Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion

Criteria proposal

Hi. How about CSD for POV forks? Thanks. ~AH1^(TCU) 17:32, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, deciding whether or not something is a POV fork is a bit too subjective for CSD. And are there really so many POV forks that they can't be dealt with through other processes (PROD, AFD)? Hut 8.5 17:43, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

I also think that it would be way to easy to abuse. --76.69.165.93 (talk) 17:50, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi. No, I meant POV forks as subpages of the main article, not POV articles and pages in general. Thanks. ~AH1^(TCU) 23:20, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

"A content fork for an article in the main namespace as a subpage of its subject's article (such as John Doe/Criticism of John Doe for example). Note, that this excludes subpages made for the rewriting of an article due to BLP or copyright concerns." ViperSnake151 23:39, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Fails 1, 3, and possibly 4 at the top of this page. Who uses subpages anymore in the main namespace anyway? Stifle (talk) 09:11, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Asserted notability and masonic Grand Lodges

There's an argument currently going on about Grand Lodges and whether they should be put through speedy deletions under A7, or whether as a matter of course they should go through prods and AfDs. On one side of the argument is that the speedy deletions tags are mostly being applied to articles with little in the way of external independent links and there is no evidence (or assertion) of the idea that they are not three men and an apron. The other side of the argument is that these call themselves Grand Lodges and so within the very title there is an assertion of notability and national coverage. This makes it an unsuitable candidate for a speedy deletion (although in some cases these will fail an AfD).

There is another point about membership of an international grouping, but this is incidental.

Some background is here:

• Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive463#JASpencer
• User_talk:JASpencer#Notability_of_Grand_Lodges
• Wikipedia_talk:Notability#Questions_as_to_Speedy_deletion_criteria

Which view is right?

JASpencer (talk) 20:56, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

From what I've read in a couple of the AfDs, I can make a good case that these are not uncontroversial deletions. That alone would disqualify them from speedy and prod.--Fabrictramp | talk to me 21:04, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

If an article has an assertion of notability, even if the assertion is undocumented, or false, then the article is not eligible for A7. If, as a rule, Masonic Grand Lodges are considered notable than an assertion that an organization is one would make an article ineligible for A7. Dsmdgold (talk) 10:11, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

JASpencer misinterprets what I have been trying to tell him... I am discussing articles that do not contain any assertion of notablility. Take this article for example. As that article stood, I feel it would clearly have qualified for A7 speedy. It contained no assertion as to what makes the org significant or important. (Note: I have subsequently added such an assertion, so it no longer qualifies... but prior to my edits, it did.) Am I missing something here? Blueboar (talk) 14:15, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

G8 and Copyvios

I have noticed a problem with G8 being used to delete talk pages without reading the entries, even on very short pages. This is a problem because the reason that G8 does not apply is often apparent there. It is established procedure for copyvio articles to have a new "clean" article started at Talk:article_name/Temp and normally to note this fact on the main Talk page, then when an admin reviews the copyvio, he or she should generally move the /Temp article back and delete the redirect. This doesn't always happen, however, as there is a lot of misunderstanding of copyvios. Some people incorrectly blank the pages, others delete without reading anything (especially if they come across the article independent of WP:CV). The /Temp article ends up hanging out there, generally unnoticed, while the underlying talk page is deleted under G8. I bring this to everyone's attention here in hopes that someone has some good ideas on how to prevent this, as well as to simply get the word out. If there is discussion of a copyvio please look for a /Temp page.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 03:14, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Just to clarify, you're only talking about articles tagged with {{copyvio}} and not those tagged as G12s? It would be very rare that a G12 would have /temp page because the only way anyone even knows to make a /temp page is through the copyvio tag. If this is the situation you're talking about, why not add to the copyvio tag, in glaring red, right above where it says "By default, this template blanks...", something like: Note to administrators: If the following link is blue ([[{{PAGENAME}}/Temp]]), a temporary page exists per the instructions given below, which should be assessed and if acceptable, moved to this name after this page is deleted. That would take care of the G8 issue as well, because talk pages are almost always deleted as an afterthought following the article deletion.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:18, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

That sounds like a great idea. I'll bring that up over at WT:CV WT:CP at the template page. Thanks. (and no, I was not talking about G12 - commonly I create the /Temp on initial review with the intent to come back when the 7 days are up, or I create a shell and ask a subject matter expert to work on it, only to find when I return that either the talk page, the /Temp page or both, have been deleted under G8).--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 00:03, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Great. It just might work. It surprises me that any of this is necessary. I would have thought most of those people who worked on copyvio review would be regulars and would thus check for /temp pages as a matter of course.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 03:42, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

So far as I know, I'm the only volunteer at WP:CP at the moment. I've been working it for about a month? In any event, looking for the bluelink is on my to-do list. Hopefully no accidents have happened. Nobody has informed me of any, anyway. :) Of course, other admins undoubtedly arrive at copyright problems via Category:Possible copyright violations. But looking for that bluelink is in Wikipedia:Copyright problems/Advice for admins, so it may be that admins who don't look for the bluelink may not be reading the instructions. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 11:55, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, there goes my theory on regulars. I've never worked on the administrative end of copyright problems but you're making a good case for some extra hands.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 18:49, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

If you get a hankering, come, hang out. We can pretend we have popcorn. :) (Alternatively, I suppose, we could separately and individually actually make popcorn....) It's gotten a bit easier around there since images have been removed to WP:PUI. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 20:25, 20 August 2008 (UTC) (P.S. To be more accurate, I should say "are in the process of being removed". There's a lag in actual changeover.)

It wasn't a recent happening, certainly nothing you did Moonriddengirl. I did recently find a /Temp all by it's lonesome recently. The page had been deleted and apparently the /Temp wasn't ready to move back, the Talk page got deleted leaving the /Temp all alone. I don't think that one actually came out of WP:CP, but I've certainly seen them there. I have been out of circulation for a few months but when I'm around I try to make my rounds of all the copyright pages. Lately no time to be a regular anywhere.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 00:11, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

[personal attack by Michael Hardy redacted]

This discussion isn't helpful. Mistakes were made, let's move on. Stifle (talk) 09:03, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

I disagree, and I think the fact that you're wrong about this point is of considerable importance. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:35, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

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

---

An anonymous vandal comes along and blanks a page. It was a biographical article. So then our heroic ever-vigilant speedy-deletion people come along, tag it for speedy deletion because it doesn't (after the vandalism) assert notability. And it gets deleted accordingly.

True story.

I restored the edit history.

I hope you're all proud of this. Michael Hardy (talk) 05:52, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

What's your point? Mistakes happen... they can be fixed and apparently were in this case. Do you somehow think a mere policy page was responsible for a tagger/admin acting too hastily? No policy can ever be written such that someone, somewhere, won't make a mistake. But Wikipedia is built so that all mistakes can be undone. Guilt tripping people over already fixed oversights seems unneeded. --Rividian (talk) 06:15, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I have suggested on this page such things as:

• Before speedy deletion, one should look at what articles link to the article in question. Sometimes that sheds light and suggests further edits that would make speedy deletion inappropriate.
• Before speedy deletion, one should Google the topic to see if that indicates anything about notability. Sometimes it does.
• One could look at category tags; that sometimes tell one where to look for further information about notability.

...and various other things of that sort. And I meet with opposition to these suggestions, and with orders to bow down to those who spend most of their time on speedy deletions, like a plantation slave to an overseer.

I thought these problems had gone away after I raised a big fuss about them in March 2008. And they had. But I'm starting to wonder if they might be starting to re-emerge. Michael Hardy (talk) 07:24, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

What about "before one speedies an article for being blank, one should check if it just got blanked by a vandal"? I somehow seem to be avoiding being hit by falling chunks of sky right now. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 09:32, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree entirely with Michael on this, a little more care from both taggers and deleting admins could reduce the effects of vandalism, and also reduce the tension between creators and deleters. DuncanHill (talk) 09:42, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

We already have notices to warn admins about the problem - the deletion form asks the admin to look at the links to the page, and the speedy deletion tag itself asks the admin to check the history, logs and links before deleting the page (and this is going to be far more visible than something added to the policy page). Wikipedia is going to delete around 40000 articles this month and if one or two have this problem that means that well over 99.99% didn't - there's no need to describe it in such overblown language. Hut 8.5 09:52, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Do you really think mistakes are somehow never going to happen when there are thousands of speedy deletions every day? This thread is rather insulting... "Speedy deleters help vandals"? Because one guy made a mistake that's been fixed? It's very rude to come in here and accuse us of helping vandals because you found one mistake that no one argues was a good deletion. mistakes happen, this page advises checking the edit history first, everyone knows this was a bad deletion because that didn't happen. What can we really do now except insult people over an already fixed error? Apparently not much. --Rividian (talk) 12:42, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

When you hit the delete button the first line of the page that comes up reads "Warning: The page you are about to delete has a history". We are supposed to check the edit history for just this reason. That said, I am certain that every admin has deleted article without checking the edit history, and every admin, including me, has had their sloppiness bite them in the posterior. You learn from your mistakes. Dsmdgold (talk) 10:20, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I couldn't agree more. No we're not proud of it. What do you want us to do about it? Aside, that is, from the jaw-droppingly obvious don't-make-the-same-mistake-again? Happy‑melon 11:08, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Holy shit, you found a mistake! Break out the gibbet.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:20, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

This has already been dealt with at Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2008_August_16#Cassi Davis (closed). Alexf made a mistake by not checking the page history. The article has been restored, Alexf has acknowledged the mistake and will presumably try not to do it again. Short of tarring and feathering him, I'm not sure what else we're supposed to do here. Incidentally I've informed Alexf of this thread, as Michael seems to have forgotten to do that. Iain99^{Balderdash and piffle} 12:10, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you Iain for letting me know (Michael should have but forgot I guess). As many admins I do a fair amount of CSD work. I have deleted what seems like hundreds of crap articles (most of them garage bands - what is it with these kids?). Yes, mistakes happen. As you already now I acknowledged a mistake in the Cassi Davis case. Also as pointed above you will notice that over 99.9% of the deletions are correct. When you are faced with a flood of crap, mistakes are bound to happen but they are easily corrected and restored. What else can I say other than try to be careful. No matter what the policies are, mistakes will always happen. Conversely I have seen (one just recently) pages that should have been challenged and deleted and they were allowed to live for months for whatever reason. That is also a mistake. We have to live with them and correct them when we see them. -- Alexf⁴² 12:23, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Alexf wrote "you will notice that over 99.9% of the deletions are correct". I will notice nothing of the sort. That number is fiction. It is patent nonsense. I challenge anyone to be specific about how it was computed. Show me the precise data. Michael Hardy (talk) 15:02, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

In June 2008 Wikipedia deleted 37400 articles. You have presented one example of an article being incorrectly deleted as the deleting admin didn't check the edit history. Suppose there are three a month, that equates to 0.008% of all deletions. This is not a massive, widespread problem, this is one admin making a mistake that was corrected. Alexf has made 5142 deletions and I would be very surprised if there wasn't one bad one in there somewhere. People make mistakes - big deal. I fail to see what this thread is trying to accomplish. Hut 8.5 15:16, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

All this came within minutes of my finding this absurd edit, and that article actually got deleted, and I restored it; and this edit. In the latter case, the "algebraic geometry" and "homological algebra" category tags were there when the speedy deletion proposal was put there, and the proposer could easily have looked further. Cooler heads prevailed and a badly needed "context" tag replaced the absurd speedy-deletion proposal and the article got cleaned up. Remember that last February and March the mere fact that a new article was on mathematics was treated by numerous admins as grounds for speedy deletion and that went on daily for maybe about six weeks. Michael Hardy (talk) 14:56, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Again, what is the point of this thread? No one denies that there have been various silly deletion taggings over the years. In an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, there will be some bad edits. What are you expecting to accomplish here, other than embarassing some people who made bad deletion taggings? --Rividian (talk) 15:03, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. What do you want, Michael Hardy? Happy‑melon

I'm impressed that Michael Hardy has never made a mistake of any kind and so can cast the first stone. Seriously, though, this particular mistake was acknowledged, corrected and apologized for. Yes, there are some bad apples on Wikipedia. Those are the editors who need to be dealt with, and I can't see that this is one of those cases.--Fabrictramp | talk to me 15:26, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I am closing this thread which serves no purpose but to be divisive over a resolved issue that resulted from a good faith error--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:29, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

(as the discussion is continuing, I removed the archive tag that had been placed at this point.) DGG (talk) 17:13, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I object to the archiving of this thread, as well as the offensive tone of some of the comments. Michael came here in good faith to point out a problem (and it is not a one off). He then gets attacked, and editors who should know better make up figures like "99.99% of deletions not having any problem". Care to give some evidence of that? Well it is not good enough. This self-satisfied "so what if we make mistakes, how dare you suggest ways of preventing them" attitude is anti-collegiate and demoralizing. DuncanHill (talk) 15:55, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

If the discussion had actually generated any usable suggestions for preventing such mistakes (other than those that are already in place) then there would not have been any problem. The issue was not that the discussion highlighted mistakes so much as that it highlighted mistakes for no apparent purpose other than to disparage those who made them. Happy‑melon 16:27, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

DuncanHill, I can tell from your comments that you are upset. But I would ask you to take a minute and try to look at all of the comments, including the ones you just made, with a neutral eye. The only actual proposal made for how to improve the speedy deletion process (which was not made in the initial post) pretty much duplicates what WP:SPEEDY already says: "Before nominating an article for speedy deletion, consider whether it could be improved, reduced to a stub, merged or redirected elsewhere or be handled with some other action short of deletion. If this is possible, speedy deletion is probably inappropriate."

If you or anyone else has a constructive suggestion for how to get more editors AND more admins to follow along with this, I'd be delighted to hear it. I am probably just as frustrated as you are about the number of articles that are inappropriately speedied, especially under G1 patent nonsense, when a 15 second google search would show the article can be improved. If the debate can become constructive, then by all means lets continue. If it's going to be a forum for name calling, then the debate is not at all appropriate (or even a debate).--Fabrictramp | talk to me 16:53, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I never objected to people suggesting solutions. To characterize my argument as "so what if we make mistakes, how dare you suggest ways of preventing them" is as insulting as the original poster. He came in and seemed to be abusing everyone involved in speedy deletion, as if one mistake somewhere means we should all be ashamed of ourselves. That's just silly and should be pointed out as such. When pressed he offered some obvious suggestions for how to make better calls, most of which are already in policy... so his participation has been very long on the insults and short on useful suggestions. it's sad that you joined in on the insulting, DuncanHill. --Rividian (talk) 22:14, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, OK here's a useful suggestion - follow the policy. Maybe that would help. DuncanHill (talk) 22:19, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

So are you saying I don't follow CSD policy? I don't understand why you're telling me to follow it... I'm all for following it. Your comment doesn't explain why you felt the need to badly distort my comment. --Rividian (talk) 22:22, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

You asked for a useful suggestion to prevent such improper speedies. I never said that you weren't following policy, but there are a significant number of admins who do ignore policy in this area. DuncanHill (talk) 22:24, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

That's like saying the solution to a crime problem is for more people to obey the law. It's basically not useful advice at all. --Rividian (talk) 22:27, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, OK, I agree it is not useful to ask such admins to follow policy, as they know they are untouchable. I also agree that some of our more enthusiastic taggers are unlikely to be motivated by a desire to abide by policy, but at least there will be some good-faith editors and admins reading this who may be inspired to take a closer look in future. DuncanHill (talk) 22:30, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, that's all fine and well, but it seems like we'll always have people who don't feel like following policy if they aren't forced to do so... no ammount of asking people to look more closely will really change that. We can introduce consequences for serial ignorers of CSD, or make DRV more likely to overturn violations of CSD... but that's about it. At any rate, none of this justifies the original poster running around insulting everyone involved in CSD because he's found a handful of bad taggings made in the past year. --Rividian (talk) 22:38, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it is possible to get many more admins to follow what speedy actually says. There are too many who enjoy the ability to disrupt the encyclopædia by creating drama or driving away editors. In my time on Wikipedia I have seen several workable suggestions to improve speedy, but absolutely no interest in improving speedy from the majority of deletionist admins or wannabes. DuncanHill (talk) 17:06, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I just want to be clear on what you're saying; you're talking about a subset of admins who you feel are a problem, rather than every admin? And you feel that a debate is a waste of time? If I've got this wrong, please enlighten me. Thanks!--Fabrictramp | talk to me 17:21, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, and every debate on this subject I have seen has failed to achieve anything. DuncanHill (talk) 22:21, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

We do need to continue this. I've long intend to do an analysis of the speedies. There are 3 sorts of incorrect speedy deletes: where t he article is valid, usually as a stub, or the sort of vandalism mentioned at the top. where the article would not hold up in the end, Second, where the article would not have held at Afd but did not meet the criterion for speedy given. Third, where the article did meet the critrion but could be fixed, and the ones that are correct. Let me use my estimate of my own work to avoid the charge of blaming others: I think that 80% of the speedies I place are correct, and unfixable. I think another 9% might be fixable, but I didn't have time or energy to fix them (eg copyviols that could have been stubbified). Perhaps 1% of the time I speedy an article that didn't literally meet the criteria, but is hopeless anyway, And I known i make at least 1% outright mistakes. There are probably some admins more careful than I; I know there are some much sloppier, and there are even some who deliberately speedy articles that do not match the speedy criterion but which they think hopeless, or match what they think ought to be the speedy criterion. DGG (talk) 17:18, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Any suggestions for improvement?--Fabrictramp | talk to me 17:23, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I can not think of any one remedy, but I can think of many partial ones. First some very simply technical ones,

The First technical one is to automatically remove tags for notability or empty or context that are placed on articles with one hour after creation. (Actually, I'd make it 24 hours, but then we'd need a mechanism for seeing they don't missed, which as an automatic holding pen).

The Second technical one is to require notification to all major contributors, and do it by a bot that works faster than the articles get deleted. We're in an impasse here--the bot people have refused to do one unless we make it required, and people here have refused to make it required unless we have a bot.

The Third technical one is to limit the speed at which an admin can do deletions, or the length of time he can spend on that alone. I make many more errors at the end of a session of this. We have lots of admins, and no real backlogs unless a bot has done some tagging.

The First more General one is to not permit single-handed deletions except for undoubted copyvio and for undoubted BLP and clearly obnoxious vandalism. I know other admins occasional find a error in my speedy tagging and do not speedy it, and they are almost always correct.

The Second is a matter of peer pressure and attitutde, which is to always complain on the admins talk page if one thinks the deletion incorrect, andfor others to fell free to add their opinion. Michael Hardy knows his way around and is quite rightly complaining. Others who are less self-assurred should be encouraged to.

The Third extends that: to permit easier undeletion. Any admin ought to be able to restore a speedy (except blp) on request, the same way they can restore a Prod. Normally one would check with the deleting admin, but one could dod it if they are not immediately available, or even if they decline, without it being considered wheel-warring, o needing to go to Deletion Review. One could do this if either the speedy is incorrect or the subject reasonably promises improvement. Normally one would place an afd or a prod either immediately or after a day or two if not improved, and so could the original deleting admin. Obviously one would be responsible for following up what one undeleted.

And Finally, those few admins who insist on speedying for reason not provided for, after a sufficent number of unjustified clear mistake, lose the power to speedy until they are willing to certify they have reread Deletion policy and CSD.. (my idea of numbers here is 5 clear mistakes within 4 weeks) This goes along with the opposite, that no admin regard it as a big deal if someone tells him he's made a particular mistake, and it not be treated as an attempted lynch.

There's a Fifth, which doesn't apply only to speedies--that we more frequently invoke the already accepted rule that admins who habitually do not reply to queries fro users or reply rudely lose the tools altogether. DGG (talk) 17:46, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

There are some interesting points here. I don't think that a technical restriction is likely to be popular, practical, or doable (the devs would probably have a fit if you suggested it!). The admin appointment process is intended to select only those who can use the tools responsibly: if we have admins who are deleting inappropriately on a regular basis, then the problem is with the system, not the software. I approve of the "two-man-rule" approach: I almost never delete untagged articles: I either respond to CSD tags, or place them for other admins to evaluate. I can't see why this shouldn't be institutionalised. I think that calling for CSDs to be reverted as easily as PRODs threatens the whole speedy system (of catching the bulk of the crap that we all know doesn't belong here). More rigid adherence to the rules is, as always, the way to go to minimise abuse of the CSD system, I think. Proper and immediate notification of authors when their article or other page has been tagged would certainly help, and it would be nice (although currently technically impractical) for all CSD tags to have time delays in them. Ultimately, the DeletionQueue extension is probably the final solution to all this. Happy‑melon 18:27, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the well-thought suggestions. Especially T1 (Technical 1), which had never occurred to me, but makes a lot of sense.

I heartily agree with G1. I've been asking on the Twinkle page for eons to have tagging be the default, not deletion. Two sets of eyes on an article, unless it's a clear case of an attack page (or a page of the "I like cheese" variety), are always a good thing.

A comment on G2 would be that encouraging people to complain is great, but approach can be everything. We're all human, especially admins, and when someone leaves a message on your talk page that starts with "You *#&*$#&, how could you...", it doesn't encourage clear thinking on the admin's part. Perhaps people could be encouraged to ask for clarification, or to say "hey, you may not have known about xyz, would that make a difference", or to say "I was still working on the page -- what does it need, and will you userfy it for me". Honey always works a lot better with me than vinegar does -- questions and comments are the main way I learn things here. (And dark chocolate will always get my attention! LOL)

G3 is also a good idea, but care needs to be taken not to encourage "admin shopping".

G4 and G5 bring up the point that a good system for constructive feedback for admins would probably be quite valuable.--Fabrictramp | talk to me 19:07, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

A clarification on DGG's Third recommendation above. Any admin already can undo a speedy-deletion which was patently out-of-process. That was a condition set by the community when the speedy-deletion process was first proposed and approved. If another admin looks at the deleted content and, in good faith, disagrees with the assessment that the page qualified under any of the speedy-deletion criteria, the page is to be immediately restored and nominated to (then VfD, now) XfD for discussion and decision. The only exceptions at this point that I know of are WP:OFFICE actions, copyright violations (including some of the image clauses about licensing) and WP:BLP violations.
DGG and Fabrictramp are correct, of course, that we must be very careful to check for and avoid "admin-shopping" and wheel wars but the rule for speedy-deletions has always been "when in doubt, send it to discussion". Rossami (talk) 20:33, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Random section break ("Speedy deleters help vandals")

For future reference, coming into this page, saying "Speedy deleters help vandals", which sounds like an accusation that people involved in speedy deletion policy and daily administration are helping vandals, is a horribly undiplomatic, if not outright insulting and rude way to go about trying to accomplish anything. Note that no suggestions were offered, only abuse. It was a terrible way to start a conversation, and not surprisingly, it got people upset. --Rividian (talk) 18:43, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

"Tart words make no friends; a spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar." — Satori Son 20:50, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

A more subtle problem is where a good faith editor alters a formerly keepable article to the point where it's speediable - say, by stubbifying it for lack of sources, copyvio, removing an assertion of notability as being peacockery, etc. In these occasional cases, that would be fine if the article were kept and allowed to grow but the article dies from the one-two punch, sometimes coming from the same person who tags it for speedy, or by someone who notices a PROD or deletion tag. No great harm, and nothing to be done about it other than being careful. If the article is worth keeping then someone will probably notice and fix it. Wikidemo (talk) 18:53, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I've also seen this done in not-so-good faith. I know of one contributor who likes to strip marginal articles of all unreferenced content, and then nominate them for deletion (sometimes speedy, sometimes not) because they're too short. What amazes me is that most participants at AFD and admins performing speedies do not seem to have a problem with this. - Eureka Lott 19:23, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

some clarifications: Yes, I was aware that any admin can remove an erroneous speedy tag, But most of us are very reluctant to get into a situation that looks like wheel-warring or admin-shopping. I have been asked to do so a number of times, but have always declined unless the admim is unreachable or its just a technical matter. What I have done from time to time is asked the deletion admin on behalf of the other person. But then, as a known anti-deletionist I feel especially necessary not to use my tools in a way that could even conceivably be suggested as being not within the accepted standards.We perhaps need a more encouraging wording here.

The problem Wikidemo mentions is very real indeed, and we need to be more of a look out for it. This trick was especially the case during the rash of deletions of in popular culture materials,and it succeeded many times. This is more a matter of general awareness at AfD, for at least they are public and stay there for a while. A related rick used in the same circumstances was to split off content into a separate article, and then remove it as not being able to stand on its own. There seems to be an equivalent question with lists: I have seen medium-sized ones nominated for Afd as being too short, and also for being too long--as if either were a reason for deletion. But t his is a matter for deletion policy, where I am developing a number of suggestions as well.

Here's the problem with simply trusting admins: there are no intermediate sanctions. It takes something really outrageous to be worth going to arbcom, and if someone is willing to ignore reversals at Del Rev and comments at AN/I they can just go on their merry way indefinitely. So that brings us to admin reform, another major se of issues. I wouldn't mind everyone having to stand again after two years or so--there have been suggestions for sooner, but the work involved would be absurd. It took me some thought here to come up with the mildest sanction I possibly could, one that would not be humiliating. Just a renewed undertaking to read and respect the rules. I myself have no problem in telling almost anyone here to their face that I think they have done something wrong, but even after a year's admin there are a few people I am quite frankly unwilling to complaining to or about. The good faith contributors are in general the ones last likely to complain--the gamesters will misuse every trick in the book, and w would always continue to give them a very short hearing and then get rid of them--I at least totally ignore hangons placed with a clear absence of justification.:DGG (talk) 22:00, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I wonder if we shouldn't encourage open review of each others' work. I've mentioned on my talk page that speedies worry me a bit since improper speedies can go undetected for quite some time. It's a half-baked idea in that I have no idea how it would be implemented, but I suspect that a system that encourages mentorship rather than trout-whacking could be helpful. There are some admins who bulldoze through articles, but I suspect that there is also plain old-fashioned misunderstanding of the criteria. I'm pretty sure I'd be mortified to find out that I'd been misapplying the criteria. I'm completely sure I'd prefer to find out that I'd been misapplying the criteria than to continue misapplying them. :) I wish that we had better recourse to "peer counseling"...giving and getting. I'd be happy to pitch in, and I'd be happy to receive constructive advice. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 01:26, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

In my experience, most admins straighten up after a DRV or two where it's clear consensus is against them. Then there are the handful of admins who don't seem to change their mind no matter how many times they get overturned at DRV/AFD/etc. I seriously doubt mentoring will help there for obvious reasons. The problem is this thread's premise seems to be ways to get a community of millions of people never to make a single mistake... which is just silly. Mistakes will happen, we just need to worry about detecting and fixing them when they occur. --Rividian (talk) 02:40, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I wish more admins weren't quite so afraid of fixing each others' mistakes. Wheel warring is bad, yes, but merely undoing an admin action does not in itself a wheel war make. Speedy deletions are meant to be easily reversable and should, in a sense, be immune to "admin shopping": if the deletion really was uncontroversial, you won't find an admin who disagrees — whereas if you do find an admin who thinks the page should be undeleted, then, per policy, it probably indeed should be undeleted. Of course, if the deletion was recent, or due to unclear or sensitive reasons (like BLP concerns), then asking the admin who deleted the page first makes sense. But if it simply looks like something was deleted as nonsense that wasn't, or something equally straightforward, then there should be no harm in just undeleting and leaving a note to the deleting admin about it. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 10:37, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I think better tools can help deal with some cases like this. For example, a tool could show the history alongside the current page text. Another thing we can do to help prevent spurious deletions is to create a "checked for speedy deletion" tag to put on the talk page of articles that an admin does not delete. The idea here: if an article looks suspiciously like it might meet a CSD, because each admin examines it acts independently, eventually someone will decide that it does. If previous admins can assert, however briefly, that they don't think it does, this may prevent hasty action and encourage more careful review. Dcoetzee 09:45, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

The traditional way to accomplish that is "speedy via AfD": just to send the page to AfD with a note saying "not sure if this is a speedy, third opinions sought" or something like that. If it really is speediable, the AfD will probably be speedily closed after a couple of unanimous (!)votes to that effect; if not, it'll just get the standard five-day treatment. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 10:44, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

---

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Template for talk pages with archived deletion discussion

I've just created a new template, {{deletion discussion}}, for tagging talk pages that contain archived deletion discussions and should not be speedied per criterion G8. Feel free to tweak it if you can think of any improvements. Comments are also welcome. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:26, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I've tweaked it slightly, changing "Do not edit the contents of this page." to "Do not edit the contents of the deletion discussion." In most cases, the deletion discussion is only one section out of many on a talk page, so the template should not discourage editing on the whole page. –Black Falcon ^(Talk) 20:39, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Can you explain the use of this template? If I delete a page that has some mention of rationale for deletion, should I tag the talk page? What if the real discussion took place at an XfD but there is some mention or questioning of the necessity of the page on the talk page? Is there some discussion somewhere of this as the documentation is pretty lean?--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 22:08, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I think the intent is to put it on the old Talk pages that sometimes hold deletion discussion results from before we started the current process of sub-pages and dedicated discussion pages. The original process was to archive the discussion onto the article's Talk page via copy-paste (if the deletion discussion was even archived at all - things were a lot looser when we first started). Rossami (talk) 14:56, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

That is indeed one of the intended uses. Other potential uses include contested speedies, which may sometimes generate extended talk page discussion, especially in the case of some of the "not-so-speedy" image deletion criteria (see e.g. Category:Talk pages of the deleted replaceable fair use images, which pre-dates this template). Of course, in borderline cases one should exercise some discretion as to whether the discussion is actually substantial enough to be worth retaining. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 16:57, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Misuse

Is there anything that could be done about editors who misuse CSD? I mean someone who persistently nominates articles for deletion which don't meet the criteria? Would it be possible to create a template similar to {{uw-AIV}}? AndrewRT(Talk) 23:13, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

You could try raising it at WP:AIN, and alert the user with {{ANI-notice}}. --Rlandmann (talk) 23:21, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

After talking to them first, of course. Politely explaining proper policy to them in personal terms usually goes a long way. I would recommend ANI only if they defiantly keep doing it. — Satori Son 13:33, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

RfA and CSD

The editors at RfA have a minor proposal for amending the G7 criteria. See this for details.---Balloonman ^PoppaBalloon 07:02, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Is it best to expand G7 to cover this, or to create a new criterion for such deletions, particularly as it isn't a general criterion, but specific to project space (and should be an entirely new prefix?).?

W1 Procedural deletion of RfA subpages where the RfA was closed as WP:NOTNOW, the user has been editing for less than 3 months, has less than 1000 edits, and agrees to the deletion.

While this could be tacked onto either G7 or U1, I think a new criterion makes more sense. Still, why not something a bit less formulaic, like:

W1 Prematurely closed or withdrawn adminship requests, where the candidate requests deletion and (if the request was created or accepted by the candidate) has not previously applied for adminship.

Yes, this would give everybody one potential "free pass" to have their crashed-and-burned RfA deleted. I'm not convinced this would be a bad thing. I also inserted a parenthetical remark to allow declined RfA nominations to be deleted regardless of past RfAs — this would seem reasonable to me, and I believe we generally already do that for frivolous nominations. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 11:07, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Makes sense to me: NOTNOW-closed RfAs should not really affect a candidate's future hopes, and keeping the old requests around is pointless seeing as very few people will want/need to see them (and admins would be able to see them in the event that this was necessary). However, the prefix W1 is slightly odd; I realise that this is a sort of 'miscellaneous' or 'unclassified' prefix, but wouldn't X1 make more sense? RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 12:05, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I would like to retain some restriction for new users on this. We don't want long term problematic users to use it to run a 4 day "testing the water RfA" then withdraw and get it deleted, because there is scope for WP:GAME here.

I chose W1 because this is a criterion which specifically affects only the Wikipedia namespace. Mayalld (talk) 15:18, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't think we really need a CSD criteria for this... if they want to make that sort of deletion part of RFA, then it's part of RFA, not CSD. I mean, they already delete WP:RFCs in certain situations, there's no CSD for that. Adding a criteria here would just bloat this policy page unnecessarily. --Rividian (talk) 12:32, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure why this needs a CSD at all; it's not frequent enough to be a problem, it's done by obvious consensus and it lives in a strictly administrative namespace. If anyone complains enough that you'd need to quote a rule to justify the deletion then the page should not have been deleted. — Coren ^(talk) 12:37, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I do think that it is useful to record the criterion in CSD, even if it does just happen as a part of the RfA process. It allows for sensible recording of the reason for deletion in the logs. Mayalld (talk) 15:18, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

You could just as easily point to the RFA instructions. A hypothetical CSD criteria W1 would just link there anyway. --Rividian (talk) 16:28, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

• Oppose, fails 2 and 3 of the criteria at the top of this page, and possibly 1 as well. Stifle (talk) 09:01, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

How so?

• As far as I can see, there is a consensus at WT:RFA and WP:VPP that such RFAs should be deleted (point 2)
• These RFAs do arise with a reasonable degree of frequency, and certainly more often than some criteria that we already have. That coupled with a total lack of subjectivity suggests that this is worth doing (point )
• The criterion is entirely objective (point 1)

Mayalld (talk) 13:44, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

• Support provided that it's limited to new users. If a user with 15,000 edits applies for adminship for the first time and then bails out as he or she is about to crash and burn, that will be relevant when he or she tries again at 20,000. RFA can do this on it's own but it is probably worthwhile to document the criterion here so others know it exists. However, it should be simply a link to RFA and should be controlled by the consensus indicated by the participants there. The only editors who are going to really care about the details already frequent RFA. G7 should not apply unless there are no comments or !votes by others. W1 makes more sense than X1, X is a placeholder as in "XfD".--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 00:24, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

I8 clarification

Criterion I8 is written to apply only when "[a]ll image revisions ... have been transferred to Commons as revisions of the Commons copy and properly marked as such" and "[a]ll information on the image description page is present on the Commons image description page, including the complete upload history with links to the uploader's local user pages".

However, is that strictly necessary for a case such as Image:Iblinchurch.jpg? The photo was taken by Almog, uploaded to the Hebrew Wikipedia by Almog, uploaded to en.wikipedia by another user (who credited Almog), and then uploaded to Commons by Almog. Since the photo was taken, originally uploaded to a Wikimedia project, and finally uploaded to Commons by Almog, is there really any need to transfer the history of the local version of the image prior to deleting it? –Black Falcon ^(Talk) 04:35, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Not especially. I don't think anyone will get too bothered about the image being deleted in those circumstances. Stifle (talk) 09:01, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

OK, I've deleted the image and briefly noted the circumstances in the deletion summary. Thanks, –Black Falcon ^(Talk) 20:21, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

I1 same format — still required?

CSD I1 requires that an image which is to be speedied as redundant be in the same file format as the other image. This requirement dates back to before we could undelete images and was there in case there were compression artifacts or other undesirable features on the new image, or to preserve a raster version of a vector image or vice-versa. I'm not sure we need this any more... opinions? Stifle (talk) 09:09, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

I would not speedily delete raster images converted to vector format (no current tracing software is exact enough to actually produce a pixel-for-pixel identical copy if rerasterized), nor images converted to or from lossy image formats. Also, occasionally raster versions of vector images may be needed to overcome quirks in MediaWiki SVG rendering and scaling. (In particular, MediaWiki renders SVG images directly to the target size, even though often rendering to a larger size and scaling down would produce better output (but be slower). The difference is often marginal, but occasionally does make a difference.) About the only case I can think of where I could see the rule being relaxed would be non-animated GIFs converted to PNG. Do we really get enough of those (or other cases where you feel relaxing the rule would be useful) that it matters? —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 20:08, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Poorly sourced Allsvenska players

There are a large groupe of players in the top swedish football/soocer league, aka Allsvenskan, that are without any form of source regarding theire playing career, have taged them with propiet signs telling people to source the articel, however this havent happend, now wonder if they reach the criteria for speedy deletions ? --> Halmstad, Talk to me 20:28, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

I would think not. Unsourced is simply not amoung the CSD criteria. And being pro soccer league players is definitely an assertion of notability. Sorry. - TexasAndroid (talk) 20:48, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

It sounds like a good question to ask in an AfD nomination, though. I recommend picking one or two good examples and mentioning in your nomination that you would like to make it a test case for x very similar articles. If the community concludes that your test cases should be deleted, then you can make a mass-nomination and reference the prior decision. Rossami (talk) 22:38, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

A7

Is there anyway to change A7 to include anything that is not notable? For example, this page is clearly not notable, a "new term" that some user was hoping would become notable in English language. Had their been anything been covered in A7, it would have been speedy deleted, but since it isn't, we have to wait for the AfD to go through. By including anything that is "not notable" we can speed up the deletion of these kinds of pages. Ctjf83Talk 00:32, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

The topic of expanding A7 or adding a new criterion which addresses what A7 is suggested to miss has been discussed many times before and thus far always rejected on various grounds. See for example here, here, here, here, here and here. I'll just throw it out there: my last suggesion on this topic was for a new proposed criterion to cover: An article on a thing (word, phrase, game, ceremony, philosophy, religion, etc.), which indicates that it was invented/coined by the article's creator or someone they know, and does not indicate why the subject is important or significant.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:06, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

WP:DEADLINE. Darkspots (talk) 01:11, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Dark, that is a lame reason...why are there SDs if there are no deadlines Ctjf83Talk 01:19, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

It is right there at the top of WP:CSD: In this context, "speedy" refers to the simple decision-making process, not the length of time since the article was created. We delete a LOT of pages by using speedy, so PROD and AfD aren't overwhelmed by the occasional article that needs some more sets of eyes to see if the material is notable or not. I'm very serious about linking to that essay. Five days is not a huge chunk of time for an article about a neologism or a piece of software to sit there with an AfD tag on it. Darkspots (talk) 00:14, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

The reason there are speedy deletions without deadlines is that these are supposed to be in no way controversial, and speedy is a method for deletion without much red tape. And because there is no deadline, prod can easily take care of anything that isn't notable. (And is a lot more newbie-friendly than speedy).--Fabrictramp | talk to me 13:42, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

This comes up all the time, and one of the classic problems is that it's apples and oranges. It's relatively easy for the average editor/admin to determine whether something in an article about a band is a claim of importance; nearly all of us know something about music, we can tell the difference between a garage band and AC/DC. But when it gets to topics that are specialized, that the average editor doesn't know much about, we'd be pretty bad making that call. I sure wouldn't know what a claim of importance is on an article about an amino acid or a microprocessor technology. --Rividian (talk) 14:04, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm not talking about difficult topics like amino acids! I'm talking about the new term floating around Joe Shmoe's high school, that a new user or IP feels the need to add. Ctjf83Talk 21:19, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

FWIW, an IP editor can't create pages. Prod can still take care of the new term Joe Shmoe made up. Plenty of editors nominate that under G1, patent nonsense. I'm not a fan of using it that way, but plenty of other admins will delete it if you tag it as such, and even I wouldn't decline it for the really obvious cases.--Fabrictramp | talk to me 22:28, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Further comment on G1. In the example you gave, I wouldn't have slapped a G1 on it because of WP:BITE. But I doubt I'd have declined a speedy either. It's not technically in G1, but it certainly meets the spirit of G1 and could be an IAR speedy.--Fabrictramp | talk to me 22:32, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Oh, ok, I suppose I could try G1, and if it doesn't work, I'll ask you to delete it! LOL Ctjf83Talk 23:03, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

But you are talking about amino acids, as you said you wanted A7 to apply to everything. The problem is it only works when applied to certain things. --Rividian (talk) 23:04, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

UGH! You know what I mean...Not notable stupid stuff like I mentioned. But I do see your point of including everything not notable. So how can we add just the stupid stuff like the new high school word, or is it best to just use G1? Ctjf83Talk 23:22, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

I have opposed this idea in the past, and still do. Although your example is of a neologism, if you expand A7 to include any article that fails to assert notability, then people would slap articles on significant topics with speedy tags, and some of them would be deleted. Neologisms are the one area where I might support an expansion of A7, if it could be demonstrated that PROD and AFD were being overburdened by them, and a very narrow wording could be found. It must be remembered that some neologisms are notable (Truthiness, for example). I BTW woulf have declined the speedy and PRODed the article. I have done it many times with neologisms, and every one of them has been deleted. Dsmdgold (talk) 01:21, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, one criterion that might be useful is if the contributor him/herself has stated or strongly implied that it's their own neologism (as in this case). I wonder how much of this kind of stuff regularly gets deleted under G1 or G3 anyway... --Rlandmann (talk) 01:40, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

As others have said above. Additionally, you seem to be concerned mainly about articles about high schools, the deletion of which is more than controversial enough to justify a trip to AfD. Many high schools have legitimate articles, hundreds in the US alone; and considering all the regional awards and such that schools receive, it's difficult to be sure what is a legitimate claim of significance. Dcoetzee 08:58, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Why would a new term at the high school be notable? Especially one with it's own page, as opposed to a small section in the high school page. Ctjf83Talk 11:48, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I think the user above must of misread your comment and for some reason assumed you wanted High Schools deleated. --76.69.168.182 (talk) 06:55, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, IP...yes, Dcoetzee, I have no problem with high schools, just articles about the new high school phrase going around. Ctjf83Talk 19:46, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

New terms are almost exactly the sort of thing that should not be subject to speedy deletion. Identifying those relatively few that might possibly be worth articles is a matter of recognition, and the wider attention given to them the better. Often a naive editor will write an article on this, and give it with a local or inadequate reference, or none at all, and it will actually be in much broader use. Many a high school student invents something novel to them that has already been long known to others. Neologisms brought to a discussion often give surprising results when someone does the work to identify them.DGG (talk) 23:01, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

You can, however, almost universally say that articles about neologisms are dictionary entries which are more appropriate at Wiktionary than at Wikipedia. A quick transwiki and {{wi}} and the page is moved to the right project. I can not think of a mere handful of neologisms where there was sufficient sourcable content to support a full-blown encyclopedia article. Rossami (talk) 02:22, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

What do speedy deleters do?

Nobody knows the answer to that question. And there seems to be no way to find out.

User:Jitse's bot attempts to keep track of information on creation, deletion, and editing of articles bearing any of the various mathematics category tags. There are probably about 20,000 such articles, so it's a fairly big project. Some of the results are displayed on the current activity page. In particular, when an article in any of the many math categories is nominated for deletion on AfD, it appears there.

But at user talk:Jitse's bot, I asked this question:

If a new article is created and has one of the math category tags on it, and gets speedily deleted 20 minutes later, does this bot add it to the list of deletions? Remember that last February and March, for about six weeks, there was effectively a policy that if a new article is about mathematics, that was grounds for speedy deletion. Recently there was a minor recurrence (but in that case the speedy deletion tag got removed and the article improved before the deletion actually happened). Is there any way to tell how often such speedy deletions occur? And to which articles? Michael Hardy (talk) 01:59, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

and Jitse Niesen replied:

Articles will only be picked up if they exist when Oleg's bot (User:Mathbot) runs. That bots runs once a day, so an article that is deleted after 20 minutes will almost certainly not be listed.

The quantity of deletions is immense (the deletion log for the last 24 hours has about 2000 entries), so I don't want to retrieve the text of all deleted articles. Regrettably, I don't see an easy way to find out what you want. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:40, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Note the problem I mentioned:

Remember that last February and March, for about six weeks, there was effectively a policy that if a new article is about mathematics, that was grounds for speedy deletion.

That stopped abruptly in late March after I complained rather stridently on this page. At least as far as the problem could be identified. But that's limited, since Jitse's bot runs only once a day.

Is there simply no way to tell what speedy deleters are doing? So it appears. Can one find a list of speedily deleted articles in the last 48 hours bearing a particular category tag, so that people with expertise in that area can look them over and judge whether the speedy deletions were justified? Apparently not. Nobody here volunteered that any such methods exist when I raised this issue above.

Fictional numbers keep getting cited. People say some particular percent—98 or 99.99 [sic!—see above!] of speedy deletions are valid. Well, the fact is 84.63% of statistics found on the internet are made up.

As long as we are deprived of methods of finding out what speedy deleters are doing, besides giving us these bogus numerical data, we must view the whole activity and those who participate in it with suspicion. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:52, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

This is really bordering on trolling at this point, are you going to show up here every week to rehash this? One math article got tagged erroneously, that's all I've seen evidence of, yet you claim "there was effectively a policy that if a new article is about mathematics, that was grounds for speedy deletion". As far as I can tell that is simply made up, and continuing to claim it is true seems like trolling. You continue to have no suggestions, very faulty evidence, and ultimately nothing to offer but abuse. I'm sorry you saw an incorrectly tagged page once... but that doesn't justify treating everyone involved in CSD like we're vandals. --Rividian (talk) 18:40, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Also, if you're genuinely curious as to what speedy deleters do, you could help out on CAT:CSD sometime. Admins who will remove faulty tags as well as delete validly tagged articles are always helpful. You might find it's not so easy to complain about people once you've tried to do their job. --Rividian (talk) 18:57, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

You say "you continue to have no suggestions". That means you didn't read what I wrote. My suggestion was: We need a way to tell what is happening; specifically, one should be able to find out which articles bearing any specified category tags have recently been speedily deleted, so that those who have exptertise in that area can tell what's going on.

And if you try to make the charge of "trolling" stick, you will fail. Michael Hardy (talk) 19:40, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps you could provide a list of the deleted articles from that six week period? Even a partial one would suffice. --Fabrictramp | talk to me 19:49, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Just for grins, I looked up the complaint Michael has mentioned more than once. I read the entire section twice and all I see is a complaint about two articles being tagging (admittedly inappropriately) with speedy deletion tags. Both speedies were correctly declined. Only one of these two articles was tagged shortly after creation. In a separate complaint in May, an article was speedily deleted, and subsequently restored. --Fabrictramp | talk to me 21:09, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

And people had the same reaction then as different people are having now. That means something. Anyway, the idea that a complaint on this page systematically stopped the supposed conspiracy of deleting math articles is a bit naive... most people who do CSD don't read this talk page regularly (or at least post here), so the impact of one thread is not going to be that great. --Rividian (talk) 21:18, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I would guess that very few articles with category tags are speedy deleted. If you did CSD you'd know the vast majority of speedy deleted articles are not formatted because they are created very quickly and haphazardly, in a minute or two. Categorization just isn't something someone is likely to think of when creating a new article haphazardly, and haphazardly created articles are the ones that are vastly more likely to be deleted. Again, this is why it would help if you actually did CSD before coming in here and telling us how awful we are.

At any rate, to generate this information, as the person you asked said, would require a bot look at all deleted articles. Feel free to write it, the results could be useful but just demanding such an extremely complex bot be written is unlikely to get results, especially with your attitude. A CSDer is going to spend dozens of hours writing a complex bot because you came in here and said he was basically a vandal? Your attitude seems to make results almost entirely impossible, and everyone is picking up on that but you. --Rividian (talk) 20:03, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

• Fabrictramp: Can you deal with the actual suggestion I'm making, or can you only offer these specious arguments about something else? My comments that you link to may have explicitly mentioned only two articles, but it is a fact that about a half dozen articles a day got tagged for speedy deletion only because they were math articles for about six weeks in February and March, and that the problem abruptly stopped after I posted here about it. There was an isolated recurrence in May and another a few days ago.
  • Michael, don't be insulting. I'm simply asking for facts so I can assess for myself the scope of the problem. You have complained about others throwing out numbers without facts to back them up. I would like to be able to take a look at the articles you have complained about multiple times. --Fabrictramp | talk to me 16:40, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
• Rividian: You say you would GUESS that very few articles with category tags are speedy deleted. "Guess". That's the word you used. And that's the problem: You have to guess. You can't actually know. What I'm saying is we need some way to know these things rather than guessing. Michael Hardy (talk) 03:21, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
  • Well if you really think a majority of speedily deleted articles have categories, feel free to prove me wrong... until them, I'm the one who's actually done CSD work in the past year and you aren't. And feel free to point out what these 6 articles a day were which were being tagged for deletion "because they were math articles". Anyway, I seriously doubt anyone is going to undertake this massive coding project just because you came in and abused everyone involved with CSD, in fact you have already destroyed any goodwill you might have gotten. Better CSD stats is a good idea, but it's a big undertaking... not one someone is going to be inspired to take because a guy came in and compared them to vandals. If you really have nothing to say but that we suck, and we should spend hours doing your pet coding project for you... you're really just wasting everyone's time. --Rividian (talk) 03:27, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Rividian: I do NOT think the MAJORITY of speedily deleted articles have category tags. You are not my spokesperson. Don't make up crap like that and attribute it to me. What happens with the MAJORITY of speedily deleted articles has no relevance at all to this discussion. Michael Hardy (talk) 03:36, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Rividian, why would you write a comment like the following?

If you did CSD you'd know the vast majority of speedy deleted articles are not formatted because they are created very quickly and haphazardly, in a minute or two. Categorization just isn't something someone is likely to think of when creating a new article haphazardly

How is any of that relevant? What happens with MOST speedily deleted articles is not relevant here. What happens with TYPICAL speedily deleted articles is not relevant here. What happens with articles created haphazardly in a minute or two is not relevant here. I'm talking about well-written, category-tagged articles that are NOT typical of speedily deleted articles, that get speedily deleted on the grounds that an admin doesn't understand what they say and isn't willing to give that any thought. So what happens with MOST speedy deletions or with TYPICAL speedy deletions is beside the point. All you tell me is that you would GUESS something about those. Just guess. Michael Hardy (talk) 03:36, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

So in that case, take it to WP:DRV, if an admin keeps doing it, take it to WP:RFAr and have them desysopped. Abusing us won't help, we don't have the power to control all 2,000+ admins and tell them to never do something stupid. There's a system to deal with bad deletions, ones that don't follow this policy... abusing us is completely misdirecting your energy. Deal with the bad guys, not the people who try to keep the policy in order. As for the other parts of your comment, I think you really need to calm down, you sound very emotional. This is just deletion policy... it's not really that big of a deal. --Rividian (talk) 03:40, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I wasn't talking about controlling what admins do; I was talking about being able to find out what they do. Michael Hardy (talk) 03:53, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Rividian, why have you accused me of abusing you? Can you find something specific under this present heading, "What do speedy deleters do", in which I was abusive? Michael Hardy (talk) 03:55, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

You said you regard all people involved in CSD with suspicion. What if I said I distrusted everyone who works on math articles? It's just a needlessly rude thing to say, especially when you're basically asking us to write and run a very complicated bot for you. In the previous thread you accused everyone involved in speedy deletion of being out to help vandals. Maybe you aren't meaning to come off as rude, but you are making statements that being taken that way. --Rividian (talk) 04:02, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I do think everyone involved in CSD should be viewed with suspicion. I don't think it's abusive to say that. I've suggested a way to make it unnecessary to view them that way. Now maybe it's not their fault that they need to be viewed with suspicion, but it's still a fact. Michael Hardy (talk) 04:06, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, if this is your attitude, you're probably wasting your time here. I was hoping you could understand by analogy, if I came into a dispute with you and said "Well I don't trust you, you edit math articles" I'm pretty sure how you'd take it, and with good cause. Yet you think it's okay to say you don't trust anyone who's involved with CSD, because they're involved with it. If you can't see the problem, I guess there's no point in continuing. Although I'll still be watching to see if you ever come up with that list of the 270 math articles you claim were speedy deleted because they were about math... --Rividian (talk) 04:10, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

When I edit math articles, you can see what I'm doing. With deletions, it's hard to keep track. Deletion logs just show ALL deletions; you can't sort them intelligently. Any time Wikipedians works in an area that lacks that sort of transparency, one must view them with a certain amount of suspicion. Michael Hardy (talk) 16:58, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

If you want that sort of transparency, it's really on you to figure out how to accomplish it. It might be nice, but it's a very complicated thing to do, it requires either a labor-intensive bot or a major rethinking of MediaWiki. Just coming in here and saying "I don't trust you, you're basically a vandal, now completely rebuild MediaWiki to pacify me" is really a waste of everyone's time. If you want a better idea of what speedy deleters do, your best bet is to actually do some CSD work. Try to clear CAT:CSD during an off-hour. You might find speedy deletion isn't some unified team of people running around to delete math articles, but a decentralized bunch of people just trying to deal with the daily deluge of spam and vandalism that comes in. --Rividian (talk) 17:53, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Rividian, are you under the impression that I do not, about twice a week for several years now, receive missives telling me I'm part of an evil conspiracy because I edit Wikipedia math articles? Michael Hardy (talk) 18:27, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I didn't even know who you were until you came to this talk page, so I am not aware of what missives you have or have not been receiving. --Rividian (talk) 18:29, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Do you think the fact that you have been on the receiving end of unwarranted and misdirected attacks gives you license to do the same? Your past thread was a nasty personal attack on one editor which continued on to paint others with a massive brush, and this, coming right on its heels, cannot help but be seen as a continuation of the same.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 18:35, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

No. I did not attack anyone. Michael Hardy (talk) 02:41, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

You said by virtue of being involved with CSD, we helped vandals... which most of us seemed to take as an attack. Bolding your claims really does nothing to make them true. --Rividian (talk) 03:21, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Please, Michael Hardy, if you want statistics, go get them. Go have a look at the deletion log, find the CSDs, see which ones have been overturned or look suspicious, do some sums. You're an admin, you can see deleted histories - there is nothing stopping you from gathering the data yourself, by hand or using a simple script. You call yourself a mathematician, so do the maths and bring us back the answer - I'm sure there is no one here who doesn't want to have a solid figure. If a rigorous and impartial analysis indicates a problem, then everyone here will, I know for a fact, jump through fire hoops to ensure that the problem is corrected. But sitting there, demanding solutions to 'problems' which you have not proved actually exist, and criticising the efforts of hundreds of volunteers who have put thousands of manhours into a process that you could, but have not, given any assistance to; achieves only one end: to discredit you so much in the eyes of everyone who frequents this page, that any legitimate criticism you have, of a process which no one claims is foolproof or inviolate, but which seems to work correctly __% of the time, is ignored entirely by people fed up of reading what appear to be nothing more than diatribes against CSD and everyone involved with it. Now please, fill in that blank for me: you'll be doing us all a favour. Happy‑melon 12:20, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm downloading some information now, and will post some statistics about categorized CSD pages soon. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:54, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Six weeks of deletion taggings × six taggings/day × seven days/week ≈ 250 taggings. And Fabrictramp says he she knows about two improper taggings. There's a discrepancy of a couple orders of magnitude here. Michael Hardy, you've made some really good points in the past (I'm thinking about the A3 discussion, where I was very much in agreement with large parts of your argument even though I greatly disliked the way in which you made it), but you have to show real evidence to make the kind of statement that you're making here, that an informal policy existed that new math-related articles, even properly formatted and categorized ones, were being targeted and tagged for deletion in the spring. Can you provide the names of even twenty-five articles about mathematics, of any quality, that were improperly tagged for speedy deletion in 2008? Darkspots (talk) 21:08, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Also, Michael Hardy, could you please clarify if you are talking about articles simply being tagged (without being deleted), or articles that have actually been deleted? Thanks!--Fabrictramp | talk to me 21:37, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I'd like to make some suggestions.

• How about a template like "math article needs to be checked to see if it makes sense" that new-page patrollers can add to questionable new math articles, instead of speedy-delete tags they might be tempted to add instead. Then people who understand math can look over articles in that category.
• How about a bot that collects statistics on math articles. There may be a bot (one of Cobi's Cluebots, perhaps) that looks at all new pages. If so, maybe the person running that bot could be persuaded to add a math page feature; or a copy of the bot could be made and modified for that purpose. The bot could look at the contents of all new pages, and collect in a file on a local computer copies of all new pages with math category tags. Then later a human could look these over to see if any good articles got deleted.
• Alternatively, a bot could look at the list of titles of new pages. That would take less of resources than looking at the contents of new pages. It could look for math keywords like "function" and "prime" and so on in the titles.
• Is there any way that an admin can easily get a list of all deleted articles in a given category?

At User talk:Coppertwig/Archive 3#Primes / rules / patterns / location is a discussion in January 2008 about a math article which had been incorrectly marked with a speedy-delete tag as "nonsense" by someone who mistook a true statement about prime numbers for nonsense. I replaced the speedy-delete tag with a "prod" tag, which led to its deletion 5 days later

The "nonsense" criterion should be used as described in this policy, not as a general way of speedy-deleting any article one thinks deserves to be deleted. ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 21:53, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

All new math articles, if properly categorized, show up in Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity a day or so after their creation, and will often then be viewed by a human project member. So if insufficiently expert new-page patrollers would make sure that there's a category (even {{math-stub}}), the rest will likely follow. But I'm not sure how we should go about training them to do so; math is only a small fraction of the total volume of new pages created all the time and we can't expect to have similarly idiosyncratic procedures for every different project. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:49, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

"All new math articles...." That statement is false. It is only the ones that continue to exist for a sufficient time—sometimes as long as 24 hours—to which that applies. As noted above at the beginning of this discussion. Michael Hardy (talk) 02:39, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

We could append to the G1 policy "Be careful with articles which look to you as if they make no sense but may actually make sense to someone who understands the subject, for example math articles." ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 13:11, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Less is more: I'd say "Be careful with complicated topics, which may just be using very technical language." Happy‑melon 13:30, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

The problem isn't just technical language or complicated topics. The example that always comes to my mind is See-through frog, which was tagged as nonsense a minute after creation. The first page of g-hits turned up two reliable sources. (Yes, I was surprised, because it sounded like nonsense to me, too.) Unfortunately, I don't know a good way to adjust the clue level of people who mis-apply the G1 tag; they seem particularly resistant when I drop a friendly note to them. Any suggestions?--Fabrictramp | talk to me 14:27, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

TBH I'd rather that articles like that were tagged for CSD than that similar nonsense articles slipped through. If the article had been deleted, then that's another issue entirely, but as long as it was correctly identified as valid at some point in the process, I consider that a success story. That's why a two-man-rule is so important. Happy‑melon 14:40, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I can see that viewpoint, but I guess I take a more inclusionist/welcoming tact. Imagine getting your courage up and submitting your first article. Then a minute later someone slaps a "nonsense" tag on it and leaves a message saying "your article may get deleted" on the editor's talk page. Not a very friendly welcome, even if the article isn't deleted. :) I'd rather see a fact tag on the article for the 30 seconds it takes to do a gsearch, and a little less viewing NPP as a race. And, of course, sometimes the article does get deleted even with two eyes. Several times I've come across a G1 tag and the article gets deleted while I'm doing that 30 second research. Then I have to restore the article before I can add the sources I found. *sigh*--Fabrictramp | talk to me 15:01, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't think adding language like "Don't use this rule incorrectly" or "Don't make mistakes when using this rule" is helpful... it's not like someone makes a mistake because they forgot to not make a mistake, that's just silly, if someone realized they were making a bad deletion or a deletion where they didn't know enough about the topic, they wouldn't make the deletion. We can make the existing language more clear, but just saying "Don't screw this up" in every rule does nothing but bloat the policy, which means fewer people read it. --Rividian (talk) 20:20, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Math is among the least of the problems--at least we know that many people don't understand the subject and are likely to tag & delete wrongly, and there aren't too many articles to check. The misuse of the nonsense tag is pretty general, and there are a lot of times when even good admins have an overestimate of their general knowledge. There may even be some otherwise excellent admins who just don't have the intuitive special ability involved to make accurate guesses about what is actually unfamiliar to them. The only practical rule is to consistently follow up with people who make the bad tagging and especially with admins who make bad deletions. I've notice an even bigger problem with the "no context" tag--and a special problem with people who come in , often as IPs, and immediately start nominating for speedy. Perhaps at least we should require the same registration requirement as for AfD. DGG (talk) 21:04, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

"aren't too many articles to check", meaning what specifically? Here are the ones starting with one letter of the alphabet. And that's not including articles about mathematicians. It's not just new articles that get tagged for speedy deletion. Someone tagged MathWorld for speedy deletion as "blatant advertising". It's an article about a web site that was famous and respected when Wikipedia was unknown, and still is now, and the article was created when Wikipedia was unknown, and nearly 1500 (literally---check for yourself) other articles linked to it, many of them put there by professionals in the field, some by world-renowned researchers, and it didn't link to the company allegedly being advertised, and many thousands (again, literally) of external links to MathWorld were put into Wikipedia articles by professionals in the field. I think there are about 20,000 articles with math category tags on them (not category:mathematics, for the most part, but more specific math categories). Michael Hardy (talk) 21:38, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I made a list of the most recent 30,000 deletions of main-namespace articles, going back to July 30. Then I filtered out a lot of them based on deletion summary to exclude reasons like R1-R3, G3, PROD, AFD, etc. That left about 9700, of which about 3500 were A7. I downloaded the deleted content of those 9700 and searched for either categories or stub tags that indicated a relationship to mathematics (and I search for the term 'mathemat' as well). This turned up 4 articles. Two were test pages, one was deleted at the request of its author during an AFD (Declan Davis), and the final one was actually interesting, but its deletion was reasonable (here). — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:25, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of user talk page

I keep noticing user talk pages are getting deleted under U1. [1] I was under the impression that this was not done unless there is personal information involved. -- Ned Scott 23:16, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

You should have came to me first. I think typically, we do not delete such pages, however, the user had contacted us asking for this to be done, and they had a valid reason to. As there was no information in the history which needed to be retained for administrative purposes, I deleted the page. The user left the project 6 months ago anyhow – I don't think this should be an issue. - Rjd0060 (talk) 23:24, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

It's not just you, I meant to find more examples so I wasn't just focusing on that one deletion, but got side tracked. -- Ned Scott 23:35, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

• [2]
• [3]
• [4]

There's more, but my watchlist will only let me go back so far. -- Ned Scott 23:42, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

We have __NOINDEX__, page blanking, and page protection. Unless there's some personal information that can't be selectively deleted, or it's a case of simple vandalism and the user is using their talk page as a trophy page (for a lack of better words), this shouldn't be happening. -- Ned Scott 23:45, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Just a note, but {{NOINDEX}} should be used instead of __NOINDEX__ for tracking purposes. Cheers. lifebaka++ 02:44, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I've always understood this somewhat differently: Unless there is an actual reason for keeping (important discussion or something), it can be deleted, and things like personal information would override any reason for keeping. Mr.Z-man 12:52, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

"Important discussion" to my mind includes any discussion of an article where there is any conceivable possibility of it being restored in some version, or anything relating to questionable wiki behavior. Yes, these are available to admins (if they remember to track them down), but people who leave sometimes come back, and so do questioned articles; anyone patrolling should be able to see the history. DGG (talk) 20:32, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Speedy deletion for unreferenced articles

WP is improving it's authoritativeness because of the requirement for references. Editors are often given prompting to give references and unreferenced articles, sections of articles and sentences are tagged with the need for references. I would like to see the speedy deletion criteria to allow for unreferenced articles to be deleted. This makes editors who create article more cognisant of the need for references. This requirement would make it easier for subsequent editors to expand the article and it will help improve the status of WP as an encyclopedia. A claim in itself to notability should not be sufficient. If the article is notable there must be published information on it. If an editor does not include references to this published information it should be speedily deleted.

The need to provide references from the time an article is first created will weed out the non-notable articles. It will also result in a better quality article from its inception. I am annoyed by articles that are produced by some of the newbie editors who put very little effort into creating an article and leaving it to others to clean it up. This means that WP will always have a number of articles that are below the level of the rest of WP. Deleting unreferenced article will eliminate this problem and make WP more professional. Editors who wish to create articles that do not have references can always try at Wikipedia:Articles for creation. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 21:49, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

That is a horrible idea! You are probably going to get a lot of disagreement with this suggestion. For example, when I was looking earlier, I noticed Yogi Bear is unsourced. Clearly this is a notable article. Other notable articles that are unsourced are Five-card draw, History of Libya, November (how can you delete one month, and none of the rest....you can't), Nuclear physics, and Topology to name a few. Based on what links to Template:Unreferenced there are tens of thousands of pages with the unreferenced tag on them. (I suppose some might be from an unreferenced section), but either way, you are looking at deleting thousands and thousands of pages, without any consensus or review?! Horrible idea! Ctjf83Talk 22:07, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

CSD is for uncontroversial deletions. This is anything but. -Chunky Rice (talk) 22:11, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

As others have said, a truly horrible idea; the fact that anyone can contribute a poor, unreferenced stub on a notable topic is one of the sources of Wikipedia's growth and success. The comment about making "editors who create article more cognisant of the need for references" sounds punitive to me. --Rlandmann (talk) 22:16, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

This is too extreme... but it would be nice if the article creation system actually brought up a warning screen for people who created articles without references. Still, the mere presence of references is vastly less meaningful than most people seem to think... they only mean anything if someone actually checks them. I think proposals like yours, which just seem to be after increasing the number of those pretty superscript blue numbers, take our focus away from verification and fixates everyone on just adding a lot of inline citations that are rarely really scrutinized. --Rividian (talk) 22:19, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

While I'm a strong advocate for "everything must be sourced", speedy deletion isn't the right way to take care of an editing issue.--Fabrictramp | talk to me 22:28, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

No, no, no. Been proposed many times and always declined. Sources are important and should be encouraged, but should never be required in a new article just being developed; frequently the original authors are writing based on internalized expertise and time and effort (frequently by other contributors) is required to dig up sources for all of it. This process is fundamental to how we write articles and shouldn't be discouraged. Dcoetzee 00:19, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Do we already have an essay on the perennial CSD proposals? If not, we oughta' write one.

Anyway, mirroring the above, this isn't a good idea. There are way too many articles which should obviously be kept and improved which have no references. Yogi Bear was already linked, another is Air quotes (which could use some work besides). So, too many bad hits. Cheers. lifebaka++ 00:43, 27 August 2008 (UTC)