Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion/Archive 55

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G11/G12 edit summary

For pages tagged both G11 (promotional) and G12 (copyvio), I sometimes use the default delete button, which gives a default edit summary that includes G11, G12, and the url for the copyvio. Sometimes I use WP:CSDH, which forces me to choose one (and if it really is G11 I choose G11). The problem with leaving off G12 is that I hate to gloss over that problem, and the link makes the work easier for patrollers if the page resurfaces. The problem with including G12 is, if the page really is G11, then I'm going to delete it anyway; does it makes sense to waste time manually comparing every paragraph in the article to the url page? But if I don't, can I really say it's a G11 G12? - Dank (push to talk) 18:11, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

G11 is easier to see for yourself; G12 is probably better, but if you don't have any means of checking it out semi-automatically, you're probably better off deleting it as a G11. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 22:04, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. One more question, not covered in the WT:U archives. When I block a new user who's here for promotional purposes and also has an unacceptable name, is it acceptable to mention only the unacceptable editing (with template:Uw-soablock) on their talk page, and not the username problem (with template:uw-spamublock)? I'm only talking about those new users where experience suggests that nothing we say is going to reform them ... and I don't particularly want to give a spammer good advice on how they can better evade our defenses next time by picking a better username. - Dank (push to talk) 19:36, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

IMO, yYou definitely need to give a correct and valid reason for the block (that is, tell the truth), but you don't need to disclose all the reasons (the full truth). This would only apply if you think that any reviewing admin (inj case of an unblock request) would be able to figure out the username issue. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 22:19, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Good point. I'll make sure to mention the username issue if it's not clear. - Dank (push to talk) 22:48, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Heh ... one more? About WP:U5 and G11. I just deleted this, the new user's only contrib, on his userpage: "Channon Demarcus Joseph ... An American singer, R&B and pop singer, 21 years old, 2 albums that went platinum, 6 Grammys awards that he earned on his own with the help of his life experiences. He write his by using real situations he been through! His voice is so unique he have been told by many peopme and many record labels that he sounds like a female singera when he sings!" It had been tagged G11, and I can't argue that that's not promotional, from my POV ... but I think it might be easier to get him to believe that it doesn't fit with our policies on user-space that to get him to believe that he's just like a serial spammer. Is this an acceptable use of U5? - Dank (push to talk) 16:40, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

Okay I'll rephrase: anyone want to share an opinion on what U5 does and doesn't cover? I've read all the discussions in the talk archives, but sometimes actual use drifts over time. - Dank (push to talk) 14:48, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

For me, U5 is for tables of fantasy football/Big Brother/beauty contests/whatever, CVs/profiles, stories and rants, in the main. It should not be used for things that are intended to be real articles - in which case the heading will usually not be the same as the user name. These are better not on a userpage, but should be on a subpage, but newbies won't know that. Obviously G11/G12 may apply, as can hoax, attack and copyvio. Where the user name is the same as the subject of the article, G11 will very often apply anyway. But a lot think that their username is supposed to be the name of the subject. In the case quoted above, there's currently only one ghit for that name - and that's a deleted Wikipedia page, so I would think it could have been tagged U5, G11, or G3 hoax - or all three. G3? 6 Grammys and two platinums when he's had two releases? Oh yeh.... Peridon (talk) 13:46, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Suggestion for vetting a topic for A7

I'd like to suggest that unless it's obvious from a new article with no clear, credible claim of significance that there's no reason to anticipate that the topic is notable ("James Jackson is the coolest guy in the whole wide world."; "Right-Left Shoes is a shoe store located at 757 Main Street in Podunk, New Jersey."), a person considering A7 should run a Web search to see whether maybe there are signs of possible notability that the author just didn't convey very well. I generally do this for certain types of topics, such as bands and stores, as well as authors for which the article gives a list of works but no indication that the author has sold any of them or has otherwise done anything significant. If I can quickly gather a sense that notability might be establishable, then I shy away from A7. —Largo Plazo (talk) 17:43, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Well, Largoplazo, this is what they are supposed to do anyway. It's called WP:BEFORE and it's in the instructions for patrolling at WP:NPP. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:31, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

WP:BEFORE, which is on WP:AFD, is about what to do before going to AFD. In fact, one of the steps it calls for is to make sure that the article isn't eligible for speedy deletion.

If someone on NPP reads this guidance and concludes that speedy deletion is called for instead of a deletion discussion, he then needs guidance about what to do BEFORECSD. —Largo Plazo (talk) 14:27, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Clarification of CSD G13

This request if for a changing of CSD:G13's rules. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 02:44, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Proposal (Clarification of CSD G13)

This conversation is the grouping of multiple disputes which can be found at the administrators noticeboard (main conversation), my personal talk page (where it all began), and a brief topic at Articles for Creation's talk page. Please do not post at any of them and instead converse here. Thanks! EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 05:02, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

This request if for a changing of CSD:G13's rules. They currently cover:

"Rejected or unsubmitted Articles for creation pages that have not been edited in over six months."

It is requested that be changed to specify what edits do not reset the 6 month count. Minor edits such as bots adding categories and other bot edits should not reset the 6 month count.^{This is all up for change and modification.} A bot adding categories does not make the article any less abandoned, therefore should not stop the article from being tagged as abandoned and deleted. This issue spouts from the recently populated Category:AfC submissions with missing AfC template. This category was filled by a bot in December, but most of the articles within it haven't been edited by a human in a year or so. These therefore should be deleted. Any changes or additions to this request are happily welcomed. Thanks! EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 05:02, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

^{Pinging all involved in previous debates @Salvidrim!: @Tikuko: @Hasteur: @DGG: @JohnCD: @Ronhjones: @Chris troutman: @A fluffernutter is a sandwich!: @Anne Delong: @Tokyogirl79:}

• Repinging (Salvidrim!—Tikuko—Hasteur—DGG—JohnCD—Ronhjones—Chris troutman—A fluffernutter is a sandwich!—Anne Delong—Tokyogirl79) for goodness because you need a signature so the ping will work Hasteur (talk) 05:28, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
  • Pinging Fluffernutter's main account since pings can't go through redirects. ekips39 (talk) 20:01, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

The precise wording should be:Rejected or unsubmitted Articles for creation pages that have not been edited in over six months (excluding bot edits). This criterion applies to all WikiProject Articles for creation drafts in project space and project talk space, as well as any userspace drafts and drafts in the Draft: namespace that are using the project's {{AFC submission}} template.

Comments (Clarification of CSD G13)

• For speedy deletion, we shouldn't ask people to make judgements. Making it automatic as possible is ideal. While I'd be okay with excluding bot edits, anything else puts too much doubt in the process. There is minimal harm in a draft hanging around for 8 months instead of 6. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 05:17, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• I disagree and think the straight interpretation of 6 months un-edited from the current date is the safest and most expedient interpretation to make. As pointed out sometimes pages get lost or forgotten about. Perhaps a new user (which is why we have AFC in the first place) accidenally removes the AFC submission template, and the user thinks that they're done with it but because it's not in any of the monitored workflows it sits there untill someone finds it lying there If a automated process comes along to tag the article for one reason or annother with a maintenance category, that means that within 6 months of that edit there could be someone uses that maintance category to drill down a specific type of gnoming (hunting for badly wikified articles, hunting for some sort of article). It should also be noted that the foundation has said at many times that disk space is cheap (despite the doom and gloom fundraising headers). I would have seen a case for this back two years ago when the community authorized G13 and we had approximately 250 thousand drafts that were over the 6 month window, but as of this writing we're only sitting on 4 thousand drafts that are 100% eligible for G13 under the stright "as it's printed" interpertation. That's approximately 120 drafts that would be nominated for G13 a day, which is much more reasonable and encourages editors to take a look and in fact there is Category:AfC_postponed_G13 which indicates that an editor looked at the potential G13 nomination and saw a possibility in it.
  • TL:DR Oppose changing the rule as we are not under a deadline to get these potential articles deleted from wikipedia. Hasteur (talk) 05:28, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• I'm torn -- on one hand, my eventualist tendencies make me agree with Hasteur's view that "there is no deadline", there is no rush to delete these articles, and whether it takes 6 or 12 months is of little concern. On the other hand, it seems to me that the spirit under which G13 was established (deleting drafts that have not been actively improved in some time, which is to say "abandoned") would lead to the conclusion that miscellaneous bot edits shouldn't be considered relevant in determining whether a draft is abandoned or not. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 05:37, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
  • I like your reasoning here. I completely agree we are in no rush, but little bot edits shouldn't really affect the status of abandoned. If an article is abandoned, its abandoned. And because this is G:13 they can easily be restored by request. More importantly the articles I was trying to delete were never going to make it through AfD anyway (since Hasteur has got them undeleted see Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Adler bug. I had deleted this article per G:13, he restored it, submitted it and now has it up for deletion again. There was no purpose to that.) EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 05:43, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
    • Want to put the Bad faith away? I've already made some improvements to those pages, but when you have a tree stump protruding from your eye, any sliver in someone else's eye is fair game for attempting to extract. Plus using G13 only causes burecratic problems down the road if these editors come back and ask for them. If you had spent the proper time in reviewing these, you might have tagged them correctly as user blanked, or other things besides G13. Hasteur (talk) 05:50, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
      • I tagged them as G13 so if they ever wanted it back they could, something you're all for. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 05:53, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
        • (edit conflict) Some were user blankings, some were outright hopeless ones, some actually have references in them and references have been found. Hasteur (talk) 05:56, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions

• • • Also, as far as I know there's only a handful of bots that actively traverse the AfC project pages so it doesn't mean we're going to end up with hordes of pages stuck in almost-G13 limbo. But if you wanted to go on a G13 binge, the category Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions has plenty to knock yourself out on that have either languished as a "AFC draft" with no change for at least 6 months or have been declined without any improvement for 6 months. These are prime targets for G13 nomination, but as mentioned by Anne, some volunteers run drogue on these "just became eligible" drafts to look for ones that could be saved. In short, you spent time nominating for shoddy reasons, I requested refunds because it's clear your reasons were questionable at best, and I'm dealing with the drafts so as to give those that have potential a 3rd set of eyes for consideration. Hasteur (talk) 05:56, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

• At the time that the db-g13 criteria was established, there was considerable discussion about how it would be applied. The consensus at the time was that when drafts were found to be abandoned:

1. the draft creators would be notified,
2. then a time delay would be applied to give the original editors time to begin editing again or ask for help
3. then still-unedited drafts would be placed in a category and other editors would be invited to improve and submit them for approval, or manually tagged for copyvio, historymerge, etc.
4. after a further delay to give time for the previous step, any remaining drafts would be nominated for deletion under db-g13.

I would agree that automatic edits such as bot tagging or dating should not count as real edits, but only if the above process has been followed. In my opinion, editors finding abandoned pages that are not labelled as such but which have in fact not been edited by a real person for more than six months should not delete them under db-g13 until the above process has taken place. The fact that there is no process for facilitating this at the present time only means that one should be developed. I agree with Hasteur that there is no rush on this because the drafts are all not picked up by search engines. I also ask that any action that would result in the deletion of these drafts be delayed for a few months, because the draft rescuers are fully occupied right now with the tail end of the giant project to check through 50,000 old drafts, which have been whittled down to about 7,000 left now in the Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation area. —Anne Delong (talk) 06:16, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

• Now he has set his bot HasteurBot (talk · contribs) in reverse to remove all of the very useful categories from the pages, without admin approval thinking it will solve this issue. This is ridiculous. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 06:21, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
  • If you had even bothered with, you know, reading instead of spouting accusations you would have seen Sorry folks, but some users have decided that the category was good for hunting for G13 nominations. As I see this as a direct harm to the project, to the drafts, to the advocates of these potential drafts, and to the community at large, I am undoing my tagging of these articles. Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation#Blast_from_the_Past. But hey, if it prevents you from causing more harm to these potential articles then I consider it a roaring success. Only when you put down your fait acompli gun, will I consider re-surfacing these pages. As it stands right now the blast furnace of bad faith you emit tell me quite clearly that you cannot be trusted to do the right thing with respect to these articles. Tit for tat complaints are not going to get you anything productive. Hasteur (talk) 06:28, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
    • Not only can I, and I will, browse through todays HasteurBot (talk · contribs) contributions and find G:13;s but more importantly I never saw admin approval for this run through which is a serious problem. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 06:31, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Support- Miscellaneous bot edits should not reset the counter. It's clear that "abandoned" means abandoned by humans, and automated edits by bots have no bearing on this. Reyk _YO! 06:33, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Reyk True, but a bot task to raise visibility of pages that were not being looked at by any AFC volunteers or the author of the AFC page because it was not being tracked in the AFC workflow should clearly not be immediately taken from "Nobody's looking at it and it's not being tracked in any defect categories" to "Send it to G13 because the page hadn't been edited in over 6 months before the bot added the defect category"? Hasteur (talk) 06:58, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

@Hasteur: I only sent ones that had no chance of passing through AfC to a G:13. That's what you forget. But that's not what this conversation is about This is for changing the G:13 rules and not old disputes. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 07:06, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

You imported it when you pointed out that I removed the rails you were using to cause problems. Trying to hoodwink several users by saying bot edits does not explain why your actions are disruptive. Hasteur (talk) 13:06, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

• I have way to little time to read this discussion after having read the one on AN and WT:AFC. I do not know how this discussion has gone/been but based on the other discussion I felt I had to write something at least, and this place seems to be the place to do it. I agree with Hasteur that G13 should only be used if no edits has been done in the last six months. (t) Josve05a (c) 08:20, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose. Per Jose05a and Hasteur, no edits means no edits. G13 is harmful enough as it is without making it even more so. Thryduulf (talk) 11:32, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• Support - as rigorously as possible. The idea was never to make a cheap edit to avoid listing under G13 and being put back in the queue for another 6 months. No edits, whether bot or human, that do nothing to improve the article beyond its abandoned state should be allowed to reset the clock. And by that I mean such edits as ading stub tempates, cats, mainteance templates, or doing typos and CE. The spirit of the creation of G13 was aimed at authors who think they can create some nonsense, drop it in the lap of AfC and clear off and not come back. They misguidedly think that AfC will turn their drafts into articles. Some people at AfC need reminding that AfC is not the ArS Article Rescue Squadron. Any admin who is doing his job properly will soon decline a G13 if he comes across one that stands a genuine chance of being picked up by someone and turned into a real article. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:35, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose as a solution in search of a problem. The current rules are nice an unambiguous. Adding potential - even if minor - ambiguity to solve no real problem is a step back rather than forward. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 12:41, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

@Martijn Hoekstra:I'll quote Gigs: "I'm really beginning to hate this sentiment. It's used to rebut just about any proposal, and it says very little. Proposers spend a long while typing detailed descriptions of why a change might be beneficial, only to be dismissed with such a flippant and nearly meaningless sentiment as "solution in search of a problem"…[This is] a general comment on the proliferation of proposals getting shot down on these grounds which boil down to 'the status quo is just fine, change is scary and unnecessary'". Original at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Revisiting past proposal – Viewdelete userright. 15:25, 8 January 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oiyarbepsy (talk • contribs)

In this case, I do believe that change is unnecessary. I'm open to be convinced though. To what is this a solution, and why is that thing a problem? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 16:31, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

What benefit do we gain from clarifying the rules to disclude bot edits from resetting the clock? Sometimes it's just a single bot edit that triggeres renewed interest in a page (by making it show back up on watchlists). Complicating the CSD patrolling admins jobs by changing "No edits to the page for at least 6 months previous to the nominating edit" to "No edits to the page for at least 6 months prior to the nomination excluding bot and minor annoyance changes" means that the admins are going to be slowed down in their patrolling of the CSD backlog. Furthermore I think we have G13 nominations in hand as our current volunteer pool and repetive processing tools are handling the backlog perfectly well, and there's no upside (as far as I can tell) from complicating the deleting admin's duties by changing the text. Hasteur (talk) 19:54, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

• Comment: It may be worth mentioning that the idea to have mass bot deletions of pages that truly met the G13 criterion by recent edits alone was opposed by the community. So ... basically, I support per Kudpung and per my comment about denying bot deletions; admin eyes equals admin judgement. Steel1943 (talk) 12:45, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
  • Steel1943 Yes the community has overwhelmingly opposed automated bot deletion, however the community has endorsed (and WP:BRFA has approved) a collection of tasts( Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/HasteurBot 2 and Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/HasteurBot).
    1. look through AFC submissions for pages that are eligible for G13 under the strict interpertation that we haven't yet notified the creator for
    2. If you find one notify the page creator that their page is in danger of being nominated for G13
    3. Log the page name and the creator to come back 30 days from now to see if the page is still eligible for G13 (so as to give the page creator or other interested parties time to make an edit to the page)
    4. If the page is still unedited after at least 6 months + 30 then nominate the page for CSD:G13 and let an admin verify that the page was truly unedited for 6 months before the bot nominated it for G13
    5. If the page was edited between the time that notice went out and it was checked back on, then remove the notification record from the internal DB and terminate.
  • This does mean that the page can go stale, the bot notices it, the page gets a small edit, goes stale again, the bot notices again, and so on. We're extending oil tankers worth of good faith by letting a single edit (even one that changes a single whitespace character) reset the clock. Should it? Perhaps. That's why we have human eyes on the backlogs of G13 eligible and G13 nominations so that if we see the same page show up for G13 eligibility several times only to have it escape by the skin of it's teeth then we'll know to use other forms of broom sweeping (such as subjecting it to a WP:MFD debate). Hasteur (talk) 13:20, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• Support. I got the impression from the original discussion that bot edits weren't meant to be relevant for G13, that we were meaning the criterion to make exceptions for human edits only. This was my position in the original discussion (sorry that I can't find the link), and looking at the criterion just now, I was surprised to discover that this wasn't in its text. Bot-tagging with db-g13 ought to ignore pages recently edited solely by bots, since we might need to make some exceptions and leave everything up to humans — we admins are sometimes careless and might well mindlessly delete a page without noticing that a recent bot edit ought to be accounted for, so g13 ought not be applied unless the admin's checked the situation personally or unless it's been tagged by a human already. Nyttend (talk) 14:33, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• Support - the only edits which sould count towards this CSD are ones which are plausably an attempt to bring the AFC closer to being accepted. Minro edits which clearly aren't intended for that should be excluded. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 15:07, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
  • That would require judgement that is probably unsuitable for a CSD criterion. Also, if this was the community's intention then they would have written the criteria to apply to articles that are unimproved, not articles that are unedited. Finally nobody has demonstrated a need to interpret the criterion differently to how it was intended when approved. Thryduulf (talk) 15:55, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

    The main rule of the CSDs is: When in doubt, don't speedy delete. In this case, I can say that bot edits and category/stub tag tweaks not plausably attempts to bring the AFC closer to being accepted. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 05:29, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

  • Just to clsrify: I believe that a rule that "any edits which are not intended towards bringing an article draft closer to acceptance" should be excluded, would be too subjective. However, for us to come up with a list of such cases, and explicitly exclude them, would be acceptable - and in this case, I support the exceptions I stated. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 19:06, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
• Support And in fact it is my sense that excluding automated tweakings was always the meaning of the discussion that led to G13. In practice, "oh look, that was just a bot template dating" is not a difficult, subtle, nor ambiguous call. --j⚛e decker^talk 16:07, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose It seems that this would require unsuitable extra judgement from the deleting administrator's side. It usually does not hurt to have an abandoned draft around for a couple of extra months. If you have a sudden urge to have a specific page deleted more quickly than permitted by G13, then the page can be listed at MFD. If not, just tag it with {{db-g13}} a couple of months later instead. --Stefan2 (talk) 16:12, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• Support, clear that the intent was "abandoned by humans", no reason not to clarify that. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 19:59, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• Support I thought the original intention was to exclude bot edits from the timing. I can't see any reason for 'that was only a bot tweak' to be a 'judgemental call'. It's a bot edit or it isn't. OK, that calls for a judgement between 'yes' and 'no', but if admins can't be trusted to make a decision like that, what the hell are we here for? We can decide that an article titled 'Shawn' and consisting of 'Shawn is awesome' is to be deleted as A7 - or should we not be deciding things like that? Should we be taking the awesome (claim to significance...) Shawn to AfD instead? 'Is it a bot or not a bot?' is one of the simplest things to decide - given that bot edits are marked in the history and that (correct me if I'm wrong...) bots tend not to make widespread content alterations to Drafts. I would be very interested to know if anyone other than perhaps DGG does go into AfC or Draft to find things to rescue - and how many rescuable things they have actually rescued. I've got two or three (listed on my user page) that I thought looked worth saving. So far, they're no nearer viability than they were. Anyone interested in finding the refs that the author couldn't (and I can't) - have a go at them. Please... Peridon (talk) 21:06, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• Comment - while there is a valid argument for trivial edits (bot or otherwise) to be excluded, there is also no harm in resetting the counter. So, I am more or less neutral on the exclusion of such edits from resetting the counter... Either way, I strongly object to drafts that were never submitted for review being deleted under G13. Every draft should receive a human review, and that shouldn't have to fall on an admin doing maintenance deletion. A drafter not figuring out how to submit the article (or even realizing they need to) should not be used as a technicality for deletion without review. That contradicts the whole purpose of AfC - to help new users. --ThaddeusB (talk) 21:39, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
  • Which is why I propose that these G13's only be submitted by a human, standing in as an informal review. If the human tager believes the article has could be improved he should take the responsibility of improving or finding someone to improve it. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!) 98.74.168.58 (talk) 23:00, 8 January 2015 (UTC)}
• Comment - I'm fairly neutral - but if we decide to ignore bot edits, then maybe I can also suggest that we use the bots to initially message the creator much earlier - say 2-3 months. The creator may not have left WP by then and we could possibly get a response. It does so often seem that abandoned drafts go hand in hand with abandoned editors. As for rescue - I think I have rescued one to date (I've deleted too many to count). I do wonder why we have lumped this deletion process into the speedy section (where's the rush, the page has been there for 6 months), maybe it should be more of a DraftPROD process - put up a final notice on the page and the draft article - then delete 7 days later, then like any PROD it can be undeleted on request. Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 22:24, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• I too can see either view as acceptable, but we do need to decide. For most bot edits, I agree that they should;t be seen as reseting the clock, because most of them have no impact at all on the content or the editing. For this particular bot, I think that moving the category might well require the additional notice, as there would have been no previous expectation of the editor that anything needed to be done ever. For all manual edits, however trivial, (or manual page moves to clarify the title), they should reset the clock, because it does need to be automatic , considering the number of items to be dealt with. DGG ( talk ) 00:45, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
• Support I believe the spirit of G13 is constructive edits by a human who is consciously choosing to work on the article; I do not believe bot edits show any intent by anyone to continue to improve the article beyond the addition of dates, categories, or template headers, which defeats the point of G13 (lightening the work load on AfC by removing articles that are not being worked on) in the first place.--TKK! bark with me! 01:51, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
• (edit conflict)There was a time, DGG, Peridon, before I more or less gave up trying to help AfC out of the mess it's constantly in, when I was deleting up to 100 or so G13s a day. When I came across the occasional draft that I thought had a 50/50 chance of surviving an AfD I either removed the CSD tag, or simply left it for another admin to decide. I did not stop and bring those drafts up to standard - IMO that is the work of WP:ARS and there would be less backlog if AfC rewiewers would bear that in mind. I still don't think very minor manual edits should reset the clock, because we must AGF and be able to assume that admins are doing a correct job of reviewing G13s before they press the delete button. It might be interesting to post the percentage of the 1,000s of G13 that have been refunded on request of the original creators.I think tyhat would be a essential statistic. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:04, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

I think you overestimate the accuracy of admin work in this area. I'm going to guess that about half the G13 deletions are made without any consideration for whether they are rescuable, or even whether they are in fact good enough for main space. A survey might show more of my evaluations than the merits of somebody else's , but I'm willing to undertake it .IF. someone can give me the technical help of implementing a filter for the deletion log, and devising a way I can look at them without a multi-step undulation and display process. DGG ( talk ) 03:44, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

DGG what would you need for this? Would A list of, say, 100 G13 deletions in the past year, viewable by click suffice, or do you need something else? I'm willing to implement whatever you need if you're putting yourself up for this job. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 00:50, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

• Comment 1 I agree with Ronhjones above that there should be an earlier notification, perhaps one month IMO. Easily done by bot (he says, not being able to program one himself). If they come back after this time and don't edit, but reappear after deletion - REFUND will supply restoration on request. Restoration is no problem. Many do seem to get restored. And some end up back at G13 because they haven't been touched after restoration. What G13 does largely is remove the crap that was being left on view. The spam that has been declined as 'reading more like an advertisement' when it's a piece of pure puffery emanating from a PR dept or 'SEO consultancy' that would take a total rewrite to be of any possible use. The very thinly veiled attack on someone. The abandoned draft consisting of 'Joe Bloggs is'. (He probably IS, but so what?) This is the dross that accumulates and needs to be scraped off. If a subject is really notable, someone will write about it. But let's be realistic. AfC and Draft are for helping newbies. I don't work IN those areas myself - but what 'help' IS given other than a review? Do ARS come in? I'm not saying that things can be done for everything to the extent that's going on on my talk page at the moment (I'm sure MelanieN would not object to some constructive help with that one...), but how can anyone help BEFORE review takes place - and how many things are abandoned immediately after review (making 'help' impossible anyway)? Peridon (talk) 12:53, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
• Comment 2 About the abandoned drafts that look possibly viable with nurture. It could be a waste to delete them. It's doing no good just simply keeping them as they are. Incubator seems to be a dead end (correct me if wrong...). Is there some way of tagging these for attention by rescuers? I'd suggest taking the G13 off and entering them in a category for rescue. A rescuer who tries and fails and considers the task totally impossible can remove the thing from the cat and leave a note to say why. Something not even touched by a rescuer in, say, 12 months can be decatted by a relation of the G13 bot and returned to the pool. If they don't want it in that time, no-one's going to do anything with it anywhere. Peridon (talk) 12:53, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

  Peridon There is {{AfC postpone G13}} which says that a reviewer thinks there might be hope in this draft and therefore is issuing a stay of G13 eligibility (resetting the clock) for 6 months so that we can see if any users are interested in taking over. Hasteur (talk) 13:47, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

  Yes, but that's just a passive prolongation. What I'm suggesting is a more active way of getting something actually done. From what I see of G13, it's not going to put a great load on the rescuers. Bear in mind that the author has seemingly given up on it, and presumably the rescuers don't know about it. Think about a pile of muck abandoned outside your house by a horse. To most people it's a smelly nuisance. To Mr Jones at No 79 (who grows roses), it's treasure - if he knows it's there... Peridon (talk) 14:02, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

  Yes, please - I and other rescuers would like these pages to be made available for improvement and the the creators notified before they are considered worthless and deleted. Last year when another batch of these pages with missing AfC templates was identified, I manually left messages on the talk pages of a number of the creators asking if they still intended to work on them, and at least half of the replies that I received indicated that the users had given up because they didn't know how to submit or resubmit the pages. Invitations to the Teahouse have likely cut down this number, but not to zero. Also, many of the pages have good encyclopedic content, but were never completed. If there are editors willing to fix them up, why delete this good material without letting them have a shot at it first? HERE is a list of just the ones I have been involved with rescuing over the last year - there are many, many more which have been improved by other volunteers. These hundreds of new articles only exist because of the built-in delay-and-notification process for the G13s.—Anne Delong (talk) 17:07, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

  Anne raises another possible issue here - ARE the instructions clear enough? Are they easy to see - and understand? For first-timers, that is. It would seem from what Anne says that they need looking at afresh. If I get a moment (and can work out how to create a Draft...) I'll have a look and experiment with a test bit of nonsense. Peridon (talk) 20:01, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

  Instructions can usually be improved (for instance, "click her to submit your draft" is clearer that just "submit your draft"), but I was talking about the situation in which the new users had removed the templates, not realizing that they were removing the instructions as well, so it wouldn't matter how clear they had been. —Anne Delong (talk) 22:02, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

  I don't know how filters work, but would it be possible to prevent user's from removing the template by accident (ie a warning when they try to do it and some clear instructions on how to fix it?). Or some more hidden text reminding them not to remove the line? 98.74.160.226 (talk) 05:10, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose this is a solution to a non-problem. Having some drafts around for a while longer does no harm. But making the admins do more work to check more complex rules is a waste of time. Perhaps 5% of AFCsare rescueable, but the point is to build an encyclopedia, and that 5% adds to the encyclopedia. Our aim is not to clear out the garbage as fast as possible. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 13:42, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Graeme, we obviously don't want to throw the babies out with the bathwater, but in fact not allowing that 95% dross to be given another 6 months lease of life through some totally insignificant edit would actually be reducing the admin workload. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:21, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

• Support, mildly. I agree with Anne Delong above: trivial bot edits should not count, but the important thing is that the process allows time for the author to be warned in time to do something, if still interested, and for other editors interested in rescue to pick over the heap before deletion. On the particular issue which sparked off this spat, I did delete some of EoRdE6's nominations from Category:AfC submissions with missing AfC template before I understood the issue, but I now agree that this was wrong: articles which have slipped through the net without an AfC template should not be immediately deleted. Ideally, those not edited for six months should be plugged into the system at the "first warning to author" stage, but if that is hard to arrange there are not so many of them that it would hurt to start the clock from the time they are first identified, by making an edit that, even if made by a bot, is marked as significant so as to restart the clock for G13 purposes. Generally, I think it would be best if G13 nominations were left to HasteurBot, which does the necessary warnings and notifications, and which I find a more reliable tagger than many humans. JohnCD (talk) 18:46, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
• Support, although this is not a big deal. We are not a WP:BURO and admins and other knowledgeable users are already allowed to decide on trivial matters, like whether or not some bot edits should be counted or not for purposes of this or that policy. Deletion discussions are not exact votes either, and their closure not dictated by rigid rules, and admins closing controversial deletions can and routinely do ignore or discount sockpuppets, meatpuppets and tag teaming. Note that hampering G13 deletions migh just shift the workload to MfD's queue, where WP:STALEDRAFTs (=typical G13 dross) are typically deleted after "discussion" by nominator and perhaps one other editor. jni ^(delete)_{...just not interested} 19:07, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
• Strong support. Earlier, Hasteur raised the very interesting point that a bot task to raise visibility of pages that were not being looked at [...] because it was not being tracked in the AFC workflow should clearly not be immediately taken from "Nobody's looking at it [...]" to "Send it to G13 [...]". While this is a valid statement, I think it misses the point a bit. G13 doesn't talk about drafts abandoned by the AfC project; it talks about drafts that have been abandoned by their authors. That means that the authors, not a cleanup bot, have not made improvements. As EoRdE6 states in the proposal, A bot adding categories does not make the article any less abandoned. This reasoning seems solid to me. APerson (talk!) 02:26, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
• Support - Bot edits should not count in a G13 clock reset. Common sense to me and I still don't know why Hasteur ran his bot to remove the Category:AfC submissions with missing AfC template category. JMHamo (talk) 17:56, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
• Support It's not the most precise resolution of the immediate problem, nor does it do anything to remove the mess at afc , but it is the simplest way to deal with this particular matter. DGG ( talk ) 14:57, 17 January 2015 (UTC)
• Support - speedy deletion criteria should be bright-line criteria, but if the problem is that there's a bot that makes edits to AfC drafts that appear to be abandoned, thus making them not abandoned per G13 criteria, then G13 can never apply. That's not a good solution to anything. The simplest fix would be to disable the bot, but that tagging is beneficial, so next best is this proposal. Ivanvector (talk) 17:17, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
  • Ivanvector I can only surmise from your comment that you've either been mislead or missed the point. There are a few issues rattling around: First is that the bright line of 6 months unedited at all which your first line suggests. Second is the fact that the pages that are being argued over were not enrolled as AFC drafts so they were never eligible for G13 to begin with because they were not part of G13. Adding the category to indicate that a human brain should look at these pages to sort them out between MFD/AFC-Draft/AFC-Submission is what the bot's purpose in categorizing the page (and thereby giving at least 6 months for consideration). The refinement to make bot edits not disqualify makes the binary criterion open to subjective calls (which is absolutely against the spirit of CSD). Hasteur (talk) 17:27, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I seem to have misunderstood. So your bot is flagging stale drafts which are not AfC submissions, with the intent of drawing attention to them, correct? In that case, as I understand the current criteria, that would make them qualify for G13 only after an additional six months passes, yes? Ivanvector (talk) 17:39, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

@Ivanvector: No you were correct. If an article is the the Articles for Creation namespace (Wikipedia talk:Articles for Creation these ones are) then they are AfC. As it says in the G13 current guidelines "all drafts in the project talk space" as well as user space and Draft: prefix articles with the banner. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 19:08, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Ivanvector Despite what other users may believe G13 reads This criterion applies to all WikiProject Articles for creation drafts in project space and project talk space, as well as userspace drafts and drafts in the Draft: namespace that are using the project's {{AFC submission}} template. which is where these deletionists are failing to see the connection. Nothing is being hurt by letting these drafts have a 6 month reprieve (after they were noticed) as these aren't being indexed by Search Engines so per WP:NODEADLINE we can afford to be lazy and wait a bit longer. Hasteur (talk) 21:49, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

I can selectively highlight things too. This criterion applies to all WikiProject Articles for creation drafts in project space and project talk space, as well as userspace drafts and drafts in the Draft: namespace that are using the project's {{AFC submission}} template. I'm afraid Hasteur is once again misinterpreting his own CSD guideline. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 22:33, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Thanks to you both. I have to agree with Hasteur here, G13 clearly only applies to articles already tagged as AfC submissions, not to untagged articles in Draft: space. I don't think that the criteria is necessarily clear enough about whether or not it applies to Draft: articles that are older but have only been tagged within the last six months. To err on the conservative side I suggest that it doesn't, i.e. if I find an untagged stale draft and put a submission template on it today, it does not qualify for G13 until six months from now. Ivanvector (talk) 00:30, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Arbitrary Break (Clarification of CSD G13)

• Oppose - this proposal is moot. See directly above this comment. The full text of the G13 criteria currently reads (without any extraneous highlighting): This criterion applies to all WikiProject Articles for creation drafts in project space and project talk space, as well as userspace drafts and drafts in the Draft: namespace that are using the project's {{AFC submission}} template. There is no room for misinterpretation: it is meant only for AfC submissions, defined specifically as articles with page titles that start with "Wikipedia:Articles for creation/" or "Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/", as well as other drafts which bear the AfC submission template. From what I can tell HasteurBot only finds articles which are drafts but don't meet these clear G13 criteria, and adds them to a maintenance category so that they can be adopted by the project. Those pages would not qualify for G13 anyway, so HasteurBot's edits don't "reset the counter". HasteurBot starts the counter. So whether minor edits and bot edits count towards the six months' inactivity is irrelevant, and in light of that I suggest that no change to the criteria is best. I'm aware that HasteurBot does other things, but the other things it does don't seem to be the issue here. Ivanvector (talk) 00:30, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Some editors are probably going to comment below this to say "but we could interpret G13 differently!" but that's not so. With speedy deletion criteria, if there's some condition in which it's not clear whether or not the criteria applies, then it does not. It's not clear whether or not G13 applies to articles that have just been tagged as AfC submissions, so it doesn't apply. Ivanvector (talk) 00:36, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) @Ivanvector: I think you may have misunderstood my issue. Hasteurs bot was tagging articles in the Wikipedia Talk: Aricles for Creation namespace which are eligible for G13. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 00:39, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Can you show me a diff? I looked through HasteurBot's contribs but didn't see it modifying any AfC pages. It was only sending notifications to certain interested users when an AfC page became eligible for G13. Ivanvector (talk) 01:03, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

@Ivanvector: this diff or this diff or especially this diff of an absolutely ridiculous submission. Whole list can be found here in his bot history from December 31 onward. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 01:13, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Aha, thanks. By the letter of the guideline I have to say that these articles did qualify for G13 deletion, and HasteurBot's edit made it so that they did not qualify. Hasteur, is this the bot's intended behaviour? I think that the last "absolutely ridiculous" one would qualify under one of the other criteria, but I have to think about which. It's not quite G3, A7 or U5, all for silly technical reasons. Ivanvector (talk) 01:35, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Ivanvector Per Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/HasteurBot 5 the bot tags those pages that do not have a AFC submission banner with a category for human review to look for several potential causes, to consider if the draft has potential to be accepted from AfC (in which case it should be submitted for review), or if it belongs in the refuse heap. Because the bot's action of bringing it to the attention of humans is a registered action I've always taken the view that makes the page ineligible for G13. To point out the fallacy in the advocate's viewpoint, would editors protest so vigorously if an editor compiled a list of these pages and went in to add the category to every single one of those pages? My guess would be not and in doing so they show their hypocrisy. That the bot's action disqualifies these pages for immediate G13 (and setting a new line in the sand for when it could become eligible for G13) is a happy side benefit. In short CSD are supposed to be unequivocal in regards to their eligibility. If you have doubts as to if it is eligible under G13, look for some other G-series CSD to tap (Promotional, Copyvio, Utterly without context, etc.) or nominate it for the appropriate XfD (which in this case is WP:MFD). Either the community will say no or yes. This back room finessing of something that is not supposed to be finessed is why I have gone to such lengths to protect these potential articles (even if most of them are hopeless) because we are under absolutely no deadline to get these out of the system despite the doom and gloom predictions that the question is predicated on. Hasteur (talk) 13:23, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Ok, I'm getting a better picture, thanks for taking the time. I can't tell for certain but it looks like the bot is only tagging articles when they have languished more than 6 months. If the bot was recoded to tag untagged articles in the AfC project space as soon as it finds them instead, with no regard to time delay, would that solve the problem? Ivanvector (talk) 16:23, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

@Ivanvector: There is a reason this is on the CSD TP, I couldn't care less what his bot does. The question here is whether bot edits reset the 6 months on the G13 criteria. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 19:16, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

They do. Ivanvector (talk) 20:02, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

And I think that it is a valid question, anyway. If HasteurBot tags supposed draft articles immediately, then they become eligible for G13 in six months, unless someone else goes to work improving them or nominates them for deletion some other way. I'm fine with that. Ivanvector (talk) 20:11, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

@Ivanvector: I still feel you don't quite understand. These articles are already Drafts, they always have been which is why they are in the AfC namespace. The author accidentally or on purpose removed the AFC banner, but it's still a draft. Now if the original author hasn't edited for 6 months they are elignle for G13. Or will be once we modify G13. I ask you to ignore Hasteur not and our arguments. If a bot, any bot at all, comes along and adds a category, or does simple fixes like that, does that magically make the article unabandoned? IMO, no it doesn't. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 20:49, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

I do think I get what you're saying, and I appreciate your patience. I don't think that the solution is a simple matter of changing the criteria - the bot should be made to work with the project's goals and if it is not then it should be turned off. Maybe that's a separate discussion. Anne Delong posted a comment above regarding how G13 is supposed to work ([1]) and it seems to me that it is not working as intended. In the spirit of the original G13 proposal (as I interpret from Anne's comments) I do think that bot edits (and only bot edits) should not count towards the six-month "timer", so I will propose that the revised wording should be:

Rejected or unsubmitted Articles for creation pages that have not been edited in over six months, excluding edits by bots. This criterion applies to all pages in WikiProject Articles for creation project space and project talk space, as well as userspace drafts and drafts in the Draft: namespace that are using the project's {{AFC submission}} template. But truthfully, on reflection, I think that G13 should be deprecated - it goes against WP:There is no deadline. These pages should only be deleted if they meet one of the other speedy criteria, or per community consensus at MfD that the subject of the draft has no hope per (the spirit of) WP:AFDISNOTCLEANUP. I realize there's a huge backlog but I think that G13 was a poor solution, or one that has passed its time. I may consider this as a counter-proposal for another time. Ivanvector (talk) 21:25, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

• What started all this was that there was a batch of old submissions which had had their AfC templates removed and so were not picked up by Hasteur's software logic that notified the editors a month or so in advance of the automatic deletion tagging. When they were noticed, many of them were already stale enough to fit G13, yet neither the original editors nor the G13 rescue crew had had the agreed-upon opportunity to decide whether to do anything with them. The proposal about not counting bot edits doesn't address this problem directly, so another discussion will need to be held to decide how to get this notification done. However, it seems to me that there are a lot of pages in the AfC that are technically abandoned, but don't show up on the list because during the six months an editor comes a long, looks at the page, and adds a comment. For example, if I see a page that's eligible for G13, and report it to a Wikiproject to see if it's notable, sometimes an editor from the project will come along and add a comment like "This is a non-notable topic and the page should be deleted". Which, of course, means that then I can't delete it under G13. As I said above, I agree that bot edits should not save AfC pages from being considered abandoned provided that their creators have been appropriately warned. However, and I realize that this would be a separate discussion, there needs to be a way to get rid of very old pages that are being edited by people, but that for one reason or another can never become articles. Wikipedia:There is no deadline means take as long as you like to write an article, not take as long as you like to promote your business, write your opinions, describe your cat, etc. —Anne Delong (talk) 23:09, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Anne, I agree with that completely. I do think that any revision we do here should be limited to exempting bot edits specifically. If we start saying "minor" edits are excluded, then G13 becomes a subjective criteria (because what is a "minor" edit is entirely subjective), and that's not what CSD is supposed to be for. On the other side of no deadline, making these pages ineligible for speedy deletion does not exempt them from deletion. If a draft topic is obviously not notable but has been edited recently, it should still be easy to delete through MfD. Ivanvector (talk) 23:18, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

You both raise good points. One thing to mention, WP:There is no deadline is a Wiki essay not a rule or a guideline. Anyone can write one. What if G13 excluded bot edits and minor edits (ie tagged with the minor check box). Then we could involve the makers of the AfC helper script to make comments and cleanup be minor edits? So a reviewing admin would simply have to find how long since the last none bot flagged or minor flagged edit... Possibly. Just maybe EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 02:01, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

True, it's an essay, but I feel it fairly represents general consensus. Like I said above, I prefer if minor edits are not excluded. If they are, then "abandoned draft" becomes a subjective criteria. I prefer "human edit" vs. "machine edit": my interpretation of consensus is that a draft is abandoned if there are no human edits in the past six months, and minor edits are human edits (unless they're bot (machine) edits). Ivanvector (talk) 15:43, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

@Anne Delong: there needs to be a way to get rid of very old pages that are being edited by people, but that for one reason or another can never become articles. There is already a way to do that - WP:MfD. Regarding the rest of this discussion, I agree with Ivan that iff anything is excluded it should only be bot edits, but "no edits" should mean "exactly zero edits regardless of performer of significance" and I don't believe there is any benfit to changing this because (a) every edit generates a watchlist entry, which might provoke input from an editor, (b) there is no deadline, (c) we are not running out of paper or digital storage, (d) abandoned drafts that do not meet any speedy criterion are not harming anything sufficiently to need speedy deletion, (e) deleting someone's work can put them off contributing in the future, (f) abandoned drafts that do meet a non-G13 speedy criterion can be deleted regardless of what happens with G13, and (g) any abandoned draft that is somehow harmful but not speediable can be taken to MfD. Thryduulf (talk) 13:59, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

On the topic of bot edits, there was a lot of concern when G13 was being proposed to make sure that the drafts were truly abandoned. A process was worked out to notify the original editors and add a category to bring the pages to the attention of willing draft-improvers, using Hasteur's bot, and the presence of that process contributed to the final consensus which allowed G13 to come into being. Now, these pages that have had the template removed slipped past that process. If G13 is to be changed to ignore bot edits, then I feel that there should be a delay in implementing this, so that a way can be found to notify creators of the current batch (those which were categorized and uncategorized by the bot). After that, if Hasteur has his bot check for missing templates on a regular basis, maybe every few weeks, we should be able to deal with the templateless aspect of these pages well before they are eligible for G13, which would lead to the notification happening as designed. —Anne Delong (talk) 17:06, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Now that's good thinking, Anne. I also agree with Thryduulf that only bot edits should be excluded. If anyone is editing a draft article, I would presume that the edits are intended to be beneficial. If it's found that vandals are going into this area to play around, then we'll have to discuss that when it happens. There is always the possibility of a very slow editor making one edit every (just under) six months, but at least they are doing something. If that's found to be a growing problem, it too can be dealt with appropriately later. Peridon (talk) 18:13, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

• Support ignoring bot edits Bot edits should be be considered attention and thus should not be considered in this case. Bots are marked as such so this adds no ambiguity. If a human improves it, even a little, it should be considered not abandoned. MfD is there if you think someone is gaming the system. Chillum 20:16, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
• Agree with ignoring bot edits for the reasons given. And I urge the greeter use of MfD. I have started sending to MfD canticles submitted more than 3 times without apparent improvement or real hope of an article. (The equally necessary correlate to that is approving instead of declining articles that would pass AfD but that will need maven major improvements--the place where articles get seen to be improved is in mainspace. Many article declined several times should silly have been accepted initially and tagged appropriately for the needed improvements.) DGG ( talk ) 06:13, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

A1/A3 footnote

Currently, both of these criteria have the following footnote: "Consensus has developed that in most cases articles should not be tagged for deletion under this criterion moments after creation as the creator may be actively working on the content; though there is no set time requirement, a ten-minute delay before tagging under this criterion is suggested as good practice. Please do not mark the page as patrolled prior to that suitable delay passing, so that the wait does not result in the article escaping review at a later time."

Despite the footnote, many editors tag articles with these criteria very quickly after the article's creation. I propose rephrasing the footnote and elevating it to policy status. Before coming up with new language, I'd like to hear whether others endorse the idea conceptually and, if so, what time frame would you suggest?--Bbb23 (talk) 22:46, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

I'd say 15 minutes minimum for everything but copyright violations and attack pages. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 23:55, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Oppose as pointless instrucreep. The entire WP:CSD - footnotes included - already is a policy, in case you haven't noticed. What would be the added benefit of making it a separate policy if it weren't one (which it is) anyway? None. See someone that tags pages too fast? Tell them not to (yes, tell them, don't block them for heaven's sake!) By the way, I think that new db-error thingy is a very good idea, and I think removing it from the page was almost as pointless as this proposal. Both done by the same user, what a coincidence! 70.182.174.125 (talk) 06

04, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

• I must say that when I was working in the depths or Edits by Recent Accounts (not NPP - I never worked that stream), I never took a bit of notice of whether a page was marked patrolled or not, and I still don't. I looked at it and decided to tag or not to tag no matter what someone else had thought. And, by heck, did I find some stuff... How much stuff gets through because the NPP are working hard to keep everything new reviewed, and is anyone working my old area to pick up the mistakes and slip throughs? How much stuff that's marked unpatrolled gets rechecked later, or is everyone busy with the new input? I don't know. I agree that things should not be deleted too soon, but would add obvious spam and blatant hoax to the tag and delete on sight list. As to bios and corps, I prefer to leave them for around an hour before deleting (with the exception of blatant no-hopers like nine year old footballers...). A newly created blank page shouldn't be tagged or marked patrolled for at least 15 mins, but an article like Fred Herbert Bloggs that consists solely of "Fred Herbert Bloggs" is never going to be expanded - don't ask me why people do this. Those can be politely deleted as 'test page' the first time round. If they're done again, A7 and have a word with the author. Peridon (talk) 10:48, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Speedy deleted related discussion

Please comment at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#User Right: CSD Patroller Oiyarbepsy (talk) 17:44, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

CSD F9 and CSD G12

The CSD F9 criteria seems to be a duplicate of CSD G12, shouldn't it be merged to CSD G12? --ToonLucas22 (talk) 00:41, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

A couple of previous discussions, Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Archive_53#Proposal:_Merge_F9_and_G12, Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Archive_45#F9 -- GB fan 00:50, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

just curious AND VERY ANGRY

people want the dragon city article to be deleted but i don't approve. tell me why people want it to be deleted Valehd (talk) 22:22, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Where do you see people asking for Dragon City to be deleted? I just scanned through the history and the article's Talk page and nobody has requested deletion. —Largo Plazo (talk) 22:27, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Pages with this title have been deleted twice, but they were not on the same topic. One was a web comic (deleted in 2006, see discussion) and the other a shopping centre (deleted in 2007, see discussion). Nobody seems to be suggesting deletion of the current article about a video game. Ivanvector (talk) 16:01, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

but it's been nominated for deletion twice and both results were delete Valehd (talk) 18:58, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

As Ivanvector said, those two articles weren't even about the same thing that the current article by that name is about. There's no connection between them. —Largo Plazo (talk) 19:00, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

@Valehd: Don't worry, the links on the talk page are normal. Users aren't allowed to see the contents of deleted pages, so we keep a note on the talk page if there used to be a different article with the same title that was deleted before. Nobody is suggesting that the page that is there now should be deleted. Ivanvector (talk) 19:03, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

If anyone was suggesting that the current page should be deleted, you would see a big red-bordered notice at the very top of the page linking to a discussion where you can provide your input. It looks like the one on this page. Since there isn't one on Dragon City, nobody is currently talking about deleting it. Ivanvector (talk) 19:20, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

ok Valehd (talk) 15:52, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Speedy deletion discussion at Idea Lab

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 16#Contesting a CSD Oiyarbepsy (talk) 20:15, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Deletion of Wikipedia screenshots used in talk pages

It is sometimes useful to provide screenshots of Wikipedia pages on talk pages to illustrate a point, particularly in relation to formatting and style issues.

For instance, in a recent discussion on the use of quotation marks in conjunction with the <blockquote> tag, I made a comment that the mobile version of Wikipedia formats blockquotes with quotation marks automatically and I provided a screenshot of part of the conversation which used a blockquote to illustrate the point. The screenshot was subsequently proposed for deletion and then deleted by User:Ronhjones with the edit summary: "File deleted: F5: Unused non-free media file for more than 7 days". The same user also edited the archive to hide the image from my comment (which may violate Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines § Editing comments § Others' comments).

This is all despite the fact (as I pointed out on the image talk page before it was deleted and on my talk page) that the image could not be a copyright infringement because the image only comprised a screenshot of Wikipedia itself and the contribution that was captured (including the author's IP address as attribution) was licensed under Wikipedia's licence terms. It seems to me that there ought to be some exemption that allows screenshots of Wikipedia to be allowed to be used on Wikipedia talk pages without fear of speedy deletion. Deletion of such images: (a) is unnecessary; (b) hampers useful discussion; and (c) could potentially unfairly refactor users' comments if the images they use are deleted/hidden after they have posted their comments (which the user may not be alerted to, especially if the discussion has already been archived and the archive is not on their watchlist). —sroc 💬 06:35, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

I for the life of me can't think of any reason to delete a Wikipedia screenshot. As far as removing the link, that's routine when deleting images, and semi-automated probably. I told the administrator about this discussion. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:23, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

• If the file was deleted per WP:CSD#F5, then the uploader had probably specified that the file was an unfree file. Unfree files may not be used on talk pages per WP:NFCC#9, and an unfree file which only is used on talk pages is not used in any articles and therefore qualifies for speedy deletion per WP:CSD#F5. If the file wasn't unfree but still marked as unfree, then the uploader shouldn't be surprised if other users do not notice that the copyright tag is incorrect but accepts the copyright tag at face value. Screenshots of Wikipedia are not unfree if the uploader follows the licensing conditions, which include attributing the author. --Stefan2 (talk) 15:49, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

• Based on this response, I can confidently say that this was a bad deletion. A universal rule of speedy deletion: Don't delete a page that should be fixed instead. A Wikipedia screenshot is so obviously free content, that the fair use tag is obviously wrong and should be changed. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 16:07, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

• I think your comment may be incorrect. If I take a picture, or a screen capture, of anything, then don't I hold copyright in my particular recording of the content even if the content itself is in the public domain? If so, then I believe someone who makes a screen capture and posts it has to affirmatively indicate his intentions regarding his rights to the recording that he made. Otherwise, it isn't free. —Largo Plazo (talk) 17:05, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

I don't think so. If you write and publish an original poem, you own the copyright in it. If I merely photocopy it, I don't own the copyright in it as I have not expended real effort to create an original work. I expect the same applies to screenshots where there is no additional effort in contributing to the image (assuming there are no annotations, etc.). —sroc 💬 17:26, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

• I would reiterate that I added my explanation below the speedy delete template on the image page (I wasn't sure what the appropriate forum was to challenge a proposed delete, but it was ignored and the image deleted anyway (along with my explanation, although a copy remains on my talk page). I would have hoped that the administrator would have read it and considered addressing it instead of just deleting it. —sroc 💬 16:54, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

• Interesting. I put all my screenshots of Wikipedia on Commons: and usually drop a PD template or a CC-BY-SA 3.0 template on them. I've been meaning to make a new/easier to use {{WP screenshot}} template, but haven't gotten to it yet. Someday I'll get to it when I'm not so backlogged with RL stuff. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 16:22, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
  • We already have {{wikipedia screenshot}}. Keep in mind that you also must attribute the author. The template only tells how Wikipedia content is licensed, not who the author is. --Stefan2 (talk) 16:43, 4 March 2015 (UTC)
    • Actually, Stefan2, we have {{Wikipedia-screenshot}}, which needs to be improved (it shouldn't always display the note about setting logo=yes/no if logo is already set for example). The ones on Commons also need some work. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 16:15, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
      • Hm? The note goes away if logo=yes/no is used. There are two errors, though: things such as logo=maybe are incorrectly interpreted as logo=no, and the template misses wmfblog:2014/10/24/wikimedia-logos-have-been-freed. --Stefan2 (talk) 16:26, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks everyone for reassuring me that I wasn't completely misguided in thinking this was wrong (although I was evidently mistaken in categorising the image when I uploaded it). I'll note that template for the future. I'm not sure who the "author" would be though, for example, in the case of a screenshot of an article that has had many contributors over time. —sroc 💬 16:54, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

The image was set up with a FUR and a {{Non-free web screenshot}} license. It was subsequently tagged by User:Stefan2 on the 23:15, 24 February 2015 as "orphaned fair use". There being no change to the license, and no use in main space, then 7 days later it usually gets deleted - it was still licensed as non-free - you made some edits to it after Stefan2's tagging, so you were obviously happy to leave the non free status up, thus it got deleted at 01:49, 4 March 2015. As for it's removal on the page - it takes way too long to individuality delete lots of images (there are usually 50 to 250 orphaned images every day up for deletion) and then have to worry about any red links left - it's far simpler to load all the images of the daily category into separate tabs with Linky, then check each one to see if the file is still orphaned - if it has been placed into an article, it gets edited, otherwise I move on, when all the images in the category have been looked at - then Twinkle deletes the lot and does the unlinking, plus AWB finds any image talk pages for deletion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ronhjones (talk • contribs) 20:13, 4 March 2015

@Ronhjones:But this misses the whole point, which is this - Don't delete a page that should be fixed instead. Don't delete a bloke's page because they don't know which template to use. Don't pretend that a person who doesn't know how images are tagged consented to deletion by not knowing. This deletion almost borders on a "didn't even look at what I was deleting" type of deletion, because the fact that it's a free image is so obvious. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 07:20, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

The statement 'Don't delete a page that should be fixed instead' doesn't seem to apply to NFCC deletions. See for example WP:NFCCE: 'Note that it is the duty of users seeking to include or retain content to provide a valid rationale; those seeking to remove or delete it are not required to show that one cannot be created—see burden of proof.' For example, many F6 deletions may take place simply because the uploader is too lazy to bother writing a rationale or because the uploader doesn't know which template to use. --Stefan2 (talk) 14:49, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Also, about 'didn't even look at what I was deleting', is there something which has changed since Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Orphaned image deletion bot? --Stefan2 (talk) 15:07, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

@Ronhjones: It is disingenuous for you to say: "you made some edits to it after Stefan2's tagging, so you were obviously happy to leave the non free status up". The edit that I made, in response to the {{Di-orphaned fair use}} tag, was to add this explanation:

The image is a screenshot of a Wikipedia talk page; as such, it is a reproduction from Wikipedia itself and inherently complies with Wikipedia's own copyright licence which all contributions (including that contained within the screenshot) are provided under. It is used in a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style § Quote marks to illustrate how quotations using the <quotemarks> tag appear on Wikipedia when viewed from a mobile device, and cannot be substituted with any alternative image (other than another screenshot) to adequately illustrate the same. An image which consists entirely of text published under Wikipedia's copyright licence itself cannot infringe Wikipedia's copyright licence terms, so it seems non-sensical that the image could be deleted for a perceived infringement.

How could you possibly think my adding this comment meant that I agreed for it to be deleted? Why would you ignore this explanation and delete the image (and my comment with it) without further consideration? Did you pause to think about this at all?

For the record, I note that the tag states that the image will be deleted "Unless some reason to retain it is given" but it does not provide any guidance on how to provide a reason. I attempted to do this by: (1) adding the above comment on the image page immediately below the tag, where I hoped any interested administrator would see it; and (2) copying the comment on my talk page in reply to (and pinging) the user who tagged it, Stefan2. If this was not the right channel to lodge my objection, then I don't know how I was supposed to be heard. —sroc 💬 14:05, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

If a file obviously has incorrect copyright information, then it seems that the file can be speedily deleted per WP:CSD#F4, as it doesn't have a correct copyright tag. I'd assume that the deletion is valid even if the deletion log accidentally mentions F5 instead of F4. --Stefan2 (talk) 14:57, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

@Stefan2: If a confused user (i.e., me) replies directly to your proposal to delete an image with a perfectly acceptable reason to keep the image (as I did), do you think think that the image should be deleted rather than trying to fix the problem with the copyright tag? —sroc 💬 15:07, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Ideally, the file should then be corrected, but the user placing the comment there should not expect the deleting admin to spend more time checking the file than User:Orphaned image deletion bot used to do. --Stefan2 (talk) 15:22, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Stefan, if that's really true, then we shouldn't expect these editors to be deleting anything. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:26, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

• Now at deletion review Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2015 March 5#File:Screenshot illustrating formatting of block quotes on Wikipedia formatted for mobile phones.jpg Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:43, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

F5 does not apply to free images

F5 does not apply to free images, period, regardless of the tag on the description page. I added such a statement and was reverted under the argument that it violates NFCCE 2. This argument is completely bogus. None of the Non-free content criteria apply to an image that is free. Whether the image is free or not is not based on a tag, but on the actual image. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:26, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

• If a free file is claimed to be an unfree file, then the file can be deleted per WP:CSD#F4 by virtue of having an obviously bogus copyright tag. In either case, the file would be subject to speedy deletion. Also, that issue was not thought to be a concern in Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Orphaned image deletion bot. --Stefan2 (talk) 15:38, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
  • Except that the editor posted a detailed explanation of its copyright status that was ignored, so F4 doesn't apply either. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:46, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
• The overwhelming majority of images you've made technically unspeedyable are company logos which have been replaced by another version or whose article has already been deleted, but which are too simple to qualify for copyright protection. When I come across one of these, I retag it {{PD-textlogo}} if it's in use on a non-article page (typically a draft or user sandbox), or otherwise just delete it. I can't see any benefit in sending these to Wikipedia:Files for deletion where they'll sit, completely ignored, for another week and then be deleted anyway. Admins are already supposed to take note of objections to speedy deletion and stay their hand when appropriate; because one admin failed to do so in a single case is poor justification to rewrite policy. —Cryptic 22:14, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Fair enough. A company logo for a company's deleted article might qualify as spam, for what it's worth, but I'm not sure I would twist the rules on that. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:41, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Screenshots of Wikipedia

As a sort of see-also for this discussion, we have a page at Wikipedia:Screenshots of Wikipedia, that details how to create, upload and correctly license these screenshots for use in the non-article space (although I wrote it with bug reports in mind, it's applicable more widely than that). People can perhaps help avoid this sort of thing happening again by ensuring that it is correct, obviously fully applicable to all uses of screenshots of Wikipedia, and more widely known about. Thryduulf (talk) 00:19, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

T3 options

EurekaLott edited the T3 criteria and got reverted by This, that and the other. The two possible versions are:

• Templates that are not being employed in any useful fashion and are substantial duplications of another template, or hardcoded instances of another template where the same functionality could be provided by that other template, may be deleted after being tagged for seven days.
• Templates that are substantial duplications of another template, or hardcoded instances of another template where the same functionality could be provided by that other template, may be deleted after being tagged for seven days.

The difference being "not being employed in any useful fashion". Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:11, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

• Thanks for starting this discussion, Oiyarbepsy. I was attempting to align the instructions on this page with the instructions on Template:Db-t3. The template has included that phrase (or something closely akin) since it was created in 2008. It seemed like a no-brainer to me—don't speedy a template if it's going to break a bunch of articles—but I suppose things are never that simple here. - Eureka Lott 15:30, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

• This makes sense: if deleting a template is going to break something then you should fix the usage before you delete the template. I don't agree with the edit summary of the revert of this change: it isn't true that all edits to this page have to be discussed beforehand, only edits somebody disagrees with. Hut 8.5 18:42, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
  • I didn't say that all edits to this page need to be discussed; I said that this edit is, in my view, controversial, and therefore requires discussion. That's what WP:BRD is all about. Edits that are not controversial don't require discussion. — This, that and the other (talk) 00:41, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
    • I didn't realise you were trying to refer to a previous related discussion. However there is an important difference between the wording discussed there and the wording proposed here. The old wording said that templates could be deleted just for being deprecated, and the objections to it were because people didn't think that was a good idea. This wording would only prevent templates from being deleted if they are still being used, and not being used would not qualify a template for speedy deletion. Hut 8.5 07:52, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

No reasonable administrator would delete a template if he or she knew that doing so was "going to break a bunch of articles" anyway, whatever the policy says. Would anything be gained by having the policy spell that out? As far as I am concerned, the steady increase over the years of the total amount of text in guidelines and policies has been highly detrimental, making things more difficult and confusing, especially for new editors. We should keep statements in policies as short and simple as possible, and introduce new content only when doing so deals with a genuine problem. Here, there is no problem, as far as I know. If you know of a significant number of cases where templates have been deleted even though they were "being employed in any useful fashion", then please list a few: if not, then it ain't broke, so let's not fix it. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 21:27, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I think the change makes sense, but if it isn't implemented we should change the template. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 21:55, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

• Very similar text was removed from the policy in 2014. However, I can see how the new text makes sense. The key word is "and", which wasn't present before. — This, that and the other (talk) 00:40, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
• It's good we are having this discussion, that never hurts. I support the language be included EurekaLott proposed. I see no downside and the positive upside of making the template and instructions align. JodyB _talk 01:09, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Pages that are infoboxes only

See also: Wikipedia:Administrators%27 noticeboard/Incidents § Linkspamming etc. by Pi-gimjiRu

I found a couple of these and marked them as stubbed/no reference, but it doesn't seem sufficient. Should they be marked for Speedy deletion? See: Akysis hendricksoni, Acantopsis spectabilis, Acanthopsoides gracilentus, Batasio fluviatilis. I have a feeling there are a lot more and probably created by the same person. —Мандичка^YO 😜 18:33, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

You can try a PROD or AFD if you wish - there is no speedy criteria under which those could be deleted. §FreeRangeFrog^croak 18:37, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes, the user Pi-gimjiRu has recently created quite a few articles which are nothing but taxoboxes. WP:A7 (no indication of importance) specifically does not apply to species of animals, and that was the best I could come up with. These could be proper stubs with a bit of a lede, maybe the user can be coached. Ivanvector (talk) 20:40, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

It would also make sense to introduce them to Wikispecies, which doesn't have an entry for all of these species. Thryduulf (talk) 17:16, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

@Wikimandia: According to the Articles created 'tool', Pi-gimjiRu (talk · contribs) created 132 pages. I too 'wasted' some time marking them as stubs. 220 of ^Borg 01:24, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Are you talking about something like this? It's easy to use the infobox to write a line of prose like this, which I think is the best way to handle it. An empty infobox, on the other hand, feel free to delete as no content. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 00:38, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Time between creation and speedy proposal

Hi, someone hit Ludlum Measurements with a speedy del just 20 mins after I'd created it. Is there any policy on this? It would seem a bit hasty - given that we are all volunteers, it can take a bit of time to get an article together.SmilingFace (talk) 00:52, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

@SmilingFace: that is what the Draft: and User: namespaces are for. Create a subpage of your name of a Draft and then move it when it's ready. As long as it's not a copyvio or an attack page, it should be able to stay there as long as you need it there. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 01:00, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

• Let me introduce you to {{new page}}, {{in use}}, and {{under construction}}. These are very handy whenever you are working on creating or improving an article, but it is going to take some time to get everything in its final form. VanIsaac_WS^cont 19:30, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

RfC on proposal replace G13 with a PROD system

There is an RfC ongoing on a new PROD system for Drafts that would replace WP:G13. Please comment at Wikipedia talk:Proposed deletion (drafts)#RfC: DRAFTPROD. Bosstopher (talk) 10:48, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

G5 and sockpuppets

CSD G5 can only be used if a user is banned/blocked. Should this include obvious sockpuppets of banned/blocked users as well e.g. if a person is creating a page that only sockpuppets of a particular user has created, then since it's obviously a sock of the sockpuppeter, is the article eligible for deletion under WP:G5? Joseph2302 (talk) 18:57, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

There is the distinction between the words "user" and "account" here. We identify accounts by the word user, but that's sometimes deceptive. A "banned user" really is a banned person, and this person can have multiple accounts. If that person is banned, then so are all their accounts. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 19:19, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Okay, so the official wording is "Pages created by banned or blocked users in violation of their ban or block, and which have no substantial edits by others. G5 should not be applied to transcluded templates or to categories that may be useful or suitable for merging." So if I'm certain that an editor is a sockpuppet of a blocked user, then it's fine to apply G5, as they are the same user? Joseph2302 (talk) 22:24, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

It should also be obvious to the deleting admin that the user is a sockpuppet, and sockpuppets should also be blocked. If it might not be obvious to the deleting admin that the users is a sockpuppet, then please first report the user at WP:SPI or some other suitable venue to have this established. --Stefan2 (talk) 22:47, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

As I understand it, you all have it exactly right. DGG ( talk ) 05:06, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Non English articles

How to deal with articles in foreign languages as a new pages patroller? --Fauzan^{✆ talk}_{✉ mail} 12:18, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

Instructions for dealing with non-English articles in new page patrol can be found at Wikipedia:New pages patrol#Dealing with foreign language new pages. -- Whpq (talk) 12:32, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

OK, thanks. --Fauzan^{✆ talk}_{✉ mail} 12:37, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

Proposal to narrow F8 reasons for not moving an image to Commons

There are maybe four valid reasons I can think of for not wanting to move an image to Commons: (1) There is a licensing reason (usually that it is PD in the US, but copyrighted in its home country and so Commons will not accept it, this would also apply to cases where there are questions about the uploader's respect for copyright and the image is tagged with {{File at CCI}}). (2) The image is only for a user's user page or for a local discussion with no conceivable encyclopedic use on any other project. (3) The image is high-risk and we need it to have the benefit of our cascading protection. (4) There is substantial history and it is beneficial to preserve that history.

Category:Wikipedia files on Wikimedia Commons for which a local copy has been requested to be kept now has an ungodly number of images in it. Some of them are for legitimate licensing reasons, but a lot are more for "I don't like Commons and I want to WP:OWN my contributions" reasons.

So my proposal is this: I propose to amend "The image is not marked as {{Do not move to Commons}} or as {{Keep local}}" to add the requirement that one of the above four reasons be the case.

For something like this - File:Baseball (crop).jpg - a high-risk image that is used all over creation - keeping a local copy makes sense. But then there are others, like File:Her Majesty Sultanah Terengganu Tuanku Nur Zahirah.jpg, which is not even a user-authored image. It's a Flickr image and 100% SHOULD be moved to Commons where they have a Flickr review process in place. Or something like File:Hickory smoked barbecue bacon.jpg or File:Hi flowerchip!.jpg, which could be useful to other projects and there's no reason whatsoever to retain the local image once it's moved. --B (talk) 05:49, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose - There's no reason to delete local images if it makes it easier for people, even if it's just because they don't like Commons or whatever. Commons won't respect {{Do not move to Commons}}, so it's a pretty dumb template, since it might give the misleading impression that it'd prevent things from being moved to Commons. But if someone wants a local version to make their life easier, m:DICK applies, and there's no reason for us to delete it and piss them off, when it offers no gain for the encyclopaedia. WilyD 09:50, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
  • In what way (other than the four reasons I mentioned above) does it make their life easier? Retaining the local version serves no useful purpose and just makes one more thing that has to be maintained. Allowing a user to dictate ownership of a page because sends a wrong message. --B (talk) 11:29, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    • The problem with the current system is that we often get outdated or low-resolution files on one website as files only are kept up-to-date on one of the websites. Besides, if there is a copyright issue with a file, there is a risk that someone might overlook the fact that the file is available on two websites with the outcome that one one of the copies is deleted although both should be. --Stefan2 (talk) 16:13, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
    • For instance, one can watchlist it. Or, one might be blocked or banned on Commons. No doubt numerous others will occur. Why should we treat users here harshly for no benefit to Wikipedia? WilyD 09:17, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
      • It is possible to watchlist files on Commons too. If users who are blocked or banned on Commons wish to upload files, the users may use WP:FFU or upload a local copy which can be moved there by someone else. --Stefan2 (talk) 16:51, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
        • It is possible to watchlist files on Commons too, but in the absence of global watchlists one would have to be active at Commons for that to be of any use. Nikkimaria (talk) 21:29, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
          • It is possible to enable e-mail notification when a page on your watchlist is modified on a project which you are not regularly following. If you ask at c:COM:VP, you might also find consensus to add a checkbox which allows you to also receive e-mails when someone makes a minor edit. I find it strange that this checkbox isn't available on all projects by default as offering that checkbox shouldn't cause any trouble for anyone. The checkbox is currently available on Meta. Also, if you ensure that you upload the file directly to Commons (so that you are listed as the uploader on Commons (instead of relying on someone else moving the file from here), then you should receive a talk page notification if someone nominates the file for deletion. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:59, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
        • We shouldn't strive to make it possible for authors and editors to write and improve articles here. We should strive to make it easy and convenient. Especially when there's no upside to the project in making things harder for everyone. WilyD 10:42, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
• Support People should be using Commons more and retaining them for silly reasons is pointless. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 17:40, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
  • But shouldn't we motivate people with a carrot rather than a stick? Why antagonise our editors for no encyclopaedic benefit. WilyD 09:17, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose File:John Noel with filming equipment, 1922.jpg is a file I recently uploaded to WP with requests to keep local and not to move to commons. I spent a great deal of time trying to assess whether it is in copyright in the UK (I'm not sure but I think it is) but because of its publication status in the US I think US courts would regard the US as the source country. It seems unclear how commons regards images simultaneously published in the US and UK if by general provenance they are close to UK. Is commons policy that because the US courts would regard it as US-only then that applies on commons or would they disregard the US courts and consider copyright in UK and US? I have asked at commons regarding pre-1923 images and got the answer that UK copyright is not relevant[2] but I am not confident I would get that answer every time. Am I being unreasonable in worrying whether someone doing a 10 second assessment might decide that commons would only consider US copyright and so it's OK to move it? Later it may be deleted at commons because it considered not to be US-only. Are such matters appropriate for speedy deletion? Thincat (talk) 18:42, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
  • That file would seem to fit example (1) above: debatable copyright status due to unclear source country. If the book was published within 30 days in both the UK and the US, then the source country is the country with the shortest term (in this case the US), but it is probably near impossible to identify the exact date of publication, so it may be difficult to tell whether the UK publication was at most 30 days before the US publication.

One problem is that {{Keep local}} creates problems like this where a low-resolution copy of a file hides a high-resolution copy of the same file. There are also cases where one of the copies is outdated. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:03, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

The template {{keep local}} should not be used here (and I have removed it). The image correctly has {{Do not move to Commons|reason=USonly|expiry=2059}} and adding {{keep local}} is pointlessly confusing. You do not, I am assuming, have any objection to the image being moved to Commons once 2060 gets here and the image is public domain in the UK. If you have no such objection, then the {{Do not move to Commons|reason=USonly|expiry=2059}} template will do exactly what you desire. --B (talk) 03:14, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Do you think the decision as to what is the "home country" (in cases such as this) is a matter that can be decided without discussion? There will be no doubt in some people's mind that the image I cited can be moved to commons (home country US[3]) and it then may be deleted there because in other people's minds there is doubt whether it is out of UK copyright. My reading of your proposal is that images tagged {{Do not move to Commons}} may be moved and speedy deleted if the mover considers there is no "licensing reason" against it. There would be no discussion. Is that intended as part of the proposal? Thincat (talk) 08:00, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Would you be happier to support the proposal if it were modified to allow F8 deletion if the file first has to be listed for a week at WP:FFD deletion only happens if the uploader manages to present a reasonable reason for keeping the file? --Stefan2 (talk) 16:51, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

I would be happier if any file on my watchlist that is moved to Commons could not deleted from both sites without me having seven days' warning. The premise that the only files moved to Commons are ones that will be kept there is completely unrealistic. Movers make mistakes and Commons is erratic. Files moved are no longer on WP watchlists. Possibly easier than your suggestion would be to require FFD before deleting a tagged file that had been copied to Commons. I also think that a file should not be moved at all without consensus if there is a reason given on the tag. I don't understand the thinking that moving a tagged file without consensus is any less objectionable that wanting to preserve a file for personal reasons. Thincat (talk) 23:56, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

• I'd be much less likely to think this proposal unreasonable if you could point at a couple dozen ffds where the local copies of such images were overwhelmingly deleted, opposed only by an uploader with a "silly" reason as stated above. As is, this fails the "uncontestable" criterion for new speedy deletion criteria, #2 at the top of this talk page, pretty much by definition. —Cryptic 20:45, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
  • These files are usually not taken to FFD as they would be kept there if the uploader gives a 'silly' reason. --Stefan2 (talk) 16:51, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
• Strong oppose. Uploaders and maintainers of content should not be forced to keep a constant eye on a completely different website in order to defend their content on en.wiki from being destroyed. If a file gets nominated for deletion on commons, it doesn't show up on your wikipedia watchlist, and commons does not send files back to wikipedia projects after deleting them, and for a disturbingly large amount of content, it is almost impossible to predict whether a given file will somehow fall afoul of some commons editor and get deleted out from under you. And like others have said, the fact that someone has placed a {{do not move to commons}} or {{keep local}} tag means that the file is automatically invalid for CSD because it is, by definition, contestable. I do, however, agree that it would probably be a good idea to do a cleanup to see if do not move files should actually be retagged as keep local, since the do not move designation is restrictive - ie, it keeps content from being shared - while keep local is permissive - it keeps the content shared as widely as possible. But until commons has policies that replaces files in local wikipedias when they get deleted from commons, editors have every reason to legitimately need critical files to remain local, and their needs should not be blithely dismissed. VanIsaac_WS^cont 18:28, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
  • You seem to be misunderstanding a few things. If a file has a restriction which forbids people from uploading the file to Commons, then the file satisfies speedy deletion per WP:CSD#F3, unless a fair use copyright tag is used. If a file risks being deleted on Commons, then the instructions at WP:CSD#F8 explicitly tell that the file doesn't satisfy deletion locally, and admins are required to check the files carefully before deletion. If a file risks being deleted on Commons for copyright reasons, then it almost always risks being deleted here too and should therefore be nominated for deletion on both projects. Will you ensure that files also are tagged for deletion on Wikipedia when the one tagged a file for deletion on Commons overlooked that there also is a copy on this project? --Stefan2 (talk) 21:21, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
    • No, you seem to be the one with the misunderstanding. Because Commons has shown itself time and time again to apply vastly different criteria than en.wiki, even far outside of the free-use criteria. Files don't just risk deletion on commons for copyright concerns, they face deletion for a myriad of reasons, and even when they do have copyright questions, the standard they apply is almost always pedantic or incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't spend large quantities of time on commons. Quite frankly, I would have no problem with commons duplicates being nominated here when they are nominated at commons, but I have a serious problem with commons unilaterally deciding a critical image that I put in a template or article can just be deleted out from under en.wiki without anyone here knowing about it until it's all over. Now, as far as I know, I've never actually tagged an image with either {{keep local}} or {{do not move to commons}}, but I know and work with editors who have done so on several occasions, and they all had previous experiences with critical images being summarily deleted from commons for no discernible reason. However, before making demands that tagging be symmetrical, I'd check out to see how well commons and en.wiki match each other when the same image is nominated at both places. I have a feeling you will be surprised at just how markedly divergent the determinations in the two communities truly are. But if you do check out symmetrical nominations and find a high degree of consistency across projects, in contrast to my experience, come back to me, and I'll work with you an a bot to automate the FFD tagging. VanIsaac_WS^cont 08:20, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
      • Commons should only delete files which are in use on English Wikipedia if there is a copyright problem. If someone accidentally deletes a file (which may happen on any project), then it should be enough to ask the admin to undo the deletion. I don't think that an 'FFD bot' would be a good idea; it is probably better to go through files manually instead, and we don't want thousands of files on the same discussion page anyway. --Stefan2 (talk) 22:21, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
• I've always thought it was silly to allow uploaders (and, in fact, anyone else) to WP:OWN files like this. I'd support a removal of the capability for people to request a local version to be kept for nothing other than their own convenience. If you really want to keep a close eye on files on Commons, you can set up e-mail notifications on your watchlist or something; or in the future (after SUL finalisations), cross-wiki watchlists will become a reality. — This, that and the other (talk) 05:40, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
  • This, This. — Keφr 14:27, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose because while we shouldn't need something like this, what gets deleted at Commons is not predictable based on Commons policy (let alone en.wp policy) and there is no guarantee that any image will not be discussed before deletion, or how long any discussion will last, and so a watchlist entry may or may not be generated in time for anyone here to see it. Thryduulf (talk) 12:31, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Quick note

File:Her Majesty Sultanah Terengganu Tuanku Nur Zahirah.jpg, mentioned above, is now at FFD; I nominated it because I don't think we should keep Flickr-sourced images purely on the request of the en:wp uploader. Nyttend (talk) 12:20, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Well, we don't keep them, do we? The "discussion" has by now been closed and the file deleted.[4] Thincat (talk) 18:44, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Is this discussion in the right place?

Would it be better to discuss this at Template talk:Keep local? It seems that this is the real issue here. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 03:06, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

No, it wouldn't I'm afraid. Anything concerning a type of speedy deletion is best kept on this page for a centralized discussion, then any changes agreed upon are implemented in templates and elsewhere. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 13:18, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

• It should be noted that commons copyright policy is not the same as en copyright policy. In particular, if something is non-copyrightable in the US, but copyrightable in its country of origin, Commons is unambiguous that it must be deleted. Our copyright policy is that we MUST obey US copyright law, and that "according to Jimbo Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, Wikipedia contributors should respect the copyright law of other nations, even if these do not have official copyright relations with the United States." which leaves a lot of room for discussion on what should happen when its clearly not copyrightable in the US, not because of lack of treaty, but because say the US doesn't recognize it as being copyrightable. Monty₈₄₅ 21:26, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Criterion U2 may need revising due to the SUL migration

After talking about this for a bit, specifically on WP:VPTECH about User:UBX and User:Example, with the WP:SUL (Single unified login) migration that is currently taking place which is being carried out by the bot User:Maintenance script, I think that with these changes, criterion U2 needs to be updated in one way or another. Since the SUL process moves all user pages, subpages, and contributions that are not linked to a unified login when a unified login with the same name exists, deletes all of the leftover redirects, frees up the user name to be used for the unified login user, and (at least on this wiki) moves the user, user page, and all subpages to "User:Name~enwiki", this has the potential to break certain needed links to a point where it causes technical issues on the wiki. I'm not sure how to word this, but given this information, there may be some plausible cases where the user name where the pages were moved from is technically not registered by the global user, but need to be retained. Pinging some who may have interest due to participating in the User:Example and User:UBX discussions: Cenarium, Mr. Stradivarius, Guy Macon, EoRdE6, and Technical 13. Steel1943 (talk) 18:58, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

What about a simple tag that can be placed on those pages (if there aren't too many) that declares them exempt from U2 and links to the explanation. If there are more than the few exceptions, then a U2 modification may need to be made. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 19:01, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

That would seem to be workable for the English Wikipedia. I have been giving this some thought, and it seems like every Wikipedia should have an example user in their own language. The question is whether we should allow someone to use the the username "Beispiel" on the English Wikipedia or the username "Example" on the German Wikipedia. --Guy Macon (talk) 19:13, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

I think it will be enough just to fix the accounts that currently show the problem. Once the pseudo-accounts broken by SUL migration are fixed, anybody creating a new pseudo-account for use on enwiki would likely create the account on enwiki in the first place, or visit enwiki while logged on with that account. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 08:36, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

I think the answer is that in the extremely unlikely event that whoever owns the SUL users "Example" or "UBX" were to start editing, we would soft block those users and inform them that their user names are reserved here. U2 is irrelevant here because these users actually do exist and so we wouldn't delete their pages anyway. I would bet that for any similar fake usernames, probably at some point, someone has created an account with that name to reserve it and so U2 is unlikely to be relevant for any of them. --B (talk) 12:30, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Speedy for albums by various artists

I placed a speedy notice, WP:A9, on Sacred Revolution. It's a collection of live performances by various artists. It was released by a conference, not a band and not a record label promoting its artists. The A9 was denied with the comment, "Decline WP:A9 speedy deletion, artist has an article, not eligible." I don't buy that argument as

1. the artist listed in the infobox is not an artist,
2. if any subject with an article, such as a local radio station, can be listed as the artist in the infobox and the criteria for A9 is used to "promote" the work and force it to go to PROD and then AfD,
3. if for collective compilation works such as this, if only one performing artist, or even half of the listed artists, need to have articles, you have a situation similar to 2.

So what is the criteria here? Did I err when applying A9? Did the admin err in stating that A9 didn't apply for that specific criteria? Could the rules be states more clearly for other similar articles? 208.81.212.222 (talk) 19:22, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I would agree with the decline. The letter of the A9 criteria says there must be an artist, but in this case realistically the spirit of the criteria is met because there are multiple artists associated with the work that have articles. I'd say take it to AFD instead where it would have to meet WP:NALBUM more specifically. §FreeRangeFrog^croak 19:27, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) So then a compilation album by a local bar of local artists, including Carly Rae Jepsen, could be PRODed or taken to AfD, but not put through a speedy deletion. 208.81.212.222 (talk) 20:00, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I am the admin that declined the speedy delete mentioned above. The decline had absolutely nothing to do with the non-artist that was put into the infobox as the artist. It had to do with the 5 artists that made ~75% of the music on the album having articles. The remaining ~25% was made by two artists without articles. I believe that is enough to survive a WP:A9 speedy deletion. -- GB fan 19:58, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

So then a compilation album by a local bar of local artists, including Carly Rae Jepsen and other artists that comprise 51% of the album, could be PRODed or taken to AfD, but not put through a speedy deletion. 208.81.212.222 (talk) 20:00, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I would say if there was an article about a compilation album with Carly Rae Jepsen on it, then the article should go through Prod or AFD, not be speedy deleted. -- GB fan 20:10, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

• I agree that A9 doesn't apply here, or to any album containing a track by an artist with an article. I can remember a similar case when I declined to delete an article about a compilation album under A9 as it included some tracks by some very popular artists such as Queen, it was eventually deleted at AfD for not being notable. Bear in mind that speedy deletion is only supposed to be for uncontroversial circumstances that almost everyone can agree on, if there's anything ambiguous or problematic then an AfD isn't much effort. Hut 8.5 21:37, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
  • Indeed, it's possible a compilation with songs by Queen and Carly Rae Jepsen ain't notable, but it'd be daft to assume that. A compilation of songs by Nalgene Supergreen and Toolsy McFuckFace & the Rake Muckers can reasonably be assumed to be non-notable. WilyD 12:10, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Would it be worth changing "has no corresponding article about its recording artist" to "none of the contributing recording artists have an article" or adding a clarification that "This criterion applies to compilation albums only when none of the featured artists have an article."? Thryduulf (talk) 12:56, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

• @Thryduulf: I see the value in this. Steel1943 (talk) 19:01, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
  • Do you have a preference which? Thryduulf (talk) 19:41, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

• Not really. They both clearly state the same thing, and I understand both. But, I'd probably go with the shorter explanation since whatever is added to the description on WP:CSD has to, in turn, be added to its corresponding {{Db-meta}} template, and most of those templates are already large text-filled eyesores. Steel1943 (talk) 19:44, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
  • A good point. That's a voice for the first of my options then. I'll wait a couple of days in case any objections come in before doing this though. Thryduulf (talk) 20:27, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

• • I have now made this change [5]. Thryduulf (talk) 14:02, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 16, 2015

I think it helps to ask from time to time ... my gut reaction is to delete this just-created page per G6, housekeeping. G6 is the rationale that has often been used to delete pages related to the Featured Article process that are created out-of-process, and this one certainly was. I'm a TFA coord, so there's certainly an argument that I'm involved and it wouldn't bother me even a little bit if anyone wants to object. OTOH ... Brian, Crisco or I would be just as involved if we go to another admin and say "please delete this", which as a practical matter is what would have to happen, since we're the ones watching those pages and responsible for making the process work. Bottom line ... I won't be offended either way, and I think it makes sense for us to poke our heads in from time to time and ask, since the argument is sometimes made that the letter of the policies doesn't match the long-term practice. Thoughts? - Dank (push to talk) 19:09, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Dank ... this is a textbook G6. Keep in mind that rules and bureaucracy are not binding constants. ;-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 19:19, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

• I don't have a problem with people deleting something like that under G6, or IAR if necessary. That person doesn't have the authority to decide TFAs and even if they did the article isn't an FA, so there's no chance a deletion could possibly be controversial. Hut 8.5 20:21, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

 Done Putting this here so that someone looking at this doesn't think that the page (which is now a blue link again) still needs to be deleted. --B (talk) 15:14, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

• Just as a little aside here, I notice that nobody has attempted to actually say something on the talk page of محمد مجیب (talk · contribs) to let him know about our processes and that, unlike some smaller Wikipedias, anyone can't just create a TFA page. Having a human conversation with someone is sometimes a good idea. Obviously, yes, the incorrectly created page should be deleted (and I see it has been) but that's not a substitute for politely informing the user of our procedures and how our featured articles work. --B (talk) 15:14, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Extraneous links on db-templates for categories

Most or all of the monthly cleanup category pages will automatically produce a db-g6 tag when they're empty, since there's no point in keeping them once the problems are all resolved. However, these templates produce silly links: after reminding administrators to check history, logs, etc. before deletion, it suggests that we search Google for the pagename (and gives us links to do that), which obviously isn't relevant. The deletion template refers to "this category", so it's already able to detect that it's a category. Could we set it up so that db-g6 (and perhaps other speedy-deletion templates) don't produce a link to search Google for the category name? I can't imagine a situation in which so doing would ever be useful. Nyttend (talk) 05:07, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

• You could I guess, but put it near the bottom of the priorities list. It's easy just to ignore them. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 01:31, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Deprecate C2

Why do we need C2 anymore? It's now possible to move a category, so there's no reason to delete it simply to facilitate a pagemove. Yes, of course we shouldn't get rid of the concept entirely (it's the standard for category pagemoves), but why does it have to be listed on WP:CSD when deletion is no longer needed for the process in question. Nyttend (talk) 03:24, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

• @Nyttend: I have a question ... if the C2 criterion is removed, then what will happen to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Speedy? Steel1943 (talk) 03:36, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

That's what I mean when I say "shouldn't get rid of the process entirely". Let's keep doing what we're doing right now, doing nothing differently except for the name. Nyttend (talk) 03:46, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Articles written as essays

I propose that we add a criterion for articles written as essays or blog posts rather than encyclopedia articles. I have seen a number of such articles get speedy deleted, most recently Prisionero En Argentina, but no criterion is available to justify this. I think the criterion should say something like "Articles that are written in violation of WP:NOTESSAY and WP:NOTBLOG". Everymorning talk 16:44, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

I would disagree with speedy delete, as often there is a valid topic hidden away in there. A discussion or a prod should be able to deal with it, if no one is around to fix the problem. Your example was a pile of problems, not english, unreferenced, but was very close to being an article about Claudio A. Kussman. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:04, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, if it doesn't qualify for any of the other criteria, I don't think we should flush something just because of the way it is written. I also don't think this happens frequently enough to merit a new criterion. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:02, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm thinking worse case scenario, the page gets moved to the "Draft:" namespace, then the leftover redirect deleted per criterion R2; most likely, regardless of the way the article is written in such cases, unless it qualifies for an existing criterion, there a valid subject present that can be expanded and the page rewritten. Steel1943 (talk) 00:39, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

• Support this!!! I was actually going to suggest the same thing. This article The Affordable Care Act and Young Adult Obesity is up for AfD. I don't know why essays, as long as everyone agrees it's an essay, don't qualify as speedy delete. Things like this that are clearly an essay ("The Affordable Care Act and Young Adult Obesity" is not close to an encyclopedic subject, but a combination of two subjects and how they interact) and seems to be written by some kind of program advocate or health educator, ("The author of this page wishes to inform young adults; whether they be in college or out of college, that the ACA is working to reduce the number of them that are obese and present them with innovative new strategies they can use to manage their battle with obesity.") —Мандичка^YO 😜 18:19, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

That looks like advertising for a start... But how do you know that 'everyone' agrees it's an essay, unless it's been to a discussion? There are quite a few things that could easily be decided by speedy (but aren't), but essayness isn't one of them. Peridon (talk) 20:08, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

• @Wikimandia:Define essay. That's the problem, there is no way for people to agree on what exactly it means to be an essay. And often essays can become decent articles simply by fixing the writing style. We shouldn't be letting a single person make that judgement, for good reason we limit speedy deletion to only the obvious cases. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 20:11, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

• @Oiyarbepsy: It should be for cases where there is no doubt that it was created as an essay, either personal or academic, and there is no one arguing the subject can be salvaged (eg "Cacophony and Alliteration in the Ottoman Empire"). Articles that have plausibility as an encyclopedic entry wouldn't qualify, even if they are essay-like. @Peridon: I thought it was some kind of advocate, because the only searches I found on this topic were health education articles. But it turns out it is an essay and is in fact created as a school assignment (as someone else posted on the AfD). The tag "this is essay-like" isn't strong enough when it's not essay-like, it is an essay. Obviously this will be deleted by the AfD, but it should qualify for speedy deletion instead of waiting seven more days. Since it's already been tagged as AfD, we can't move it to creator's userspace. —Мандичка^YO 😜 20:31, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
• "...and there is no one arguing the subject can be salvaged" And where exactly would people be arguing that if not at an articles for deletion discussion? Anything that requires an argument is totally outside the scope of speedy deletion. And there is no harm in having it be discussed for seven days - one bad article doesn't destroy Wikipedia. The only things that truly need to be removed immediately are copyright violations and attack pages, and pretty much everyone else doesn't pose enough risk of harm to the project to justify summarily deleting where there is any possibility doubt. I'll also note that you did not actually define essay as I asked above. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 20:37, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

There are four basic rules for new criteria at the top of this page. I think this fails the first three. It is too subjective, thus making it highly contestable, and essay-like articles that do not otherwise qualify for speedy deletion are not a big, frequent problem. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:42, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Speedy is for pretty much set things - advertising material is very easy to spot (except for the people who work in PR because they actually talk like that to each other...). and so on. I would have deleted this under G11 quite happily had it been tagged for that. (See my comments at the AfD.) Significance is abused to an extent, but is fairly clear cut. 'Joe Bloggs is a footballer. He was born in 2002.' - no significance shown or credibly claimed. 'Joe Bloggs is the CEO of BloggsCo Stores. He was born in 1955 in Swemple, AZ, the eldest son of the Fred Bloggs, the founder of the BloggsCo international chain of stores.' - that could be a credible claim to significance (not notability - that only comes into A9 at CSD, except that actual passing of a notability policy trumps the significance question at A7). And so on. CSD is at usually least two people looking - tagger and reviewing admin. The tagger may well be an admin too - we mostly tag things we find rather than ending them alone. (When it's a clear attack, we may execute summary justice.) 'Essay' takes too much judgement as it depends on style - and not an obvious style like PR jargon. Peridon (talk) 21:11, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Excuse me, I thought that was a rhetorical question. I would define an essay as prose written about the author's interpretation and speculation on a particular topic or theme. I don't think that's a particularly controversial definition. If it were impossible to define, there would not be an essay tag. Pages tagged for speedy deletion are not automatically deleted as you know - people can contest them, or an administrator may disagree. To say "there's no harm" in it being discussed for seven days means nothing - there's also no harm in having a seven-day discussion about articles where there is no indication of importance, but those are eligible for speedy deletion. I would argue it's even more harmful to have a personal essay in which someone speculates about health care law and disease and how that affects young people, then it is to have an article about a web hosting company in Australia that existed from 1998 to 1999. —Мандичка^YO 😜 23:20, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Speedy is in the main for things that are either clear and urgent (copyvio, attack and blatant hoax) or clear and frequent (A7, G11, and no content, no context, author requested, etc). Speedy is a short cut that was introduced to take the strain off prod and AfD by eliminating the most obvious and frequent cases, with a fairly easy restoration request system. It was never intended to replace prod and AfD. It's a bit like a traffic warden booking illegally parked cars so that the police can concentrate on the more tricky issues like murder and arson. The essay in question here, to my mind, would be an easy G11, and quite a few that I've seen have been dealt with that way. But they're not common as a class of article. There's a few other things I'd think more useful at CSD than a criterion for essays. Peridon (talk) 08:18, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

AfD can be quick at times - I see that SNOW has fallen on the essay already. Peridon (talk) 08:21, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Sometimes essays are copy and pasted from another site, and can be deleted per G12, but that's a red herring for this debate. As Peridon says, unless the existence of the article is a clear and obvious violation of the terms of services (which fits at least G3, G10 and G12), all speedy means is "less than 7 days, without discussion". Indeed, I've seen a few borderline A7s sit at CAT:CSD for a few days. A personal essay criticising health care law might be POV, it might be entirely negative in tone, but unless it contains obvious personal attacks on specific people, I don't think it can be speedied. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 09:19, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Centralise the notice talk pages too

I notice that almost all of the template talk pages of speedy deletion notices do not exist, have no content at all or just contain one or two revisions. Obviously, these should be redirected to a centralised talk page because they are not being used, just as we have centralised the template talk pages of CSD tags.

• Template talk:Db-nonsense-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-test-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-hoax-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-vandalism-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-repost-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-copypaste-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-attack-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-spam-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-copyvio-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-afc-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-nocontext-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-nocontent-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-transwiki-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-person-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
• Template talk:Db-notwebhost-notice (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)

and more... 103.6.156.167 (talk) 17:11, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Good idea. Template talk:Db-notice seems like an obvious candidate.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 22:04, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Waited a week for other comments and have now implemented. I will place a notice at the top of the talk page so that redirected users are not confused and know to tell us (as they often don't at db-meta) what actual template they are talking about.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:04, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

Validity of WP:CSD#F7 for old files uploaded with non-templated FUR?

Is this a valid CSD for File:Al Lewis 01.jpg?

The root problem is that this is an old file (2006), uploaded with the obvious intention of a valid FUR, but before the current templates were created. It has not been updated since. It is true that the FUR is thus incomplete, however should the file then be deleted for that and no other reason? Note also that this is CSD (rapid, no public forum listing, almost invisible before deletion has taken place) rather than FfD.

We have many files in such a state. Ideally, good editors would rework them as they're encountered and simply fix the problem by formatting the FUR . However it's so much more adminish to tag them for deletion instead, and this is what is happening. We thus lose content unnecessarily.

Should CSD be permitted in such cases? Or should CSD be excluded when a FUR is only incomplete for this historical reason? Andy Dingley (talk) 22:19, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

The spirit of the criterion clearly does not apply to files uploaded before the current FUR standard was implemented (for an ongoing definition of "current", in case the standard changes in future) where there has been no notice that the file's rationale is incomplete. I would personally decline deletion of any file in this situation unless there has been an FFD discussion and/or a notice on the talk page of the uploader AND a notice on the talk pages of all articles using the file. Thryduulf (talk) 21:55, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

It seems to me the A7 subcriterion "Invalid fair-use claims..." conflates two ideas – (1) that it is incorrect to be regarding the image as fair use and (2) that the fair-use claim has not been made according to WP policy for an image properly being regarded as fair use. (1) involves copyright and (2) does not. When (2) applies there seems to be no requirement for a speedy and indeed, it does not meet the instruction "Speedy deletion is intended to reduce the time spent on deletion discussions for pages or media with no practical chance of surviving discussion". The speedy nomination was incorrect and an administrator deleting the file would be making a mistake. An FFD would not be improper but an improved NFUR would be better still, as has now been done.Thincat (talk) 08:05, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

Improving articles temporarily undeleted for WP:DRV

At Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2015 May 15#Seth Goldman (businessman), Spartaz (talk · contribs) undeleted Seth Goldman (businessman) with the {{TempUndelete}} template. Spartaz and I disagreed about whether I am allowed to rewrite the article in mainspace before the DRV is closed. He reblanked the article with the edit summary "restore temp delete. Article hadn't been restored has it?". At the DRV, he further wrote:

There is long standing practice that we leave deleted articles under a temp undeletion template during the whole discussion. You should know this by, now given how much time you have spent at DRV.

I believe that my restoration is permissible because {{db-repost}} clearly no longer applies. The original article had no sources. The new article has nine reliable sources from reputable newspapers such as the Boston Herald, The Baltimore Sun, the Financial Times, and USA Today.

DGG (talk · contribs), the AfD nominator at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Seth Goldman (businessman), wrote, "I don't think we should salt, because there is a possibility of a properly written article by a NPOV editor." I therefore rewrote the article in mainspace. DRV closers will close as "keep deleted" if no one steps forward to do a rewrite, which is why I did one here.

During the DRV, I could have asked an admin to move the deleted article to draft space. I then could have rewritten the draft and moved it back to mainspace before the DRV was closed. I do not believe it would be blanked or deleted in that case. I do not believe the draft should be blanked or deleted in this case either.

My question: Is there any support in Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion or elsewhere for the position that an article restored under {{TempUndelete}} cannot be rewritten in mainspace?

Cunard (talk) 03:58, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

• 1) No direct discussion with me.
• 2) This isn't a CSD so your discussion should be at WT:DRV. Courtesy undeletion is a courtesy and you should consider the other editors who wanted the article gone.
• 3) You are becoming increasingly difficult if you don't get your way and need to step back a bit and think about that. Spartaz ^Humbug! 06:50, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Temporary undeletion at DRV is done as a courtesy to non-admin participants in the discussion so that they can see the article in question and participate usefully in the discussion. These undeletions are not done for normal article development, which is what the DRV is supposed to be deciding. Nobody has claimed that any of the CSD criteria apply in this situation, and I agree that G4 doesn't, but that's beside the point - people shouldn't be trying to rewrite these articles and Spartaz could have protected the article to stop people doing so (see the protection policy). Hut 8.5 06:53, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

• Like Cunard I have sometimes felt utterly prevented from improving articles while their history has been temporarily undeleted. Also, except for things like copyright infringements and attacks, we may be being unnecessarily coy about undeleting. However, I am quite clear that improving articles in situ hinders the DRV process and makes it less likely that such undeletions will continue to be done. DRV should be reviewing the AFD/Speedy and the article as it was during the relevant time. "Improvements" should wait. Thincat (talk) 07:08, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

• Comment Good faith improvements to a topic should be encouraged per WP:IAR and WP:NOTBURO. Deletions are not permanently binding per WP:CCC and if a topic can be greatly improved by such work this is likely to help DRV reach a sensible conclusion. G4 does not apply in cases where such substantial improvements are made. Andrew D. (talk) 07:17, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

Of course, fixing problems should be encouraged, and we shouldn't be overly bureaucratic. On the other hand, we're trying to get things right in the long run - while the DRV is running, whether the article is blanked or not shouldn't be worth worrying about (in this case, anyhow. Actually problematic articles, that may vary). Yes, re-blanking is a bit bureaucratic, and a bit un-collaborative. But it's wiser to roll with the temporary situation, rather than escalate the confrontation. WilyD 07:41, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

• Yes, there is support in the WP:DRV procedure that you should not be changing the contents of the subject of an active DRV question that has been temporarily restored to review if the AFD was valid. Your storming around and trying to bypass the process is not doing you (or the subject) any favors. You could have requested a copy to work in Userspace or Draftspace with following a process like Articles for Creation to have an independent set of eyes review your improvements to determine if there was merit in restoring the biography to mainspace. The CSD:G4 (recreation of substantially same work as already deleted by AFD) was valid. Furthermore the AFD as it was when closed was justified. What I would suggest is that the "article" gets put into draft space and enrolled in AFC to ensure that it meets the standards before it gets back to mainspace. A clean restoration would be best Hasteur (talk) 11:21, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
• As mentioned above by Hut 8.5 above and by me at WT:DRV, yes, there's explicit support for this position at Wikipedia:Protection policy#"History only" review. We don't, and shouldn't, require a rewrite to demonstrate that a deleted article should be restored; listing sources is sufficient, just like sources and not a rewrite are (or should be) sufficient to get a poor article on a notable subject kept at AFD. Rewriting in-place can also backfire: if the decision at DRV is to endorse, the article will be deleted again, and admins will likely use your rewrite as a basis for whether to G4 a subsequent re-creation. If you're going to rewrite, you're better off doing it in userspace or draftspace and getting a history merge. —Cryptic 13:33, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

• listing sources is sufficient, just like sources and not a rewrite are (or should be) sufficient to get a poor article on a notable subject kept at AFD – Cryptic (talk · contribs), I used to share this view, but I no longer do. Listing sources not infrequently is insufficient to get a poor article on a notable subject kept at AfD. See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Array Networks, Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2015 May 17#Array Networks, and my rewrite of the article. Of particular note at the DRV are DGG's comment and Thincat's comment:

  I can't see what was there before your new draft but it highly likely demonstrates that articles can get deleted on notability grounds not because the topic lacks notability but because the article has been poorly written. I think this happens a lot. You know this, I know this and a lot of other people here do as well. However, pretending it doesn't happen is part of the game we play. I'm too old to be shocked. As it happens, in this case the "promotional" aspect has muddied the water.

  Cunard (talk) 04:13, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

• Purely in order to avoid confusion, I agree with Hasteur and Cryptic that it would be much better doing it in draft space or user space--it can be moved if that's what the DRV decides. It's not necessary to do this usually, but it can help to show that an improved article is possible. DGG ( talk ) 15:44, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
• Best thing to do - after reverting the rewritten article to the deletion review version, comment at the deletion review that the article was rewritten during discussion and provide a history link to the rewritten version. If the re-write is good, you can close it as either "moot" or "should have...", while keeping the re-write. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 20:09, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

• I have reviewed my rewrite again, and I did not use any content from the deleted article Spartaz (talk · contribs) undeleted. I wrote a new draft without relying on the deleted revisions. The blanking of my fresh rewrite under {{TempUndelete}} or Wikipedia:Protection policy#"History only" review therefore inapplicable and has no grounding in policy.

  {{TempUndelete}} should not exist to prevent recreations that do not rely on the deleted content.

  Spartaz's comment You are becoming increasingly difficult if you don't get your way and need to step back a bit and think about that is a personal attack ("Accusations about personal behavior that lack evidence" from WP:NPA#WHATIS) and should be withdrawn or substantiated with diffs.

  I most agree with Andrew Davidson (talk · contribs) about WP:IAR and WP:NOTBURO applying in this situation. My recreation of a neutral, reliably sourced article about a notable topic benefits the encyclopedia. For years, I have done numerous rewrites of articles at DRV and until now have never had my work blanked and my getting criticized for "becoming increasingly difficult". Putting roadblocks in editors' way takes wastes their time and makes them less likely to do such work in the future. This is the message that Spartaz sent with his page blanking and hurtful words (diffs 1 and 2).

  I disagree with Thincat (talk · contribs)'s comment that "'Improvements' should wait". When I choose an article to rewrite, I rewrite it immediately. Otherwise, I might never get around to doing the rewrite. I forget or I don't have the time later. If a rewrite renders DRV's review of an inferior draft moot, then that is fine. Improving the encyclopedia should be the main goal of all Wikipedia processes, including DRV.

  I agree with WilyD (talk · contribs) that "it's wiser to roll with the temporary situation, rather than escalate the confrontation", so I did not edit war with Spartaz. I will follow WilyD's advice to minimize confrontation using Oiyarbepsy (talk · contribs)'s sound idea. I will do the following if I rewrite an article with a {{TempUndelete}} template on it in the future. I will either save the rewrite in mainspace and then immediately blank it myself, or I will recreate it in the draft namespace.

  Cunard (talk) 04:13, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Expand scope of A11?

I don't mean expand the definition, just where we can apply it. Currently it applies to articles only, but we are seeing increasing numbers of such pages in userspace, either in sandboxes or AFC submisssions on subpages. This is actually a good thing as at least they aren't in article space, and I for one am perfectly willing to WP:IAR delete them anyway, but it would be nice if this popped up on the drop-down menu for deletion reasons when in userspace. I guess what that would actually involve would be converting it to one of the general cirteria that can be used in various namespaces. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:56, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

• I certainly think this would be a good idea.--Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:50, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

I can't think of any reason not to make the change. There is no reason why this sort of thing should be allowed just because it isn't in article space. A similar situation is a hoax, and G3 applies to pages anywhere: why not the same for "obviously invented"? Make it G14. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 11:43, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

• Yes, what a splendid idea (although it might make more sense to expand the scope of G3 instead, so that we have a General criterion that encompasses this sort of thing). Yunshui ^雲_水 11:47, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

I like the idea of expanding this to G14. Userspace drafts that are obviously made up stuff can be speedied per U5, but a "catch all" clause would make things a little simpler, and stop people hiding things in draft space that will never be acceptable. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:49, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

In principle yes, but I'd want some sort of exclusion for things which are obviously not intended as articles - including (but not limited to) things explicitly marked as humerous, as essays or as user pages ({{user page}} and similar). Actually it may be easier to specify that it applies only to pages (a) in the article namespace, (b) intended to be moved to the article namespace, and/or (c) intended to be percevied as an article. Thryduulf (talk) 21:48, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

• This is an excellent idea. §FreeRangeFrog^croak 21:52, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
• No. On the simple grounds that deletion is almost never required in this instance. No to mention that made-up stuff on user pages is often testing, which is what user pages are for. If something made-up is genuinely a problem, it's easy to just blank it and send a polite message to the user, there is no need to delete. And all the exceptions that people have been coming up with above show that we might not be able to make something workable. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 03:07, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
• No A CSD must be "Objective, Uncontestable, Frequent, and Nonredundant" per Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion/Header The proposed criterion fails Objective (requires people to make a judgmeent call on the content of the page), Uncontestable (one editor or admin will have differing thoughts as to what's eligible), Frequent (you have to show how these pages are overrunning MFD (and are being deleted the majority of the time when they do go to MFD) to justify a creation of new rules). You get a pass on nonredundant as there's a clear seperation from the existing CSDs. Furthermore I think this is a bad idea as semi-silently deleting things in "speedy" fashion is only going to flood WP:REFUND with more petitions for pages back. No objection to revising this proposed critera Beeblebrox, but I think we should have some precedent on the books before we try a land grab for more process. Also, you probably want to tag Article Rescue Squadron (or whatever it's calling itself today), the WT:Drafts, WT:Userspace, AN, etc. to this discussion as it has significant ranging implications. Hasteur (talk) 23:15, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Slightly off topic, but to those four mentioned, maybe we should add a fifth, "necessary", meaning that deletion is actually required to resolve the stated issue. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 01:44, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure we do have precendent, in that if these drafts were moved to article space they could immediately be speedy deleted. I get that it may be preferable to go a little easier on stuff in the draft and user namespaces, but if users are creating WP:FAKEARTICLEs in those namespaces I don't see why we should hold off. In fact in userspace we already can delete them under U5. My feeling is more that the draft namespace is kind of new and CSD hasn't really caught up with it yet. Fake articles are in fact almost always deleted if brought to MFD. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:01, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

• If #U5 doesn't apply, I'm not seeing what's left that would need the (already bad) A11 to be expanded. WilyD 10:59, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Proposal to broaden A9

Currently A9 covers articles "about a musical recording where none of the contributing recording artists have an article and does not indicate why its subject is important or significant". I don't see why this is limited to the medium of sound, can we expand it to cover books, films, etc. as well? Everymorning talk 18:21, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

I would oppose this. We were getting huge amounts of "songspam" articles about non-notable albums or singles by non-notable performers, often with no more than a track listing. Also, for popular music at least, it is petty much given that if the artist isn't notable, the song/album won't be. This is far less true with books, films or other creative works, where a single work may well be notable but the creator isn't or is notable only for the single work. Thus false positives are more likely with other kinds of works, and the need is much less. So the cost/benefit balance is not in favor of extending A9, in my view. DES ^(talk) 18:30, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

I have to agree, it's a lot easier to have a notable book by a non-notable author than it is to have a notable song by a non-notable artist. In the case of films you have the additional problem that the film isn't clearly identified with a single person or small distinctive group of people, but with a much larger number of actors and production people who probably won't work together on anything else. Hut 8.5 18:55, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Unfortunately, as pointed out above, films need to be taken individually rather than as a category. However, books that are by non-notable authors (that is, no WP article as in A9 already) and which are self-published (quite an easy standard to check on - if there is doubt about the status it would default to needing prod or AfD) could well be included. A9 already states that the recording must be non-notable in its own right, so if a self-published book has sufficient coverage, it would not be eligible (and would be rather out of the ordinary to boot...). This would NOT mean that all books that are with regular publishers would automatically be classed as notable - just that those that have no reliable independent coverage, a non-notable author, and self-publication would be liable to speedy rather than waiting for prod or AfD (where they get deleted anyway). I'm not against self-published books per se - I have worked with a self-published author who would definitely not consider his works to be WP material - but the purpose of most articles here about them is promotion. Peridon (talk) 19:29, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict)And of course for painting and sculpture, it is quite common to have highly notable work where the artist is unknown or only conjectured. But also important is the issue of frequency. CSDs should only include areas that get a lot of deletable contributions, thus significantly reducing the load on AfD, or areas where quick action is vital, such as copyvios and attack pages. Apparently non-notable books and films fit neither criterion. DES ^(talk) 19:36, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Peridon, do please recall that neither A9 nor A7 deal with non-notable items per se but with items where no plausible claim of significance, a different if related standard. Adding self-published would make an extension more reasonable, IMO, but is threre enough volume to warrent a CSD for such? DES ^(talk) 19:36, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

You know what I meant. I would think that as an addition to A9 rather than a new A number, it would merit inclusion. With both self-published books and A9 recordings, there appear to be peaks and troughs. I would foresee more use than A2 gets, for instance, and at least equal to hoax (which seems to me also to have peaks and troughs - and to be declining in 'quality'...). Peridon (talk) 19:49, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

I know what I hope you meant, but its amazing how many experienced editors confuse the standards. Anyway, IMO the grounds for extending an existing criterion are pretty much the same as for adding a new number. If this were to be done, I'd like to add a requirement that the book must be fairly recently published. There was a time (in the 19th C and before) when self-publication was common for respected authors, and didn't in any way imply vanity publication (Alice in Wonderland and most of Carrol's other books were self-published, for example). Even after that, prior to the recent flood of self-published POD- and e-publication, there just wern't all that many such books. I'm not sure where to set the limit. Having an additional condition might mean that this should be a new number if it is adopted. DES ^(talk) 20:03, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

1950 would be a safe year - most of the surviving self-publishers from then will probably have forgotten all about it (or wish to...). In practical terms, the start of the internet would also be OK as a cut-off point. It's with the ease of computerised print on demand and type setting that the flood gates opened. Before, it cost quite a bit to get a vanity book out. Now, while some firms charge an arm and a leg, others do it almost for the profits of the on demand printing. This is, of course, another thing that lowers the quality of recent self-published work - no pro involvement in the setting and proofing, apart from no editorial input (or out-take). Peridon (talk) 20:40, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

While vanity publishing is a problem, we should remember that there are notable authors who self publish today, and the number of self published e-books that achieve commercial success is on the rise. Now the examples I could find are all blue linked authors without articles for each book, but I think it is very possible we could fine a notable, self published book, with an author that is not independently notable. Monty₈₄₅ 00:31, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

OK, but if the book were independently notable, it would not meet the criterion of not being significant AND not having a blue-linked author. Like A9, it would be a two part thing. The target here is the stuff that was published last week, through CreateSpace, lulu or such, by someone who is not significant (and not even showing any sign of becoming significant), and which is only referenced to Amazon and Goodreads (possibly to Barnes and Noble as well, or the Medicine Hole Weekly Observer publishing a puff piece about a local author who has lived in Medicine Hole, AZ, for five years). The plot often looks directly derived from something well known. On occasion, the book in question is only part written. I would think that book equivalents of They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa! (notable recording - redirect only artiste) are likely to be in the hen's teeth bracket. Peridon (talk) 11:55, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

(reset indent) Peridon, you write "...if the book were independently notable, it would not meet the criterion of not being significant..." The problem is that what a speedy tagger or patrolling admin will know is not whether the book is significant, but whether the creator of the article managed to explain something of how or why it was significant. The real question is, how often does the inital draft of a notable book fail to clearly assert its significance? Also, speedy deletion is an almost inherently WP:BITEy process, and so we shouldn't use it where we dont really need to. Les e some stas, just how many articles about books are getting deleted at AfD, and how many of those would have been caught by this new propesed criterion (or extension if you prefer)? DES ^(talk) 13:07, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Discussion needing eyes

A discussion is open at Template_talk:Db-meta#F2_issue:_template_and_policy_disagree which could use some eyes. — Chris Woodrich (talk) 10:27, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

Additional instruction in regard to Removing speedy deletion tags

Earlier today Gparyani added to the section of the project page that instructs article creators not to remove Speedy Delete tags the text "; using multiple accounts to deceptively do so is considered sock puppetry and will not be tolerated.". JamesBWatson reverted this as instruction creep. Staszek Lem reinstated the text, noting that "Usually it is done by smartass newbies; and for them cross-referncing various policies is actually a good idea." Beeblebrox reverted back to the stagte before the first of these edited, citing WP:BRD. So, in the spirit of WP:BRD let us discuss. It seems to me that JamesBWatson has a point, our policies (specifically WP:SOCK already say that using a sock to make it appear that actions are by separate people when they aren't is deceptive and not acceptable. But perhaps Staszek Lem has a point also, in that it can be helpful to have a single place to point a newbie or a wikilawyer at, and newbies might possibly read WP:CSD but honestly be unaware of other policies such as WP:SOCK. Is adding this admittededly redundant text helpful to good faith but naive editors, or to those working with such editors or with possibly bad-faith editors? I'm not sure, myself. DES ^(talk) 19:52, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

WOW! Are you accusing me of being sock of Gparyani? Did you notice that I already agreed with JamesBWatson, assuming that he made a honest mistake, and now you are telling me that JamesBWatson did take me for a sock? Staszek Lem (talk) 20:01, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Now that you staring BRD, I can only repeat my edit summary "cross-referncing various policies is actually a good idea". And contrary to JamesBWatson's opinion, it is not an "instruction creep": the disputed edits don't add new instructions; they merely clarify policy interplay, i.e., the edit decreases confusion, rather than increases it. Staszek Lem (talk) 20:02, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

I did not in the least mean to imply that anyone was socking here, I was merely trying to accurately recount the course of events. I am sorry if what I wrote could be taken that way. I wrote "Staszek Lem reinstated the text" meaning that you reverted to the text that Gparyani had earlier added. I tried to be very explicit and exact about who did what. What anyone else thought I don't know, no one else has said anythign about anyone here being a sock.

As to the substantive point, I agree with you, Staszek Lem this is not instruction creep per se, because it doesn't add any instructions or policies or procedures. It merely repeats a policy from another page. It does make this already long policy page a sentence or two longer, the question is if the gain is worth that (IMO rather small) cost. DES ^(talk) 20:10, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

The length of a guideline page per se is not a problem, as long as it is easily navigable and clearly sectioned. TL;DR usually applies to long rambling structureless paragraphs. In our case a quick look into the page reveals that each section is short and clear, way below the TL;DR limit to worry about text length, so that there is enough slack for extra clarification. Staszek Lem (talk) 20:30, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

At the same time, I've been thinking that this clarification (118 characters) may be shortened and made less threatening. Staszek Lem (talk) 20:32, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

• May I suggest added the proposed note as a footnote, rather than in the running text? Oiyarbepsy (talk) 00:14, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

I think that gets us the worst of both worlds, Oiyarbepsy. The page bcomes longer and more complex (at least a bit), but the chance of someone actually reading such an instruction and being detered by it are even smaller than if it were in running text. DES ^(talk) 13:11, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Can someone explain "it is not an 'instruction creep': the disputed edits don't add new instructions"? The whole point of instruction creep is that it happens gradually, by adding a few words one day, a few more a month later, a few more two months later... The fact that it is merely duplicating instructions that exists elsewhere, rather than adding anything new does not in any way at all negate or even reduce the fact that this is adding yet one more bit of content to the whole body of guidelines, policies, "essays", etc etc: that is instruction creep, and it all contributes to making Wikipedia just one bit less easy for new editors. Indeed, the fact that it adds nothing new makes it less justifiable, as the increase in volume of text is less necessary. Anyone who knows what Wikipedia policies and guidelines were like eight years or so ago, when the total body of guidelines and policies was a small fraction of what they are now, will be likely to understand what I mean. And the worst thing is that the vast majority of the increase has not been because the community has introduced a lot of new policy "rules": over 90% of it has been because people have time and time again added just one more little bit of "clarification" or information regarding what for the most part is essentially the same basic policy or guideline. Step by step, each step being so small that people can sincerely think that the step is so trivial that objecting on the grounds that it adds more length is unreasonable, but a lot of tiny steps add up to a huge staircase. But really, really, really, what purpose would this serve? If the creator of a page is not allowed to remove a tag, then nobody can reasonably think that that means "unless they pretend to be another person". Anyone using a sockpuppet account or IP-editing to evade this policy knows damned well that he or she is dishonestly trying to evade the policy, and doesn't need to be told so. Also, anyone dishonest enough to do that is dishonest enough to do it even if the policy says "..and it doesn't make it all right to do this because you pretend to be a different person". To add yet a little bit more to the gradually expanding volume of Wikipedia policies and guidelines is something that is sometimes necessary, but in a case where it cannot possibly achieve any benefit, it is neither necessary nor desirable. We should be looking for ways to simplify and shorten our rule book, and adding to it only with reluctance when there is a serious benefit to be obtained by doing so. When I joined Wikipedia, I found the forest of guidelines and policies intimidating and confusing, and it must be far worse for new editors joining now. I don't agree at all that " there is enough slack for extra clarification": it is a mistake to judge this by the length or complexity only of one paragraph, or even one page, as the problem with instruction creep is, as I have already indicated, it gradually adds to the whole corpus of instructions that a new editor has to try to cope with. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 18:56, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

I agree with JBW. This really is obvious. DGG ( talk ) 17:44, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

We need a CSD criterion for blatantly unencyclopedic drafts

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

---

There are too many cases where the draft namespace is misused for hosting blatantly unencyclopedic content and WP:NOTWEBHOST violations. This is especially a problen since even IP address users can create draft pages. CSD G13 can only be used for deleting pages that are more than six months old. Even then, G13 deletions are technically eligible for undeletion upon request. And unencyclopedic content doesn't need to be restored. We need to clean up the draft namespace and optimise it for constructive purposes.

Current practises: Whenever a reasonable user comes across a draft page with purely unencyclopedic or WP:NOTWEBHOST content, they would nominate it for G13 deletion (assuming it is 6 months old, which is often the case as draftspace stuff without the AFC templates are too slow to be discovered) rather than take it to MFD. Even when a page isn't 6 months old, a reasonable user would shop for another criterion such as G2 (test page) or G3 (vandalism). If nothing works, then the page is CSD'd with a custom rationale.

All these practises are rough and the need of the hour is to introduce a new criterion to deal with such drafts, a sample of which are listed below in the collapsed box. To be called CSD D1 or G14 or whatever, I belive it meets all the requirements of CSD criteria as it's clearly objective, is unambiguous, is frequent, and mostly nonredundant.

Of course, this criterion would be used for clear and unambiguous cases only (as with G11 and G12 - for unambiguous advertising and copyvios). Everything else will have to be taken to MFD. This criterion covers pages in the draft namespace as well as subpages od Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation.

103.6.158.193 (talk) 13:59, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Sample template message
Feel free to edit this.

• This is a discussion worth having, perhaps promoting WP:U5 to a general criterion. However first I'd like to point out that all of the sample pages listed already qualify under WP:G8, and none are in Draft: space. Ivanvector (talk) 15:00, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
  • No, see WP:G8. WT:AFC subpages are explicitly exclided from that criterion. 103.6.158.193 (talk) 19:07, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
• I removed the sample invocation of {{db-meta}}; it's causing Wikipedia:Requests for comment/All (among other pages) to show up in Category:Candidates for speedy deletion. Thanks, Mackensen (talk) 15:09, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

• I would oppose this. Waiting 6 months to allow people a chance to develop possibly valid articles does no harm, and I can see a lot of trigger happy patrollers declaring as "obvious" drafts not acceptable as they stand, but that with the addition of proper references can be perfectly valid articles. I have seen some very poor drafts become decent articles, particualrly if an experiencd user helps the drafter. DES ^(talk) 15:23, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

  I would add that I strongly disagree with the description of "current practices" above. A page that is a good faith attempt at a draft of an article, even if it is clearly non-notable and never going to be acccepted, is not a "test page", and good faith additions are never vandalism. And a "custom" CSD rationale is simply out-of-process and should be rejected unless one of the actual criteria happen to fit the case. DES ^(talk) 15:23, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

  • DES, I feel that you're missing the point completely here. The criterion covers only those pages that consist of unencyclopedic content in its entirety, as well as blatant WP:NOTWEBHOST violations. Clearly, any attempt to create an actual draft is not included. I suppose you've not looked at the pages sampled in the collapsed box above. 103.6.158.193 (talk) 19:07, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
    • No I don't think so, 158.193. I will assume good faith that you intend this to apply only to junk that does not in any way represent even a possible draft. But I have very frequently seen the term "unencyclopedic" used in CSD, Prod, and AfD discussions. Many editors, no doubt quite honestly, use "unencyclopedic" to mean anything tha tthey think isn't notable or even anythign they don't think belongs here. Those who dislike pop-culture articles often describe their subjects as "unencyclopedic". I have also seen people attempt to apply WP:NOTWEBHOST to pages that were in fact unsourced article drafts. A CSD criterion must be clear and objective, somethign that almos all reasonable admins and most reasonable editors will agree on in any given case. If it needs to be a judgement call, then it need consensus and therefore discussion. DES ^(talk) 20:43, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

      Here is an example for you. Had it been in Draft instead of mainspace, would you think of this as deletable under your proposed new criterion? If so, consider this later version. (This was actually tagged for an A1 speedy as "no context". A 30-second web search found sources.) DES ^(talk) 20:43, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

      No, I don't think it meets the proposed criterion simply because it isn't unencyclopedic. (Articles about films are well within our inclusion policy.) Also note CSD A1 is not valid for that stub as it clearly provides context as to what the subject is. 103.6.158.193 (talk) 10:51, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose Is it that time of the month again for the perenial Draft namespace deletion discussion? Referring back to Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Header: A CSD must be objective, unconstestable, frequent, and nonredundant. The carte-blanche request for the ability to CSD these without a demonstration of the above objectives. The main one is we need to see frequent use. Hasteur (talk) 19:41, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose "blatantly unencyclopedic" is far too broad and subjective for my liking. Deleting drafts drives off editors, we shouldn't be encouraging admins to delete good faith efforts. Sam Walton (talk) 19:44, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

• Comment The proposer is mistaken about the application of G13. It is only relevant to drafts that have been reviewed and declined by the AFC process. In addition such drafts must have been untouched by human editor for at least six months before they are eligible for G13. Merely being "six months old" does not qualify a draft for G13 deletion and if it does not have an AFC template it is never eligible for G13. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:47, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
  • Not quite, Dodger67. G13 reads "Rejected or unsubmitted Articles for creation pages that have not been edited in over six months..." (emphasis added by me). Drafts neveer submited for review and left untouched for 6 months are eligable. DES ^(talk) 20:52, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Good catch, thanks. The point is if a draft never had an AFC template at all it is outside the scope of G13 - otherwise several of my own drafts might have been deleted already - some I've been working on very slowly for years. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:58, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Wrong again :) See {{db-g13}}, which says This applies to all pages that contain an Articles for Creation template or are located in the Articles for Creation namespace. (My misinterpretation, sorry, I took Articles for creation namespace to include the draft namespace, which it seems is not the case.) I have frequently nominated such pages (only the hopeless ones) and they've always been deleted. Your drafts are safe if they're in your userspace though. 103.6.158.193 (talk) 12:31, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

103.6.158.193, as one who helped design G13 and implement the main workhorse of G13, I can speak with authority about G13 and it's interpertations. You are misreading them. G13 applies to all pages that are under Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/ pseudo namespace, or any page that is tagged with the AFC banner that have recieved zero edits in over 6 months. Those are the two criterion. Your attempt to lob every page that lives in Draft namespace under the G13 criteria is wrong and will get you chased off with pitchforks and threats to indefinite block. I've tried multiple times to advocate for some procedural rule for how long we'll let a draft remain before we sweep it up, each time getting swatted down. This new criterion is overlaping many tools already in the toolbox, and must demonstrate it's needed factor. Hasteur (talk) 16:06, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

• I don't think it's necessary. The current G* criteria catch the very worst, and the rest should be speedily noindexed, generally via {{subst:AFC draft|username}}. (Though I'm unclear on why the whole Draft namespace isn't in robots.txt, like all of Wikipedia talk:Articles for Creation/ is. Can anyone point me to a discussion?) —Cryptic 23:33, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

  According to Wikipedia:Controlling search engine indexing all of the Draft: namespace is automatically noindexed. My memory (which could be wrong) of the proposal that created draft was that it was supposed to be noindexed. I can't say if it really is. DES ^(talk) 23:43, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose First I'm opposing on principle. Since there is no review process or public access to the content CSD for any reason, I do not think we should broaden the grounds in any way. This double secret purgatory you send the articles to is so easily abused and there is no recourse provided to the average editor, much less the average reader. Go away, nothing to se here. Additionally, as stated above this is "blatantly unencyclopedic" and is far too broad and subjective. As we have seen with other guidelines, give them an inch and they will take a mile. Trackinfo (talk) 04:01, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

  While I agree with your conclusion, I must point out that there is a review process. Any speedy deletion can be taken to deletion reveiw. There it will often be temporarily undeleted so peopel can see what is being discussed, unless it was a copyvio or an attack page. This is not a perfect system, and I agree that the criteria should be kept narrow, clear, and focused. But I don't see a better alternative. DES ^(talk) 04:20, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

There is no public review process. Its not kept in an unknown vault where only someone who searches can find it, that would be bad enough. Unless you have administrative privileges, the rest of the public has no idea what content was deleted, only a record that one editor thought it was important enough to delete. If we were fortunate enough to have been involved, we know the content. That is extremely rare. You can't defend an article at DRV if the content is unknown. Literally an article can appear and be removed from sight within minutes. CSD can very easily be used as a unilateral censorship system. We don't have a check and balance system to prevent that.

There should be a holding place for public review and the potential to open a discussion if a contentious deletion exists. Currently, only if an administrator chooses to look into the matter and decides there is a problem does a CSD come under any tiny bit of scrutiny. And if reversed, offending abusers are not punished. Trackinfo (talk) 06:19, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Although irrelevant to this discussion, I strongly agree with your observation that there is no transparent process for review of CSD deletions. It's also sad that those who make controversial CSD deletions are not punished. Again, the root of this problem is that there is no easy way for desysoping administrators. The bar for ArbCom is too high, discussions with the admin on their talk page are always futile, and of course, such discussions on the drama boardz are speedily closed and hushed up. 103.6.158.193 (talk) 11:02, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Its relevant to the point that we are discussing putting another weakly defined, potentially destructive, opinion bullet into the super secret gun. Trackinfo (talk) 17:16, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

A better review process for speedy deletions would probably be a good idea, but it isn't easy to formulate a practical one. In anycase, this threqad isn't the place to do it. DES ^(talk) 23:23, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose WP:UNENCYCLOPEDIC is an argument to avoid. Andrew D. (talk) 07:20, 15 June 2015 (UTC)
  • I don't think so. See #14 on WP:DEL-REASON. Any other content not suitable for an encyclopedia is a valid reason under Wikipedia's deletion policy. 103.6.158.193 (talk) 10:45, 15 June 2015 (UTC)
  • If editors can't even agree whether it's a good argument in a discussion, how could it be acceptable for speedy deletion? Oiyarbepsy (talk) 13:14, 15 June 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose as it hasn't been long enough for WP:CCC yet in my opinion on this perennial suggestion. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 16:20, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

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

Proposed change to criterion F2

It has come to my attention (see e.g. section above this one) that there is misunderstanding about what qualifies as an F2 speedy deletion and some disagreement that everything it currently covers should always be deleted. This is with regard to the image description pages portion of the criterion ony. To try and resolve this, I propose tweaking the wording of the criterion to resolve these issues.

Current wording:

F2

Files that are corrupt, empty, or that contain superfluous and blatant non-metadata information. This also includes image description pages for Commons images, except pages containing information not relevant to any other project (like {{FeaturedPicture}}).

Proposed wording:

F2

Files that are corrupt, empty, or that contain superfluous and blatant non-metadata information. This also includes file description pages for files hosted on Commons that exactly duplicate the description page there or where the only additional information consists entirely of material that consists entirely of patent nonsense, vandalism, copyright violation(s), or material that would be speedy deleted under criteria G10 or G11 as a stand-alone page. Pages that contain categorisation, status or project templates relevant to the English Wikipedia (e.g. {{FeaturedPicture}}) may not be deleted under this criterion.

I am unsure though whether to recommend file description pages that do not meet this criteria should be sent to FfD or MfD. Thryduulf (talk) 10:29, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

I would favor this, althogh as i matter of style i would like to reword it so that we didn't use "consists entirely of" twice in the same sentence. DES ^(talk) 11:18, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

perhaps:

Modified Proposed wording:

F2

Files that are corrupt, empty, or that contain superfluous and blatant non-metadata information. This also includes file description pages for files hosted on Commons that exactly duplicate the description page there or where the only additional content consists entirely of patent nonsense, vandalism, copyright violation(s), and/or material that would be speedily deleted under criteria G10 or G11 as a stand-alone page. Pages that contain categorisation, status, or project templates relevant to the English Wikipedia (e.g. {{FeaturedPicture}}) may not be deleted under this criterion.

How is that? Does anyone have any subsantive objections? DES ^(talk) 11:18, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

• No, it looks good to me. — Chris Woodrich (talk) 11:48, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Proposed simplification of the "useless extra content" part:

F2

Files that are corrupt, empty, or that contain superfluous and blatant non-metadata information. This also includes file description pages for files hosted on Commons that exactly duplicate the description page there or where the only additional content would otherwise qualify for speedy deletion. Pages that contain categorisation, status, or project templates relevant to the English Wikipedia (e.g. {{FeaturedPicture}}) may not be deleted under this criterion.

I see no reason to specifically mention G10 & G11, which suggests that a description page that's vandalism can't be deleted, since the wording could be misread to suggest that only attacks pages and spam could be deleted. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 14:13, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I like that simplification. My initial thinking was that other pages would either be caught by the listed factors or be eligible as a whole regardless of the partial duplication (e.g. G6 and G7), but the simplification is better way of expressing it. Thryduulf (talk) 14:43, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

• The wording should not mention other speedy deletion criteria. If the page qualifies for deletion under another criterion, then you can simply tag the file for deletion per that criterion, regardless of what this criterion states.

The wording 'file description pages for files hosted on Commons that exactly duplicate the description page there' is inappropriate. The speedy deletion criterion currently allows deletion provided that the file information page doesn't contain useful information such as DYK templates or certain other templates. I see no reason to change this. If there is some information which doesn't exactly duplicate the information on Commons, then it sounds like a good idea to speedily delete the local page anyway, provided that the information isn't useful for Commons. If some of the information is useful for Commons, consider amending the information on Commons prior to deletion. --Stefan2 (talk) 23:40, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

• The criterion states "information not relevant to any other project (like {{FeaturedPicture}})". Information doesn't have to be about the subject; it can also be about the image itself, and its position within the English Wikipedia. Such information is not relevant to other projects. As such, DYK templates, portal templates, and FP templates are all exceptions to F2 (rather than things which must be deleted). Please quote the entire criterion, rather than just the first sentence. — Chris Woodrich (talk) 00:30, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
  • That's what the criterion currently says, but it is not what the two proposed new wordings are saying, which looks attempt to extend the exemption to a lot of other irrelevant information. --Stefan2 (talk) 01:46, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
    • All of the proposed wordings provide a paraphrased/more explicit version of the exception. What you consider "irrelevant" (what, exactly? Categories? DYK templates?) are already covered by the current exception. They're just made more explicit by the proposals above. As for "file description pages for files hosted on Commons that exactly duplicate the description page there", that is just one example in the criterion. It's not the only possibility. — Chris Woodrich (talk) 01:52, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
      • All of the proposed wordings provide a copy of the exception and also an additional exception: if there is a local file information page with some other information (for example an extra {{information}} template with slightly different information), then the file information page won't satisfy speedy deletion per F2 unless the information already is on Commons, regardless of whether this extra information would be useful for anyone. The proposed wordings also contradict themselves: according to both proposed wordings, it would be possible to use {{db-f2}} whenever all of the information on the local file information page also is available on the file information page on Commons, but it also says that it wouldn't be possible to use {{db-f2}} when {{featured picture}} is used, which is a contradiction as all information on the local file information page typically also is on the file information page on Commons when {{featured picture}} is used locally. --Stefan2 (talk) 02:03, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

• I don't understand the proposal to include the words "exactly duplicate the description". Does this mean that if essentially the same information is given, but differing in some minor way such as using different wording, then it should stay? If so, why? If not, then what is the word "exactly" supposed to convey? The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 00:02, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

  @JamesBWatson: My understanding of the proposal is that when there is additional information on the local description page, which is or might be useful to the en Wikipedia project, whether or not it is relevant to other projects, the local description page should not be deleted under F2, even though there is a commons description page. The wording tries to make it clear that this exception does not apply to useless junk, but does apply to category links or useful templates. I gather that pages with such links/templates have on a number of occasions been deleted under F2, losing relevant info with no easy way for anyone to notice and loss and undo it. I am not the proposer, and I may not be exactly correct about this. DES ^(talk) 23:34, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

  @DESiegel: Yes, that's pretty well how I understood it. However, it seems to me that, unless there is some good reason that I have missed, including the word "exactly" is a bit of very woolly thinking. At the very least, I can foresee fruitless arguments about how strictly the word "exactly" should be applied in a particular case, and worse still I can see pages which clearly should be deleted being kept because of some utterly trivial difference in wording, formatting, or whatever. Surely the issue is whether the page contains the same information, even if the page isn't exactly the same. It may be that "exactly duplicate the description page" was intended to mean "exactly duplicate the information contained in description page", but it doesn't say so, and it is by no means obvious that everyone would read it that way; indeed, I would be willing to bet pretty heavily that it wouldn't be very long before someone would read it as meaning exactly what it says. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 11:06, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

  JamesBWatson, you have a point, Probably if this goes forward the text should be reworded to remove "exactly". DES ^(talk) 11:35, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

  The problem is that the way the proposal is written, more or less every image which currently qualifies for deletion per {{db-f2}} would have to go to WP:MFD instead as there will always be some minor difference between the wording on Wikipedia and the wording on Commons. The only problem seems to be that WP:CSD#F2 currently doesn't say the same thing as {{db-f2}}, so the easiest solution is to just modify {{db-f2}} by replacing the current text in the template with the text from WP:CSD#F2. --Stefan2 (talk) 16:37, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

  We need the current criterion; whether precisely as-is, or slightly modified, doesn't matter, but the major change herein proposed is a bad idea. In particular, Commons images should not be categorised here; that's what Commons categories are for. If there are major differences between the Commons description and the en:wp description, and the latter gets deleted, request a refund or ask an admin privately; F2 deletions aren't controversial, and in all but the most exceptional case (e.g. someone dumped copyright-infringing text into a description page), any admin will agree to a request such as "Please temporarily undelete this F2-deleted image page, since it might have some text that could be used elsewhere". Nyttend (talk) 22:52, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

SpamUserPage gadget

For admins who often find themselves deleting spam/vandalism user pages and then blocking the user: I've just finished writing User:Mr. Stradivarius/gadgets/SpamUserPage, and it might save you a lot of work. When viewing a spam/vandalism user page, it can delete the page, block the user, and issue the user with a block notice, all in one click. Plus, it's highly configurable, so you can use your own custom templates etc. with it. Please test it out and see what you think. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 07:08, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Foreign language articles

Would it be reasonable to develop a speedy deletion criterion for foreign language articles that have not been translated for two weeks or more? The current wording at WP:PNT#Standard procedures states that all articles of this type should be listed for deletion. An untranslated article that does not get translated for two weeks comes up fairly frequently at WP:PNT and I can see no reason at all to keep them. A criterion like this would take at least a little load off the other deletion processes, since there is a consensus to delete them anyways. Eventhorizon51 ^(talk) 18:15, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

You can just PROD them. PROD is ideal for uncontroversial deletions and has the advantage that if someone is working on it (or planning to work on it) then the article won't be deleted automatically. I doubt there are many such articles, WP:PNT doesn't have that many listed. Hut 8.5 19:16, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

A criterion such as this would only apply if the article has already had its two-week grace period. Two weeks is plenty of time to allow a chance for anyone working on the article to publish their results. Forcing every article of this nature to go through the PROD process would effectively legthen the intended two-week grace period to three. There doesn't need to be two separate measures to ensure that people working on the article have a chance to publish their work. Two weeks is plenty. Eventhorizon51 ^(talk) 21:16, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

PROD it after a week, then, and it'll get deleted in two weeks or so. If somebody's wqrking on it, speedy deletion is a bad idea - if no one's working on it, no one'll contest it, so PROD'll work fine. No need for pointless rule bloat (especially given that CSD is way, way harsher on new users than PROD). WilyD 09:20, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Fair enough, I've never tried PRODing after one week to ensure that it gets deleted in two. However, I have a hunch that it won't work very well since the process can be so easily terminated by anyone (even those who do not intend to fix the issue) and cannot be restarted even if the problem is still there. This would force these articles to AfD, which is not very efficient. I can try the PRODing for now, and I'll return with a new thread if I see a problem. Eventhorizon51 ^(talk) 15:39, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Personally, I think we should have a longer period, not a shorter one. They do no harm staying there for a little while, unlike most other kinds of undesirable content, and there are only a limited number of translators available. DGG ( talk ) 00:08, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Agree with DGG, two weeks is far too short. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 10:05, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

• Google Translate handles 91 languages. That easily covers the vast majority of non English articles that get posted/pasted into en.Wiki. Very few non English articles end up escaping deletion because most of them are either copied from their home Wiki, copied from somewhere else, or are spam. Strictly speaking it's clearly within the remit of every New Page Patroller to do that basic bit of research that only takes a few seconds, and then tag the page appropriately for deletion. If after a brief look at Google's machine translation they appear to salvageable, there is rarely an excuse for sending them to WP:PNT with 'Language unknown' on them, --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:27, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Google Translate is increasingly useful, but only as a screening device. Other useful screening crieria are whether the articles exist on their home wiki, or if they appear to be well-referenced. I am not sure why Kudpung thinks being copied from their home wiki a reason for deletion. It's a reason for attribution and translation. (The standards of notability are different, but I would be most reluctant to challenge articles from the fr de or nl WPs, whose standards may be a little different, but are at least as high as ours. es and some of the Scandinavian WPs however have the same problem with spam as we do, and may not be as energetic in removing them. DGG ( talk ) 14:11, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@DGG: probably because WP:A2 is valid only for foreign-language articles that are effective copies from other projects. That said, there is no WP:DEADLINE here and I am not clear on why the PROD process is insufficient to deal with articles that cannot be translated for whatever reason. VQuakr (talk) 14:16, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

A possible amendment to the amount of time a foreign language article can stay or the translation process can be discussed at WT:PNT. The intention here was to discuss whether a CSD criterion can be implemented to delete articles that have already had their time. However, it seems that most people think the other deletion processes work fine and a CSD criterion is unnecessary. In addition, there is this discussion over at village pump that touches on this issue. If the proposal over there succeeds, then it may be the case that foreign language articles will all end up in the draft namespace (and be subject to G13 when appropriate). Regardless of which process these articles go through, there definitely needs to be some mechanism for deletion for foreign language articles. The English Wikipedia isn't meant for the indefinite hosting of non-English content. Eventhorizon51 ^(talk) 15:58, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

We already have two mechanisms: prod & AfD. Both of them give a reasonable time to salvage. If no one interested, well, off it goes. Salvaging could mean as small work as making the first sentence, copying existing refs to it, making an interlink, and moving the foreign text into the talk page. Staszek Lem (talk) 16:18, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

• DGG, What I am highlighting is not that non-Englsh articles should be radically deteld - they most certainly should not unless they fall clearly within a CSD criterion - but that we should be putting these issues squarely at the feet of the new page patrollers. We demand 200 mainspace edits and a graduation from the CVUA to be able to conbat vandalism which for the most part is easily recognidable, and we demand official user rights for several other tasks that do not demand the same level of knowledge of competence as NPP, but ironically NPP does not require the vaguest notion of policioes and guidelins at all. That's where we should be encouraging people to understand what to do with non-English articles. And that said, I do not see any compelling reasosn for introducing a new CSD category to cover non-English articles.--Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:37, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

New issue with userpage deletions

This came up at WP:VPT#Is CSD:U5 dead?. It's not dead. However, if you delete a userpage, and it happens that the user has a userpage over at meta, it will be recreated here. It may even be the same garbage page you just deleted. This is thanks to the WMF introducing the well-thought-out-nothing-could-possibly-go-wrong-as-usual idea of global user pages.

It's unlikeley we can do anything about it, but we need to be aware of it as there is a simple solution, which is to re-create their userpage locally as a blank page. This will apparenrtly override the global page. I don't expect this wil happen all that often, as most of the type of users whose userpages are being speedy deleted won't have a userpage at meta as well, but it can happen. Beeblebrox (talk) 16:59, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

I starting seeing these almost as soon as the misfeature was rolled out. The admins at meta will delete the user page over there as G7 if you tag it, but not at all promptly. —Cryptic 18:06, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't think we can or should count on meta being much help with this, we need to keep an eye on it ourselves. We can ask them to do the right thing, and sometimes they will even do it (provided the right admin shows u to deal with it), but that's about as far as it goes. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:26, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Facepalm The WMF needs to hire someone whose only job is to listen to new ideas, and come up with the ways it can go horribly wrong. Monty₈₄₅ 18:55, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

I forgot to mention the best part: The creation/transclusion/whatever of the copied user page does not show in the page history so watchlisting is useless in detecting when this is ocurring, only opening the page and looking at it will allow you to see if it has been recreated. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:35, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps from now on when deleting a blocked user's UP, we should routinely create a page with a 'This user is blocked" template? DES ^(talk) 21:00, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

That might not be a bad idea in the case of blocked users, although the majority of them aren't going to have a meta user page. This has apparently been going on for several months and I just became aware of it today, so it's not too common....yet. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:02, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Maybe adapt the current block templates to be placed on the user page instead of user talk? I've always thought them redundant to the Mediawiki interface and block log message; at least on the user page, they'd finally be doing something useful. —Cryptic 21:13, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

There's always the old trick of creating a page with a dot on it, which will keep the meta one out without needing to say anything... Peridon (talk) 20:44, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't understand what the fuss here is all about. Inappropriate userpages from meta can be nominated for speedy deletion. There's absolutely no need to create a blank page or a single-dot page or anything. You don't even need to memorise meta's CSD criteria, since you can just use the {{delete}} template with a custom rationale. Cryptic, Beeblebrox, why exactly does the deletion need to be prompt? What harm could a user page do if it stays here for one or two days extra? If anything's really serious, like a blatant attack page or a dangerous copyvio, what you do is to contact a steward using the emergency IRC channel and the page would be deleted instantaneously. 103.6.158.193 (talk) 13:15, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

The fuss is that this is yet another way the Foundation's going out of its way to make us an attractive target for spam while making it difficult for encyclopedists to detect and remove it. —Cryptic 15:00, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Didn't you know? This is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. That stills seems to take priority over making it a valuable encyclopedia. In a choice between restricting authorship and improving quality, the WMF always backs user count. Andy Dingley (talk) 15:43, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

• Why not just ask Pathoschild to add a feature where local administrators can have Meta:Synchbot delete user pages on meta that violate policies? — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:52, 15 June 2015 (UTC)
• If the user is blocked indefinitely (i.e. is unable to edit his own user page), then just ensure that the user has a local user page, and the problem is solved. For example, if the user has a talk page with a notice that the user is blocked, you could just redirect the user page to the talk page. If you find a global user page on Meta, then also consider nominating it for deletion there if it meets the deletion criteria on Meta. --Stefan2 (talk) 08:38, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

• This doesn't leave any trace at all? Is there no way to simply block Synchbot locally? It doesn't appear to perform any useful tasks.—Kww(talk) 14:26, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

  Global user pages are a MediaWiki extension, so blocking Synchbot won't address this issue. The bot does delete local user pages on request, but it won't delete them if the user has a block history here (even if they're not currently blocked) and the deletion is logged the usual way, so I think the issue at hand is mostly unrelated to the bot. —Pathoschild 02:21, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

4-day delay period for G13 deletions

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

No consensus for change, status quo ante maintained. Guy (Help!) 20:38, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

---

The idea of having a delay period for G13 deletions has been aired too many times. A number of users have noted that there are some administrators who delete pages nominated under CSD G13 merely after checking that the page meets the technical requirements. In the RfC for Draft PROD too, it was opined by many that a PROD-like system should replace G13.

Ultimately, what a delay period ensures is that editors (especially the one who use this userbox) would get time to review abandoned drafts and make sure they aren't salvagable.

The implementation would be similar as in case of C1 deletions. Nominated drafts would appear in Category:Abandoned AfC submissions awaiting deletion, sorted by the number of days the draft has been in the category. If the tag isn't removed in four days, the draft would be moved into Category:Candidates for speedy deletion. (G13 eligible drafts that have not been tagged would continue to appear in Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions.)

To make it clear, this sytem would not affect any existing process such as the automated G13 nominations by HasteurBot. 103.6.159.179 (talk) 06:46, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

It's already been abandoned for six months. What's the point of a few more days? If the concern is identifying salvageable drafts then why can't a bot be tasked with tagging articles (maybe a category) a week or two before the six months are up? §FreeRangeFrog^croak 07:17, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't think we need such a rule as the deletion victim can always request the page back again. But perhaps there could be a check if the draft creator has been warned or not. If the person has not been warned then remove the G13 tag. If this behaviour is repeated by the nominator, eg adding G13 tags again without warning the creator, then the G13 tagger can be blocked by the administrator instead of deleting the file. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 08:04, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

AFAIK Hasteurbot posts such a warning a month before tagging, I'm not sure what an additional four days would achieve. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 09:11, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Hasturbot warns on the day the draft becomes eligible for G13 deletion, and tags after 30 days (or more sometimes). This is more about manual tagging. If we have a 6 month time limit for G13, are we now making it 6 months and 7 days? If the issue here is notice, maybe we should consider asking Hasteur to set the notifications 7 days before G13 becomes possible. Rankersbo (talk) 22:30, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/G13 rescue It might not be a bad policy to delay any given month until the volunteers go throguh the queue looking for salvagabel content, although this is not required. DES ^(talk) 08:56, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

We (G13 salvage crew) sometimes use G13 as part of the process, say to get rid of all the blank sandboxes and cut down on the number of other pages that need going through. At the moment the G13 eligible category isn't populated due to a bot not working somewhere. Rankersbo (talk) 22:30, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

See also Category:G13_eligible_AfC_submissions. DES ^(talk) 09:05, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Grame Bartlett, see DGG's comment below. The whole point of having a delay period is not for the creator to come back and improve the draft. Rather, it's for other users to go through them and "rescue" the ones that do have potential for becoming articles. This can be done either by improving the draft or just by removing the speedy tag. 103.6.159.179 (talk) 09:29, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Couple points:

1. HasteurBot only notifies the user that their page is in danger of being G13ed once the page is eligible for deletion right now.
2. When the warning goes out, the bot performs a NullEdit to ensure that the special categories (like the above mentioned "eligible submissions") get evaluated through to the page so that editors who run drouge on the submissions get a chance at trying to save them.
3. 30 days after the notification that the page is eligible the bot checks back on the page to see if it's still eligible (i.e. 6 months + 30 days) and if so then performs the G13 nomination.
4. This is the 2nd G13 modification suggestion this IP has proposed recently with extensive knowledge of Wikipedia process and procedure. I find it highly suspect that their knowledge comes so well formed after springing to life and suspect that there is a case of editing while logged out to avoid scrutiny (WP:EVADE). Hasteur (talk) 11:50, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

• Support I am sneaking my vote here, given the enthusiasm of the rescuers, we need to give them a last chance, though 7 days is better. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 07:35, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• we need this; the bot only notifies under certain conditions that may miss those who have concerns or interest about an article such as the ability to rescue it or the knowledge that it is adequate for mainspace as is. The need is not for the original contributor coming back and wanting it--that we have allowed for already in an adequate way; the need is for other people to know about it. The possibility of rescuing an article is more important than any other factors mentioned. My estimate is that with this I could have rescued at least 1 article a day, based on my percentage of rescuing the ones I manage to see. 1 article/day=365/year. DGG ( talk ) 13:30, 20 June 2015 (UTC)
• support. DGG is absolutely correct above. I would even support a 7-day delay. Frankly the bot does a fine job of both notifing and taging. In all ordinary circumstances, people should just leave it to the bot. What's the rush? If another criterion applies, such as copyvio or attack page, that's different, but then don't use G13 anyway. Stomping on the work of the G13 rescue project, even if unintentionally, as IMO a very bad idea. DES ^(talk) 13:57, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

• Pinging users from the DRAFTPROD RfC who have not commented here. @Coldacid, Bosstopher, B, Steel1943, SD0001, Gigs, and Ivanvector:. @This, that and the other, EoRdE6, Anne Delong, Graeme Bartlett, Kudpung, and SmokeyJoe:. 103.6.159.179 (talk) 14:52, 20 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support per DGG. Anything that is eligible for G13 and no other criterion is harmless and should not be deleted without ample chance for a human to rescue babies from the bathwater. Thryduulf (talk) 15:43, 20 June 2015 (UTC)
• I don't have any objection to that as long as it is not abused. (In other words, objecting in bulk to DRAFTPRODs should not be a way for one person to scuttle the policy and ensure that drafts never get deleted.) Article drafts are not well-monitored for vandalism, libel, promotional use of the encyclopedia, etc, and so as long as there is a process whereby we are going to get rid of those drafts after they are abandoned for a certain amount of time, whether it happens after six months or six months and four days is not a big deal. Having a warning period like there is for PRODs is fine. --B (talk) 16:16, 20 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support I like the bot and am glad it exists, but sometimes other users nominate a draft for G13 with no advanced warnings or anything... 4 days shouldn't adversely affect anything... Also H brings up a good point, whats up with the IP's, though I guess the AfC process attracts many of them. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 17:40, 20 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support - I voted against the PROD. I'll support this but I'm concerned that it might be abused and that some articles may simply be parked somewhere else. I also still maintain that it is not really up to other editors to repair or rescue the efforts of lazy drive-by creators who just drop their stuff in our laps. Kudos for anyone who does, though. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:18, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

  Kudpung, it's not strictly speaking up to anyone to do much of anything here. No one has to rescue old drafts, and no one has to work with other editors either. Some people, including myself, think that rescuing and working on inadequete drafts (or mainspace pages) improves the project, and therefore choose to do so. All we ask is that you not hidner them from doing so to no benefit. A mainspace example, but it could have been in draft, Mahler on the Couch. I found this a week ago on CSD patroll, declined an A1 speedy, and have now expanded it enough to submit it to WP:DYK. This one didn't happen to be in Draft, but I've done similar work on others that were. The G13 Rescue project does so often. Why not give them a little time to try? DES ^(talk) 18:56, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

  David, I am not hindering anyone from doing anything - I am supporting this proposal. Admins are nevertheless perfectly in their rights to delete G13 without a second glance, just as they do to PRODs. FWIW however, I have rescued many bot-tagged G13s but as an active admin I generally have other more pressing engagements, such as for example, chasing the poor quality of reviewing both at AfC and NPP and seeing how these issues can be addressed. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:20, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

  Fair enough, Kudpung, you indicate support for this proposal. I was reacting to what I percieved was the tone of your comment and particularly to "...I'm concerned that it might be abused and that some articles may simply be parked somewhere else. I also still maintain that it is not really up to other editors to repair or rescue the efforts of lazy drive-by creators who just drop their tuff in our laps.... but perhaps I was over the top. Then take my comments as addressed to anyone who is in a hurry to delete drafts in general without a particularly urgent reason. As to "Admins are nevertheless perfectly in their rights to delete G13 without a second glance..." I suppsoe that they are. But I think that an admin who deletes any page without pausing for a moment to consider if that deletion helps the project is not doing the job the way an admin really ought to. (well, with copyvios, attack pages, blatent hoaxes, and the like there isn't much to consider.) I hope that an admin never deletes a prod without considering, at least momentarily, if the project wouldn't be helped by declining instead. That does not mean that an admin is obliged to source any unsourced draft left around for 6 months, or even to try to. Not at all. But judgement, not bot-like adherence to "It fits the criteria, so delete it" should generally be used. (To be clear, I am not saying you don't use judgement, but I have encountered a few admins who seemed not to, in my view.) I hope my view is clear. DES ^(talk) 20:17, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

• commentOppose I'm an occasional contributor to the G13 rescue project, and unclear as to the benefit of this. One concern I have is that the G13 buffer has a limit of 50 articles so as to not overload the admins signing the deletions off. This 4 day moritorium would destroy that safty valve. If a human marks a page for deletion, the page has been checked by human eyes. If the bot marks a page for deletion, then the creator has been warned at least 30 days before the tagging takes place. The bot does not delete without warning first. It doesn't warn on some pages (eg sandboxes) but equally it doesn't mark those for deletion either.

response This was not my experience. A recent draft I was working on went from first warning to deletion in less than one day. This rapid deletion unnecessarily creates bureaucratic work for editors. 4 days is not that long to let the notice do its job to encourage more editing. --Dkriegls (talk to me!) 20:47, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Equally, if those few of us assessing G13 eligible submissions aren't checking them before they get tagged, I'm not sure what good a 4 day delay would make. It would just give us another stack of hundreds of submissions to get through. Rankersbo (talk) 22:52, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

• Having never supported DraftSpace, and noting the failure of the incubator, my comment is that this automated system of directing newcomers into a near hopeless process where eventually their efforts will be deleted as a matter of course is unhealthy. Instead, newcomers should be encouraged to become at least autoconfirmed by improving existing content before creating new content, to use their own userspace if they not able to put their work directly into mainspace, and in the one in a million case where someone has a good article but can't manage to autoconfirm, to use {{helpme}}. In userspace, there are no timelimits. {{Inactive userpage blanked}} is available for those who find others userspace subpages bothersome. While I'm at it, I think autoconfirmation (which enables unilateral page creations and page moving) should require an email address and enabling of email. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:22, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

What you are looking at, SmokeyJoe, is WP:ACTRIAL which although approved by an overwhelming consensus in a heavily subscribed debate was ruled out by the Foundation. This is a few years ago now and the staff who threw it out have moved on. Perhaps it's time to give it a second crack of the whip. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:23, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose By far the greatest number of G13's come from Hasteurbot. For me these are fine as they stand. A few days either way make no difference. Others have said that this is aimed at manual taggers. Ok, a spare draft is harmless, so a few days make no difference. A dormant editor might need a few days to be woken up, and may be if they have email notifications enabled. If not then it makes no difference. In that case dormant is, well, vanished, from this perspective.

So, what will this proposal do?

Add a layer of extra complexity to a simple task.

Editors making manual nominations will have to add a few days to their calculations. The days are only valuable for the few dormant editors who have enabled email notifications.

My opposition is based on the lack of a return on the investment we will make with our time, and in 'investigating' those who transgress. We are wonderful at creating more and more layers of administrative red tape and rules. Time to draw the line under this one. Fiddle Faddle 08:54, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

• Timtrent, the proposal is not aimed at allowing dormant editors a few days in which to wake up and start editing their draft articles again. It is aimed at giving the G13 rescue project (linked above in the thread) time to asses drafts and rescue those which are promising. Therefore it is entirely aimed at manual tagging, hasturbot alrady has a 1-month delay built into it for this purpose, and to be sure it doesn't tag too soon. I am tempted to propose that manual tagging for G13 be forbidden entirely, and only hastubot or other approved bots be allowed to do this, which would solve the issue much more comprehensivly. As for the return on investment of time, no one is asking you to invest anything. If the colunteers who run the G13 rescuse project think their time is well used, that is their choice. If any valid articles result (and a number have) the project is thereby benefitted. DES ^(talk) 13:19, 21 June 2015 (UTC)
• Also, editors will have no need to "add a few days to their calculations". The template will, as decribed above, handle this automatically. But if manual G13 taggers didn't tag for G13, and instead left it to the bot, they would have no worries about the matter at all. The bot gets to all eligable pages in an orderly manner without overwhelming the Category:CSD backlog at any time. Does that alter your voew at all? DES ^(talk) 13:26, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Speaking as one of those G13 project people you wish to give more time to, I don't see any evidence that there is a big problem with manual tagging causing good material to be lost. The main reason we're not getting to articles is the fact the G13 eligible category is not being poupulated because the bot that is supposed to nul-edit is not working. The reason we don't get to check everything is that there are only two or three of us and we basically don't have the time to spend on this. Thanks for your concern, but this is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. That isn't there. Rankersbo (talk) 22:29, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

• @DESiegel: Thank you for your explanation. I stick with my opposition, though now for enhanced reasons. If folk wish to rescue long abandoned drafts then they can and should rescue them. Rankersbo has it i a "nut"shell. The problem is really not there. We cannot save them all. Many are simply not worthy of a second thought. A few more days makes no real difference. Fiddle Faddle 23:05, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

• Support. 7 days would be better. I have a strong opinion about this, but haven't had internet access to comment sooner. I spend a good deal of time checking pages in Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions; these only appear on the list at the moment they become eligible for deletion. Until recently, editors were mainly leaving these alone until they were nominated for deletion by the HasteurBot, respectfully giving time for various "rescuers" to pick through them and save some. Now, though, distressingly, most of them are being deleted right away, even though many are on notable topics and can be improved. If they were ordinary drafts, they wouldn't be deleted; their only "crime" is that their editors asked for a review at AfC, or created them through the Article Wizard. Here's a sample, a small percentage, of mainspace articles that were once g13-eligible drafts: User:Anne Delong/AfC content rescued from db-g13. Almost none of these nearly 1000 articles would exist if they had been tagged for deletion under db-g13 the day they became eligible. Timtrent, if they really weren't worth a second look, why haven't they all been sent to WP:AFD? It's fine to say that we should improve them before the six months are up, but we need a way to identify the short timers so that we can get to work on them. I can't believe that the community has so little respect for our work that they won't give us some small window of time in which to select candidates for improvement. If waiting a few extra days is unacceptable, the same effect could be achieved by having these drafts placed in a soon-to-be-g13-eligible category a number of days before they actually become eligible, and letting the rescuers check that category instead. —Anne Delong (talk) 05:42, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose There's already a 6 month delay. I don't see any point in making it a 6 month and 4 day delay. A bot letting them know it's coming up is the same as some additional delay. Gigs (talk) 14:03, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose - Thanks for pinging me here, however I am still of the opinion that G13 should be deprecated, thus all proposals for reform are moot. Ivanvector (talk) 14:31, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose - Tacking on an arbitrary delay period will only make it more difficult for editors at large and admins to figure out if they can delete these. IP editor who kicked off this proposal will have no hand in making these nominations (as IP editors are supposed to be barred from making CSD nominations IIRC) nor in processing the nominations so they're creating work for others. Hasteur (talk) 14:51, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose - the "Sidebar proposal" below is better than this one. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:25, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose. Besides the unnecessary few-day extension, this looks like unnecessary bureaucracy. Instead, just ask Hasteur to start notifying a few days beforehand. Nyttend (talk) 19:02, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support - In my perspective there should be ample time before a page is actually deleted to give the original page creator to contest the violation. I looked at the Criteria for Speedy deletion page in general and I didn't see any specific time frame for actual deletion. So it's an aye for my vote on the delay for G13. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sam.gov (talk • contribs) 22:09, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose This seems to fall in the category of making a process more complex so that it becomes less effective at its intended goal.—Kww(talk) 01:35, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose per Hasteur. This delay is senseless. Writing articles isn't so hard that seven days will make up for your lack of expertise. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:35, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support, and I would even prefer a 7-day delay to make it a quasi-PROD. The problem is that while the current system notifies only the original draft creator, often drafts are adopted or watched by other users who would not get a watchlist notification. This is especially important in the case where a new user signs up with the username "ABCWidgets", creates a draft about "ABC Widgets", and then is blocked for a username policy violation and told to create a new account. "ABCWidgets" would get the G13 warning 30 days in advance, but "JohnatABCWidgets" wouldn't. If there were a delay after the CSD template were applied, JohnatABCWidgets would at least see the nomination on their watchlist. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ahecht (talk • contribs) 15:14, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support this would be significantly less bitey to newbies. Though as others have said this needs to be 7 days to bring it into line with prods and guarantee that the period involved includes a weekend. No objection to the 7 day tag being added 7 days before the 6 months is up, but I would point out these are no longer speedies. ϢereSpielChequers 11:27, 25 June 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose I prefer the 'sidebar' proposal. Peridon (talk) 18:43, 25 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support My one and only experience with a Draft Deletion was me needing to take time away from Wikipedia, a warning being placed on the Draft Article, but not on my talk page (so I didn't know about it); and then finally a Talk Page warning several hours before the deletion. What's the point of the warning if not to create motivation to edit and move the article out of "Draft"? If the impending deletion is what's finally getting editors to Talk Page Warn the primary editor of a Draft, then there should be some time between the impending deletion (that is motivating talk page warnings) and the actual deletion. Dkriegls (talk to me!) 21:07, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Actually @Dkriegls, I think your case would be better served by the alternative "sidebar" suggestion below, which is in my opinion a vast improvement on this, while tackling the same problem. In that case the first notice you recieved would come after 5 months of inactivity, not 6, and give you chance to either re-commence work or show you are still intersted through a brief token effort followed by return to more important things) a whole month before the draft becomes stale. Rankersbo (talk) 06:50, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose — CSD isn't PROD. CSD is literally for speedy deletions; something where we don't have to do mental math or create some extra process by which CSD is slowly converted into PROD. The admins, patrollers, bots involved, and taggings of CSD candidates make obviously valid assumptions that something tagged should, by the time someone comes by to patrol it, either meet the criteria or be declined immediately and its tag removed. Otherwise, it's a waste of manpower for 10 different people to stop by and keep checking datestamps. Besides, it's silly bureaucracy and CREEP. If you can demonstrate that there's a high proportion of people cropping back up after 6 months to claim their recently deleted article with a margin of 4 days, or if you want a delayed thing for a bot to use or whatnot, consider proposing some sort of bot prod, but after 6 months of something being unsuitable for the encyclopedia, sitting around gathering dust without a single edit, the community has agreed that the thing can and probably should disappear. It's not biting the newbies to clean up after the process that, by its very existence and processes, bends over backwards to accommodate and not BITE them in the first place. --slakr^\ talk / 09:31, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

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

Requesting criteria called T4

 Request withdrawn

I'm requesting a speedy deletion criteria called T4 which is for templates that only add simple things such as categories, text, etc. when the same thing could be manually added to the page (stub templates, or templates used to add text to another page to avoid excessive bite size would not be eligible for this criteria) as I argued here. Feel free to comment about this proposal to see if anything is wrong. --TL22 (talk) 10:45, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

• Question: Please would you clarify your rationale for this. I am not sure I can see clearly why you feel that this criterion is required, but might be able to form a decent view if spoon fed Fiddle Faddle 11:43, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
• Question: Please provide answers to the magic 4 questions (Objective, Uncontestable, Frequent, Nonredundant). There's several convienencce templates (like {{Reply to}} and {{Ping user}} that use more space in wikitext than what they evaluate as so Objective and Uncontestable are in danger as the community has accepted that these templates are useful. As to Frequent, we need to see some demonstrations that the community has already suppored deletion of pages under the justification you're giving. Right now I see two XFDs that are reading as no-consensus at this point, so you're trying to hand craft a speedy rationalle to win the debate in case you loose the XFD nomination. This is exceptionally poor form and I suggest you withdraw this proposal unless it be construed that you're attempting to forumshop for a desired result. Hasteur (talk) 12:05, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose. "only add simple things such as categories, text, etc" is too vague, and I would also oppose attempts to formalize it more. A simple templated text to be displayed consistently in similar circumstances can be very practical. Templates should be evaluated individually unless we get so many of a type that individual discussions become a burden and have already shown a clear consensus to delete. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:20, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
•  I withdraw my nomination . Yes, that early. I forgot about that other templates that are simple but actually useful. --TL22 (talk) 20:24, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

Bold G8 clarification regarding article talk page archives

It should be a no-brainer that if an article is deleted (not moved or merged with the redirect deleted) and as a result the talk page is also deleted, all talk-sub-pages that are dependent on that page should be deletable under criteria G8 unless the page is still useful to Wikipedia (an example of "still useful" would be a replacement-draft that is being written if the main article is deleted due to suspicion of copyright violations). I have updated the G8 criteria accordingly.

I specifically made this "for article talk page archives only" because the odds of both the nominator and the deleting admin "getting it wrong" are very low in article space but potentially much higher in other spaces. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 23:02, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

Sidebar proposal

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

---

• Being that the bot handles G13 nominations in a reasonable, predictable, and manner that causes the least disruption to editors who have created these pages
• Being that the original "6 months" and "6 months + 30 days" markers were proposed when we had ~27k AFC submissions that met the criteria of G13
• Being also that the complaint is that human editors are running roughshod over the editors who created these pages and not giving 30 days from when the editor was notified (and the page became eligible for G13)
• Keeping in mind that Consensus can change

I Propose

1. That HasteurBot task 2 be modified to send the "Nag notice" which informs the user that their page is in danger of being nominated for G13 starting on month 5 of inactivity (thereby giving a month before the page is eligible for G13)
2. That HasteurBot task 1 be modified to nominate for G13 at the 6 month mark instead of 6 months + 30 days
3. That the AFC templates (specifically {{AFC submission/draft}} and {{AFC submission/declined}}) be edited so that pages that have passed the 5 month mark un-edited get put in a "AFC submissions 5 months un-edited" so as to give the "rescuers" an opportunity to work on the candidates without the threat of the work being G13ed underneath them

Initially the time frame worked because there was plenty of time for reviewers. Now that we are getting to the daily eligibility is being dealt with almost instantaneously (by activist editors who are causing more harm than good), it makes sense that the process should change to allow those who want to fly just ahead of the burn line to do what they want. Hasteur (talk) 11:56, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

I'm all for #1 and #3. I don't see what good having the bot nominate drafts as soon as they're eligible will accomplish, though. Surely if a human looks at a 6-month-untouched draft, decides it's hopeless, and tags it, that's better than a bot tagging it whether it's hopeless or not? —Cryptic 12:19, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Basically the way it works the bot notifies, then a month or so later it tags. The proposal is to bring both those points forward a month and have rescuers working on drafts that are not yet (by G13 criteria) stale. Rankersbo (talk) 12:36, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

I assume that the "at the six month mark" is rough and not that HB is going to guillitine dead on 6 months. So there is always at least 30 days between the two tasks? Rankersbo (talk) 12:40, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

@Rankersbo: I tried to push for getting 6 months clarified to mean 182.5 days but got shot down (as some months have more days than others). Hasteur (talk) 12:57, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

• Support Hasteur's excellent sidebar proposal. Much better, and more logical than the 4 day delay. It deals with the perceived problem of deleting articles before people have had chance to look at them, while not needing any labyrinthine changes to deletion criteria. It's an intelligent solution that understands how the system works. Rankersbo (talk) 12:36, 22 June 2015 (UTC)#

• Support this suggestion, oppose above. This means that both the user and the people patrolling G13-eligible get a months notice, when they are not at risk. Adding a delay will, IMO, just make the situation worse, as it is essentially introducing the PROD proposal again (as at any time while the G13 tag is on the page, it can be removed to restart the clock AFAIK). Mdann52 (talk) 12:53, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

• Support This would be much easier than trying to change the whole process around. Gigs (talk) 14:09, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

• Support any proposal that gives more and wider notice for rescue. This seems to be the better proposal but I support the 4- or 7-day delete deferral if this can't be made to work. ~Kvng (talk) 14:56, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support sidebar proposal per nom, no comment on first proposal. Best, FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 15:43, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support this proposal neatly addresses the concern I expressed about the above proposal. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:22, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support. Excellent idea. APerson (talk!) 18:06, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support (but someone had better notify WP:BAG, since we're probably doing IAR by making changes here to a bot request), because this would resolve potential problems without making more work for the humans. Nyttend (talk) 19:04, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
  • Nyttend Securing consensus first so that I can go to BAG and request a speedy approval. Hasteur (talk) 19:07, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/HasteurBot 12 BRFA filed. Hasteur (talk) 19:34, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support This is much better. I have nothing against saving content but I was concerned about additional manual complexity for admins and/or reviewers where the bot can simply be adjusted to serve the same purpose. §FreeRangeFrog^croak 19:09, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support - Earlier notification should solve the problem without having to make changes to the CSD criteria. It's also better for any of the original editors who may still be paying attention. In fact, this is exactly what I thought the original process was going to be last year, and I had a hard time getting the actual process straight in my head. Thanks, Hasteur —Anne Delong (talk) 21:10, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support slightly increasing the complexity of a bots' rules affects the bot. Slightly increasing the complexity of wikipedia rules impacts on every editor, old, new and yet you join the project. This is clearly a better proposal. Stuartyeates (talk) 21:24, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose This seems to fall in the category of making a process more complex so that it becomes less effective at its intended goal.—Kww(talk) 23:08, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

• Kww, I don't understand your reasoning. Unlike the first proposal, this is just a modification to the bot's actions; it won't affect the rules for humans. Nyttend (talk) 00:14, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

• @Nyttend: Not just a modification to the bot's actions, it also proposes a change to the AFC submission templates to help support the action. Hasteur (talk) 00:25, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

• Okay, true, but isn't that a one-time thing, i.e. you make one edit or series of edits, and that's it? It's not a change to the bot's rules or a change in the procedures that humans have to follow. Nyttend (talk) 00:33, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Placed my oppose in the wrong section.—Kww(talk) 01:34, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

• Support - Brilliant proposal, fully support JMHamo (talk) 00:40, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support hopefully wake up the contributors to restart their effort before it is nominated for deletion. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:37, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support as it gives users a chance to fix content without the looming threat of deletion at any time by an admin. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 22:19, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support - a better solution than the 4-day one above. JohnCD (talk) 22:29, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose - The problem is that while the current system notifies only the original draft creator, often drafts are adopted or watched by other users who would not get any notification until the article is deleted. This is especially important in the case where a new user signs up with the username "ABCWidgets", creates a draft about "ABC Widgets", and then is blocked for a username policy violation and told to create a new account. "ABCWidgets" would get the G13 warning 30 days in advance, but "JohnatABCWidgets" wouldn't. I would only support this if HasturBot warned all editors of a page, not just the page creator (perhaps skipping editors whose only edits were using the AFCH tool, which is easy to detect since the edit summary would contain a link to Wikipedia:AFCH). --Ahecht (TALK
  PAGE) 15:18, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
  • I'm sorry, but your enhancing of what the bot is supposed to do is a bean suggestion. Not all editors who process AFC submissions use the AFCH tool so we can't depend on that to disclude an editor. I'll give a pertinant example: Typically when I reviewed submissions, minor things like fixing references (or converting inline links to references) cannot be done only by AFCH, yet I wouldn't consider myself involved enough to justify being on the "This page is about to be eligible for G13" notification train. This will only encourage AFC volunteers to be more hands off of the submissions so that they don't get put in the notification train. If this is a dealbreaker, it's going to require a significant new BRFA as right now notifying the page creator and a few others is a reasonable output on notifications, yours effectively jumps up to the level of mass notifications and would require a huge trial/buy in. Hasteur (talk) 15:47, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
    • As an alternate proposal, have the bot add a warning tag to the article at the 30 day mark (and obviously set it up in such a way that this does not reset the 6-month timer) so that any user with the page on their watchlist will see it. --Ahecht (TALK
      PAGE) 19:05, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
      • Out of scope of this proposal (and will not be done). When the bot gives the warning, it doesn't actually cause an edit to the page. G13 (and the bot) are defined in such a way that the last edit timestamp (that little text that say This page was last modified on 24 June 2015, at 19:05 at the bottom of the screen for example) is what determines the trigger condition. That's how the templates and the bot's evaluation works. There was a consensus that added "except for bot edits" which I disagree with that and have the notifying/nominating go with the original interpertation due to the fact that the templates also follow the same interpertation. When the bot does find a page that is eligible, it performs a null-edit to get the templates to evaluate through certain variables (such as potentially adding the G13 eligibility category or adding the "Soon to be eligible category"). The categories are sneakily included in the page through the template so that they are not mixed up with other categories that might be used for other purposes (like mainspace categories). If the goal is to get the page to show back up in the user's watchlist, the only way to do that is to have a registered edit (which restarts the clock on G13). If you really want to push for this kind of regime, we can do that but it's going to mean deprecating G13 and adding a new CSD to the effect of "Your draft has sat idle for at least 5 months at some point in it's history and has sat idle for 3 months now" with only a bot being allowed to do the nomination. I say again, this is a very bad and disruptive process you suggest. Hasteur (talk) 20:09, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
        • I'm curious, Hasteur. If instead of editing the actual draft to place a warning and trigger watchlists, could the bot edit the draft's talk apge (for those drafts in the Draft: namespace, which have talk pages -- by now that should be most of them). An edit to a talk page triggers watchlist notifications just the same as an edit to the corresponding non-talk page, but it doesn't contaminate the edit history of the actual page. Would such an addition be feasible, whether it requires a separate discussion or not? DES ^(talk) 22:29, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
          • @DESiegel: Thought about it (and slept). While yes, it'll trigger watchlist notifications, do we really want to create the talk page companion to the draft only to start the doom and gloom pronouncements of staleness? Also if we did this HasteurBot could potentially be notified of a great many pages that are beeing speedied under G8 once the draft page is gone if the admin who processes the G13 forgets to check if there's an associated talk page. If regular editors try to do that with Twinkle they're going to get a big nasty error because the bot's talk page is fully protected because editors couldn't prevent themselves from doing something less than briliant. Finally adding this true edit to an associated talk page is going access a new page, get the page's text, and save the new text (including the eligibility warning) which is more bits going back and forth over the wire. Also IIRC, not all pages are in the Draft namespace yet, so how would we handle pages that live in the old prefix of Wikipedia talk:Articles for Creation/. Hasteur (talk) 13:15, 25 June 2015 (UTC)
  • The bot does not currently warn other editors of delete eligibility. The proposal will add a category prior to eligibility. Other editors monitoring this category will be informed. The proposal improves visibility so I don't understand why you wouldn't support it. Further improvements can be made incrementally after this proposal is implemented. ~Kvng (talk) 16:48, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

• • • Kvng there's one exception to that. Any editor who lists themselves on User:HasteurBot/G13 OptIn Notifications will be notified via a different process that a page they've edited is eligible for G13 nomination. Obviously this will change based on this package of changes securing concensus, but this gives editors who have made a distinct action to indicate they do want to recieve these extra notifications the opportunity to opt in (instead of a disqualifying ruleset or opt-out). Hasteur (talk) 17:09, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
      • But I doubt that "JohnatABCWidgets" from my example above, being a new user, would know enough to find User:HasteurBot/G13 OptIn Notifications and add themselves to it.--Ahecht (TALK
        PAGE) 19:05, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
        • Playing along with your absurd hypothetical: If JohnatABCWidgets got a username change then the page creation will show JohnatABCWidgets. If they didn't, then it's on them to pay attention to the page. G13 is treated as a soft-delete by the admins at WP:REFUND (which the bot tells the creator how to go about potentially requesting their page back) unless there's some other justifying reason why the user can't have the page back (such as copyright violation, unreformable Advertising, hoax, already been restored from G13 multiple times before). Either JohnatABCWidgets pays attention and does the work prior to G13 nomination to kick the can down the road, or doesn't and notices after the fact that it's deleted under G13 and has information on how to get their submission back. If JohnatABCWidgets doesn't notice that the page is gone, then there's nothing for us to worry about as we've eliminated a page that was in the AFC system that not even the primary advocate cared enough to keep/maintain (see also "Drive by Spam"). Hasteur (talk) 20:16, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
• support this "sidebar" proposal as a reasonable alternative to the main proposal above, which I still also support. DES ^(talk) 22:29, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
• Support even though I'm not sure what sidebars have to do with it. It looks better thought out and argued out. Peridon (talk) 18:49, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

@Peridon: This proposal originally lived as a subsection to the above section. Hasteur (talk) 19:27, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

• Support This sounds very workable with minimal impact and certainly provides adequate rescue time. SBaker43 (talk) 06:46, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
• Support. Keeps rules-for-human simple - simpler, because there is no "30 days after 6 months", simply "6 months". I bet the bot does not mind doing a slightly different job, and coding it seems a one time only task and proposed by the coder (right?). Most of all, it is best to warn before a deadline instead of giving a grace period after the deadline. A deadline should be THE deadline, as much as possible. - Nabla (talk) 13:56, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

Being that we've gone a couple days now since the last comments with consensus firming up even further to support this proposal, I intend to close this discussion on (or around) the 13th and begin to make the changes necessary to implement this consensus (starting with the AFC templates). I intend to invoke WP:IAR with respect to "You should not close a discussion you expressed a viewpoint in" as it's clear there is a wide consensus to implement this change. My intention to close does not preclude an independent user coming in to evaluate consensus and close, I'm simply telegraphing my actions well in advance so that people who wish to challenge my use of IAR (especially as I'm the proposal creator) have plenty of time to object. Hasteur (talk) 12:25, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

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

Speedy deletion discussion ongoing at Village Pump

There is currently a discussion of A7 at the Village Pump: Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#CSD A7 as written is widely misapplied: Why this is and ideas to fix it. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 05:27, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Expand G6 to include pages with wikimarkup in their titles

From RfDs at [6] [7] & [8], there is a fairly thorough consensus that page titles containing wiki markup cause technical issues by inserting control characters into URLs which causes page links to break (I don't know the exact mechanism, I just know it breaks). Although they're supposed to be blacklisted by the title creation blacklist, a new RfD at [9] reveals either that the blacklist is not working, or users are finding ways around it to create these pages anyway. As such, I propose adding pages containing wiki markup in their titles to the G6 technical deletion criterion. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 01:57, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

I'd have thought new ones, at least, were R3s. The Joy Luck Club has no apostrophes in its title, for example. The ancient ones, and ones created by moving ancient pages, should continue to go through WP:RFD; there's legitimate reasons to keep them presented in the second and third RFDs you link above (even if they were outnumbered) so deletion isn't uncontestable as noted at the top of this page. —Cryptic 02:30, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

Generally these are redirects from page moves when editors attempt to create pages with titles that require italics but aren't aware of the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} method, and redirects from page moves are exempt from R3. As far as being uncontestable, I see your point. All of the pages (other than '') were deleted, but I'll see about adding this to WP:RFDOUTCOMES instead. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 15:50, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

Redirects with capitalized letters that are not abbreviations, etc

What criteria does the redirect GREEK MINORITY IN FORMER YUGOSLAV REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA fall under? It is annoyingly coming up when searching for "Greek minority". It was created in 2008.--Zoupan 20:29, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

It would not come under any of the speedy criteria - it may be a valid {{R from alternate capitalization}} (but I suspect not). You can nominate it at redirects for discussion and propose deleting it. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 21:09, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

G7. Author requests deletion: What about WP:Notability?

While using WP:STiki either late yesterday or very early this morning, I saw the Tom Derry article; it looked well-sourced to me at first glance, and I wondered if whether or not the author who'd nominated it for speedy deletion would be granted his request. I figured that he wouldn't be. I was initially tempted to revert his request, but I decided to put the page on my WP:Watchlist and see what happens to it. Minutes ago, I saw that RHaworth deleted it, per WP:G7; the log states, "11:22, 23 July 2015 RHaworth (talk | contribs) deleted page Tom Derry (G7: One author who has requested deletion or blanked the page)." I also see that MusikAnimal deleted it per WP:G7 last year; that log states, "16:38, 10 November 2014 MusikAnimal (talk | contribs) deleted page Tom Derry (G7: One author who has requested deletion or blanked the page)."

This got me wondering about whether WP:Notability should ever play into such cases. I haven't yet checked to see if the Tom Derry topic is WP:Notable. But should WP:Notable articles be wiped from Wikipedia based on the whims of an editor, all because of WP:G7? If this is the same author both times in the case of the Tom Derry article, then it seems that this editor is recreating and deleting the article for some type of promotional purpose. It would be interesting to see the rationale given both times. Flyer22 (talk) 23:32, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Just because a topic may meet WP:N doesn't mean we require an article on it; there are many valid reasons to either direct discussion to a larger article on a topic, or perhaps for privacy reasons that the name should be searchable but full details would not be prudent to go into. Of course, deletion requests for something that is clearly encyclopedic, like Barack Obama, should clearly be declined, but here we're talking a short-career footballer. In this case, the article did almost fall afoul of self-promotion (as well as some BLP sourcing issues) as the editor that required deletion - the same as the first one - claims to be the the person the article is about, so I think it is fair that the request was fair. If someone else came along, built out the article to clearly meet all policy, the request would be more difficult to consider. --MASEM (t) 00:11, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

Derry would fail WP:NFOOTBALL and would be deleted at AfD as he never played for a fully professional team. JMHamo (talk) 00:17, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

[ WP:Edit conflict ]: Masem, I know that "just because a topic may meet WP:N doesn't mean we require an article on it"; I cited WP:NOPAGE in a WP:Red link discussion. I'm asking, "Should WP:Notable articles be wiped from Wikipedia based on the whims of an editor, all because of WP:G7?" Thanks for letting me know what both articles looked like and that it was seemingly the same editor. In this case, what if the topic had been well-suited for its own Wikipedia article and there was no better Wikipedia article to cover the topic? Flyer22 (talk) 00:19, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

Well the administrator, or anyone else could reject this delete request. Also if someone else requested an undelete after it was deleted and the page looked good then I would likely undelete it for some one else that wants to take responsibility. Once I noticed someone who lost their temper and nominated every page they wrote for G7 deletion. These were declined or restored. Mostly though G7's happen after someone has complained about the article somehow and the writer blanks the page. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:26, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, Graeme Bartlett, and the rest of you, for your answers. Flyer22 (talk) 00:50, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

• See also this exchange re the first deletion of the article. The top edit of the state I deleted contained "{{delete| I am Tom Derry, I created the page to promote my football but are no longer playing and request it please be deleted }} {{db-g7}}" which, I must admit, is a somewhat spurious reason for deletion. But there were no significant third-party editors so I deleted. However it is perfectly possible for us to say to Tom/Shotsfan (talk · contribs) "you released your edits irrevocably so we can restore them even if you don't want them restored". I have emailed the text to Flyer22 and will restore on request. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 09:11, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

New New A12

Proposed A12: An article that, in all its versions, states, either directly or indirectly, that it is not suitable as an article, without any indication to the contrary. Indirect claims are statements in an article that normally result in deletion, such as "a new name coined by us yesterday" ,"an ordinary building I lived in", "Not really known", "This theory has not been established"...

Such articles are usually deleted. I want to edit that into the policy(and the templates)... but I want to make sure that nobody has a problem with that. It is a policy page, after all.--Müdigkeit (talk) 13:52, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

• I Strongly object. This is way too broad for a speedy deletion criterion, CSDs should be bright-line rules which will seldom be disputed. Also, they should be frequent occurrences -- just how often has this sort of thing been the main reason for a deletion at AfD? DES ^(talk) 13:59, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
  • I rather suspect it's the underlying, unstated reason for lots of AFDs. Probably a majority of them. Not that that makes this any more appropriate for a speedy deletion criterion. —Cryptic 14:48, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
    • I am sure that a lot of AfDs are because the nominator thinks the topic is "unimportant" "not notable" "not encyclopedic". But how many are largely based on such a statement in the article? I rather doubt that many are. DES ^(talk) 21:59, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose - This sounds like an expansion on notability to be tagged for speedy. We have WP:A7 and WP:A9 dealing with specific topic areas, and there is a lot of reason and background on why these aren't more broad. This proposal is simply to vague and broad. -- Whpq (talk) 14:33, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
• No, neither objective nor uncontestable, not by a long shot. Please read the "Read this before proposing new criteria" section at the top of this talk page before proposing new criteria. —Cryptic 14:48, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

• I have written "without any indication to the contrary" which should limit that to mostly uncontroversional deletions. And there needs to be a statement that indicates that that article should not be kept. I also doubt that it would contested whether an article would fall under that or not. At least in nearly all cases- there will be always exceptions somewhere, but that is no difference to other CSD rules.--Müdigkeit (talk) 15:28, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Well: An article that, in all its versions, states, either directly or indirectly, that it is not suitable as an article, without any indication to the contrary. Note:Indirect claims are statements in an article that normally result in deletion, such as "a new name coined by us yesterday" ,"an ordinary building I lived in", "Not really known", "This theory has not been established"... A lack of information is not sufficient for A12.

I think the previous wording was maybe not clear enough. And... this one?--Müdigkeit (talk) 16:13, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose: A7 is already used in this way, and it shouldn't be. No need to further legitimize that unfortunate practice. If notability can be adjudicated at CSD in any way, then AfD becomes redundant. Any cursory glance at AfD shows articles that appear non-notable being rescued by people who hang out at AfD for just this purpose. This cannot happen at CSD, which is why notability is not and should not be adjudicated there. A2soup (talk) 16:36, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
• That wording is no better, in my view. What exactly would constitute "any indication to the contrary." or for that matter constitutes an "indirect claim"? We have had enough trouble defining "claim of significance" from A7/A9 and this is much more fuzzy, in my view. AS to frequency, can you link to ten AfDs in the past year where such a statement was discussed during the debate, or even where such a statement was presnet and this proposed A12 would have applied? Can you find ten current articles that it would apply to? When A7 was adopted there were dozens of new articles a month, or more, that it was expected to apply to. DES ^(talk) 21:59, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose. Fails the CSD new criterion criteria (at the top of this page). "it is not suitable as an article" is an extremely gross failure to be a Bright-line rule. According to this tool https://tools.wmflabs.org/afdstats/afdstats.py?name=M%C3%BCdigkeit&max=500&startdate=&altname=

the OP has little participation at AfD, but when participating he *only* !votes to delete and does so with poor correlation with the close. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:20, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

• @Müdigkeit: Define "not suitable as an article". Define what exactly is "any indication to the contrary". Define "statements in an article that normally result in deletion". There are so many vague, undefined elements to this, that it would take a discussion among the community to see if an article meets it. In that case, the discussion might as well be articles for deletion. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 23:09, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Ok, I won't do it.--Müdigkeit (talk) 06:31, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

G5: Should the tag be applied before the relevant SPI is resolved?

I had thought this was not even an open question; until recently, I had rarely seen the tack applied before an accused sock was identified and blocked, but it's becoming increasingly common. I see no reason to apply the tag before the accusation is settled. With a debacle like this [10] barely two days ago, the need to carefully follow process should be clear. The Big Bad Wolfowitz (aka Hullaballoo) (talk) 14:55, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

I would remove such a tag and reject the speedy and trout the tagger if it doesn't link to an SPI where the socking is confirmed. DES ^(talk) 16:34, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

Deletion of page.

Please, can anybody help on how to make my page not to be deleted? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.190.2.242 (talk) 23:47, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

• @41.190.2.242: Articles on Wikipedia have to be notable. That means that their content must be backed up by reliable sources. If you have additional questions, feel free to contact me. North of Eden (talk) 00:43, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
• @Chibics4luv:@41.190.2.242: The article that I saw you write, Samchitechh, is clearly written to promote your own website. To be totally frank, the reality is that if you aren't here to improve the encyclopedia, the chances are pretty good that your contributions will be removed. Another thing you need to know is that no page you write here is "restricted." Any page here can be edited by anyone. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:29, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Being clear that F7 is to only be used in limited circumstances

It happened that a tv screenshot used as an infobox, which otherwise had all proper rationale parts, was tagged by @J Milburn: as failing CSD F7. While I am not disagreeing with the net result (the image was deleted after 7 days, and I agree that it really didn't have a strong rationale for use), this mechanism is not the intent of CSD F7, as there was no immediately obvious reason as specifically laid out in F7 on this page - the only failure would be somewhere between NFCC#8 (contextual significant) and NFCC#1 (free replacement, in this case, a simple text description over the screenshot), neither which are clear allowances by CSD F7. This image should have been tagged and deleted "in progress" via WP:FFD.

Can we add language to CSD F7 to make it clear that it should be used for crystal-clear problematic NFCC failures - clear NFCC#1 where a free replacement is possible, NFCC#2 failures, and the like. If there's a question that revolves around NFCC#8 for the most part, that should never be done via CSD. --MASEM (t) 05:12, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

"Invalid fair-use claims tagged with {subst:Dfu} may be deleted seven days after they are tagged, if a full and valid fair-use use rationale is not added." That's pretty clear- images which are used under an invalid claim of non-free use can be deleted via F7. Unless I have missed some discussion, you aren't seeking to clarify the deletion criteria, you're seeking to change them. There's nothing per se wrong with that, but let's be honest about our aims... Josh Milburn (talk) 09:55, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

To avoid repeating arguments, I'll point back to a discussion from February [11] that restates my concerns: if CSD is meant to be used for the most obvious, non-subjective cases, F7 should not be used to tag images that have all the proper parts of a rationale, and otherwise meets NFCC, but may have a weak rationale or other subjective call based on the judgement of one single admin; that's where a consensus based process like FFD (recognizing these are nearly always low-volume discussions but generally at least get 2-3 addition voices involved). Otherwise, this puts too much deletion control into the hands of a single admin without discussion, and makes it the only CSD clause that allows for more subjective calls to be used to tag instead of being an "obvious" case. --MASEM (t) 13:23, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Masem, I agree with your concern, and I have expressed it to Mr. Milburn in File talk:SansapleadsforNed.png as well as on my talk page. I am not sure which file you're referring to, as Mr. Milburn tagged several other TV episode screen shots in rapid succession, but I think this one should have a consensus-based discussion, yet Mr. Milburn has stated in that discussion that F7 is being used as designed. I am of the impression that any speedy process should always fail over to an XfD process if any one editor in good standing disputes the speedy rationale. As the "creator", however, CSD prohibits me from removing the tag, and after seeking an appropriate wikiproject member to do so, he accused me of WP:CANVASSING by doing so. I am concerned that this interpretation is not in line with every other CSD process, and possibly biased towards deletion based on the NFCC interpretations of administrators who self-select to handle F7 deletions. Jclemens (talk) 20:58, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

We need to be clear that "invalid rationale" is one that mechanically is broken from what NFCC requires. A file with a fully complete rationale, but with a reasoning that is rather weak, like "because every episode should have a screenshot", is not invalid, but very much one that can be easily challenged or possibly improved. CSD should only be targetting file images that do fail to meet the fundamental requirements of NFCC, which the examples listed at F7 are proper, but we do need to be clear that going beyond that is inappropriate. --MASEM (t) 21:03, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

This one isn't even that weak, Masem. In the discussion page, I cite a couple of sentences from the episode article (in which the screenshot appears) that highlight the importance of the depicted scene to the depicted character's development. But that, somehow, isn't enough for Mr. Milburn to believe it merits a FfD lising. The counter argument is that it's just a shot of the actress, and we can't really tell what she's doing, which seems to me to be the kind of thing that should be decided by a consensus-based discussion, not a speedy process. Jclemens (talk) 21:20, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

A more concrete example that I think it where the line needs to be is this one File:White Collar NWatch.jpg (note, I fully believe that this image does not support the article, and its deletion should be done, just not through CSD). The rational is there, so it is not invalid - it is just weak and non-supportive of the claim of importance, as I cannot find anything in the article its used on to justify it. So the CSD of this image is an inappropriate use of F7; FFD is the proper venue for this. --MASEM (t) 22:03, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Jclemens is twisting my words and has been doing so for some time. I have not said half of what he claims I have. On a more general note, I am not necessarily opposed to making this change to the requirements, but I remain fairly sure that it would be a change rather than a clarification. Josh Milburn (talk) 16:18, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

If I've misconstrued anything, please let me know so I can apologize appropriately. Absent specific issues with how I've described our interactions, your rebuttal doesn't provide anything I can respond to. Jclemens (talk) 02:40, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

I think it would be best if we discussed the issue of this thread without getting into a who-said-what match. I won't be posting here again, as I've said what I have to say about the matter. If you choose to continue posting, I'd appreciate it your comments weren't about me in any way. I hope you feel that this is a reasonable request. Josh Milburn (talk) 23:46, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

My offer to provide an apology for any misstatements I may have made stands, stymied only by your refusal to name any. Cheers, Jclemens (talk) 05:45, 4 August 2015 (UTC)