User:Ritchie333/Plain and simple guide to A7

This is an essay on the Criteria for speedy deletion policy.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

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WP:PASGA7

This page in a nutshell: CSD A7 is for articles on very specific subjects that have not got a hope in hell. Nothing else.

Some of my time as a Wikipedia administrator is spent at the speedy deletion queue, working out what articles should be speedy deleted and what should stay. There are a number of different criteria, but by far and away the most popular is WP:CSD#A7 : No indication of importance (people, animals, organizations, web content, events). While this criteria has broad consensus in the project, it can frequently be a source of upset for new editors, so should only be used when absolutely necessary.

Why is this a problem?

When an article is deleted, nobody can look at it anymore. (Administrators can view deleted material, but regular editors can only view restored articles and only if the deletion policy allows them to). Consequently, any deletions have the potential to be highly controversial.

Most of the time, we discuss deletions at Articles for Deletion (AfD), and those discussions form a permanent record. You might not like the discussion or agree with the result, but at least it's available. Actually, it should really be called "Articles for Discussion" as there are a number of different outcomes from a debate besides deletion or retention - the article may be merged or redirected to another article, for example, or they may be no agreement as to what should happen.

Speedy deletion is the main place on Wikipedia where administrators have broad consensus to delete pages without any discussion whatsoever. We do this to save time on the same obvious discussions again and again. Some speedy deletion criteria deal with obvious vandalism and obvious libel, where it's important to get rid of the article immediately. Most of those types of articles are deleted pretty quickly, and rightly so.

A7 is different from the others for two main reasons:

Most articles that meet the criteria are written by users in good faith
Most of those users are new

Therefore, having an article deleted via A7 is many new Wikipedians' introduction into the project. People get upset when they lose all their work and get told off for doing what they thought was the right thing. And then they read the criteria : "This applies to any article about a real person, individual animal(s), organization, web content or organized event that does not indicate why its subject is important or significant" and think "well of course my article is important and significant!" This is bad.

Where did A7 come from?

CSD A7 was originally put into policy in July 2005, after a number of articles on high school teachers were nominated for deletion at debates such as Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cindy Costa and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bob Burns. One creator of several of these articles annoyed established editors with the excuse "I set this section up just to tell other people about my school. I don't see why any of it needs to be deleted."^[1] so it was decided to do something about it to prevent another flood of pointless articles.

This led to a follow-up proposal, Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion/Proposal/1. The proposal gathered around 74% of support and gave the following examples:

"John Doe is good at chess" - is an A7
"John Doe has won the UK National Chess Trophy in 1994" is not an A7
A senator is probably not an A7
A porn star is likely to be an A7

What do you mean I can't speedy delete school articles?

CSD A7 only applies to a very specific class of articles : real people, real animals, bands, websites, organisations and events. It does not apply to books, video games, rivers, towns, roads, railways, schools, or anything else. An administrator will turn down an A7 request on a book without hesitation - it doesn't meet the criteria.

This can sometimes lead to contention - is a hospital an "organisation" or simply a building? If we believe the former, a hospital may be eligible for A7, if the latter, it cannot be, full stop. In these cases, you're better off searching for sources and adding them to the article (or parking them on the talk page, if you're in a rush) than trying to argue the semantics.

What else can we do?

The problem with terms like "importance", "significance" and "notability" (which isn't in the CSD criteria at all, but more of that later) is they are subjective. What I think is "important" may not be the same as what you think. This is how arguments start.

A better way of looking at A7 is this : could any independent editor reasonably improve this article so it would not be deleted at AfD?

Wikipedia is a collaborative effort. We need to make sure articles are verifiable to reliable sources, because it lets anyone in the world fact-check and ensure content can be improved. You might think Bringers of Darkness are the best rock band in the whole of history, but hundreds of thousands of bands feel the same about themselves too; only a truly independent and reliable source like Rolling Stone or Billboard can be considered a good and impartial judge of whether or not a band is good. If there are no reliable sources, nobody can do any work.

What this boils down to is that a legitimate A7 is one where there is no reasonable chance any neutral and un-involved editor could improve it to a state where a deletion debate would close anything other than "delete". Deletion discussions have several outcomes, including "merge", "redirect", "userfy" and "transwiki" - if you believe any of those are possible, it's not an A7.

If we can't speedy delete per A7, what can we do?

A7 is a pretty low barrier for obvious cases. The article may go on to be :

Deleted as a unsourced biography of a living person
Deleted as an uncontested proposed deletion
Deleted via a full deletion debate
Redirected to a more significant topic
Improved to good article status (also known as the Heymann standard)

When doing triage with new pages that don't meet CSD A7, check each of the other criteria in turn. If they apply, stop there. It is perfectly acceptable to decline an A7 tag on an article and then propose or nominate deletion, and experienced editors may mention this as part of the deletion debate.

Responding to A7-related complaints

Some administrators will respond with complaints about an A7 deletion with a message that can be paraphrased as "kindly wait until someone with no conflict of interest thinks you / your band / your company / your mother (delete as applicable) is notable and writes about them here." This isn't much use as it doesn't explain what "conflict of interest" and "notability" actually means.

A better question for deleting administrators (and tagging patrollers) to ask is to find out what the actual end goal was for the article creator. While many articles appear high in a Google search, newer articles tend not to appear as the top results any more, so there tends not to be an advantage for using it over your own website. Indeed, with your own website, you pretty much have free reign to do exactly what you want when you want, which sounds like a much better fit for some things, and people are not really any more likely to find your information on here given we have 5 million articles and rising.

Find out what the intended result was; it can be useful feedback.

Historic A7s

These notable subjects were all tagged CSD A7 at one point or another:

Footnotes

^ Talk:Ted Mullen - admins only

[1] Talk:Ted Mullen - admins only

[1]