

Does the redirect qualify for any CSDs? Consider using WP:TWINKLE to assist.

R2 - Inappropriate cross-namespace redirects
R3 - Recently created implausible typos
R4 - File namespace redirects with names that match Wikimedia Commons pages
G1 - Patent nonsense
G3 - Pure vandalism and blatant hoaxes
G4 - Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion
G5 - Creations by blocked or banned users
G6 - Technical deletions
G8 - Pages dependent on a non-existent or deleted page
G10 - Pages that disaparage, threaten, intimidate, or harass their subject or some other entity, and serve no other purpose
G11 - Unambiguous advertising or promotion

Does the redirect violate WP:R#DELETE? If so, may need to nominate it via the WP:RFD process. Consider using WP:TWINKLE to assist. For redirects concerning subjects you are unfamiliar with, at a minimum conduct an internal Wikipedia search and an internet search for the term to look for possible explanations or sources of confusion.

The redirect page makes it unreasonably difficult for users to locate similarly named articles via the search engine.
The redirect might cause confusion.
The redirect is offensive or abusive (Speedy deletion criterion G10 and G3 may apply.)
The redirect constitutes self-promotion or spam. (Speedy deletion criterion G11 may apply.)
The redirect makes no sense. (Speedy deletion criterion G1 may apply.)
It is a cross-namespace redirect out of article space, such as one pointing into the User or Wikipedia namespace.
If the redirect is a novel or very obscure synonym for an article name
If the target article needs to be moved to the redirect title, but the redirect has been edited before and has a history of its own, then the title needs to be freed up to make way for the move. (Speedy deletion criterion G6 may apply.)
If the redirect could plausibly be expanded into an article, and the target article contains virtually no information on the subject.

Does the redirect need a redirect template? Consider using WP:TWINKLE or WP:CAPRICORN to assist. Here are some of the most used

{{R from move/except‏‎}}
{{R from move‏‎}}
{{R from modification‏‎}}
{{R to diacritic‏‎}}
{{R from title without diacritics‏‎}}
{{R from other capitalisation‏‎}}
{{R to section‏‎}}
{{R to disambiguation page‏‎}}
{{R from alternative name‏‎}}
{{R from sort name‏‎}}
{{R from alternative scientific name‏‎}}
{{R from alternative spelling‏‎}}
{{R to scientific name}}
etc.

If you find an unpatrolled redirect that is at RFD, or you send a redirect to RFD, mark it as reviewed.

Is somebody creating a lot of redirects, and you are finding zero problems with them? Consider posting an application for them at the redirect autopatrol list. They need around 100 redirects to qualify. Use xtools (and select "only include redirects") to check number of redirects created.

If a redirect or blanked page is converted to an article, it will be marked as unreviewed and placed in the new pages feed. This is to avoid people hijacking reviewed redirects to create unreviewed articles.

I'd say that on a typical day of patrolling the back end of the queue, I'll go through 150-300 [redirects], send 5-10 to RfD, tag around 5 with G5 or R3, and either retarget or convert-to-dab 5 more. Attack redirects are less frequent, I'll come across a handful of attack redirects per week. --Rosguill

Other issues

Article clean-up

The curation toolbar will highlight some common issues:

Orphaned articles, or articles that have no internal links to other Wikipedia articles. Sometimes orphans result from a mistitled article (see above). It may be helpful to search for mentions in other articles.
Articles without sources: The best time to ask for sources is when an article creator is still online and logged in. Tag the article with an appropriate tag in Page Curation and leave a message for the creator.

It is common for New Page Patrollers to also help with basic article cleanup. Common examples include:

Stubs are the beginnings of meaningful and encyclopedic articles but which need a little help: Place an appropriate stub notice at the end of a stub.
Bold face the article title in the lead.
Link relevant terms.
Overlinking – remove unnecessary internal links.
Phrase the article in complete sentences, including the first sentence.
Condense orphaned sentences into existing paragraphs.

Moving new content to other projects

Dictionary definitions. These can be transwikied to Wiktionary or converted into disambiguation pages. Many may be redeemable as Wikipedia articles, if sufficiently refactored, rewritten, and expanded.
Primary source texts. These should be transwikied to Wikisource.
How-tos or instructional materials. In some cases, these can be transwikied to Wikibooks; however, it's often possible to turn these into meaningful articles by rewording the text to make it more descriptive and less prescriptive. Try to improve an article by adding some more material before resorting to moving it out of Wikipedia.

Redirects converted to articles

Shortcut

WP:NPPREDIRECT

If a redirect or blanked page is converted to an article, it will be marked as unreviewed and placed in the new pages feed. This is to avoid people creating redirects for inappropriate pages and later converting them into articles to avoid review. If you see an old page (such as one from 2005 or 2016), it is likely that it was recently converted from a redirect. In these cases, you should check the page history, and if the page is not appropriate as an article, restore the redirect and notify the person who created the article. If you are reverted and you still believe the article is inappropriate, you should list it at Articles for Deletion. Redirects that are currently listed at Redirects for Discussion should simply be marked as reviewed.

Technical details

Namespaces subject to review – Mainspace and userspace are the two namespaces where the page curation toolbar displays. NPPs do not need to patrol userspace and are encouraged to focus on mainspace.
Users subject to review – Most editors will have their mainspace page creations show up in the new pages feed as unreviewed until marked as reviewed by an NPP. Editors with the autopatrolled permission and global rollbacker permission are an exception: their pages do not show up in the new pages feed, and their pages are marked as reviewed when created. Admins are no longer autopatrolled by default, but can self-assign the permission if desired.^[3]
Who can review which articles – New page patrollers are prevented by the software from reviewing or unreviewing their own articles, unless they are autopatrolled.
Autopatrol and page moves – For users with the autopatrolled permission, a page move will autopatrol an article if it is a move from outside of mainspace into mainspace. So an autopatrolled user should be careful, for example, when accepting AFC drafts, as these will be autopatrolled. However, the software lets them unpatrol it if needed.
Search engine indexing
- Articles – Unreviewed articles are prevented from being indexed by search engines for 90 days.^[4]^[5] After 90 days, the article remains in the queue to remind us to eventually review it, but search engines can begin indexing it.
- Articles sent to AFD – Sending an article to AFD and marking it as reviewed will not allow search engine indexing (unless the article is older than 90 days), because there is a NOINDEX template used in the AFD notification template.
- Redirects – Redirects are automatically marked as reviewed after 6 months.^[6]^[7] As soon as they are marked as reviewed, they become indexable.
Patrol versus review – There is a difference between an article being marked as patrolled (which uses the patrol log) and marked as reviewed (which uses the page curation log). Clicking [Mark this page as patrolled], which appears in the bottom right corner of some pages, makes an entry in the patrol log only. Clicking the green check mark in your toolbar always creates an entry in the page curation log, and often creates an entry in the patrol log, but not always. Most people use the "mark as reviewed" button, so most people should be checking the page curation log exclusively. You can apply the "Reviewing" log filter if needed, which will filter out non-reviewing from the page curation log. The patrol log should usually be ignored. [Mark this page as patrolled] appears when the Page Curation tool bar is closed (see next bullet), and in namespaces where PageTriage doesn't operate (for example, draftspace and template space).
Closing and re-opening the toolbar – If you close the Page Curation toolbar completely, by first minimizing the toolbar using the top toolbar button, then clicking the top X icon on the mini-toolbar, it will disappear completely. In this situation, to get the toolbar back, you need to click "Open Page Curation" in the left menu, in the "Tools" section.

Notes

^ Do not confuse notability of a topic, with the very low bar necessary to assert importance or significance in the text. Notability assesses the merits of the subject to warrant an article based on evidence out in the world of substantive publication about the topic in reliable, secondary, independent sources, whereas, A7 looks exclusively to the current content.
^ ^a ^b Cite error: The named reference draftifyoldrfc was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ Do not confuse notability of a topic, with the very low bar necessary to assert importance or significance in the text. Notability assesses the merits of the subject to warrant an article based on evidence out in the world of substantive publication about the topic in reliable, secondary, independent sources, whereas, A7 looks exclusively to the current content.

File namespace checklist

Special:NewFiles logs all files as they are uploaded. This includes uploads over existing files. PageTriage and Special:NewPagesFeed do not work in this namespace. To mark a file as patrolled, use the "Mark this file version as patrolled" link that appears at the bottom right of the licensing section of unpatrolled files.

Check each for the following problems:

Copyright tag Check that an appropriate image copyright tag has been added. If not, leave a note on the contributor's talk page and tag the image with {{subst:nld}}.
Source The image description must say how the image was obtained, for example if the uploader took it himself. Tag unsourced images with {{subst:nsd}}.

For non-free files:

Check to see if the file meets the non-free content criteria. Common situations to watch out for:
- Images used to illustrate living people, unless the person is in jail or a free image could otherwise not be created: notify the uploader and tag with {{subst:rfu|reason=As the person this image depicts is still alive, a free image could be taken}}.
- Similarly, use {{subst:rfu}} for other replaceable images. Common examples include charts, graphs, tables, and maps (where the map is used to show something and is not itself discussed)
- Make sure a fair use rationale exists for each use of the image. Remove the image from all non-mainspace pages. If the file was not uploaded extremely recently (a few hours), tag orphaned non-free files with {{subst:orfud}}.
- If the upload is over an existing image, tag the page with {{subst:orfurrev}}.
  - If the new file is merely a higher-resolution version of the existing file, the upload should be reverted unless there is good reason not to.
- Double-check that the copyright tag is appropriate for the image (i.e. {{Non-free logo}} should only be used on logos, etc.) If not, either fix the tag yourself or notify the uploader and apply {{db-f7}} for immediate deletion. Only do the latter in egregious scenarios, such as calling an entire song a sample.
- If the source cited is Getty Images, a news agency, or other commercial stock photo agency, check to see if the image itself is being discussed in the article. If not, tag with {{db-f7}}.
If you are sure that the image and rationale are proper, append |image_has_rationale=yes to the copyright tag.

For free files:

If a source is cited other than the uploader, and there is no evidence of the license claimed at the website provided, tag it with {{subst:npd}} and notify the uploader.
Run a reverse image search to see if the image is a copyright violation. If it is, notify the uploader and tag with {{db-f9|url=}}. Remember that a blatant copyright violation requires that the image you find online be of the same or greater resolution than the uploaded version. If the file exists at lower resolution on many websites, or you have other doubts about authorship (professional quality, web resolution, missing EXIF data) consider sending it to WP:FFD.
If it is clearly an image for a userpage (i.e. a selfie), tag it with {{userspace file}} so it does not get transferred to Commons.
Only mark these files as patrolled if you are sure they are free.

Copyright is a serious matter. Do not mark files as patrolled if you have any doubt as to whether it is acceptable. This is especially true for complex situations such as freedom of panorama, copyright renewals, and non-US works.

Wikipedia namespace checklist

Common reasons for speedy deletion of new Wikipedia namespace pages:

G2: Pages consisting of test post. {{db-test}}
G6: Page unambiguously created in error. {{db-g6|rationale=page unambiguously created in error since (reason)}}

Note: The descriptions above are brief summaries of these speedy deletion criteria. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the exact criteria before tagging a page for speedy deletion. See WP:CSD.

Page specific check list:

Wikipedia:

Essay pages - (i) is it instead a strictly personal viewpoint about Wikipedia or does not contain enough advice or opinions (User essay); (ii) does it supplement or clarify communal consensus through impartiality (Information page) - (see WP:WES)
"Fun" pages - judge on a case by case basis; consider userfying

Wikipedia:Ambassadors -
Wikipedia:Articles for creation - Normally pages should be created under "Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation".
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion page - Is the nomination in the Articles for deletion page complete?- If someone else besides the AfD nom posted on the page, then the nomination likely is complete. If only the nom has posted 1. Check "What links here" - the article page should be linked and a Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/ page should be listed as (transclusion); 2. Was {{subst:afd2}} used to post the nomination (Step II. see WP:AFDHOWTO)? Fix these as needed.
Wikipedia:Featured list candidates -
Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates -
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion - Check to see whether the page is transcluded
Wikipedia:Peer review - Check to see whether the page is transcluded
Wikipedia:Requests for feedback -
Wikipedia:School and university projects -
Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations - Check to see whether a sockpuppet created the page.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost - Signpost editors will usually remove any unneeded or bogus articles from this space
Wikipedia:WikiProject - Subpage proposals for WikiProjects sometimes need to be transcluded to a higher-up page. If only the noms post is on the page, check "What links here" to see if the page was transcluded.

General check list

Does the page qualify for speedy deletion? - If so, usually {{db-test}} will be the appropriate template to add to top of the page. Also, notify the page creator. Generally see WP:CSD.
Is the page in the wrong namespace (e.g. an article in Wikipedia namespace) - can simply be moved and then tag the redirect for speedy deletion using {{db-reason}} using the reason: Redirect left after a cross-namespace move - G6 Housekeeping. Notify the author of the original page of the cross-namespace move.
Does the page belong on Wikipedia? If you think the page qualifies for deletion, follow How to list pages for deletion at MfD. If an experienced editor posted the page, consider asking about the Wikipedia namespace page before listing it at MfD.
Is the page categorized? If the page is not assigned to any categories, add some appropriate categories to the bottom of the page. It is usually fairly easy to find at least one appropriate category.

Template namespace checklist

Common reasons for speedy deletion of new templates

G2 - test pages. {{db-g2}}
G6 - for pages created in the wrong namespace. If useful, consider moving the page to the correct namespace without leaving a redirect. {{db-g6|rationale=created in the wrong namespace}} or {{db-wrongnamespace}}. Notifying creator with {{db-wrongnamespace-notice}} can be helpful (Twinkle does not notify for G6 deletions, so this must be done manually).^[a]
G11 - adverts. You'd be surprised at how common these are, in template-space for some reason. Usually eligible for G6, but this is faster.

Common easy template types

Did you know nominations: if the nomination is properly formatted and transcluded, simply mark as patrolled, otherwise, if more than a few minutes old, consider contacting the author.
Taxoboxes: if not obviously broken, just mark as patrolled, these are usually fine.
Documentation subpages, sandboxes, and test cases: generally mark as patrolled unless there are glaring problems - even while evaluating the parent template's suitability (if they were created at the same time). If orphaned, consider talking to the author or nominating for WP:G8 (subpages with no parent page).
Attached KML: it's kinda silly that this is in template-space, but just mark it as patrolled.

Otherwise

If the template has already existed for a few days, check if it has any transclusions (or if it is subst-only). If it has no transclusions, but is not subst-only, consider nominating it for deletion at templates for discussion.

Common cleanup/maintenance tasks for new templates

WikiProjects - tag as normal^[b]
- CLASS = template
- IMPORTANCE = N/A, not low
Add documentation, if it doesn't exist.
- Use <noinclude>{{doc}}</noinclude> at the bottom of the template, then create a documentation subpage. If the documentation is just noincluded on the template, move it to the subpage.
- Add template categories on this subpage.
Add categories
- Category names for templates usually end with "navigational boxes" or "templates".
- Do not put templates in article categories.{{efn}|Wikipedia:Categorization#Template categorization}}
- Don't use HotCat on templates.
- Put template categories the documentation subpages in the appropriate location (usually, between <includeonly> tags).

Notes

^ It's recommended to provide more details, if the deletion reason is not apparent.
^ Do not tag with the banner for WikiProject Templates.

Disambiguation page checklist

Tutorial

Discussion

New page feed

Reviewers

Curation tool
Suggestions

Coordination

Backlog drives

NPP backlog

Articles: 11598 ↑140
Oldest article: 3 years old
Redirects: 34946
Oldest redirect: 5 months old
Article reviews: 1406
Redirect reviews: 2179

There is a very large articles backlog
The articles backlog is growing very rapidly (↑1124 since last week)
There is a very large redirects backlog

Reading time ~35 minutes

Welcome!

GLOSSARY

AfD: Articles for deletion

PROD: Proposed deletion

CSD: Criteria for speedy deletion

BRD: BOLD, revert, discuss cycle

BLPPROD: Proposed deletion of biographies of living people

Links

Instructions for the Curation Tool

New Page Reviewer permission

Deletion process

Notability guidelines,

Reliable sources

Guide to proper speedy deletion

Draftifying

Thank you for your interest in becoming a new page reviewer. Reviewing new pages is one of the most important maintenance tasks on Wikipedia. It's what keeps bad pages out and, equally important, it helps new, good faith users creating their first genuine articles. Reviewing new pages needs a near-admin knowledge not only of deletion processes and notability guidelines but also a good understanding of reliable sources. If you are reading this, most of the terms are already familiar to you, everything in this introduction is fully explained in the tutorial below and you must also read the instructions for using the Curation Tool, after which you can consider applying to use the tools.

Designed for processing newly submitted articles, New Page Patrolling is almost as old as Wikipedia itself—21 years in 2023. The system we currently use, Page Curation, was specially designed and rolled out in 2012. The user right, New Page Reviewer, was introduced in 2016 to ensure quality of reviewing. The system is the front line of interaction between new authors and the community's volunteers who maintain the quality of Wikipedia's articles. Page Curation has a variety of detailed, easy-to-use actions for patrolling pages in all namespaces. New page reviewers can mark pages as 'Reviewed', which releases them for indexing by search engines such as Google and Bing. Pages can be reviewed and can be tagged for additional attention and can also be tagged without passing them as reviewed with an option to inform the creator. Pages can also be listed for deletion processes or moved to draft space.

New page reviewing is mainly about deciding whether a new article will be marked as approved and accepting it into Wikipedia, or initiating one of several deletion procedures. Uncontroversial deletions can be proposed using PROD while most other deletion proposals are resolved in a discussion at Articles for deletion (AfD). In a very narrow set of cases, an expedited speedy deletion| (CSD) can be requested, or a BLPPROD can be placed to delete material which is unambiguously not an improvement to Wikipedia. When subpar articles are about subjects that are related to other existing articles on Wikipedia, according to policy merging content or simply redirecting the page to an existing article may be preferable to deletion, in which case editors should follow BRD and escalate the discussion to AfD if contested.
Moving pages to the draft namespace is sometimes used for articles that may have been created by an editor with an undeclared conflict of interest, or to preserve material that may have potential as an article but cannot be accepted in its current state. As you work through this tutorial, special attention is required to the explanation of draftifying.
If an article is accepted, new page reviewers may choose to apply maintenance tags for significant problems. Reviewers are not expected to 'fix' articles but may do so if they wish.

It is paramount to review correctly and seriously. Because of the high volume of articles created each day, even a few wrong or bitey reviews can adversely affect hundreds of articles and deter many new users from staying on and becoming regular editors. It is critical that editors review with care and diligence. New Page Patrolling values quality over speed and quantity—something to remember during backlog drives.

Use the flowchart on the right until you become comfortable and knowledgeable with all of the aspects of reviewing new articles. For quick reference, you may wish to keep it open in separate window or desktop on your computer (attempting to review new pages from a smart phone is not recommended). Reviewing is entirely voluntary and carries no obligation. Sometimes patrolling new pages can be stressful. If this happens, the best thing to do is take a break. If you're not enjoying patrolling, then it is time to take a break—don't become addicted to it and don't hesitate to suggest changes or improvements to the system. The New Page Patrol community does listen to you.

If you have a specific question or concern, post a message at the New Page Reviewer Talk, and an experienced reviewer or editor will be along soon to help you. For other help using the tools, see the related tabs above or enroll for a course at the New Page Review School.

The purpose of reviewing new pages

Watch a quick video tour

New Page Patrol is responsible for finding articles which do not follow Wikipedia's policies and guidelines and also for supporting and nurturing new editors. Fast attention is given to articles which may be eligible for speedy deletion, particularly if they might be obvious hoaxes, copyright violations, defamatory material about living persons, pages that exploit Wikipedia for money (think spam, promotion, and undisclosed paid editing). Other pages need to be deleted for other reasons but may be less urgent—unpatrolled pages are not indexed by Google or other search engines for 90 days.

Reviewers work with editors of a wide range of skills and motivations. Excellent communication is an important part of the new page patrol process. Reviewers should make use of Page Curation to post short messages to the creator, provide informative edit summaries, and otherwise appropriately engage with other editors. Reviewers are encouraged to make frequent use of the existing message to creator tool. It is essential that good faith new creators be encouraged to continue creating articles and editing Wikipedia.

Reviewers are not obligated to mentor new users or complete their articles, but may wish to direct new users to the Teahouse question forum, help desk and Articles for Creation for assistance. Wikipedia:Your first article, Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia, the Wikipedia:Tutorial, The Wikipedia Adventure, and other help pages are also available. When drafts are approved at AfC and moved to the mainspace they will be checked again by new page patrollers in many instances.

Triage

New page review is the only firewall against totally unwanted content and the place to accept articles that may not be perfect but do not need to be deleted.

If the content is marginally poor, do not be too hasty to nominate contributions by new editors for deletion, or to draftify them or redirect them. If you are uncertain, leave the page unpatrolled, and another volunteer can review it later.

It is often helpful to review the oldest pages in the NPP queue, rather than the newest, as these may have even been indexed by search engines. When reviewing from the back of the queue, you may come across pages that were created long ago but that recently were changed from being a redirect to an article (or vice versa). These articles pose a distinct challenge, as they are often the result of edit wars, other forms of tendentious editing, or paid editing and spam. You can find a guide to additional concerns and suggestions related to these types of pages here.

Care

Care should be exercised when reviewing very new pages. Tagging anything other than attack pages, copyvios, vandalism or complete nonsense for deletion shortly after creation may stop the creation of a good faith article and drive away a new contributor. Outside these exceptions, articles less than an hour old should not be nominated for deletion, blanked and redirected or moved to draftspace. It is often appropriate to tag problems and allow several hours or days for improvement. Articles must nevertheless be reviewed within 90 days otherwise they will be released for indexing by Google and other search engines whatever state they are in.

Maintenance tags

If the page is not a candidate for a deletion process but has other problems or needing to be draftified, add appropriate tags and use the message feature of the curation tool to inform the creator of the issues (see the patroller checklists section below for more information). If the article has potential but is not yet suitable for mainspace, consider draftifying it - but draftifying is not a catch-all for not knowing what to do with it. Note however that moving an article with a copyright violation to Draft space is not permitted. See section § Drafts below.

User names and vandalism

In serious cases, the creator of a new page may need to be blocked to prevent further disruption or damage to Wikipedia's reputation. Familiarise yourself with the WP:UAA and WP:AIV systems and their policies and report such cases as necessary.

Wikipedia forensics

Page reviewers are in a good position to detect policy breaches such as sockpuppetry, promotion, serial copyright violations, undisclosed paid editing, and child protection issues. Learn about these policies and what to do. For example, check the content of new articles for inline external spam links. Many of these topics are covered in more detail on this page.

Monitoring the system

Other editors, particularly those who are interested in fighting vandalism, also regularly check newly created articles to tag them for maintenance or deletion. Although they don't have access to the features of the Page Curation Toolbar, all editors, even IP users, can tag pages. Tagged pages remain listed in the feed until patrolled by a reviewer, enabling New Page Reviewers to identify and isolate poor patrolling. Use the 'Unreview' feature for good faith errors and see the templates that can be used to encourage users to do less demanding maintenance tasks until they have more experience. If you find inappropriate new page patrolling, you can use the template {{Stop NPP}} as a supportive ask. In persistent cases however, it will be necessary to escalate through the warning levels and might need administrator attention at a place like ANI or by getting help on the NPP discussion page.

Tools

The most important tool is the page curation toolbar, which appears on all pages in the new pages feed. It contains the actual button to mark a page as reviewed. It also contains an information summary about the page and its creator, tools for tagging articles with maintenance tags, and a tool to send barnstars and other nice things to editors that have worked on the article. A copyright violation detector can be added to the toolbar with this user script. There are many other useful tools available to make doing NPP easier. You can find many of them on the resources page or linked throughout this page.

Special:NewPagesFeed

Special:NewPagesFeed is the central motor for reviewing new pages and drafts. It logs new pages immediately after the first version is saved. While it is a good idea to reduce the backlog of unreviewed pages by working from the back of the list, it is nevertheless important that serious breaches of policy such as spam and attack pages be deleted very quickly. A comprehensive preferences panel lets you select what kind of new pages you want to review. The system remembers your preferences each time you open the feed. A list daily created by a bot at sorted list classifies all unreviewed articles by topic, along with a short excerpt of the article. Use this list if you prefer to work on articles in your own sphere of knowledge. A system called ORES inserts alerts of possible problems with the article. Other information will easy help you identify if the article creator is a beginner.

This useful script conveniently adds a "Page Curation" link to your top toolbar that loads the NewPagesFeed. The feed also has a "New pages feed" link in the side column of every page on Wikipedia.

Sourcing issues and notability

Notability is key to Wikipedia inclusion. Sources are the foundation upon which all of our inclusion policies converge. The notability rules are complex, especially SNGs and require special understanding. New articles rarely meet our sourcing requirements and so should be tagged specifically for that issue. There are two kinds of sources:

Sources that establish notability,
Sources that corroborate the content.

Do not overload the article with every sourcing template that could possibly be relevant. Typically, one sourcing tag should be added to address lack of sources entirely or depth of those in place, and if others, to address the manner of sourcing, such as no footnotes, the poor attribution of those cited, the use of only primary sources and related issues.

If an unsourced article would generally be appropriate for an encyclopedia and if sourced it would probably survive an AfD, consider moving it to draft and customising the default message if required. Remember however, that draftification is not a catch-all if you don't know what to do with the article
If the article does not cite any sources, consider adding {{unreferenced}}, or if they are insufficient, {{refimprove}} (for articles on living person, {{BLP unsourced}} and {{BLP sources}}), but do not pass it as reviewed.
Other common tags include {{no footnotes}}, {{more footnotes}}, {{primary sources}}, ({{BLP primary sources}}), {{one source}}, {{self-published}}, {{citation style}}, {{cleanup-bare URLs}} and others.
If you do not believe the subject is notable based on having looked outside the article for the existence of sources, then PROD or AfD may be warranted.

Copyright violations (WP:COPYVIO)

Shortcut

WP:NPPCV

A COPYVIO alert is often displayed in an article's entry in the feed. This must immediately be investigated. Some alerts may be false positives, such as properly sourced quotations.
Copying material without the permission of the copyright holder from sources that are not public domain or compatibly licensed (unless it's a brief quotation used in accordance with Wikipedia's non-free content policy and guideline) is likely to be a copyright violation. Content on other Wikimedia projects is free content, and may be copied, subject to attribution statements that are part of Wikipedia's licensing terms.

Wikimedia projects

All content contributed to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-SA), and may be reused and built upon by anyone. This includes copying material from one Wikipedia article to another, or translating material from another language Wikipedia. Wikipedia's licensing requires that attribution be given to all users involved in creating and altering the content of a page. This requirement is fulfilled by adding an attribution statement to the edit summary, for all copied or translated material.

If you notice an article containing a translation from another Wikipedia and there is no attribution in an edit summary, you should add one. You may use this model:

NOTE: The previous edit of 22:31, October 32, 2020‎, contains content translated from the French Wikipedia page at [[:fr:Exact name of French page]]; see its history for attribution.

This is per Wikipedia's licensing which requires such attribution. For further details, please see Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia#Repairing insufficient attribution.

Other sources

Although we have a system in place to automatically detect copyright violations, it misses a large number of them. 100% reliance should never be placed on bots, which can also produce false-positives. Copyright infringement is a pervasive problem and it is not only important that we not host such material, but it often leads to significant additional work when not caught early. Accordingly, please check all new pages for copying from pre-existing material. Articles about organizations and music groups are especially prone to 'borrowing' content from other sources.

It is not a copyright violation to copy material that is in the public domain or has a compatible license if the material is properly attributed. (Templates are available but are not required.)

It is important to remember that any text that is a copyright violation should be removed from the article and the revisions deleted, even if the text doesn't qualify for G12 deletion.

Hallmarks of copying include:

The addition of a large portion of text in a single or few edits – especially when coupled with other criteria listed below
Single reference articles, or ones with large sections of text without inline references
Articles with text that seems too good to be true
Articles whose text resembles that of a news report, press release, blog, or a book, that rarely occurs outside of a specific, invariably copyrighted use, or that has a strange tone of voice, such as an overly informal tone
First-person pronouns and possessives (I, we, my, our), and contractions (I'm, we're, they're, can't, didn't, aren't, won't, etc.)
The inclusion of a slanted marketing voice with weasel words and other puffery; explicit or implicit claims of ownership of the text added and insider status as to the topic (inclusion of intellectual property symbols [©,™,®] is highly correlated)
Out-of-context and out-of-place words or phrases, smacking of an existing source or the navigation structure of an original website: "this site/page/book/whitepaper"; "top", "go to top", "next page", "click here", etc. and non-standard characters (e.g., Microsoft "smart quotes")
Articles whose style of referencing appears to be that of a book or other pre-existing source, not corresponding to the actual references in the article – such as reference numbers or author names in the text, including in-line footnote links such as "[1]", especially when no footnotes are given

Methods to check for copyright violations:

Use filters in the page curation feed to see if any edits on a particular page has been flagged as a copyright violation.
To see if content has been copied from pre-existing writing, copy and paste a limited but unique portion of text from the page into a search engine such as Google (between quotation marks), and try a few such snippets from each paragraph.
Compare the article's content with the references and external links and look for copy/pastes or close paraphrasing. In some cases, a search engine can find close paraphrasing if you copy a unique portion of text from the page, but without quotation marks.
Even if not given as a reference or link, see if the person or organization has a dedicated website (it is often fruitful, once located, to look for an "about", "history" or other narrative section, which will not necessarily appear in Google). If you have access to them, Facebook and LinkedIn are also widespread sources of copying.
Earwig's Copyvio Detector and the Duplication detector are useful tools to find copyright violations. However, do not treat a negative result by either as conclusive – both are hit-and-miss, being unable to read some web content and are poor at finding closely-paraphrased content. Positive results too must be checked by a human, including to see whether the source is in the public domain or bears a suitable free copyright license. This user script can be added to create a link in your tools that will run the current page through Earwig's tool.
Some copyright violations are from PDF files. To read them you will need to open them in your browser or download them.
Copyright violations can also come in the form of machine translated text from sources; these can either be manually checked by reading the translated source, or pasting the text into a text comparison website such as Copyleaks.
It is important to understand "backwards copyvios" – that Wikipedia content gets quickly picked up and duplicated by outside sources, and false-positives may be triggered by searches finding content copied from the Wikipedia article. The Wayback Machine is an invaluable tool in sorting these. If needed, look for organic development of content over multiple edits by combing though the diffs in the page history.

What to do if you find a copyright violation:

If substantially the entire page is an unambiguous copyright violation, and there's no non-infringing revision to revert to (which will usually but not always be true for new articles), tag the page for speedy deletion under CSD G12 using {{db-g12}}. Don't forget to warn the user with the warning notice template that will be provided to you in the text of the speedy deletion tag (If you are using Page Curation, it will do this for you, if you are examining an older page that has already been reviewed, Twinkle will also do it).
Note: for copyright violations where the content is copied from multiple sources, you can put more than one URL into Twinkle, but page curation only has a single field. To get around this, simply put a space and write "and" between the URLs and enter them both in the single field.
Where you have not marked the page for speedy deletion – for example, because removing the infringement found would still leave substantial content – then:

remove all of the copyrighted infringing material from the page, noting in your edit summary where it is from ("Remove copyright violation of http://www...."). Where the copying is from more than one source, it is often easiest to remove each infringement in a separate edit.
post to the article's talk page {{subst:cclean|url=URL(s) copied from}}; just place a space between the URLs if there's more than one (note: this template automatically signs for you so place no tildes).
if you are an administrator, revision delete the span of edits containing the copyright violations, and if you are not, mark the revisions in the page history (typically the first edit and second to last edit) for redaction by an administrator by placing and saving at the top of the page this template: {{copyvio-revdel|start = earliest revision ID (that is, the number at end of the revision's URL after "oldid=") | end= end revision ID}} Please be careful to search for the oldid and not the diff number when requesting revision deletion. You may use a script that semi-automates the requesting of revision deletion and helps speed up the process.

Where you have not marked the page for speedy deletion, and cannot clean it up yourself, or believe your suspicion of copying warrants further looking into, send the page for investigation to Wikipedia:Copyright problems, by marking it with {{copyvio|url=insert URL}}, and then follow the instructions in the copyright investigation notice to list the page at "today's" copyright violations page and to warn the user.

What not to do:

Note that moving an article with a copyright violation to Draft space is not an option. See section § Drafts below.

Conflict of Interest (COI), paid editing

Shortcut

WP:NPPCOI

Many articles are created by users with a conflict of interest in editing, resulting in a tendency to favour the topic. Such users find it very difficult to write in a neutral and balanced manner. For example, this includes people attempting to write about themselves, their business, band, family, friends, clients, employers, favourite charity, or anyone they have a financial or personal relationship with. Paid editing is a subset of COI editing and comes in three flavors. Most common are people who simply have a financial stake in a topic, such as a person writing about their own business. The second, paid advocacy, is an especially egregious type of COI, referring to people specifically paid to insert an article into Wikipedia. The third kind are users who sell a service to write Wikipedia pages about people and organizations.

A common indication of paid advertisements masquerading as articles, possibly written as works for hire by public relations experts, or sometimes by sophisticated insiders, are: Articles That Look Too Good To Be True: Well-written, perfectly formatted articles with lots of neat references submitted by users with low edit counts. Such articles are often patrolled as okay by inexperienced patrollers, but they are classic examples of the need to thoroughly research an article and its user when patrolling it. See: WP:COI, WP:Paid, and the detailed description of what to look for at Long Term Abuse. To understand the extent of this problem, see Orangemoody. Note that sometimes we do get articles by people who sit down, read up on how to create an article, and produce a near-B level article in less than 50 edits. If there doesn't seem like there could be an ulterior motive for writing the article, it is unlikely to be undeclared paid editing. Articles about living people and companies that are still in business are the most common topics for COI and paid editing.

Other hallmarks of COI editing include:

Multiple references to company, B2B, or financial listings, staff lists, interviews
Articles with inline external links
Articles whose style of text appears to come from a news article, press release, blog, or a book
Articles whose style of referencing includes many references to the subject's own publications
Article posted in one or a very few edits, denoting meticulous offline preparation.
Author has posted several single edit new articles that are related
Author has a corporate sounding username or a name that is otherwise reminiscent of the subject
Text written in first or second person (I, we, my, our, you, your)
Biographies with photos that look like professional headshots, especially when attributed to the same editor that wrote the article as "own work"
WP:REFBOMBed articles with an absurd amount of references that are trivial and redundant

What to do if you suspect a COI

An understanding of context is important in responding to COI editing. The COI guideline only "strongly discourages" editing by those with a conflict of interest. Conflict of interest editing is thus not prohibited. However, many of the behaviors exhibited by those with a COI are prohibited or are otherwise actionable. If the editor can be confirmed as a paid editor, their submission may be moved to draft space, as the COI guideline clearly states that any new articles should be submitted through Articles for Creation (make sure to use the move to draft tool or else add the AfC submission template).

1) Responding to paid editing

The WMF Terms of Use require all paid editors to disclose their "employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which they receive, or expect to receive, compensation". Disclosure requirements are casually ignored by the majority of paid editors. We can seek deletion of articles containing blatant advertising or promotion of individuals; users with corporate names can be blocked on that basis. You can tag articles for COI for added scrutiny and take other indirect actions explained below; generally the only direct action we can take to address paid editing is to enforce disclosure compliance. If you are able to confirm that the editor is a paid editor (based on their username being connected obviously with the company, or perhaps some other evidence such as their LinkedIn page) you can move the article directly to draft space. Paid editors are expected to submit their articles through Articles for Creation. Moving to draftspace and requesting that editors submit through AfC is also an appropriate response for articles that have hallmarks of COI and are overloaded with an unnecessarily large amount of references that would make it extremely time-consuming to review, as this comprises an attempt to game the system.

If you have a good faith basis to suspect a user of paid editing, add to the user's talk page the template:

{{subst:uw-paid1}} which asks the user to state whether they have a financial stake in their edits, asks them to not edit further until they respond, and instructs them on how to post the required disclosure.
{{subst:uw-paid2}} if they continue to edit without responding
{{subst:uw-paid3}} if they still don't respond
{{subst:uw-paid4}} if the final notice is ignored, and seek a block at WP:AIV or contact an admin directly.

2) General COI actions

COI editing strongly correlates with copyright violations. Therefore, follow the prior instructions to identify and address copyvios.
Articles written by editors with a COI are often blatant advertisements and may also contain no credible assertion of importance or significance. Thus:

If the page meets CSD G11, tag it for deletion using {{db-g11}} / {{db-spam}}.
If the page meets CSD A7, tag it for deletion using {{db-A7}} / {{db-corp}}, or other applicable A7 deletion tag.
Mark the page for speedy deletion under such other criteria as may apply.
Speedy deletion under multiple criteria can be requested using {{Db-multiple|G11|A7|etc.}}
Don't forget to warn the user with the warning notice template that will be provided to you in the text of the speedy deletion tag (if you are using Page Curation, it will do this for you, if you are examining an older page that has already been reviewed, Twinkle will also do it).

If the article is promotional, but not sufficiently-so to meet G11 (and no other criterion applies), add applicable promotion-related maintenance tags to the article. Do not overload the article with every template that could possibly be germane.

These might include (non-exclusively): {{COI}}, {{advert}}, {{POV}}, {{original research}} and {{autobiography}}. Many new articles will also need some type of tagging regarding the status of the sources cited (or the entire lack thereof). That is addressed later in this page.
If possible, use {{multiple issues}}, so the issues identified are presented in a single, compact notice.
It is important that you familiarize yourself with how to locate applicable templates. Explore Wikipedia:Template index, which provides a break-down of templates by type.

If the article makes a credible claim of importance or significance, so that A7 does not apply, but you believe the subject of the article may not be notable^{[note 1]} – and after first performing a minimum check for existence of sources using a normal Google, Google Books, a Google News, and a Google News archive search – you might add the tag {{notability}} to the article.
An indication of lack of notability also implies other actions you might take – tagging for lack of sources, prodding the article, taking it to AfD, etc. – all of which are covered in later sections.
If an article on a company, group, or product is clearly promotional (and only if it is clearly promotional), check whether the creator's name violates WP:CORPNAME. If it does, you might post to their talk page: {{subst:Uw-username|it appears to unambiguously represent the name of a company, group, institution or product; see WP:CORPNAME}}. If that is ignored, and there is further promotional editing, follow the instructions at Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention (WP:UAA).
You might leave a message on the user's talk page regarding their conflict of interest, including (non-exclusively): {{subst:welcome-COI}} and {{subst:uw-coi}}.

Recreations

Always check the history and the talk page. A new page might be a recreation of a previously deleted article; it might have been created by a 'different' user to evade a block or prevent detection of a particular pattern of editing. With other articles, someone may have removed a tag. The talk page may contain a notice that indicates that the article has already survived, or was previously deleted, at an AfD (possibly under another title). A script can also add a button which appears when there has been a previous deletion or AfD for an article.

If previously deleted (at the most recent AfD held), and if the recreated page is sufficiently identical to the previously deleted content, it may be subject to CSD G4 (tag to use:{{db-g4}} / {{db-repost}}). G4 only applies to articles deleted after discussion – not to prior speedy deletions or PRODs.

Deletion

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WP:NPPDEL

Reviewers must fully understand Wikipedia's deletion policy and remember it. A page can be speedy deleted only if it meets one of the strict criteria. From the policy:

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.

If a reviewer thinks a page should be deleted, but it is not a candidate for speedy deletion, AfD, PROD or WP:BLPPROD must be used instead. Spurious nominations for speedy deletion, even if the article is later deleted at AfD, are damaging to Wikipedia and may quickly result in the reviewer losing their 'reviewer' flag.

Criteria for speedy deletion (CSD)

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WP:NPPCSD

Speedy deletion candidates (CSD). Carefully read through the major speedy deletion criteria. In most cases you can only use the fixed criteria; there is no catchall—so if you are not sure what criterion to use, but are sure the article should be speedied, leave the page for another reviewer. Do not be too hasty to use CSD A1 (no context), CSD A3 (no content), or CSD A7 (no indication of importance for people, animals, organizations, web content, events); per § Care, wait at least an hour to give time to the creator to add content and/or references.

Speedy deletion is a tool which can easily be overused. Since speedy deletion removes a page without discussion, an article should not be tagged for speedy delete if there are plausible reasons that it should be kept and it is not a copyvio, attack page, a hoax, empty or sheer nonsense.

Make sure you understand what CSD A7 applies to, and in particular, that it does not apply to schools or educational establishments. An article should not be tagged for speedy delete under CSD A7 simply because an article is not notable, or does not prove notability by the references included. This is a common misunderstanding. The standard under A7 is solely whether the content contains a credible assertion of importance or significance (whether it actually is notable is a subject for an AfD discussion, not for speedy deletion). Consider using a Notability tag instead of a speedy deletion tag.

Pay attention to the policy "Contributors sometimes create articles over several edits, so try to avoid deleting a page too soon after its creation if it appears incomplete." Wikipedia articles do not have to be 100% perfect the instant they are first posted; that's why they can be edited.

If the article creator removes a CSD tag, restore it and warn them on their talk page using the warning series starting at {{subst:uw-speedy1}}.

When tagging pages for speedy deletion do not mark the page as reviewed. CSDed pages should be left 'unreviewed' so that in the case the author inappropriately removes the tag, it will be sent back to the new page feed to be checked again (previously, when CSDs were marked as 'reviewed', these articles could fall through the cracks if the original reviewer didn't check up on them). Similarly, if the CSD is declined by an admin or other user, it should also be re-reviewed; declined CSD articles may be candidates for AfD instead.

Redirect

The deletion policy and its associated guideline clearly emphasise that not all unsuitable articles must be deleted. In many cases a redirect may be more appropriate. Converting an article to a redirect without prior discussion is allowed and is not tendentious editing so long as proper BRD procedure is followed. Non notable schools, for example, can be redirected to the school district article (US), or to the locality article (rest of the world), with a very brief mention. Convincing the creator is however occasionally challenging; in the case of a redirect reversal, the solution is either draftify or AfD.

Proposed Deletion (PROD)

PROD is a way to suggest an article for uncontroversial deletion. It is designed to be a less time-consuming method than nominating at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion (AfD), and is meant for uncomplicated deletion proposals that do not meet the strict criteria for speedy deletion. PROD must only be used if no opposition to the deletion is expected. To nominate an article, place {{subst:Proposed deletion|concern=reason for proposed deletion}} at the top of the page – the Page Curation tool will do this for you and notify the creator automatically.

Note: A PROD removed by anyone—including the article creator, and even without any explanation for the removal or attempt to address the issue(s)—must not be restored. If you believe the article should still be deleted, you should nominate it for removal through a deletion discussion at AfD.

When tagging pages for proposed deletion do not mark the page as reviewed. PRODed pages should be left 'unreviewed' so that it will remain in the new page feed and be re-reviewed if somebody removes the tag.

Proposed deletion of biographies of living people (BLPPROD)

BLPPROD is used to propose articles for deletion on living persons, where the article contain no sources in any form whatsoever (as references, external links, etc., reliable or otherwise). To nominate a biography using this process, place {{subst:prod blp}} at the top of a page—the Page Curation tool will do this for you and notify the creator automatically.
Note: Unlike a PROD, if a BLPPROD is removed by the creator or another user without adding a relevant, reliable source, it must be restored. If however the creator persists in removing the tag, it might be a good idea to send the article for discussion at AfD. You may wish to add the {{subst:uw-blpprod1}} warning to the user's talk page.

When tagging pages for proposed deletion do not mark the page as reviewed. BLPPRODed pages should be left 'unreviewed' so that in the case the author removes the tag, it will be sent back to the new page feed to be checked again.

Articles for deletion (AfD)

If neither the strict speedy deletion criteria nor PROD/BLPPROD are applicable, but you think an article should still be considered for deletion, you can nominate it for removal on its merits through a deletion discussion held by the community at AfD. Outside of rare, early closings, Articles for Deletion discussions are held over a minimum seven-day period (longer if relisted), after which the discussion is closed (usually by an administrator).

Include in your nomination rationale a link to the applicable policy and/or guideline under which you are proposing deletion
If you are AfDing a dePRODed article, mention this in your rationale: DePRODed by creator without addressing the issue(s). Concern was:.......
You should mention in your nomination rationale what attempts you made to look for sources and the results of your efforts.

Most AfD nominations focus on notability (existence, or not, of reliable, secondary, independent sources for a topic), though AfDs focused on verifiability, original research and What Wikipedia Is Not issues also occur. Notability is targeted to existence of sources (out in the world), rather than what sources are currently in an article. Thus, searching first for sources before nominating an article for an AfD discussion is crucial.

You must read and follow WP:BEFORE before nominating an article at AfD. The minimum searches expected (to the extent they are appropriate for the subject) are a normal Google search, a Google Books search, a Google News search, and a Google News archive search; Google Scholar is suggested for academic subjects or using this script to have an "Search Google" link show up. As a supplement to the above searches, a narrow Wikipedia Reference Search (WP:WRS) can be performed using this script.

Unlike CSDs and PRODs, you can mark AfDed pages as 'reviewed' after tagging them, as their fate will be decided via discussion and they can't fall through the cracks if tags are removed (a bot will restore them so long as the AfD discussion is open).

Content forks

To aid reader navigation and make efficient use of editor resources, Wikipedia prohibits having multiple articles on the same or an extremely similar topic, which is known as content forking.

If you encounter a broad or popular topic that you are surprised didn't already have a page, there is a high chance that it has been forked. Authors sometimes also link to pages they have forked from the "see also" section.

When you encounter a fork, you have two options. If the new page has content the existing page does not, nominate the pages for merging; otherwise, just convert the new page into a redirect.

Drafts

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WP:NPPDRAFT

Wikipedia's 'Draft' namespace was created to provide a 'safe harbour' from deletion for pages under construction. This does not apply to copyright violations and attack pages, which should be addressed or deleted immediately in any namespace. Drafts allow new articles to be developed before being moved to Wikipedia's mainspace. Drafts are also a way for people to create an article who are not (yet) authorized to create an article directly in the mainspace. Registered users can also create user space drafts. Moving an article to draft should not be used as a back-door route to deletion. Moving to draft is not a catch-all for not knowing what to do with an article.

To move an article to draft space yourself, you should:

First tag it for any obvious issues
Read the full instructions for installation and use on this page
Notify the author. The tool has preloaded selectable message criteria to send to the creator. This message can be added to by leaving a further rationale in the 'Other' field. Check the preview before sending.
Be accountable for your draftification decisions per the standard described at Wikipedia:Administrators#Accountability.

Moving to draft does not necessarily increase the workload at AFC. While backlog drives may obviously cause a temporary slight increase in the number of articles moved to Draft, draftification is not AfC and does not oblige an article creator to avail of the AfC process. Draftification is nevertheless a standard procedure that can be used by New Page Reviewers as and when they consider appropriate. There is no shame in having one's article draftified. Quite to the contrary in fact, it can be a far more friendly process that having an article marched immediately to AfD or PRODed, and if/when a draft is submitted to AfC, a lot of help might be forthcoming - which is not in the remit of NPP. NPP also has deadlines - AfC does not..

As part of the review of new pages, an unreviewed page may be moved to draft if:

the topic has some potential merit, and
the article does not meet the required standard, and
there is no evidence of active improvement (at least one hour since the last constructive edit), and
the article does not contain copyright violations.
or when the author clearly has a conflict of interest (per WP:COIEDIT).

Expanding on the above:

Has some merit

. for example, the topic is plausibly notable (if not, it should be speedy-deleted under A7 or nominated at AfD; do not draftify junk).

Does not meet the required standard

. The page is obviously unready for mainspace, for example:

. is not a reasonable WP:STUB (e.g. has very little verifiable information, or is interchangeable with a short dictionary entry, but the definition is not good);

. or it would have very little chance of survival at AfD;

. or it meets any speedy deletion criterion.

. The topic appears unimportant, is possibly not worth the effort of fixing, and no great loss if deleted due to expiring in draftspace.

. The topic is not a new topic likely to be of interest to multiple people (such as current affairs topics).

. The page is a recent creation by an inexperienced editor. As a rule of thumb, articles older than 90 days should not be draftified without prior consensus at AfD or another suitable venue.^{[note 2]}

No evidence of active improvement

. There is no evidence of a user actively working on it. Wait at least an hour after the last constructive edit to see if the page is likely to be expanded in the immediate future.

. There is no assertion that the page belongs in mainspace, such as a clear statement to that effect in the edit history, or on the talk page, or a revert of a previous draftification.

Does not contain copyright violations

. Articles with copyright violations must be addressed, and may not be moved to any namespace.

When the author clearly has a conflict of interest

. The article has some merit but is written with a promotional tone that makes it clear that the author has a conflict of interest with the topic (exclusively promotional articles should instead be tagged with G11).

. Whenever this is done, the draftifier must inform the author that COI editors should submit new articles through Articles for Creation (fourth bullet point of WP:COIEDIT).

Reviewing drafts

Reviewing drafts is usually the domain of the AfC team. Submitted drafts are displayed in the Articles for Creation list at the New Pages Feed. In a similar way to the process at Articles for Creation (WP:AfC), if they are suitable for publication they can be moved to the mainspace

In progress articles

If a new article (not a 'Draft') contains a {{newpage}}, {{inuse}}, or {{underconstruction}} template, a good rule is to wait about an hour after the last edit before tagging the article.

Pages in languages other than English

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WP:NPPNE

If the article is a mere copy of (all or part of) an article in another language's Wikipedia which is often the case, it can just be tagged with {{db-foreign}} to get added to Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion: we want to discourage people who cut articles from one Wikipedia and paste to another without translating. You can leave a message on the contributing user's talk-page in their own language, using the templates from WP:PNT/Templates for user talk pages or using {{UE}}. For other non-English articles, follow the instructions at Pages needing translation into English/Procedures. If such articles have not been translated within two weeks they will be deleted.

Do not tag articles written in another language with G1 Patent nonsense – languages are not gibberish. If you are not sure what language an article is written in, Google Translate will generally auto-detect the language. If you know or can guess the language, place the {{notenglish}} template, e.g., {{notenglish|Spanish}}. This provides a link to the relevant foreign language Wikipedia and to Google Translate – which will show you a machine translation; rough and ready, but often good enough to tell you that the article is about a non-notable band, person, company, organisation, or is nonsense, and thus whether it can be speedy tagged without bothering to list it at WP:Pages needing translation. You can paste a Google translation to the article talk page, but not on the article main page.

The reason {{notenglish}} is suggested – which is not a speedy template – is that these articles are sometimes worth translating. When that expands on the article page, it gives you a message and a link to the place to paste it on the list of pages needing translation at WP:PNT, where someone who knows the language may pick it up and translate it or place PROD, BLPPROD or take other appropriate action. The Page Curation tool does this automatically and will notify the creator.

Non-English articles eligible for speedy deletion

If an article is a copyright violation it may be nominated for G12.

{{db-foreign}} or {{db-a2}} should only be used in the rare situation where an existing article from a non-English-language Wikipedia has been cut-and-pasted here. That is not allowed because it disconnects the source of the content from its editing history, which we have to maintain for attribution to the original authors. The message generated for the author points them to the correct procedure at Wikipedia:Translation. The foreign Wikipedia reference should be included in the tag, e.g. {{db-foreign|source=es:Warekena}}.

Titles and redirects in other languages

Articles should be titled based on the name most commonly used in reliable English-language sources. In some cases this may be a non-English title, even though an English translation may exist (e.g. Niños Héroes), and may contain characters not present in the English alphabet (e.g. Aşk-ı Memnu (novel)), but will never be entirely in a non-Latin alphabet.

Redirects from titles in languages other than English are allowed if there is a significant connection between the language in question and the target subject. Examples include non-English titles for creative works originally written in those languages such as Cien años de soledad, or regional names for foods such as kebapcinja. These are allowed even in alphabets other than Latin, such as Москва or 日本. However, names for common objects that have no particular association with any culture despite global use (e.g. Bahnwagen, German for Railroad car) or even use with a sufficiently broad subset of countries (e.g. Bidé, Italian for bidet), are discouraged and generally deleted at RfD.

Article titles

Mistitled articles can't be edited but must, rather, be moved to a new title using the "move page" function. This preserves the page history, which is required to be maintained under our copyright licenses. Moving an article to a more appropriate title is an important patrolling task. Your move will automatically create a redirect. If the prior name, now a redirect, was an implausible typo or misnomer, request its deletion using {{Db-r3}} / {{Db-redirtypo}} / {{Db-redirmisnomer}}. Otherwise, it is fine to remain. There are technical limitations that may restrict you from moving to a better title, such as where the title is protected from creation, or already exists and cannot be moved over a redirect. In such cases, ask for a technical move or, if potentially controversial, see Wikipedia:Requested moves for more information.

In order to understand whether an article title is or is not appropriate, and what title a page should be moved to, please familiarize yourself with Wikipedia:Article titles. This can be a complex area. Here is a summary of titling issues commonly encountered with new pages:

The common names section of the policy provides that topics are generally given their common name – the name that is most commonly used for the topic, as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable English-language sources.
The precision and disambiguation section of the policy provides that usually, titles should be precise enough to unambiguously define the topical scope of the article, but no more precise than that. We usually only include parenthetical disambiguation (a title like Mercury (planet) or Windsor, Berkshire) when there is an existing Wikipedia article (or plausible one) on a topic with an identical or confusingly similar name. See also the disambiguation policy. Unnecessary disambiguation or precision can also be a warning sign of an editor trying to avoid scrutiny (i.e. the article at the correct title was deleted at AfD).
The WP:TITLEFORMAT section of the policy provides that titles take sentence case – proper nouns are capitalized, and other words that would not be in running text, are not.
We generally do not include honorifics in titles (Sir, Dame, The Most Noble, Saint, CH, etc.), nor educational degrees, certifications or social social titles (PhD, Esq., Dr. Doctor, Professor, etc.). In names of companies, we generally do not include Inc. Corp. Ltd. etc. – except where they are needed for natural disambiguation.
Using an ALL CAPS title is a common mistake seen at new pages: We capitalize acronyms (NASA, FAQ, SQL) – except when the acronym is no longer typically treated as an acronym but was originally ("Laser", "Scuba") – and ignore all pure caps stylization [(Carquest (not: CARQUEST) (Ridgid (not: RIDGID)], unless the capitalized part of the title is pronounced by each letter (ATI Technologies, EVGA Corporation). We ignore most other matters of trademark stylization: Pink (not: P!nk) Toys "R" Us (not: Toys Я Us).
Where a title should be displayed as italicized (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles#Italics), italics will be automatically placed by any infobox you add to the page if it's dedicated to the type of topic (e.g. {{infobox album}} for articles on albums). If not placing a dedicated infobox, you can italicize the display of the entire title by placing at the top of the page {{Italic title}}. If only part of the title should be italicized, use the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} magic word, e.g. {{DISPLAYTITLE:Lorem ''ipsum'' dolor}}

Addressing cut-and-paste moves

Finding they cannot change a typo in the title, or being unaware of redirects and wanting a topic found at another title, new users sometimes create new pages with the content of existing articles – 'cut-and-paste moves'. Doing so severs the edit history, required under copyright. In such situations, request deletion using {{Db-a10|article=Existing article title}} / {{Db-same|article=Existing article title}}. Though these templates have their own warnings, separately warn the user using {{subst:Uw-c&pmove}}. In the rare situation that the user has added significant content to the copy they posted that is worth merging, list the page for a history merge (note: not the same as a merge) at WP:SPLICE.

Where an existing page or redirect has been used as the target of a cut-and-paste move the edit should be reversed, restoring the original page content.

Duplicate articles with separate origins

If you come upon an article on a duplicate topic but that has a separate origin (not copied from the existing article, addressed above), this also can be asked to be deleted under CSD A10. However, here, if the article has content that warrants merging, perform a merge (do not ask for a history merge) and redirect to the existing article. Be sure to provide mandatory copyright attribution when you do so. See WP:MERGETEXT.

Optional steps

Categorizing

Categorization: Check that the article has been assigned to one or more useful categories, and if not, either tag it with {{uncat}} or try to find a category for it. You can check similar articles for potentially relevant categories. The Hotcat gadget can help in adding or changing categories.

Stub tagging

If the article is a stub, then tag it as such. You can use the generic {{stub}} tag, but consider choosing a more specific one, like {{England-school-stub}}. More information is available at Stub types, but don't spend too much time attempting to find the right tag; there are dedicated stub sorters at WikProject Stub Sorting who can frequently figure out how to sort them quickly. User:Danski454/stubsearch is a script available to easily find stub tags.

WikiProject Sorting

Ensuring that Talk pages are tagged with relevant WikiProjects is an important way to get additional eyes on new articles and it can help get interested editors involved in expanding stubs and in copy editing and fact checking. You can add WikiProjects either manually or using a script. Evad37's Rater is one current tool, and another, no longer actively developed one, is Kephir's Rater.

Maintenance tags

If needed, add maintenance tags to the article. This can be done via the Page Curation toolbar or via Twinkle. Examples of maintenance tags include {{Copy edit}}, {{Orphan}}, {{POV}}, {{Advert}}, tags related to sourcing, {{COI}}, {{UPE}}, {{Dablinks}}, {{Bare URLs}}, {{Underlinked}}, {{No footnotes}}, {{More footnotes}}, {{Over-quotation}}, {{Criticism section}}, and many others.

Disputes and consensus

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WP:NPPCON

As a new page patroller, any action you take other than marking an article as reviewed is not likely to be welcomed by the page creator. In the best case scenario, they will simply listen to your feedback and address the issue promptly. However, disputes are common. Whether it is about a cleanup tag, a deletion nominations, a move to draft, or something else, try to approach these disputes with humility and empathy. Avoid the temptation to "pull rank" over a user who probably knows a lot less about our processes than you do. Even if you are completely correct in your judgement of an article, it is not surprising that the creator might be offended if you tell them that there is something wrong with their contribution, or threaten to remove it. New editors might be unfamiliar with our practice of not asking permission to fix problems – or its obverse, not being offended when somebody fixes or points out a problem with your work. Experienced editors might be reluctant to acknowledge that they aren't immune to making mistakes. All reviewing disputes are more likely to be resolved amicably if you try to understand the other party's point of view before putting forth your own.

It is especially important to remember that the new page reviewer right gives you the technical ability to mark pages "reviewed"; it does not give you any special decision-making powers over new articles. Like all advanced rights holders, from page movers to bureaucrats, the way you use your tools is subject to the consensus of other editors. For example, if you move a page to draftspace, and the creator of the article objects to this, there is no consensus on where the page should be. The recommended course of action here is to return the page to the state it was in before the dispute begin (i.e. in mainspace), and then attempt to solve it through discussion, for example by opening an AfD.^[8] You should not simply insist that the page remains in your preferred namespace because you are a new page patroller and the other editor is not.

NPP professionalism

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WP:NPPNICE

Throughout the entire process of new pages patrol, it is important to remember not to bite the newbies. Far from being a monolithic horde of vandals, trolls, and spammers, the available evidence seems to indicate that newcomers write most of Wikipedia's content. If you see a new user or IP address contributing significantly, post a welcome template to their talk page, such as {{subst:welcome}} or {{subst:welcomeg}} or, for IPs specifically, {{subst:welcome-anon}} or {{subst:Anonwelcomeg}}, and include a pointer or two of feedback about how they can make their contributions even better. Most will gladly welcome the support.

It is also important to assume good faith as much as possible, or, minimally, to assume incompetence instead of malice. For example, remember not everyone is as computer-literate as you; some people will accidentally blank or damage pages when attempting to cut and paste material from Wikipedia. Others may not understand that, yes, their changes really are visible to the entire world immediately; consider using {{subst:uw-draftfirst}} to suggest that new users work on their article as a userspace draft.

Please do not be too hasty with speedy deletions for "non-egregious" (other than attack pages, copyvios, vandalism, or complete nonsense), especially those lacking context (CSD A1) or content (CSD A3). Writers unfamiliar with Wikipedia guidelines should be accorded at least an hour to fix the article before it is nominated for speedy deletion. If you see a page that has been tagged too hastily, please notify the tagger about their hasty deletion with {{subst:uw-hasty}}. The template {{hasty|placed above existing speedy tag to inform admins to of hasty tagging and to wait}} can also be added to the tagged article to flag that it was hastily tagged.

If you tag an article written by a newcomer, consider leaving a friendly note on their talk page, pointing them to Help:Maintenance template removal (WP:MTR), which is dedicated to explaining the process of addressing and removing maintenance tags and including that anyone can remove them (except for AFD and CSD tags) after the problems have been addressed (or if they were truly added in error). Most new editors don't know that they are permitted to do this.

Unreviewing

Page Curation also includes a feature to 'unreview' a new article. Nobody is absolutely perfect and errors can happen. If you come across an article that appears to have been wrongly or inappropriately tagged, consider clicking the checkmark icon in the Page Curation toolbar ("Mark this page as unreviewed") and leave a friendly note for the patroller.

If you notice a patroller making frequent errors, tagging too quickly, or tag-bombing, offer friendly support or direct them to a specific section of this or another help page. In extreme cases you may need to inform an administrator, an NPP coordinator, or post at WP:ANI, but always try to help your colleague first.

Reviewer checklists

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WP:NPPCHK

Using the NPP flowchart is an excellent way for new reviewers to ensure that they complete all primary New Page Patrol tasks.

Template loop detected: Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Article namespace checklist

File namespace checklist

Special:NewFiles logs all files as they are uploaded. This includes uploads over existing files. PageTriage and Special:NewPagesFeed do not work in this namespace. To mark a file as patrolled, use the "Mark this file version as patrolled" link that appears at the bottom right of the licensing section of unpatrolled files.

Check each for the following problems:

Copyright tag Check that an appropriate image copyright tag has been added. If not, leave a note on the contributor's talk page and tag the image with {{subst:nld}}.
Source The image description must say how the image was obtained, for example if the uploader took it himself. Tag unsourced images with {{subst:nsd}}.

For non-free files:

Check to see if the file meets the non-free content criteria. Common situations to watch out for:
- Images used to illustrate living people, unless the person is in jail or a free image could otherwise not be created: notify the uploader and tag with {{subst:rfu|reason=As the person this image depicts is still alive, a free image could be taken}}.
- Similarly, use {{subst:rfu}} for other replaceable images. Common examples include charts, graphs, tables, and maps (where the map is used to show something and is not itself discussed)
- Make sure a fair use rationale exists for each use of the image. Remove the image from all non-mainspace pages. If the file was not uploaded extremely recently (a few hours), tag orphaned non-free files with {{subst:orfud}}.
- If the upload is over an existing image, tag the page with {{subst:orfurrev}}.
  - If the new file is merely a higher-resolution version of the existing file, the upload should be reverted unless there is good reason not to.
- Double-check that the copyright tag is appropriate for the image (i.e. {{Non-free logo}} should only be used on logos, etc.) If not, either fix the tag yourself or notify the uploader and apply {{db-f7}} for immediate deletion. Only do the latter in egregious scenarios, such as calling an entire song a sample.
- If the source cited is Getty Images, a news agency, or other commercial stock photo agency, check to see if the image itself is being discussed in the article. If not, tag with {{db-f7}}.
If you are sure that the image and rationale are proper, append |image_has_rationale=yes to the copyright tag.

For free files:

If a source is cited other than the uploader, and there is no evidence of the license claimed at the website provided, tag it with {{subst:npd}} and notify the uploader.
Run a reverse image search to see if the image is a copyright violation. If it is, notify the uploader and tag with {{db-f9|url=}}. Remember that a blatant copyright violation requires that the image you find online be of the same or greater resolution than the uploaded version. If the file exists at lower resolution on many websites, or you have other doubts about authorship (professional quality, web resolution, missing EXIF data) consider sending it to WP:FFD.
If it is clearly an image for a userpage (i.e. a selfie), tag it with {{userspace file}} so it does not get transferred to Commons.
Only mark these files as patrolled if you are sure they are free.

Copyright is a serious matter. Do not mark files as patrolled if you have any doubt as to whether it is acceptable. This is especially true for complex situations such as freedom of panorama, copyright renewals, and non-US works.

Wikipedia namespace checklist

Common reasons for speedy deletion of new Wikipedia namespace pages:

G2: Pages consisting of test post. {{db-test}}
G6: Page unambiguously created in error. {{db-g6|rationale=page unambiguously created in error since (reason)}}

Note: The descriptions above are brief summaries of these speedy deletion criteria. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the exact criteria before tagging a page for speedy deletion. See WP:CSD.

Page specific check list:

Wikipedia:

Essay pages - (i) is it instead a strictly personal viewpoint about Wikipedia or does not contain enough advice or opinions (User essay); (ii) does it supplement or clarify communal consensus through impartiality (Information page) - (see WP:WES)
"Fun" pages - judge on a case by case basis; consider userfying

Wikipedia:Ambassadors -
Wikipedia:Articles for creation - Normally pages should be created under "Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation".
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion page - Is the nomination in the Articles for deletion page complete?- If someone else besides the AfD nom posted on the page, then the nomination likely is complete. If only the nom has posted 1. Check "What links here" - the article page should be linked and a Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/ page should be listed as (transclusion); 2. Was {{subst:afd2}} used to post the nomination (Step II. see WP:AFDHOWTO)? Fix these as needed.
Wikipedia:Featured list candidates -
Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates -
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion - Check to see whether the page is transcluded
Wikipedia:Peer review - Check to see whether the page is transcluded
Wikipedia:Requests for feedback -
Wikipedia:School and university projects -
Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations - Check to see whether a sockpuppet created the page.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost - Signpost editors will usually remove any unneeded or bogus articles from this space
Wikipedia:WikiProject - Subpage proposals for WikiProjects sometimes need to be transcluded to a higher-up page. If only the noms post is on the page, check "What links here" to see if the page was transcluded.

General check list

Does the page qualify for speedy deletion? - If so, usually {{db-test}} will be the appropriate template to add to top of the page. Also, notify the page creator. Generally see WP:CSD.
Is the page in the wrong namespace (e.g. an article in Wikipedia namespace) - can simply be moved and then tag the redirect for speedy deletion using {{db-reason}} using the reason: Redirect left after a cross-namespace move - G6 Housekeeping. Notify the author of the original page of the cross-namespace move.
Does the page belong on Wikipedia? If you think the page qualifies for deletion, follow How to list pages for deletion at MfD. If an experienced editor posted the page, consider asking about the Wikipedia namespace page before listing it at MfD.
Is the page categorized? If the page is not assigned to any categories, add some appropriate categories to the bottom of the page. It is usually fairly easy to find at least one appropriate category.

Template namespace checklist

Common reasons for speedy deletion of new templates

G2 - test pages. {{db-g2}}
G6 - for pages created in the wrong namespace. If useful, consider moving the page to the correct namespace without leaving a redirect. {{db-g6|rationale=created in the wrong namespace}} or {{db-wrongnamespace}}. Notifying creator with {{db-wrongnamespace-notice}} can be helpful (Twinkle does not notify for G6 deletions, so this must be done manually).^[a]
G11 - adverts. You'd be surprised at how common these are, in template-space for some reason. Usually eligible for G6, but this is faster.

Common easy template types

Did you know nominations: if the nomination is properly formatted and transcluded, simply mark as patrolled, otherwise, if more than a few minutes old, consider contacting the author.
Taxoboxes: if not obviously broken, just mark as patrolled, these are usually fine.
Documentation subpages, sandboxes, and test cases: generally mark as patrolled unless there are glaring problems - even while evaluating the parent template's suitability (if they were created at the same time). If orphaned, consider talking to the author or nominating for WP:G8 (subpages with no parent page).
Attached KML: it's kinda silly that this is in template-space, but just mark it as patrolled.

Otherwise

If the template has already existed for a few days, check if it has any transclusions (or if it is subst-only). If it has no transclusions, but is not subst-only, consider nominating it for deletion at templates for discussion.

Common cleanup/maintenance tasks for new templates

WikiProjects - tag as normal^[b]
- CLASS = template
- IMPORTANCE = N/A, not low
Add documentation, if it doesn't exist.
- Use <noinclude>{{doc}}</noinclude> at the bottom of the template, then create a documentation subpage. If the documentation is just noincluded on the template, move it to the subpage.
- Add template categories on this subpage.
Add categories
- Category names for templates usually end with "navigational boxes" or "templates".
- Do not put templates in article categories.{{efn}|Wikipedia:Categorization#Template categorization}}
- Don't use HotCat on templates.
- Put template categories the documentation subpages in the appropriate location (usually, between <includeonly> tags).

Notes

^ It's recommended to provide more details, if the deletion reason is not apparent.
^ Do not tag with the banner for WikiProject Templates.

Disambiguation page checklist
Template loop detected: Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Disambiguation checklist

Redirect checklist

Does the redirect qualify for any CSDs? Consider using WP:TWINKLE to assist.

R2 - Inappropriate cross-namespace redirects
R3 - Recently created implausible typos
R4 - File namespace redirects with names that match Wikimedia Commons pages
G1 - Patent nonsense
G3 - Pure vandalism and blatant hoaxes
G4 - Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion
G5 - Creations by blocked or banned users
G6 - Technical deletions
G8 - Pages dependent on a non-existent or deleted page
G10 - Pages that disaparage, threaten, intimidate, or harass their subject or some other entity, and serve no other purpose
G11 - Unambiguous advertising or promotion

Does the redirect violate WP:R#DELETE? If so, may need to nominate it via the WP:RFD process. Consider using WP:TWINKLE to assist. For redirects concerning subjects you are unfamiliar with, at a minimum conduct an internal Wikipedia search and an internet search for the term to look for possible explanations or sources of confusion.

The redirect page makes it unreasonably difficult for users to locate similarly named articles via the search engine.
The redirect might cause confusion.
The redirect is offensive or abusive (Speedy deletion criterion G10 and G3 may apply.)
The redirect constitutes self-promotion or spam. (Speedy deletion criterion G11 may apply.)
The redirect makes no sense. (Speedy deletion criterion G1 may apply.)
It is a cross-namespace redirect out of article space, such as one pointing into the User or Wikipedia namespace.
If the redirect is a novel or very obscure synonym for an article name
If the target article needs to be moved to the redirect title, but the redirect has been edited before and has a history of its own, then the title needs to be freed up to make way for the move. (Speedy deletion criterion G6 may apply.)
If the redirect could plausibly be expanded into an article, and the target article contains virtually no information on the subject.

Does the redirect need a redirect template? Consider using WP:TWINKLE or WP:CAPRICORN to assist. Here are some of the most used

{{R from move/except‏‎}}
{{R from move‏‎}}
{{R from modification‏‎}}
{{R to diacritic‏‎}}
{{R from title without diacritics‏‎}}
{{R from other capitalisation‏‎}}
{{R to section‏‎}}
{{R to disambiguation page‏‎}}
{{R from alternative name‏‎}}
{{R from sort name‏‎}}
{{R from alternative scientific name‏‎}}
{{R from alternative spelling‏‎}}
{{R to scientific name}}
etc.

If you find an unpatrolled redirect that is at RFD, or you send a redirect to RFD, mark it as reviewed.

Is somebody creating a lot of redirects, and you are finding zero problems with them? Consider posting an application for them at the redirect autopatrol list. They need around 100 redirects to qualify. Use xtools (and select "only include redirects") to check number of redirects created.

If a redirect or blanked page is converted to an article, it will be marked as unreviewed and placed in the new pages feed. This is to avoid people hijacking reviewed redirects to create unreviewed articles.

I'd say that on a typical day of patrolling the back end of the queue, I'll go through 150-300 [redirects], send 5-10 to RfD, tag around 5 with G5 or R3, and either retarget or convert-to-dab 5 more. Attack redirects are less frequent, I'll come across a handful of attack redirects per week. --Rosguill

Other issues

Article clean-up

The curation toolbar will highlight some common issues:

Orphaned articles, or articles that have no internal links to other Wikipedia articles. Sometimes orphans result from a mistitled article (see above). It may be helpful to search for mentions in other articles.
Articles without sources: The best time to ask for sources is when an article creator is still online and logged in. Tag the article with an appropriate tag in Page Curation and leave a message for the creator.

It is common for New Page Patrollers to also help with basic article cleanup. Common examples include:

Stubs are the beginnings of meaningful and encyclopedic articles but which need a little help: Place an appropriate stub notice at the end of a stub.
Bold face the article title in the lead.
Link relevant terms.
Overlinking – remove unnecessary internal links.
Phrase the article in complete sentences, including the first sentence.
Condense orphaned sentences into existing paragraphs.

Moving new content to other projects

Dictionary definitions. These can be transwikied to Wiktionary or converted into disambiguation pages. Many may be redeemable as Wikipedia articles, if sufficiently refactored, rewritten, and expanded.
Primary source texts. These should be transwikied to Wikisource.
How-tos or instructional materials. In some cases, these can be transwikied to Wikibooks; however, it's often possible to turn these into meaningful articles by rewording the text to make it more descriptive and less prescriptive. Try to improve an article by adding some more material before resorting to moving it out of Wikipedia.

Redirects converted to articles

Shortcut

WP:NPPREDIRECT

If a redirect or blanked page is converted to an article, it will be marked as unreviewed and placed in the new pages feed. This is to avoid people creating redirects for inappropriate pages and later converting them into articles to avoid review. If you see an old page (such as one from 2005 or 2016), it is likely that it was recently converted from a redirect. In these cases, you should check the page history, and if the page is not appropriate as an article, restore the redirect and notify the person who created the article. If you are reverted and you still believe the article is inappropriate, you should list it at Articles for Deletion. Redirects that are currently listed at Redirects for Discussion should simply be marked as reviewed.

Technical details

Namespaces subject to review – Mainspace and userspace are the two namespaces where the page curation toolbar displays. NPPs do not need to patrol userspace and are encouraged to focus on mainspace.
Users subject to review – Most editors will have their mainspace page creations show up in the new pages feed as unreviewed until marked as reviewed by an NPP. Editors with the autopatrolled permission and global rollbacker permission are an exception: their pages do not show up in the new pages feed, and their pages are marked as reviewed when created. Admins are no longer autopatrolled by default, but can self-assign the permission if desired.^[9]
Who can review which articles – New page patrollers are prevented by the software from reviewing or unreviewing their own articles, unless they are autopatrolled.
Autopatrol and page moves – For users with the autopatrolled permission, a page move will autopatrol an article if it is a move from outside of mainspace into mainspace. So an autopatrolled user should be careful, for example, when accepting AFC drafts, as these will be autopatrolled. However, the software lets them unpatrol it if needed.
Search engine indexing
- Articles – Unreviewed articles are prevented from being indexed by search engines for 90 days.^[10]^[11] After 90 days, the article remains in the queue to remind us to eventually review it, but search engines can begin indexing it.
- Articles sent to AFD – Sending an article to AFD and marking it as reviewed will not allow search engine indexing (unless the article is older than 90 days), because there is a NOINDEX template used in the AFD notification template.
- Redirects – Redirects are automatically marked as reviewed after 6 months.^[12]^[13] As soon as they are marked as reviewed, they become indexable.
Patrol versus review – There is a difference between an article being marked as patrolled (which uses the patrol log) and marked as reviewed (which uses the page curation log). Clicking [Mark this page as patrolled], which appears in the bottom right corner of some pages, makes an entry in the patrol log only. Clicking the green check mark in your toolbar always creates an entry in the page curation log, and often creates an entry in the patrol log, but not always. Most people use the "mark as reviewed" button, so most people should be checking the page curation log exclusively. You can apply the "Reviewing" log filter if needed, which will filter out non-reviewing from the page curation log. The patrol log should usually be ignored. [Mark this page as patrolled] appears when the Page Curation tool bar is closed (see next bullet), and in namespaces where PageTriage doesn't operate (for example, draftspace and template space).
Closing and re-opening the toolbar – If you close the Page Curation toolbar completely, by first minimizing the toolbar using the top toolbar button, then clicking the top X icon on the mini-toolbar, it will disappear completely. In this situation, to get the toolbar back, you need to click "Open Page Curation" in the left menu, in the "Tools" section.

Notes

^ Do not confuse notability of a topic, with the very low bar necessary to assert importance or significance in the text. Notability assesses the merits of the subject to warrant an article based on evidence out in the world of substantive publication about the topic in reliable, secondary, independent sources, whereas, A7 looks exclusively to the current content.
^ Cite error: The named reference draftifyoldrfc was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

Redirect checklist

Does the redirect qualify for any CSDs? Consider using WP:TWINKLE to assist.

R2 - Inappropriate cross-namespace redirects
R3 - Recently created implausible typos
R4 - File namespace redirects with names that match Wikimedia Commons pages
G1 - Patent nonsense
G3 - Pure vandalism and blatant hoaxes
G4 - Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion
G5 - Creations by blocked or banned users
G6 - Technical deletions
G8 - Pages dependent on a non-existent or deleted page
G10 - Pages that disaparage, threaten, intimidate, or harass their subject or some other entity, and serve no other purpose
G11 - Unambiguous advertising or promotion

Does the redirect violate WP:R#DELETE? If so, may need to nominate it via the WP:RFD process. Consider using WP:TWINKLE to assist. For redirects concerning subjects you are unfamiliar with, at a minimum conduct an internal Wikipedia search and an internet search for the term to look for possible explanations or sources of confusion.

The redirect page makes it unreasonably difficult for users to locate similarly named articles via the search engine.
The redirect might cause confusion.
The redirect is offensive or abusive (Speedy deletion criterion G10 and G3 may apply.)
The redirect constitutes self-promotion or spam. (Speedy deletion criterion G11 may apply.)
The redirect makes no sense. (Speedy deletion criterion G1 may apply.)
It is a cross-namespace redirect out of article space, such as one pointing into the User or Wikipedia namespace.
If the redirect is a novel or very obscure synonym for an article name
If the target article needs to be moved to the redirect title, but the redirect has been edited before and has a history of its own, then the title needs to be freed up to make way for the move. (Speedy deletion criterion G6 may apply.)
If the redirect could plausibly be expanded into an article, and the target article contains virtually no information on the subject.

Does the redirect need a redirect template? Consider using WP:TWINKLE or WP:CAPRICORN to assist. Here are some of the most used

{{R from move/except‏‎}}
{{R from move‏‎}}
{{R from modification‏‎}}
{{R to diacritic‏‎}}
{{R from title without diacritics‏‎}}
{{R from other capitalisation‏‎}}
{{R to section‏‎}}
{{R to disambiguation page‏‎}}
{{R from alternative name‏‎}}
{{R from sort name‏‎}}
{{R from alternative scientific name‏‎}}
{{R from alternative spelling‏‎}}
{{R to scientific name}}
etc.

If you find an unpatrolled redirect that is at RFD, or you send a redirect to RFD, mark it as reviewed.

Is somebody creating a lot of redirects, and you are finding zero problems with them? Consider posting an application for them at the redirect autopatrol list. They need around 100 redirects to qualify. Use xtools (and select "only include redirects") to check number of redirects created.

If a redirect or blanked page is converted to an article, it will be marked as unreviewed and placed in the new pages feed. This is to avoid people hijacking reviewed redirects to create unreviewed articles.

I'd say that on a typical day of patrolling the back end of the queue, I'll go through 150-300 [redirects], send 5-10 to RfD, tag around 5 with G5 or R3, and either retarget or convert-to-dab 5 more. Attack redirects are less frequent, I'll come across a handful of attack redirects per week. --Rosguill

Other issues

Article clean-up

The curation toolbar will highlight some common issues:

Orphaned articles, or articles that have no internal links to other Wikipedia articles. Sometimes orphans result from a mistitled article (see above). It may be helpful to search for mentions in other articles.
Articles without sources: The best time to ask for sources is when an article creator is still online and logged in. Tag the article with an appropriate tag in Page Curation and leave a message for the creator.

It is common for New Page Patrollers to also help with basic article cleanup. Common examples include:

Stubs are the beginnings of meaningful and encyclopedic articles but which need a little help: Place an appropriate stub notice at the end of a stub.
Bold face the article title in the lead.
Link relevant terms.
Overlinking – remove unnecessary internal links.
Phrase the article in complete sentences, including the first sentence.
Condense orphaned sentences into existing paragraphs.

Moving new content to other projects

Dictionary definitions. These can be transwikied to Wiktionary or converted into disambiguation pages. Many may be redeemable as Wikipedia articles, if sufficiently refactored, rewritten, and expanded.
Primary source texts. These should be transwikied to Wikisource.
How-tos or instructional materials. In some cases, these can be transwikied to Wikibooks; however, it's often possible to turn these into meaningful articles by rewording the text to make it more descriptive and less prescriptive. Try to improve an article by adding some more material before resorting to moving it out of Wikipedia.

Redirects converted to articles

Shortcut

WP:NPPREDIRECT

If a redirect or blanked page is converted to an article, it will be marked as unreviewed and placed in the new pages feed. This is to avoid people creating redirects for inappropriate pages and later converting them into articles to avoid review. If you see an old page (such as one from 2005 or 2016), it is likely that it was recently converted from a redirect. In these cases, you should check the page history, and if the page is not appropriate as an article, restore the redirect and notify the person who created the article. If you are reverted and you still believe the article is inappropriate, you should list it at Articles for Deletion. Redirects that are currently listed at Redirects for Discussion should simply be marked as reviewed.

Technical details

Namespaces subject to review – Mainspace and userspace are the two namespaces where the page curation toolbar displays. NPPs do not need to patrol userspace and are encouraged to focus on mainspace.
Users subject to review – Most editors will have their mainspace page creations show up in the new pages feed as unreviewed until marked as reviewed by an NPP. Editors with the autopatrolled permission and global rollbacker permission are an exception: their pages do not show up in the new pages feed, and their pages are marked as reviewed when created. Admins are no longer autopatrolled by default, but can self-assign the permission if desired.^[14]
Who can review which articles – New page patrollers are prevented by the software from reviewing or unreviewing their own articles, unless they are autopatrolled.
Autopatrol and page moves – For users with the autopatrolled permission, a page move will autopatrol an article if it is a move from outside of mainspace into mainspace. So an autopatrolled user should be careful, for example, when accepting AFC drafts, as these will be autopatrolled. However, the software lets them unpatrol it if needed.
Search engine indexing
- Articles – Unreviewed articles are prevented from being indexed by search engines for 90 days.^[15]^[16] After 90 days, the article remains in the queue to remind us to eventually review it, but search engines can begin indexing it.
- Articles sent to AFD – Sending an article to AFD and marking it as reviewed will not allow search engine indexing (unless the article is older than 90 days), because there is a NOINDEX template used in the AFD notification template.
- Redirects – Redirects are automatically marked as reviewed after 6 months.^[17]^[18] As soon as they are marked as reviewed, they become indexable.
Patrol versus review – There is a difference between an article being marked as patrolled (which uses the patrol log) and marked as reviewed (which uses the page curation log). Clicking [Mark this page as patrolled], which appears in the bottom right corner of some pages, makes an entry in the patrol log only. Clicking the green check mark in your toolbar always creates an entry in the page curation log, and often creates an entry in the patrol log, but not always. Most people use the "mark as reviewed" button, so most people should be checking the page curation log exclusively. You can apply the "Reviewing" log filter if needed, which will filter out non-reviewing from the page curation log. The patrol log should usually be ignored. [Mark this page as patrolled] appears when the Page Curation tool bar is closed (see next bullet), and in namespaces where PageTriage doesn't operate (for example, draftspace and template space).
Closing and re-opening the toolbar – If you close the Page Curation toolbar completely, by first minimizing the toolbar using the top toolbar button, then clicking the top X icon on the mini-toolbar, it will disappear completely. In this situation, to get the toolbar back, you need to click "Open Page Curation" in the left menu, in the "Tools" section.

Notes

^ In the specific case of contested moves to draft, this guidance is codified as WP:DRAFTOBJECT, but Wikipedia's overarching policies on consensus, edit warring, and dispute resolution apply to all actions by new page patrollers.
^ In the specific case of contested moves to draft, this guidance is codified as WP:DRAFTOBJECT, but Wikipedia's overarching policies on consensus, edit warring, and dispute resolution apply to all actions by new page patrollers.
^ Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2021 review/Proposals#Passed: 7D Remove autopatrolled from default toolkit
^ https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageTriage/blob/3119b474f6ecdd0e1fe19e3bcd6c248bdb84b9c3/extension.json#L639-L641
^ phab:T310974
^ https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageTriage/blob/3119b474f6ecdd0e1fe19e3bcd6c248bdb84b9c3/cron/updatePageTriageQueue.php#L80-L102
^ phab:T227250
^ In the specific case of contested moves to draft, this guidance is codified as WP:DRAFTOBJECT, but Wikipedia's overarching policies on consensus, edit warring, and dispute resolution apply to all actions by new page patrollers.
^ Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2021 review/Proposals#Passed: 7D Remove autopatrolled from default toolkit
^ https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageTriage/blob/3119b474f6ecdd0e1fe19e3bcd6c248bdb84b9c3/extension.json#L639-L641
^ phab:T310974
^ https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageTriage/blob/3119b474f6ecdd0e1fe19e3bcd6c248bdb84b9c3/cron/updatePageTriageQueue.php#L80-L102
^ phab:T227250
^ Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2021 review/Proposals#Passed: 7D Remove autopatrolled from default toolkit
^ https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageTriage/blob/3119b474f6ecdd0e1fe19e3bcd6c248bdb84b9c3/extension.json#L639-L641
^ phab:T310974
^ https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageTriage/blob/3119b474f6ecdd0e1fe19e3bcd6c248bdb84b9c3/cron/updatePageTriageQueue.php#L80-L102
^ phab:T227250

[6] It's recommended to provide more details, if the deletion reason is not apparent.

[7] Do not tag with the banner for WikiProject Templates.

[1] Do not confuse notability of a topic, with the very low bar necessary to assert importance or significance in the text. Notability assesses the merits of the subject to warrant an article based on evidence out in the world of substantive publication about the topic in reliable, secondary, independent sources, whereas, A7 looks exclusively to the current content.

[draftifyoldrfc-2] Cite error: The named reference draftifyoldrfc was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[4] Do not confuse notability of a topic, with the very low bar necessary to assert importance or significance in the text. Notability assesses the merits of the subject to warrant an article based on evidence out in the world of substantive publication about the topic in reliable, secondary, independent sources, whereas, A7 looks exclusively to the current content.

[13] It's recommended to provide more details, if the deletion reason is not apparent.

[14] Do not tag with the banner for WikiProject Templates.

[18] It's recommended to provide more details, if the deletion reason is not apparent.

[19] Do not tag with the banner for WikiProject Templates.

[15] Do not confuse notability of a topic, with the very low bar necessary to assert importance or significance in the text. Notability assesses the merits of the subject to warrant an article based on evidence out in the world of substantive publication about the topic in reliable, secondary, independent sources, whereas, A7 looks exclusively to the current content.

[draftifyoldrfc-16] Cite error: The named reference draftifyoldrfc was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[3] In the specific case of contested moves to draft, this guidance is codified as WP:DRAFTOBJECT, but Wikipedia's overarching policies on consensus, edit warring, and dispute resolution apply to all actions by new page patrollers.

[5] In the specific case of contested moves to draft, this guidance is codified as WP:DRAFTOBJECT, but Wikipedia's overarching policies on consensus, edit warring, and dispute resolution apply to all actions by new page patrollers.

[8] Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2021 review/Proposals#Passed: 7D Remove autopatrolled from default toolkit

[9] ttps://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageTriage/blob/3119b474f6ecdd0e1fe19e3bcd6c248bdb84b9c3/extension.json#L639-L641

[10] :T310974

[11] ttps://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageTriage/blob/3119b474f6ecdd0e1fe19e3bcd6c248bdb84b9c3/cron/updatePageTriageQueue.php#L80-L102

[12] :T227250

[17] In the specific case of contested moves to draft, this guidance is codified as WP:DRAFTOBJECT, but Wikipedia's overarching policies on consensus, edit warring, and dispute resolution apply to all actions by new page patrollers.

[20] Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2021 review/Proposals#Passed: 7D Remove autopatrolled from default toolkit

[21] ttps://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageTriage/blob/3119b474f6ecdd0e1fe19e3bcd6c248bdb84b9c3/extension.json#L639-L641

[22] :T310974

[23] ttps://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageTriage/blob/3119b474f6ecdd0e1fe19e3bcd6c248bdb84b9c3/cron/updatePageTriageQueue.php#L80-L102

[24] :T227250

[25] Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2021 review/Proposals#Passed: 7D Remove autopatrolled from default toolkit

[26] ttps://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageTriage/blob/3119b474f6ecdd0e1fe19e3bcd6c248bdb84b9c3/extension.json#L639-L641

[27] :T310974

[28] ttps://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageTriage/blob/3119b474f6ecdd0e1fe19e3bcd6c248bdb84b9c3/cron/updatePageTriageQueue.php#L80-L102

[29] :T227250

[note 1]

[note 2]

[1]

[note 3]

[2]

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[b]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[a]

[b]

[note 1]

[note 2]

[8]

[a]

[b]

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

[17]

[18]

@@ Line 382: / Line 382: @@
 ===Maintenance tags===
 If needed, add [[Wikipedia:Maintenance tags|maintenance tags]] to the article. This can be done via the Page Curation toolbar or via Twinkle. Examples of maintenance tags include {{t|Copy edit}}, {{t|Orphan}}, {{t|POV}}, {{t|Advert}}, tags related to sourcing, {{t|COI}}, {{t|UPE}}, {{t|Dablinks}}, {{t|Bare URLs}}, {{t|Underlinked}}, {{t|No footnotes}}, {{t|More footnotes}}, {{t|Over-quotation}}, {{t|Criticism section}}, and many others.
+== Disputes and consensus ==
+{{shortcut|WP:NPPCON}}
+As a new page patroller, any action you take other than marking an article as reviewed is not likely to be welcomed by the page creator. In the best case scenario, they will simply listen to your feedback and address the issue promptly. However, disputes are common. Whether it is about a cleanup tag, a deletion nominations, a move to draft, or something else, try to approach these disputes with humility and empathy. Avoid the temptation to "pull rank" over a user who probably [[WP:BITE|knows a lot less about our processes than you do]]. Even if you are completely correct in your judgement of an article, it is not surprising that the creator might be offended if you tell them that there is something wrong with their contribution, or threaten to remove it. New editors might be unfamiliar with our practice of [[Wikipedia:Be bold|not asking permission to fix problems]] – or its obverse, not being offended when somebody fixes or points out a problem with your work. Experienced editors might be reluctant to acknowledge that they aren't immune to making mistakes. All reviewing disputes are more likely to be resolved amicably if you try to understand the other party's point of view before putting forth your own.
+It is especially important to remember that the <small><code>new page reviewer</code></small> right gives you the ''technical'' ability to mark pages "reviewed"; it does not give you any special decision-making powers over new articles. Like all advanced rights holders, from page movers to bureaucrats, the way you use your tools is subject to the [[Wikipedia:Consensus|consensus]] of other editors. For example, if you move a page to draftspace, and the creator of the article objects to this, there is ''no consensus'' on where the page should be. The [[WP:BRD|recommended course of action]] here is to return the page to the state it was in before the dispute begin (i.e. in mainspace), and then attempt to solve it through discussion, for example by opening an [[WP:AFD|AfD]].<ref>In the specific case of contested moves to draft, this guidance is codified as [[WP:DRAFTOBJECT]], but Wikipedia's overarching policies on [[Wikipedia:Consensus|consensus]], [[Wikipedia:Edit warring|edit warring]], and [[Wikipedia:Dispute resolution|dispute resolution]] apply to all actions by new page patrollers.</ref> You should not simply insist that the page remains in your preferred namespace because you are a new page patroller and the other editor is not.
 == NPP professionalism ==