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Read this before proposing new criteria

Contributors frequently propose new criteria for speedy deletion. If you have a proposal to offer, please keep a few guidelines in mind:

  • The criterion should be objective: an article that a reasonable person judges as fitting or not fitting the criterion should be similarly judged by other reasonable people. Often this requires making the rule very specific. An example of an unacceptably subjective criterion might be "an article about something unimportant."
  • The criterion should be uncontestable: it should be the case that almost all articles that can be deleted using the rule, should be deleted, according to general consensus. If a rule paves the path for deletions that will cause controversy, it probably needs to be restricted. In particular, don't propose a CSD in order to overrule keep votes that might otherwise occur in AfD. Don't forget that a rule may be used in a way you don't expect if not carefully worded.
  • The criterion should arise frequently: speedy deletion was created as a means of decreasing load on other deletion methods such as Wikipedia:Articles for deletion and Wikipedia:Proposed deletion. But these other methods are often more effective because they treat articles on a case-by-case basis and incorporate many viewpoints; CSD exchanges these advantages for the practical goal of expeditious, lightweight cleanup. If a situation arises rarely, it's probably easier, simpler, and more fair to delete it via one of these other methods instead. This also keeps CSD as simple and easy to remember as possible.
  • The criterion should be nonredundant: if an admin can accomplish the deletion using a reasonable interpretation of an existing rule, just use that. If this application of that rule is contested, consider discussing and/or clarifying it. Only if a new rule covers articles that cannot be speedy deleted otherwise should it be considered.

If you do have a proposal that you believe passes these guidelines, please feel free to propose it on this discussion page. Be prepared to offer evidence of these points and to refine your criterion if necessary. Consider explaining how it meets these criteria when you propose it. Do not, on the other hand, add it unilaterally to the CSD page.

Oft referenced pages
Archive
Archives

G4 corollary

There are a few templates and categories that are recreated in some form every month or so, and usually deleted per G4 since we've seen them before. The most obvious examples are voting templates and disclaimer templates. I think it would be useful to make a very brief list of those perennials here. Any thoughts on this? >Radiant< 21:34, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

To the contrary, I think that justifying deletion of these templates would require new criteria; G4 should only be used on content that is recreated by the same users without addressing any previous objections. Deco 21:57, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • G4 does not, and never has, required the author being the same. What matters is that the content is the same. >Radiant< 22:09, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I haven't seen the templates in question, and I agree with you if it is truly a "substantially identical copy", but a page that merely has the same purpose and vaguely similar content is not at all the same thing. The spirit of the rule is that it is intended to deal with re-creations that attempt to reverse prior deletions without addressing the issues raised in those deletions. It should not apply to people who evidently have no knowledge of those prior deletions, since we could not reasonably expect them to address those issues. At the very least they deserve a link to the deletion discussion for the original page. Deco 22:32, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Yes, but we're not talking articles here, but templates and categories. In particular, any template that says "the following page may contain objectionable content" is something we've seen before. And speedied under G4 before. I'm not proposing anything new, just to make a list of anything that has been G4'ed twice. That shouldn't be that much. >Radiant< 22:43, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • Any reason why you want to limit your list to just templates and categories? If you're willing to open the analysis up to all pages, this might be a good proxy. It's got some false positives but they're pretty easy to sort out. Rossami (talk) 00:37, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The idea is to be able to get rid of templates like {{Warning - this article contains pictures of naked women}} and {{Warning - do not try this at home, kids}} without going through the hassle of TfD. --Carnildo 04:08, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think, if {{Nudity warning}} is deleted and then someone makes {{Nakedness warning}} with very similar wording, it can be called a repost and deleted. But that doesn't mean that {{Racist warning}} would be deletable as a repost. However, I think there's a new policy we should make here: warnings, other than spoiler warnings, are deleted VERY regularly. WP:SPOILER mentions a quote that says that spoiler warnings should be the only warnings, but I think this is an unwritten policy of Wikipedia that should be formally written. Mangojuicetalk 18:09, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
N/m, scratch that, I found WP:NDT. Mangojuicetalk 18:30, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
WP:NDT is a guideline, not a policy. To claim that G4 applies to all such templates would be to effectively elevate it to policy, and under a dubious interpretation of G4 that contradicts its spirit. Any such deletions that have already occurred are out of process, as far as I'm concerned, and should have gone to TfD. If you're interested in unilaterally deleting this type of template, I would suggest you first garner support for making WP:NDT a policy, and then adding speedy deletion criteria to support it. Deco 20:32, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, NDT is a guideline, and so? The spirit of G4 is to avoid discussing things that we've discussed before. We've had plenty of discussion on voting templates and disclaimer templates, and so we now speedily delete them. We might as well update this page to reflect that; not doing so will not in any way stop those deletions. >Radiant< 21:02, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That's true, but it's not always possible for an individual to conclusively establish that the arguments posed against a similar template in the past apply equally to a new template, which may have a similar purpose but notable differentiating factors that could alter the outcome of the argument. And "we do it anyway" is never a good argument; you could just as easily argue that the page should be updated to clarify that it shouldn't be done. Deco 23:20, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Blatant advertising

I wish more and more that blatant advertising would qualify for speedy deletion. On several occasions, I have seen people who don't even try to disguise their advertisements as articles, but instead write them as straight-out advertisements, including contact information, in first person voice. This makes me feel they knowingly and shamelessly disregard Wikipedia's intention, and instead think "Hey, I can edit it! Cool, free advertisement space!". Why in the world is this not a speedy deletion criterion? Do we want to turn Wikipedia into a free Internet host? I would love to see a template {{db-we}} which would display:

This page is a candidate for speedy deletion. Reason: Uses first-person voice.

JIP | Talk 19:16, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely not. At best, an "advertisement" that may meet notability guidelines should be stubbed/rewritten. At worst, it should go to AfD and get a hearing, and possibly be stubbed and rewritten there following a few new eyes looking at it. I'm sure this has come up before, but there's no reason to speedy these. --badlydrawnjeff talk 19:21, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The argument that WP is being used by companies as a "free web host" is a bit silly - any company with more than $20 in annual gross revenue can afford its own commercial web site. What they're interested in is describing their company on a popular and highly ranked site. On WP:CSD, under "non-criteria", you can see:
Advertisements or spam: These may be subject to deletion, but not speedy deletion. There is often a chance to replace them with an NPOV version instead.
Which is brief and clear enough. Deco 20:35, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Not a free web host, a free advertisement where they can instantly get a page on one of the most popular sites on the Internet. In such cases, even if a company be notable enough, the article must be entirely rewritten. —Centrx→talk • 22:01, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I routinely see an account start, post a new article as a blatant ad/promo pointing to their site, then run around to other articles and link to the new article. The only point of this activity is to get links from Wiki to increase Google PR. I should be able to tag for speedy deletion, but I end up putting in a prod tag, which 90% of the time is removed with no article change, then I have to go AfD, which as it currently stands is a time consuming process just to post it. Then it has to go through the time lag and feedback. The reality is that in many cases I just don't have the patience to do all that - and I suspect the same that may apply to others. --ArmadilloFromHell 05:29, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • My feelings exactly. If a new account writes a blatant advertisement, in first-person voice, as his only contribution, where it is obvious his only intent is advertising, why do we have to wait 5 days for the article to be deleted, when it's always going to get 100% delete votes and 0% keep votes? Why do we need to have this artificial-seeming wait period when everyone agrees the article must be deleted? JIP | Talk 07:05, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I concur with the above. A CSD for advertising is sorely needed with the amount of SEO going on. And who knows how much spam has snuck through. Prod and AFD are too slow and ineffective when it comes to dealing with this crap. And anyway, some admins just delete these "articles" on sight. MER-C 09:57, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Search engine optimisation, basically an euphemism for spamming. MER-C 10:40, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
We need to be a lot wider than that because a lot of spamming occurs in the main namespace. MER-C 12:08, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • For mainspace article, another possibility is to allow speedy deletion for articles that both are blatant advertisment and do not assert notability. My point is, if the article needs to be rewritten completely, what's the point of discussion? It can be (speedy) deleted and then recreated from scratch. (Liberatore, 2006). 11:52, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I somewhat agree with this - we should not make advertisements for notable topics deletable, just non-notable topics, which couldn't reasonably be improved into useful articles. On the other hand, you'd be hard pressed to find an advertisement that doesn't assert notability of the product! ("a major advancement", "newest in the successful X line", "most popular in X", whatever) Deco 12:28, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Some ads are (often deliberately) vague; of the three examples you provided, the second one would probably not qualify as a notability assertion ("successful" may just mean "having met the (low) expected results"). Some ads are also mostly based on weasel terms ("excellent", "vision", "customer-oriented", etc.) rather than any concrete notability assertion. (Liberatore, 2006). 13:02, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd be very happy to see this. Quite a few times you see an ad (sorry article) - you know the prod will be removed without any action. Then you look at the contributions of the author - this and nothing else. Good proposal --Nigel (Talk) 12:06, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A quick draft: "It is an advertisement masquerading as an article which does not assert notability or it is a userpage of a single purpose advertising account." MER-C 13:00, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good to me. A little grammar change: "It is an advertisement masquerading as an article that does not assert the notability of its subject, or it is a userpage of a single purpose advertising account." (Liberatore, 2006). 13:05, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I would be very happy to see this (or a variant of) added to the CSD. Martin 13:12, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds good to me too. JIP | Talk 13:28, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Whatever the final wording works out to be, the last sentence of the A7 criteria - If the assertion is disputed or controversial, it should be taken to AfD instead - needs to be included. --Allen3 talk 14:10, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know. Some of these do definately need to be deleted, but I have seen several cleaned up to be decent articles. In my experience this, "when it's always going to get 100% delete votes and 0% keep votes," is simply not true. There are many notable and important companies and products that Wikipedia does not have articles on. Lots of people (sometimes unaffiliated with the company) will copy the company's promotional materials to Wikipedia in order to fill the gap. This is wrong, violates copywrite, etc., but often (though not always) these products deserve an article. We have a clean-up template for advertising; and advertising should 'be cleaned up, not deleted. Copyvios should be deleted, non-notable things can be deleted, and those get rid of half the ads there. The rest, consisting of notable products or companies with articles that read like ads but are not copied directly from websites or press releases, should be cleaned up, not deleted. I really think ad articles need to go through the AFD process to determine which of the three categories of ad articles they fall into. Adding it to the SD criteria is a mistake. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 13:47, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If the topic deserves an article, then the advertisement should be speedily deleted and a request placed at WP:RA. Our cleanup backlog is so long that allowing people to add to it by placing advertisements here doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Kusma (討論) 13:55, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • True. In general, speedy deletion is not a mark aganist the subject, only against the current content. That's why G4 is worded the way it is. Articles on good subjects are inevitably recreated with some decent content. >Radiant< 14:42, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • One more vote for tyhe proposed wording: advert masquerading asd an article or userpagfe of single purpose account is excellent, add the AfD rider from A7 and let's go for it. Guy 16:30, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In practice, advertising is speedy deleted all the time. When an article starts out "Our mission is to provide a value-centric people-driven paradigm..." A) there's nothing there which good editors would actually use in an encyclopedia article on that topic and B) It's a copied and pasted right from the company webpage. Yes, sometimes what starts out as an ad can end up a good article, but it has to have some salvageable content, and not be a copyright violation, before any of that can happen. I think that saying we should never speedy delete advertising is relatively naive and doesn't take into account how much spam we get in an average hour, let alone day.

There seems to be a basic problem at work here. A lot of this "about our company" stuff isn't what you or I, as Wikipedia editors would write: Factual information, statistics, history, summary of controversies, etc. All that some companies put into their "about our company" is stuff about how great their product/service is... I've read corporate pages that literally don't give a single objective fact about the company.

At times I've advocated a CSD for "Articles that exist only to promote a product or service", which covers these non-informative company fluff pieces... although perhaps that rule is a bit too given to misinterpretation. If an article has factual information (e.g. "Company was founded in 1917, purchased by X in 1950, moved its headquarters to City in 1997" and so forth) that's all stuff we could use in an article, so articles like that really shouldn't be speedied unless they're copy and paste jobs. --W.marsh 17:09, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some of the information in an ad-like article may be useful if someone wants to do a rewrite, that's true. However, such information is usually only sourced by the company's web site (if it is sourced at all). So, in order to turn such an article into a real encyclopedia article would require, 1. a complete rewrite 2. addition of reliable sources for the remaining factual information, and 3. addition of information to assess the notability of their subjects. All of this can only be done if the subject is actually notable. (Liberatore, 2006). 12:06, 29 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If this is the practice, it's incredibly improper. Why aren't we stubbing adn AfDing them? --badlydrawnjeff talk 14:36, 29 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well these articles I'm talking about are usually copyvios, when you get down to it. I didn't think speedy deletion of those was controversial. Trust me, I do suggest AfD/prod if it's not a copyvio and the real problem is just that the assertions of importance are questionable, Prod and AfD are more appropriate venues for addressing those kinds of issues. I am not sure all CSD-patrolling admins do this, so any established non-admins who want to go through CAT:CSD and remove non-qualifying candidates is more than welcome to as far as I'm concerned, especially if you'll take them through PROD/AfD if called for... I think that helps with the backlog anyway. --W.marsh 15:06, 29 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I see no reason why WP:PROD is inadequate for dealing with new spam articles. The article creators rarely object in such cases, as they've vanished off of Wikipedia, and if they do, it's because they really do think (for whatever reason) their company or product should be in an encyclopedia. Mangojuicetalk 17:12, 29 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That is not my impression. I would think at least 70% of the prod or prod2 articles I've tagged get the prod removed. In most cases they just remove the prod and make no changes or improvements or comments. --ArmadilloFromHell 17:22, 29 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Seconded. MER-C 01:28, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strongly support this idea; I've been wishing for this for a long time. Prodding and AfD'ing these is usually a waste of everyone's time, which is exactly what speedying is supposed to prevent. An article deleted under this criterion can be easily recreated with encyclopedic material if the subject was genuinely notable and relevant, and deletion has the advantage of a) taking the spam out of the article history, b) presenting a red link to editors who may be interested in recreating it, and c) not having the spam sit around on Wikipedia's servers for 5+ days waiting for perfectly snowy processes to finish. Opabinia regalis 03:06, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I support the criterion as stated, with the reservation that it may not prove as useful as hoped, given that many ads do make claims of notability (usually unsupported). Deco 03:40, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Brad Patrick's comments

Brad Patrick, the foundation's legal counsel, has just made comments related to this very issue, that I thought people would be interested in. From Foundation-l:

This means the administrators and new page patrol need to be clear when they see new usernames and page creation which are blatantly commercial - shoot on sight.

Full comment here. I think there is a bit of a sea change going on, used to the attitude was "Just slap a tag on it and someone will clean up the spam eventually", not it's becoming more well, I don't even have to exagerate, "shoot on sight". --W.marsh 17:28, 29 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nice, since I don't think AfD can possibly keep up with the amount of spamvertisements. I'd also like to see a policy change (and maybe some kind of monitor bot) for users who stick their URLs on multiple topics. I've seen cases of someone putting their website on more than 50 articles, and getting away with it for a long time before being caught. --ArmadilloFromHell 17:38, 29 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Might I mention another part of the email: "Some of you might think regular policy and VfD is the way to go. I am here to tell you it is not enough. We are losing the battle for encyclopedic content in favor of people intent on hijacking Wikipedia for their own memes. This scourge is a serious waste of time and energy. We must put a stop to this now." There you have it from the office. AFD and prod can't deal with this crap. MER-C 01:28, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Except since he is talking about vfd it is quite posible he hasn't really considered prod.Geni 12:47, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You can't seriously be implying that prod can effectively deal with spam? -- Steel 12:51, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It often does. If not, then it should go to AfD to possibly be cleaned up if it should exist, and deleted if not. There's no reason to speedy it. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:21, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
While prod works well for hit and run articles involving neologisms or hoaxes, spam articles tend to be defended by their creators against quick and simple actions. This is because placing a vanispamcruftisement on the #14 website on the Internet proclaiming the virtues of "Bob's Gently Owned Autos" is a marketing value not equaled since the development of the Make money fast e-mails. As a result of this value, the creators of these articles have increasingly taken to reverting speedy deletion tags, prod labels, and even spelling corrections. With current trends it is just a matter of time before spammers become savvy enough to routinely request that AfD discussions be removed due to the their inevitably pointing out that the business is a small time operation that lacks relevance outside its local community or some similar information that does not show the spam subject in the best possible light. --Allen3 talk 14:23, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Then it should be sent to AfD. Not a big deal. --badlydrawnjeff talk 16:47, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm under the impression AfD is needless bureaucracy for something which is clearly going to be deleted. -- Steel 16:50, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • The argument to send everything to AfD also ignores one of the basic principles behind Wikipedia: Removing vandalism must be no harder than adding it. The process of nominating an article at AfD requires three edits and, when done correctly, a well reasoned and properly researched explanation for the deletion citing appropriate policies. Closing the AfD as a delete requires examining and editing the discussion, performing the actual deletion, dealing with any possible talk page, checking for links to the deleted page, and fixing any issues caused by the links. Thus both the nomination and the deletion may each involve as much effort as creating the spam and this does not include the time and effort invested by other discussion participants. Unless you are arguing that a project based on volunteer effort is able to consistently exert more than twice the effort exerted by for-profit based spammers just to reach equilibrium, then your thesis that everything needs to go to AfD appears to be a prescription designed to render WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not a soapbox irrelevant. --Allen3 talk 17:48, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, discussion. Something that's a basic principle of Wikipedia beyond deleting articles because they look like ads. Opening that can of worms? Not a great idea, although it seems like we've happily done so anyway. --badlydrawnjeff talk 20:38, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
How would "shoot on sight" per WP:CSD work now that {{db-spam}} has been turfed? --Rrburke 21:36, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Personally, I do delete the most blatant advertisements on sight, on the ground that spamming is listed as a kind of vandalism. (Interestingly, I remember that the speedy deletion criterion used to be phrased as "Pure vandalism, such as spam".) Some of the advertisements also get nominated as copyright violation (the contributor may well be the copyright holder, but when he makes no claim of that, I don't examine the issue any further). I have noticed that somebody has just added spam as a speedy deletion criterion - when and by whom was it decided? - Mike Rosoft 13:10, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • According to WP:VAND, spam as vandalism is "Adding inappropriate external links for advertisement and/or self-promotion. Note that this applies only to placing links on numerous and/or unrelated pages. Adding self-promotional links to a few related articles may be inappropriate, but is not vandalism." This is quite different from what is discussed here (creation of even a single article that is only used for advertising). Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 13:19, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Radiant! implemented it, and it's been fiddled around a bit by me and a few others. I'd wait until tomorrow so it settles down and all the related templates are created. MER-C 13:15, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • Thanks for the explanation. I would just like to comment that WP:VAND doesn't say that the list is exhaustive (it just gives an example of what kind of spamming may be regarded as vandalism), and that WP:SPAM lists many more types. It is my opinion that any kind of deliberate misuse of Wikipedia or damaging of its contents constitutes vandalism. - Mike Rosoft 14:06, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
          • I understand this point of view. G11 could be possibly merged with G3, and WP:VAND updated to reflect the inclusion of "spamming" as a form of vandalism. This has the advantage of reducing the number of criteria; on the other hand, I'm not sure equating vandalism and spamming will be accepted by the community. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 14:21, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to have been implemented by Radiant!: [1]. MER-C 11:42, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Another more general idea

"It is a page created by a single purpose advertising account (csd g11)" MER-C 12:24, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'd rather see "It is an advertising page created by a single purpose advertising account". There is a subtle difference; for example such an account may upload an image that is used on the ad page without the image being an ad by itself; in this case, the image may be useful so it shouldn't be speedied. (Tizio, 2006). 12:27, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've removed the requirement for it being a "single purpose advertising account," because that's a loophole that's easily gameable. Start an account, make minor edits to a few unrelated articles, and then you can claim that you're not a "single purpose advertising account." And we're back to square one. Ξxtreme Unction|yakkity yak 12:53, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Why would spam be useful? Some of the spam that comes in is so unsalvagable that I just tag it with a {{db-g1}} and the admin on the other end is more than willing to hit delete. (P.S. have you ever been on new pages patrol before?) MER-C 13:36, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Spam isn't useful or necessary, and is only fixable by deleting it. Assuming good faith has nothing to do with it, this amounts to judging an "article" on its merits or lack thereof. We should of course welcome and attempt to reform the "spamming" newbie, but we were asked by Brad Patrick to be "draconian" in ridding Wikipedia of blatant advertising. >Radiant< 13:56, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
In an editable encyclopedia where the page histories aren't indexed by google, spam can easily be removed while the article stays intact. We can be draconian (editing out spam on sight) without being blatantly idiotic (deleting articles that could otherwise be salvagable). --badlydrawnjeff talk 15:02, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
How many of the articles we are discussing are salvageable without doing research and rewriting them from scratch? Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 15:17, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No clue, nor should that be an indicator. If there's a chance that an article can meet our already overboard guidelines, we shouldn't be speedying it, period. --badlydrawnjeff talk 16:04, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If an article must be totally re-written—and spam articles must be totally re-written—then the article is not for inclusion in the encyclopedia. If there is someone willing to write a neutral encyclopedia article about it—and there will exist such persons if the subject is verifiable or notable—there is no problem in having an empty space waiting for them to write it, rather than an advertisement sitting in that space. —Centrx→talk • 20:15, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that's true at all. --badlydrawnjeff talk 23:35, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
What's not true? If nobody is ever willing to write an article about a subject, that subject is most likely not important. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 12:44, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That's a horrible line of logic. I mean, I can list off ten articles in a blink that we can use here that haven't been created yet. Is it unimportant in that case? Of course not. If we have a "spam" article on something that's otherwise useful for inclusion, then someone's been willing to write one and simply has not done so to our specifications. That's not a reason for deletion. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:17, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't say that if someone has not yet written an article then its subject is not important. That would be really bad logic. What I say is that if we delete spam and the subject is important, we are not missing much because someone else will write an article on the subject sooner or later, and that the effort of doing that is probably the same as that of rewriting a spam article. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 16:35, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That assumes someone will be able to come along, that it won't be speedied G4 by an admin quick on the trigger, that it won't be assumed that it's spam every time it's created, and that the earth won't be salted after it's been recreated a few times. Too many factors go into it, when we could solve it once by not speedying it and giving it a hearing where we get some consensus on it. --badlydrawnjeff talk 16:38, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Unless you mean that we will let POV, unsourced articles sit around, this means someone will have to do the work of cleaning them up. Also, anyone can request that a page be unprotected and allowed for re-creation. Admins can easily recognize where the old deletion reason is "spam" that a new, legitimate article can be created on the same subject, just as they can recognize the same where an old deletion reason is "vandalism" or "copyvio", etc. —Centrx→talk • 22:12, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Miscellaneous questions on WP:CSD#A7

1) Wording of WP:CSD#A7: The bolded text that explains the criterion as "Unremarkable people or groups/vanity pages" seems to me at odds with the actual usage guidelines. Surely it's the assertion of notability, rather than notability per se, that's decisive. "Non-notable subjects with their importance asserted" are, as WP:CSD says, not eligible for WP:SD. Surely "unremarkable people or groups/vanity pages," while candidates for WP:AfD or WP:PROD, are not candidates for WP:SD if they assert even an implausible or unverified claim of notability. Does the wording of of WP:CSD#A7 need to be amended to reflect the distinction?

2) I've been thinking about trudging through band (and possibly album and song) stubs and articles for candidates for WP:SD. In an earlier discussion, it was suggested that any claim of notability renders an article ineligible for WP:SD, and that stating that a band has an album is a de facto claim of notabilty. I presume the adjective "popular" would be, too: as in, "X is popular band from Y." First, is that a consensus position? If it is, would it be fair to consider putting forward for WP:CSD#A7 any band article that says no more than: "X band exists. Bobby, Timmy, Twirly and Jethro are its members. They recently played at open mic night at the Stuckey's on Route 17 to coincide with the release of a single on their MySpace page and are really really sure they're going to be famous" -- or less? This would probably be enough to eliminate dozens of band articles.

3) If bands are speedy-deletable per WP:CSD#A7, shouldn't it follow a fortiori that albums and songs which likewise lack assertions of notability ought to be so too? So how to accomplish this? WP:CSD#A1 sometimes works for this, but even stubs or articles with, for example, full track listings and graphics obviously don't fit the criterion. WP:CSD#A7 only applies to people or groups of people; it seems odd to me there's no criterion to apply to the things they make.

a) Are albums/songs by obviously notable bands/performers automatically precluded from being nominated for WP:SD even if the articles on them make no claim of notability?

--Rrburke 21:36, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Ah, good questions. Let's see...
    1. Most criteria have a 'summary wording' of two or three words, and a slightly longer explanation. The wording "unremarkable people or groups" was used when the principle was 'officially' proposed. Additionally, it seems clear that an article on someone who isn't notable cannot assert that person's notability (well, except by lying, but that falls foul of other policy).
    2. Saying anything is "popular" is not really an assertion of notability since it's way too vague. For instance, a guy named Jack was popular in my high school, and so what? The idea of CSD is to save effort; using your best judgment, try to consider if the band article has a remote chance of passing AFD. For "popular" to mean anything it'd have to name some specifics, like a chart position, or a prize they won, or a famous place they play in, or somesuch.
    3. Good point. I would argue that an article on a song written by a band is in fact an article about a band, just like an article about some guy's clothing is an article about that person - mainly because common sense is more important than the letter of a rule.
  • When in doubt, you can tag an article with both {{delete}} and {{prod}}. If some patroller or closing admin disagrees with the former, we can wait a few days for the latter. >Radiant< 00:15, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Part of the reason for having the "unremarkable people/vanity" wording is that it is a further restriction on the criterion. That is, articles about people who are eminently notable but do not contain an assertion are not, ideally, speedy deletable. There are often articles like "John Bishop (1839-1900) is a pianist": There is no assertion of notability, and if it were an article about a guitarist born 1985 it would be suspicious, but no one is writing vanity articles about 19th century pianists and in these cases the mere "physicist" or "artist" with no assertion should not be deletable under the CSD. The article must first appear to be vanity or unremarkable, and then you check for the assertion. —Centrx→talk • 04:30, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Talk pages of images on Commons

I have noticed that image talk pages frequently appear in the speedy deletion category, and I don't believe that they should be deleted on the grouds that their respective page doesn't exist (unless the content is truly meaningless, it should be moved to the Commons at worst). For example, I have just declined to delete Image talk:Flag of Poland (state).svg. The problem is an inconsistency between the image page and the image talk page because the latter makes it seem that the image doesn't exist. - Mike Rosoft 11:33, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

[2]
Hopefully no-one has any objections to that. -- Steel 15:39, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed A9

Given the growing concern over vanity articles, I've suggested a new A9 which will cover vanity articles, but deliberately does not mention notability - if notability is disputed then the article is for Afd. But vanity articles should be speedied REGARDLESS of notability. Cynical 15:05, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why? --badlydrawnjeff talk 15:14, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I would have reverted (Steel was faster than me) the change while this is discussed: g11 is in a way broader than a9 (it is about any page, not just articles; it does not require any link between the author and the subject to be established), and in a way stricter (only allows deletion of articles written as advertisement). Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 15:15, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
(twice edit conflict) To expand on my revert [3], there's no need to speedy articles on notable subjects just because it's been written by the subject itself in a POV fashion. In these cases, rewrite, don't delete. -- Steel 15:17, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that G11 is about tone, A9 was about the article. In other words, deletion under G11 comes down to whether an admin thinks the tone of it makes it an advert, whereas A9 was more objective - if it was written by or on behalf of the subject, it was deletable. Edit as David Gerard pointed out to me on the mailing list, A9 seems to be more resilient to rules lawyers - whether we want to base a decision on that or not is another matter of course. Cynical 15:21, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If an article isn't an advertisement (I.e. it's a valid entry to the encyclopedia) does it really matter who it was written by? -- Steel 15:28, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough - although what I have done is add a qualifier to G11 which has much the same effect as what you have suggested - in other words, spamvertisements which have significant potential to be fixed to become decent articles are exempted. That way we can deal with all the blatant spam, but don't risk deleting articles on decent subjects just because they are fugly at the moment. Cynical 15:36, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
While your efforts are noble and understandable, you may wish to consider the following:
Spam is cost-shifted advertising. The recipients of spam bear the cost of recieving it. While the cost to the end user in terms of money is neglibile, the cost to the end user in terms of time may not be. (The cost to the end user's ISP may be significant, however, but that's a digression for another time.)
In any case, the notion that we cannot delete any spam article which may be "salvageable" allows the spammers to once again shift the burden of dealing with their spam to well-meaning individuals who play within the rules. They put up their spam, we debate on whether the article is "salvagable" for whatever length of time, the people who argue against deleting the article fail to go in and improve the article, and we're left with a spam article in our database.
Spammers have a direct monetary incentive to spam. The cost of entry is pitifully low when compared to other forms of advertising. Given this fact, I believe the best course of action is to adhere closely to Mr. Patrick's words. If a new article looks like an advertisement, I plan on shooting first and asking questions later.
All the best,
Ξxtreme Unction|yakkity yak
18:00, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Hear, hear. Shoot first, ask questions later is an extremely efficient way of dealing with this. If I delete 100 spam articles and of those, 1 is salvagable and is recreated, so be it. That's much better than having 99 pointless AfD discussions. -- Steel 18:06, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
you don't know if they're pointless until you run them. Best not to "shhot first" but to rather get consensus. You know, how we do just about everything else here. --badlydrawnjeff talk 18:14, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Speedy deletions are done unilaterally. It has always been thus. Ξxtreme Unction|yakkity yak 18:44, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Not denying that. I am saying, however, that things that may be otherwise salvageable generally are not speedied. --badlydrawnjeff talk 23:34, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Clarification to G11 & (new) proposed A9.

I feel that the new spam criterion is okay, but I think it needs some clarification. Different people consider "spam" differently. I think it's important to make it clear in the policy that speedy deletion of spam should only be meant for cases that are not only blatant examples of advertising, but also ones for which the page in question contains nothing else in its history. This will hopefully take care of all the most egregious cases, but I thought of a specific case that will probably be uncontroversial, and applies a bit more broadly than just spam:

  • A9: Repost of official website. Any article on a company, product, living person, band, organization, or website, for which the article and all its history consists entirely of material from the official website of its subject, regardless of any assertion of permission.

In 90% of such cases, the article would be a copyright violation. In 99% of the remaining cases, the only reason a copyright violation wouldn't be an issue is that someone promoting the subject, and working for/with the official website, wants that info hosted on Wikipedia. I can't see why, in those cases, we should accept such material: Wikipedia articles are supposed to meet certain standards of content, which websites basically don't ever meet. Thoughts? Mangojuicetalk 19:04, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Would this simply be a copyvio criterion relaxed for these specific unsalvageable articles or is "material" taken to mean "information": if everything in an article could have been found out by the reader just going to the company website. —Centrx→talk • 20:23, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • It differs from A8 in two ways: First of all, A8 talks about copyvio from commercial content owners (like magazines/newspapers), whereas official websites of companies or products are not making money off of their content. Second, my proposed A9 applies whether or not permission is given: the idea is that we take that kind of content to automatically be inappropriate promotional text. Mangojuicetalk 20:38, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • If it were actually the case that 99.9% of such articles were copyvios or vanity articles on non-notable companies, this would seem reasonable, but these numbers are totally made up. I don't know how many useful articles began with companies donating text from their official website, but I could very well see it forming a useful basis for an article, once it is wikified and made less biased. Deco 20:49, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I haven't been here since the beginning but (1) I have never come across such an instance, (2) I can imagine only a very odd series of coincidences that would produce such a situation, and (3) if a copy of a website would be a useful basis for an article, then as long as the article isn't just a repost of that website (or part of it), it wouldn't meet this criterion. Mangojuicetalk 23:18, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • We don't have to refer to "all in its history" for all individual CSDs; it is mentioned at the top of the page, and also on the page you get when you click 'delete'. For instance, a page that looks like gibberish could be patent nonsense, or vandalism of a good page - so we do check history before deleting. I'm not too happy with this A9, because an article on, say, a famous band could be based on what it says on the website. >Radiant< 21:33, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • "Based on" would be okay though. A pure copy is what this is referring to. Can you give me an example of an official website -- any official website -- where some subset of the contents would be appropriate as the entire contents of an article on Wikipedia? Mangojuicetalk 23:18, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • True. A literal copy of any commercial website would be a copyvio, and could be swiftly deleted without further investigation (unless said site was GFDL or some such but that just doesn't happen). Maybe a better way is to reduce some of the sub-clauses of A8, though. >Radiant< 23:29, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • The issue is these companies want to be on Wikipedia. They release the text under the GFDL, and if the copyright owner releases it, there is no copyright infringement. —Centrx→talk • 00:40, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
          • In my experience (and I've been using Copyright Judo against company advertising for a long time now) companies never release their advertisements under the GFDL. The idea that other people and other companies may take their advertisements and freely copy, modify, and redistribute them is anathema to advertisers. Uncle G 10:51, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
            • I don't mean advertisements made by advertisement company, but promotional text that can be found on the company website. There certainly do exist companies that want it on Wikipedia; why do you think most would not? Most of the copyvios are not authorized by the company, but what makes you think they would not be? —Centrx→talk • 22:18, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Personally, I strongly support the expansion of A8 to slacken or even remove the restriction to "commercial content providers" that it has, and thus allow the speedy deletion of copyrighted advertising blurb under that criterion without further ado, and without need for having to repeatedly educate editors on what "spam" is. It's a lot easier for administrators to decide whether something is a straight copy of a web page, which just involves reading and mechanically comparing the two, than it is to decide whether an article's tone is "promotional", which involves a subjective evaluation of content.

    I also warn you now: A deletion criterion that talks about "spam" will result in many controversial deletions. If the experience with electronic mail, such as this and this, tells us anything, it is that definitions of "spam" vary widely, and that many people use it to mean "I don't like this." or even "I don't like you.". People will overuse and abuse "spam" in the same way that they abuse "nonsense". Be clear and name it what it is: Corporate advertising and corporate autobiography.

    In practice, the "commercial content provider" restriction is a silly restriction. If the content is copied wholesale from a web page, and the web page is copyrighted and not GFDL licenced, then we don't want it, whoever is publishing the web page, and any granting of permission should occur before any content is contributed. Such content is a copyright violation. It's as simple as that.

    If we can apply Copyright Judo speedily to corporate advertisements and corporate autobiographies, in both articles and user pages, which we can if we slacken the restriction on A8, then we don't need the above proposal, we don't need the nebulously and subjectively defined G11, and we don't need a perennial and unceasing education campaign as to what "spam" actually is "in the Wikipedia sense". Uncle G 10:51, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't have that the commercial-content restriction any more. It was changed 3-4 weeks ago; read it again. —Centrx→talk • 22:19, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

CSD G5 case at deletion review

I have started a deletion review of a page deleted under CSD G5 ("delete pages created by banned users"). Comments would be welcomed. My arguments in favour of restricting G5 in cases where useful content has been created can be seen at the deletion review and also at Wikipedia talk:Deny recognition. Carcharoth 01:25, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Technical error with this page?

Is it possible that there is something wrong with this page (the WP page, not this talk page)? For the last few weeks, whenever my cursor moves over a link on the page, I get an error that says A Runtime Error has occurred. Do you wish to Debug? Line: 3096 Error: Object doesn't support this property or method. I don't remember getting this message historically, so I sifted through old versions and I found the edit in the history where the error first starts happening for me. If seems to be something in this diff. Can someone please take a look at this to see if something is wrong (or maybe I'm just having a personal problem? although I can reproduce it at both home and office.) Thanks --After Midnight 0001 02:08, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That edit was faulty, and was corrected in the following edit. Do you get an error on the following version? -- zzuuzz (talk) 02:16, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the fast response. Yes, I do still get the error on that version as well. --After Midnight 0001 02:22, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm unable to reproduce it, even when I try :( There is one major difference between the versions you identify. The newer version has duplicate SPAN ID's for example 'g8' and 'G8'. I think this shouldn't make any difference because ID tokens are case sensitive (this was probably the reason for the change), but it may cause problems with an outdated or poorly implemented browser. Unless anyone else is having this problem, maybe change or update your browser? -- zzuuzz (talk) 03:26, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
OK, thanks for trying. I'm using IE 6.0.2900. It happens with VP also. If it matters, I am also running popups. I'll probably just live with it, unless I start having other problems. --After Midnight 0001 03:44, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This undoubtedly sounds like a problem with the popups (on IE), pertaining to the issues I mentioned. You should raise it there. -- zzuuzz (talk) 11:11, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

CSD G11

Spam. Pages that exist only to promote a company, person, product, service or group.
  • This criterion isn't clear about what exactly is considered spam. Perhaps we should write a page about it and link to it to clarify this new suggested rule.

Some tell-tale signs of spam.

  • The article is a copy of promotional material,but permission for use has been given, or when said material is a free-to-use press release.
Other promotional text can be deleted as a clear copyright infringement of commercial website.
  • When it's obvious the creator of the article is promoting themselves or their company based on their username.
When it's not allowed to have a promotional username (company name for example), it should be clear it is vanity when someone with such a name creates an article about it. Also, we should be more firm about the "discouraging" of self-promotion and actually take action when it is done.
  • When the creator shows no interest in editing other articles (with the exception of linking to his new creation).
If they only edit articles related to the subject they're promoting, it's clear they're using Wikipedia as a promotional tool.

Has anyone got any other ideas on useful things to determine what is and isn't spam? - Mgm|(talk) 10:38, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • A few more spammy indications:
    • Consistent use of marketing hyperbole/peacock terms i.e. totally POV.
    • Author's only contributions are to that article or linking to it.
    • The subject is hopelessly obscure (e.g. ghits < 1000 or top ten are unrelated).
    • It is a userpage that aims to promote a product or company.
    • Fails to assert notability of the subject.
  • Let's say that it has to meet at least two of these points to be tagged for deletion. MER-C 11:02, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • See what I wrote above. I suggest not using the word "spam" at all and instead calling it what it is: Corporate advertising and corporate autobiography. I also suggest that the better way to approach this is not in fact having a new criterion, but instead expansion of the existing A8 criterion, both by making it into a criterion that also covers user pages and by removing the "commercial content provider" restriction. Self-promotion can sometimes be neutralized and cleaned, and there have been several AFD discussions where this has occurred. Such cases should continue to go through AFD. What should be a criterion for speedy deletion is self-promotion that is obvious because it's a straight copy of the subject's advertisements or promotional blurb. Because such advertisments are always copyrighted, and because advertisers won't GFDL licence their advertisments because they don't want people to freely redistribute modified versions of them, that requires nothing but a more aggressive application of Copyright Judo, with an expansion to the speedy deletion criteria to support it, to show people that we are serious about not copying advertisements and blurbs and pasting them into Wikipedia. Uncle G 11:04, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • That works, and in fact corporate vanispamcruftisement is vandalism anyway so can be speedied with a little creativity. I still feel that articles created by single purpose accounts which serve only to promote a company or organisation should be explicitly speediable, but maybe that's just because I'm tired of arguing with trolls who dispute the deletion of their vanity. So my spam identifiers would be:
  • created by a single purpose account, or
  • no substantive edits other than by the creator and
  • unsupported by references from reliable seconmdary sources and
  • makes no credible claim to meeting notability guidelines and
  • promotional in tone.
Of course the last is difficult to quantify, but since this rule is to be applied by humans not robots that should not be an issue. Guy 11:33, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The only explicitly justifiable one for a speedy would be the third one, because the others are either violations of WP:AGF and/or WP:BITE(i.e., SPAs aren't always bad, new users often look like SPAs to start, only one editor isn't a problem, and you can't expect new editors to understand all of our overbearing notaiblity guidelines), and all of them can be fixed with editing rather than speedying outright. A stub article in encyclopedic tone will not hurt having on the servers for a few days while we discuss the possible merits of the article. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:21, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Jimbo's solution is to leave a nice friendly message (not unlike {{nn-userfy}} in tone). Keeping spam is not part of the plan. This comes from foundation and has been debated on the mailing list as well. Guy 08:38, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I should think that we can distinguish between an innocent novice and a spammer without too much trouble. Erring on the side of caution is good, erring on the side of moral panic is not. The aim, as requested by Brad, is to get rid of advertising swiftly and effectively. >Radiant< 13:23, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As I mentioned in one of my edit summaries and elsewhere on this talk page, the more we qualify this particular rule with provisos and definitions, the more loopholes we create. And the more loopholes we create, the more loopholes that will be exploited.

I spent 10 years working the abuse desk for a large regional ISP, and my job included both designing and enforcing an online ruleset. When I first started that job, our definition of "spam" was "20 or more substantially identical emails or newsgroup posts". So, naturally, we had several people who would only send them out in batches of 19.

The rule needs to be short, sweet, and to the point. Specifying criteria that the article creator should meet (e.g., single purpose account, no substantitive edits other than by the creator) will simply provide mechanisms for gaming the system. As somone who fought spam professionally for 10 years, my advice is to avoid providing those mechanisms.

All the best,
Ξxtreme Unction|yakkity yak
13:30, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that we shouldn't have this guideline to speedy what may appear to be spam. You have to have detailed explanation or you end up speedying otherwise useful content. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:35, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think Wikipedia can afford to delete legitimate content that looks like spam more than it can afford to be lenient on actual spam. Administrators should not look through a long list of criteria for what is or is not spam anyway, but use their common sense (and undelete and apologize if they make a mistake). Kusma (討論) 13:48, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly disagree. We shouldn't assume something "looks like spam," and common sense would dictate not to delete something just because it "looks" like spam. --badlydrawnjeff talk 15:03, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
And I strongly disagree with your disagreement. So there, neener, etc.
Seriously, man. You're way way way way WAY in the minority on this one. The notification of this change has been posted several places, including WP:ANI and WP:VPP, so it's not like this change is being snuck in under the radar. Those are two of the most heavily watched policy pages on Wikipedia. Furthermore, WP:CSD itself is watched like a hawk by every admin who does any sort of deletion activity. And not a single admin has reverted the the addition of the spam clause, which is what inevitably happens whenever a change like this is made to the CSD criteria and someone strongly disagrees with it. Mike Rosoft put a "Proposed" flag on it, but even then he didn't remove it. The only thing we've done is try to finesse the wording.
That's because the admins who've been doing speedy deletions and new page patrol know that this is already a long-term, on-going problem that has been needing a solution for Quite Some Time.
I appreciate that you have very noble sentiments and lofty goals for Wikipedia. But on this particular topic, your time could probably be used more productively to find another machine to rage against.
All the best,
Ξxtreme Unction|yakkity yak
15:19, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
No, I like this machine, and my rage continues. I don't especially care if an admin hasn't reverted the spam claus,e the only reason I haven't is because I'm making a good faith effort to see that this has support beyond the few people who've chimed in and Brad Patrick in the very short time it's been there. My worry is more that we're not thinking this out - you want to speedy "spam?" Fine, but you have to be able to recognize it first, and not allow otherwise good or potentially good material to be caught up in it. It would make it unique from the other CSD criteria, which is way overblown anyway. --badlydrawnjeff talk 15:49, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Good luck with that. ΞU
There is a growing awareness among mainstream corporations, publicists, and political campaigners of Wikipedia as a possible channel for promoting their point of view, obtaining free publicity, and increasing their Google page rank. I've thought for some time that this currently constitutes a serious "present danger" to Wikipedia, because it means that there are an increasing number of sophisticated Wikipedia editors who come to Wikipedia with no interest whatsoever in presenting a neutral point of view, and about whom one cannot assume good faith.
However things shake out, it is very important to have a means for expeditious deletion of spam.
It is trivially easy for anyone to write an article so that it does not smell like Spam. This does not impose a heavy burden on a contributor.
A spam article is not a human being. A spam article is not a prisoner of war. A spam article is not a foetus. Spam has no habeas corpus right. Presumption of innocence does not apply to spam. If a legitimate article is occasionally deleted as spam, DRV and other mechanisms are available to correct the problem.
If it's really a problem, we could always consider putting a notice on the article creation page along the lines of Wikipedia's not being an advertising service, warning new editors that promotional articles about themselves, their friends, their company or products, or articles created as part of a marketing or promotional campaign, may be deleted. Dpbsmith (talk) 15:24, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
These are all reasons why I'm a strong proponent of AfDing possible spam. More eyes = better result. --badlydrawnjeff talk 15:49, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
More eyes = exactly what the spammers want. What a coincidence. 69.207.172.61 16:26, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Don't be ridiculous. I can see it now. IBM's marketing department put "getting listed on Wikipedia's AfD" as their major achievement this year... Carcharoth 15:59, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've been watching this discussion for a while now. Despite the serious efforts of a lot of good editors, the wording of this new proposal remains unacceptably vague. Good CSD criteria are ones where any reasonable editor reading the page can immediately see that a page does or does not meet the criteria. They must be uncontroversial for the system to work.
I'm not averse to the principle of the speedy-deletion of spam but the current definition of spam boils down to "I know it when I see it." I can't convince myself that's a scalable definition. What appears to me to be a "page that exists only to promote a company," etc. may not appear to be the same thing to you. For example, is Cap Gemini spam or just in need of serious clean-up?
I am seriously concerned that the vagueness of the current wording is more likely to lead to further arguments, DRVs and bickering. It will create more problems than it will solve. I would prefer to withdraw that criterion while we work on the wording some more. Rossami (talk) 17:50, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some case studies

Is this going to become ridiculously long and clutter the talk page? —Centrx→talk • 00:02, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The way you have formmatted the table, it will! :-) I don't know how to repair it, but there must be a neater way to present the case studies. Carcharoth 00:04, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ah. That's better! :-) Carcharoth 01:03, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Article Description "Repost of official website"? Creator is named after company? Speedily deletable under A8 now? Speedy deletable if A8 didn't have date restrictions and ignored the possibility of permission?
Israel today (AfD discussion) a straight copy and paste from this copyrighted advertisment ("Copyright 2006 israel today Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.") Yes No (Oaarmo (talk · contribs)) No Yes
Avesthagen (AfD discussion) initial text was a straight copy of this corporate blurb No No (Frontstcorner (talk · contribs)) No No
Apps Communications (AfD discussion) Appears to be original. No peacock terms. No Yes (Dapps007 (talk · contribs)) No No
Demonic computers (AfD discussion) Already subject to vandalism No No web site exists. No (Howie91 (talk · contribs)) No No

Those are the WP:CORP-related AFD discussions from today's per-day AFD page. Uncle G 00:13, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It may be interesting to add this to the grid, but I don't think I should be the one to do it. --MyWikiBiz 13:38, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That's a very interesting AfD discussion. I personally think that if Wikipedia has stub articles about thousands of small US towns, then having stub articles about thousand of US (and European) businesses is OK as well. Unless all the small town articles got deleted when I wasn't looking. In any case, the business articles are sometimes more interesting to read. Carcharoth 13:50, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
MyWikiBiz: The idea is to take an arbitrary day and list the discussions about companies of the day. That discussion is from August. We may discuss it, but it's not suited for the grid.
Carcharoth: Articles about places are much easier to maintain. Towns do not die often, and new ones are rarely created. The city council is unlikely to sue even if a vandal adds "this place sucks!" to the article. The real problem with spam articles is that they are created by someone affiliated with the company itself but then has to be maintained by volunteers. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 14:58, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Also, it's a matter of perspective. Any random person and their grandmother can create a website, and anyone who can afford a small legal fee can create a corporation or a business. It takes a lot more political effort to create a town. That may not have been the case several centuries ago but it's true now. >Radiant< 15:20, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK. I am persuaded by those arguments and withdraw my comments above. Still, I hope this doesn't swing things too far the other way. I have read Brad's post, and he specifically focuses on obvious spam and self-promotion. This shouldn't preclude later creation of neutral articles at the same title. And criteria for business notability need to be sorted. I remember seeing something like that somewhere. Can anyone point me towards them? Carcharoth 15:56, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Do you mean WP:CORP? Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 16:11, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. Thanks. Carcharoth 16:34, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
And yes, what you say about recreation is right. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 16:14, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hey! I just looked at the change to the page. When did we decide notability of the entity being advertised doesn't matter? I did not agree to this ridiculously over-inclusive wording, and I am violently opposed to this change. Deco 19:37, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, this just won't do in the sort of half-baked way it was phrased that amounted to "anything that looks dodgy, guv". Particularly seeing as there is active and fruitful discussion here that may lead to something better crafted. I do rather object to the approach of "god it's so obvious let's just add something", and so I've removed it. I would also observe that as cast it was in some percentage redundant to A7: which is perhaps an indicator that A7 is all we need since speedies are not intended to deal with vague, hand-wavy cases anyway. -Splash - tk 20:12, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Spam tends to have strong assertions of notability. —Centrx→talk • 22:28, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, but the attempt at reductionism :) slips over my deliberate phrasing of "some percentage". The fact that you have to couple "strong assertions of note" with a shoot-on-sight policy probably means you need to go about this someotherhow. -Splash - tk 22:41, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Since I placed the speedy tag on both of the articles that were deleted under G11 in the table (I was field-testing the new criteria), I feel that I should comment. While it's true that the Apps Communication article (from my memory) doesn't use peacock terms, the author was linkspamming in other ways. The other article recently started, and didn't even have a website to promote. Remember that the vandalism criteria is also vagued worded due to the nature of vandalism. I don't like expanding A8, because while it was used mainly to avoid spam in the past, its purposed has changed recently to preventing copyvios in general, and expanding the criteria to do two jobs at once seems like it wouldn't be able to do either of them. There's obvious spam out there that isn't copyvio, as well. ColourBurst 23:50, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Can we just leave it in place and trust that someone who passed an RfA has just enough sense to know when it's iffy? ~Kylu (u|t) 02:05, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • If you did not notice, after Splash removed G11 at 19:44, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[4], Danny put it back in at 02:05, 4 October 2006 (UTC).[5] Therefore, it is safe to assume that G11 has the full support from the Wikimedia Foundation office and thus we should work on the specifics instead of removing it again. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 04:38, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • This was not done using his official office action account, and so was not an office action. As much as a CSD for ads appears to be justified by their sheer volume, I suggest that instead of attempting to add exceptions to include notable articles, that we sacrifice letting some of them go to AfD. The point is not so much to make spamming impossible but to make their required effort roughly equal to ours overall, so we just need to exclude the ads that are really easy to write and obviously worthless. Deco 06:48, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Indeed, the account User:Danny is a regular editor (and admin and bureaucrat, but that's immaterial) so no, the Foundation hasn't issued an executive order. Which of course they will surely do now I have said that. I have to say I'm disappointed in Danny's approach : he uses a meaningless edit summary and declines to explain what it intended to mean on this talk page. Troublesome as use talk pages can be, they are much better than raging on the mailing list and IRC. -Splash - tk 12:33, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
(after edit conflicting with Splash) The vibe I get from Brad's e-mail and more directly talking to Danny on IRC is that the foundation wants stuff deleted if it's advertising. Look at Fleshlight, okay it's an embarassing example, but here's a product that's been reviewed in at least the Village Voice and is widely known (at least amongst Internet people) and Danny deleted it because he felt it was created as an advertisement. It didn't meet G11 even, the foundation simply wants all advertising to be nuked, it was really clear in talking to him that the belief is that stuff should be deleted just because it was meant as an ad initially. To anyone familiar with AfD, there's long been a culture of discouraging people from deleting because of the circumstances under which an article was created and just considering the actual content of the current article, and possibility for improvement. Even that seems to be changing.
I'm not really sure how seriously we can argue that the foundation's opinion here is ambiguous. They want advertising purged. I do know that their stance seems to run contrary to what even most self-proclaimed deletionists believe in terms of advertising, maybe they should be more aware of this. Anyway, what I'm getting at is it feels like that if you want "spam" not to be speedy deletable, you're going to be up against the foundation here. I'm not condoning it... I'm just trying to explain the broader situation here. I think it's a transitional time for Wikipedia. --W.marsh 12:44, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Then maybe the foundation should make an attempt to explain the situation to those of us who have to deal with it, instead of making ambiguous pronouncements on the mailing list and glib edit summaries when they decide to add it in. If they want to be shortsighted about it, that's their perogative, but at the end of the day, it's us that are adding/removing/fixing tags and dealing with the aftermath. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:08, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't disagree with that. Some presence here by Danny/Brad and even Jimbo would, in my opinion, be helpful. Not sure if it's going to be forthcoming, they often have "bigger fish to fry" and I don't claim to really know everything the Foundation is dealing with, but if they have some time to spare, a comment here would be a good thing. --W.marsh 13:22, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion is no big deal

Since Danny and Brad have been mentioned above, I'd add that Jimbo also commented on the issue in this post to the mailing list. "Deletion is no big deal" is a novel point of view even for the most extreme deletionist; this gives the idea of how much spam is considered a problem. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 13:03, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

On the other hand, the advocation of deletion as an alternative to editing is a big deal. -Splash - tk 13:25, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder how little a deal it will be when an article gets created the fourth time, gets salted, and then no one can create a viable article in its place. --badlydrawnjeff talk 15:07, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, they can, the deletedpages template tells them exactly how to create a page. Regardless it is not a significant loss if an article on some random company is absent for a few months. —Centrx→talk • 15:20, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Salting isn't forever.... honestly, WP is not the Yellow Pages... we can't list every non notable business. What else are we susposed to do? -- Tawker 15:30, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Salting has that "forever" effect, though. It often doesn't matter if you can prove notability - if the deleting admin isn't budging and DRV gets it wrong, you're stuck. No one's saying "list non-notable businesses," we're saying "don't spend so much time rushing to get rid of nn ones that you make it difficult to keep articles on the notable ones." That's essentially what's occurring here. --badlydrawnjeff talk 15:34, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think moreso G11 is for articles similar to "buy or product, we're the best... look at how great we are" more than anything else. Most notable companies already have an balanced article, we're seeing more and more SEO attemps using WP now. G11 is kind of like a short circut operator for WikiProj No Ads -- Tawker 15:44, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If it works that way, great. The problems? 1) It won't work that way. Look at how A7 is used and abused. 2) If an article can be edited as opposed to deleted, we should go that route to lessen possible abuse. Stubbing and AfDing > deleting outright. 3) If an ad-maker is vigilant, it will be recreated and eventually salted, and that could cause potential problems down the road. --badlydrawnjeff talk 16:26, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Any case we create people are going to abuse it..... I wouldn't say A7 gets abused, it just saves us a lot of time. Sending everything to AfD would increase the backlog and cleanup wouldn't get done. You win some you lose some. -- Tawker 19:06, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Some administrors routinely check the category Category:Protected deleted pages or the list User:DumbBOT/TimeSortedPD and delete pages that have been salted for too long. As you see from the list, there are only three articles that have been salted before May and are still salted. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 16:20, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
We are up to June 20 for article space. —Centrx→talk • 16:43, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A note on bureaucracy

I understand the need to keep the deprecated A4 and A6 listed to keep the numbering intact; however, I8 and especially U3 are very new and should have few incoming links yet. I think it's a good idea to remove those lines referring to them, as they serve little purpose. The effect is renaming I9 to I8, but also to make the page look less like a book of law. >Radiant< 16:22, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

An alternative is stop merging criteria that don't actually need merging, and then there won't be an instantaneous production of a new piece of bureaucracy. Wasn't broke. Didn't need !fixing. -Splash - tk 17:45, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I suppose that's true, but then we'd end up with five criteria, one each for attack pages, attack images, attack templates, attack categories and attack userpages. >Radiant< 15:18, 5 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Not to mention attack talk pages, attack portals (although this would usually have been covered by P1), attack help pages, attack interface messages, and attack transwikis... The point of having this in the 'General' criteria is that attack pages are unwanted no matter what namespace they're in. --ais523 15:22, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

The reason for keeping the numbering is that, unfortunately (despite the instructions to the contrary), many people use the CSD numbering system when writing edit summaries for the CSDs they carry out. These won't show up on incoming links, and so the numbering system needs to be kept. It's not too bad, as when it gets excessive, hive off the historical numbers to a note and have the list as : I7, I56, I455, etc! :-) Or just keep a record of the dates when each change took place. ie. From 5th February to 6th June 2006, G87 referred to what became G2 on 6th September 2007. Carcharoth 11:34, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

G11: not going well

I decided to check and see how the new G11 was working so far. I believe, as I had expected, that it's being vastly overused. I looked through all articles that transcluded {{db-spam}} just now. Here's what I came up with, and my assesments.

  1. Fahd Mairaj Alvi - also marked as A7; it was the profile of a company founder that didn't explain his significance, nor the company's. A7 applies. I said G11 also does when I deleted it, but I'm wrong: it's only A7 that applies. The article was promoting a non-notable company, but that doesn't make it blatant spam.
  2. John Angelo - repost of official website. Still, it was a POV-laden bio, not blatant spam. Deleted under A8.
  3. Ludwig Trossaert - bio of a possibly nn businessman who opened an art studio in Belgium. Speedy changed to prod; A7 doesn't apply, and the article doesn't try to sell the guy, it's just inappropriate in its existence.
I removed the PROD template, after removing possible spam and unreferenced text. He is rather notable in Belgian art circles. JoJan 19:48, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Web Design Group - a neutrally-written profile of a web design company with no claim of significance. Deleted under A7.
  2. David worthington - very short article. deleted under A7 (only description of his importance was "very well respected" member of Canadian record industry). In retrospect, A7 may not even apply. The "very well respected" bit was the only way this could qualify as promotion, and it's not blatant at all.
  3. Sonic 2 Reloaded Online - a brief article about an upcoming game. Not really spammish, except in its existence. Author requested deletion, so G7.
  4. The National Association of Industrial and Office Properties (NAIOP) - blatant spam, deleted under G11. Probably also an official website repost, it included stuff like "The premier forum for commercial real estate," "Our members...," and included some products with prices.
  5. Tri-Slim CD Jewel Case - ad for a particular brand of jewel case, deleted under G11.
  6. HostelBookers.com - AfD in progress, removed the tag. Article is fairly neutral, again on a non-notable subject.
  7. TUSC - BLATANT spam. My favorite bit: "Allow us to show you customer case studies that illustrate and quantify substantial savings." Lots of 1st-person voice.

Normally, I would discuss these issues with those who added the tags, but since the policy isn't clear yet, it wouldn't make much sense. What I can say is that there's a CLEAR tendency to describe articles as "spam" when the only thing that's really problematic is its existence on Wikipedia. In other words, in those cases "spam" serves as a way of condemning these subjects as non-notable. I think it's clear we need to add a clarification to G11 that excludes this kind of thing. And I really think we should drop people: promotions of people are rare, will likely meet other criteria, and in the odd case, we can suffer through the other types of process. The current wording of G11 is:

11. Blatant spam. Pages that exist only to promote a company, person, product, service or group, have no other purpose and cannot be reasonably edited into an encyclopedic contribution.

I think we should change it to:

11. Blatant spam. Pages with content solely aimed at promoting a company, product, service, or group, which serve no other purpose and cannot reasonably be edited into an encyclopedic contribution. This does not include encyclopedia articles on companies, products, services, or groups that were likely added only to promote their subject, unless the content itself is blatantly and unsalvageably promotional.

BTW, the one example where spam might be person-oriented with any frequency would be political candidates, but such people are clearly notable enough to merit inclusion (or at least, to pass A7), and it would be a rare case where the article could not be "reasonably edited into an encyclopedic contribution." Mangojuicetalk 17:22, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

While I'm still opposed to G11 on principle, the rewrite is much more palatable. --badlydrawnjeff talk 17:41, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I understand your point, but your proposed version looks a little self-contradicting (it isn't; it just looks like). I suggest a rewrite, something like "this is about the content of the article, not about the motivation of the creator". Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 18:10, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that something that emphasizes content over intent would be welcome, but this criterion is frankly looking increasingly subjective. Almost any article contains some verifiable, neutral information, and could be stripped down to a good stub. The issue is not whether the article could be edited to be encyclopedic, which it almost always can be, but whether the topic is notable, which is again a very subjective judgement. WP:CORP lists a number of good objective criteria, but using any of them by itself is obviously a bad idea due to false positives.
The only effective way to make a speedy deletion rule for ads would be to shift the burden of establishing notability to the editor. A mere claim of notability is too easy - maybe we need something like "a plausible, verifiable claim of notability". Again though, this seems subjective. I wonder if this can be done. Deco 21:15, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As I warned: People in the world outside of Wikipedia grossly misunderstand what constitutes "spam", and mis-use it to describe things whose sole fault is that they don't like them. We should expect the same here, and indeed that's what's happening. Once again: Call it what it actually is. It's corporate advertising and corporate autobiography. Uncle G 01:18, 5 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Change & CSD combinations

I have made a simpler change to this effect which ties the criterion to the value of the content. Also, this and all criteria work together, so that a combination of weakly satisfied criteria is similar to a single strongly satisfied criterion. For example, the more notable a company or person, the more likely we would want to salvage something from a spam submission on it despite blatantly promotional material. Conversely, if an article is only somewhat spammy but contains a tepid or ridiculous assertion of notability and would invariably be deleted at Afd, in combination this indicates a speedy deletion may be warranted. —Centrx→talk • 21:49, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I tightened the language somewhat, because it avoided the key point raised above. The criterion is still ill thought out, however. Your notion of inventing new CSDs out of fractions of existing ones is wrong. If an article doesn't meet any of the speedies, then you can't usefully cite any of them in support of deleting it. If you decide to delete it anyway, you do so with reference only to your own judgement not figleaves of policies. -Splash - tk 22:50, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It is neither an invention nor a disguise. Such an article meets the criteria, severally and together. The judgement is whether there is a loss to the encyclopedia in deleting an article that technically satisfies the criteria. —Centrx→talk • 23:25, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • If you want to tie the criterion to the content, then the approach to use is the one recommended in the guidelines at the top of this very talk page, and use an objective criterion that requires nothing but simple inspection of the article. "spam" is not objective, by a wide margin, and never will be. "advertising" is much better. But by far the best speedy deletion criteria put forward so far are "repost of official website" and "copy of an advertisement", since those don't involve any subjective judgements at all. Furthermore, they cover things that currently do go through AFD unnecessarily because of the 48-hour rule. Uncle G 01:18, 5 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

New G11 redirectemplate

A new way to type Db-spam template has been created: Template:Csd-g11 is now a redirect to the CSD template for G11. Shin'ou's TTV (Futaba|Masago|Kotobuki) 04:26, 5 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yet more G11 talk

This is a follow on from a conversation I've had on Improv's talk.[1] A couple of thoughts on this from me:

  • This is a target-rich environment.
    • Some of these will be potential "real" articles (Famour Amos, Tim Tams)
    • Some will be redirection/merge candidates (Iced Vovo, Tiny Teddy)
    • Some will be neither on nor the other of the above
      • Some non-articles will have long legs
      • Some non-articles will be very new

There is no good reason to start with anything other than the last category. These are the entities no one has ever heard of, and for whom the "advertising" is most valuable. rather than doing things the easy way and just firing with both barrels at anything that looks like advertising, can we proceed with a bit of caution? Less "ohh, shiny new rule, let's use it!" and more "yet another thing to be responsible for, better be careful."

brenneman {L} 05:29, 5 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hear hear, I totally agree. Reflecting on the War on Biscuits, I think there has been some slightly overzealous application of G11 when an {{unreferenced}} tag or even an AfD may have been more appropriate. I don't doubt that editor's motives were good and his actions bold, but I think he may have not considered the cultural and regional importance of some articles.
Some thoughts from me on the matter:
  • Firstly, can I suggest that admins applying G11 not delete the articles themselves, but tag them for speedy deletion so that another admin can assess the criteria and at least some modicum of consensus (even if it's only two people) can be reached?
  • G11 is for blatant spam - some suggested identifiers above: written in the first person, copied verbatim from a company website, glowing superlatives, unambiguosly promotional. An unreferenced article or stub about a brand name or company does not necessarily meet these criteria, particularly those with a large number of edits and revisions. It's a waste of time and energy to delete and restore when there are dozens of far more deserving targets in Project Wikify.
--Canley 00:04, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]


I just want to add new arguement. It can from what I saw from Infotech Strategies. It originally started its AfD with arguements for G11. Then poor zocky took up the job of cleaning it up. After he finished (for the time being), the article still had some rather rosy interpretations of the company like "A significant proportion of the company’s consultants have served in senior positions at the White House, U.S. Executive Cabinet Departments, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S House of Representatives." A completely unsourced statement zocky left in when he/she rewriting it. Zocky redid the article and that's very commendable. Unfortunatly, he/she probably should've also redone the first paragraph from scratch. Not trying to target Zocky specifically,(sorry about this) but we're only human here. It's like copyvio text, dangerous to try to rewrite a copyvio article. Unless you are well experienced in doing so, you're likely to end up paraphrasing or leaving a sentence in. And that's still very much plagarism. The same happens here. The content is hopelessly and unavoidably POV in rosy and weasely words toward the subject. Often its unsourced as well. Its a little easier to clean out the massively slanted text without just removing the content, but still very difficult. Aside from phrases, you're likely to end up using terms they originally used. Many of them will contain buzz words or even search engine optimization terms designed to increase exposure to the company through an article on it appearing at the top of a search engine results page for some specific terms. The whole of a spam article is a quagmire of junk, and ought to be deleted to avoid even the rewrites containing the spam, if only in a more subtle manner. Kevin_b_er 20:02, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I left that in because it looked likely to be true, based on the available sources. It probably could have been worded better, but it was a deliberate decision on my part, not an oversight. Zocky | picture popups 20:16, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

More G11 abuse

More G11 abuse is being done by User:Improv. Noted here, it seems bizarre to delete articles on Teddy Grahams and Pepperidge Farms. I never thought I'd see the day, but G11 is an even bigger mistake than A7. --badlydrawnjeff talk 17:41, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've listed them at DRV, but there were over FORTY articles/images deleted essentially at random by Improv, not counting redirects. This isn't abuse, this is an outright failure of the guideline. --badlydrawnjeff talk 18:20, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

{{hangon}} revamp / somewhat major {{db-meta}} modification

Recently, I've modified {{hangon}} to offer an optional parameter, like so:

{{hangon|Example}} =

The speedy deletion of this page is contested.

Reason: Example

Note that this request is not binding, and the page may still be deleted if it is considered that the page unquestionably meets the speedy deletion criteria, or if the given explanation is unacceptable.

To the author: Please place this notice on the article itself, not the talk page.

This doesn't change the parameterless form of the template, but it does do the following:

  1. Allows an editor to provide the viewing admin with a short explanation of why the {{delete}} tag is in error without resorting to the talk page
  2. Helps point out which articles are hoaxes and which users are up to no good (specifically, the ones who add "{{hangon|KEEP MY ARTICLE CUZ I RULE NOW SHUT UP}}")
  3. Gives legitimate editors a tool in fending off ridiculously quick deletions with faulty reasoning
  4. In many cases may eliminate the need to create a talk page
  5. Mirrors the {{db}} tag's optional "open-ended response"
  6. Counterparts tags in support of deletion like {{prod2}}

My introduction of this parameter can be said to be intended as a solution for the problem of overlooked reasoning against deletion on talk pages. At least one other editor has agreed that administrators do not always check talk pages before deletion, especially in cases where an article should seemingly be deleted without question.

As I do a lot of recent changes patrol, I've seen my share of deleteworthy articles as well as a lot of frivolous {{hangon}}s. However, this new functionality does not just cater to vandals or inexperienced editors – it is a possible timesaver for everyone involved.

The reason I'm bringing this up on this talk page (in addition to fear of it going all but unseen at Template talk:Hangon) is because it somewhat changes the whole speedy deletion plan that's currently in place. It has a likelihood of replacing the "see talk page" concept in a lot of situations, but it may also be needless, since there's only so much thoughtful argument one can fit in a {{hangon}} box. Thus, it runs the risk of eliminating the thoughtful process of "taking it to the talk page" in favor of hasty, ill-conceived pleas wedged below a speedy deletion tag. Still, it's all that is needed in many cases. Many articles are deleted before the {{hangon}} process is completed, and many editors who don't want their articles deleted simply enter their reasoning below the hangon or speedy tag on the article page.

I think this is a good change for the reasons above and because I think the {{hangon}} tag could have used some more planning right from the start; if a person is to remove the tag after his or her explanation is written, for example, then how does the expedient deletionist administrator ever know it was there in the first place? I'm bringing this discussion here – and it certainly doesn't have to be a long one – because if this parameter gains general acceptance, I plan to add usage instructions to it on the {{db-meta}} template, meaning this idea will be reflected in every mainspace speedy deletion tag.

So – does anyone have an objection to the placement of anti-deletion arguments inside the {{hangon}} tag in lieu of longer arguments on the talk page, as speedy deletion templates currently suggest? To clarify, this would not eliminate the ability of an editor to post to the talk page of a speedied article if desired.

And secondly: is it okay with everyone to just do away with the current practice of removing {{hangon}} tags after talk page discussions are completed? It seems to me an unnecessary practice, as {{hangon}} tags don't create much more overhead, if any, nor do they necessarily insist on extra consideration from an administrator before he or she decides to delete. -- Omicronpersei8 (talk) 04:13, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Place 'an additional explanation may be present on the talk page', linking 'talk page', inside the parametered version of the template, then I'll agree with this. Your second solution is definitely a good idea, as long as admins remember to always check the talk page when doing a deletion (as it'll normally be a redlink, this shouldn't be too much trouble). --ais523 12:49, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Oh, sure. I should've mentioned that I do intend to preserve that phrasing, except in another tag. Here's my sandbox concept for {{db-meta}}, by the way: User:Omicronpersei8/sb/Db-meta -- Omicronpersei8 (talk) 13:13, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I've just added

(Admins, please be sure to check the talk page for further explanation if applicable.)

to {{hangon}} (a sandbox copy of it). Will that do it? -- Omicronpersei8 (talk) 13:57, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Support this. However, I'm not sure why this discussion's on WT:PROD; make sure nobody objects on, say, Template talk:Hangon and Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion before you make the change. --ais523 14:44, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Good point. Why did I put it here? (Moved from WT:PROD; I'm a little off today) -- Omicronpersei8 (talk) 15:29, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I noticed this change yesterday, I'm in full support of it. Good move. --badlydrawnjeff talk 16:25, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm against it. There has been a lot of shifting lately towards having commentary about the article on the article page: the hangon tag has to go there or else admins would always have to look on the talk page to see if one was there. But the reason, just like any other discussion (and especially defense of content another editor finds objectionable), should go on the talk page only. Besides, most people who have to use the hangon tag would just leave the reason empty. Mangojuicetalk 17:25, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm confused: the hangon tag (apart from being a joke) should obviously go on the article itself (hard to find the talk page if you're new, more likely to spotted by fast-moving admins) and therefore should certainly be removed on the conclusion of the process if the article is retained. -Splash - tk 21:31, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's true, I suppose. I guess this would have the benefit of not listing the talk page for speedy deletion as well as the article page... Mangojuicetalk 05:45, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You have very good points above, obviously.
Regarding the placement of the tag (parameterized or not), I don't see it as being any more inappropriate on the article page than a {{db}} already is. On the talk page, it would create an extra entry at CAT:CSD, and this functionality is unavoidable since a lot of new editors delete speedy tags to replace then with {{hangon}}. That's not really a major problem, though.
About it placing more commentary on the article page, I again see a parameterized {{hangon}} on an article's main page as being only a little more out-of-encyclopedic character than {{db}} or {{prod}}. It certainly runs the risk of putting semi-nonsense in large letters on the article page, but it doesn't have to. Editors can also use this parameter to cite policy in a formal and rational style as well. In a case where an article may be saved by a quick mentioning of relevant and sensible policy, I don't see a reason for creating two different pages to delete. If an editor (i.e. the speedy-tagging one) disagrees with the reason, he or she can take it to the article creator's talk page or can at least use the creator's talk page to point them toward article talk. This seems a logical enough process to me to make explicit mentions on templates unnecessary. -- Omicronpersei8 (talk) 18:25, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

So, is this topic officially in idea purgatory now? -- Omicronpersei8 (talk) 14:05, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

G11 user talk warning

Is anyone involved in the CSD G11 creation/development working on an appropriate message to leave on users' talk pages? Where should such a discussion take place? (Forgive me; Wikipedia is extremely byzantine when it comes to certain aspects of policy changes.) For the G11 I've deleted, I've left a note on users' talk pages about how Wikipedia is not a soapbox, but it's a bit tedious to type out all the time. A templated warning would be great. -- Merope Talk 20:36, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I assume you mean for users whose articles were speedily deleted under CSD G11? No discussion is necessary, just make one (or I will if you want, I kinda like making templates). You can even make your own version in your userspace if you want. :) Mangojuicetalk 20:46, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You like making templates? Then have at it, my friend! And, yes, that is what I meant. Even though the people whose articles we're deleting are likely to be single purpose accounts, I still believe in WP:BITE just in case. And I think explaining why the article gets deleted repeatedly may help in stopping its recreation. (Or in justifying a block later.) If you want my input, just drop a line on my talk page. -- Merope Talk 20:49, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I also encourage anyone to make more templates :) Mathiastck 17:06, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Made one at User:Mangojuice/spam. I'm just not sure what to call it, so I didn't put it in template space just yet. Template:Deleted-spam, perhaps? Choose a name and move it there. Mangojuicetalk 05:44, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I like Mangojuice's message, but personally I'd replace "and Wikipedia content must be neutral, not promotional" with "not an advertising service". -- Steel 17:14, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia articles promote things merely by existing. Many users create or edit articles with the goal in mind of promoting the topic of that article. Why was wikipedia created in the first place? To promote something I'd bet. We just have to make sure we promote without violating any other guideline. Mathiastck 17:30, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
What nonsense. Wikipedia articles don't promote things just by existing. -- Steel 17:36, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Then why is there a passionate DRV over Diane Farrell? Articles do promote their subjects, at least in the sense "There's no such thing as bad publicity". Septentrionalis 19:41, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

(starting over indent) I think I'd prefer "Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising" to the bit about content being neutral. It's clearer to newcomers unfamiliar with WP policy, and, well, I don't know how often newcomers click the links we give them. (Rarely, if the comments I receive on my talk page are any indication.) I also wonder if we can word it so it can be placed on talk pages by new page patrollers, and not just the deleting admin. -- Merope Talk 03:02, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I've moved the template draft to Template:Deleted-spam. Be WP:BOLD if you think anything needs updating. The template is not currently worded to imply that the person leaving the message was the one who deleted it, though there is the bit about "feel free to leave a message at my talk page," which implies that the message-leaver is the one to discuss the issue with. Mangojuicetalk 04:47, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Speedying A7/G11s that have survived an AfD

Should we be doing this? If not, should we make it explicitly clear to head off situations like Wikitruth and Fleshlight? --badlydrawnjeff talk 01:43, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That is likely a good idea, but I'm more worried about articles with long history. At least in the case of Wikitruth, the number of editors who edited that page should mean that the page can't be simply speedied without wider input. Zocky | picture popups 02:09, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
As am I, but seeing how we continue to expand these things, it's probably not a bad thing for deleting types to check to see if there's been any prior consensus on the matter. I'll wait for a little more input. --badlydrawnjeff talk 02:26, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Refer to Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion#Yet_more_G11_talk above for more chatter. I'm going to be quick restoring something deleted here that I disagree with. I'll be notifying the deleting admin of course. Anything I notice that has left mainspace redlinks I'll restore as well as easier than cleaning it up. Do the same to me. - brenneman {L} 03:07, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Is this controversial? Can we make this change before we get too deep into it? --badlydrawnjeff talk 22:15, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've posted this at the pump and the deletion policy talk. If there's no substantive protest in the next couple days, I'll add it. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:18, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Just some thoughts that shouldn't be construed as opposing: A7 and G11 are for articles that are obviously unfit for encyclopedia-dom. Is it not an "obvious" candidate if it's survived an AfD? Is it not an "obvious" candidate if it has a long history? Is it not an "obvious" candidate if it uses a secondary source as a reference? I would say that it is not obvious in any of these cases, and I think that that is the general idea behind these. However, it can be hard to spell out all of the possible cases that would make a decision "non-obvious". JYolkowski // talk 15:42, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
One would think, but that hasn't been how it's happened in recent practice. I'd hate to see Fleshlight and Wikitruth occur again. --badlydrawnjeff talk 16:47, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Consensus so far doesn't seem to support the idea that A7 or G11 alone would be sufficient to obviously speedy those articles. Not to mention that fact that A7/G11 weren't mentioned as the deletion reasons. So it's not clear that the two examples given so far necessarily demand a change in A7/G11. Are there other specific examples where this might be useful? --Interiot 03:55, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This seems like it would be so incredibly obvious as to not need clarified, but I guess some people might need everything spelled out for them. Sure, let's include it. --tjstrf 04:15, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • I disagree with this proposed change - the added criteria are intended to make a change in what we keep on wikipedia. If it matches the new CSD, it should be deleted on sight, even if before we failed to do so because some people were confused about the scope of our project. Let deletion review handle misapplication. --Improv 04:31, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • As A7 already says that controversial assertions of notability should be sent to AfD, if it's kept at AfD, it means it's already been reviewed and approved by the community. Essentially, the same with G11 - if it were clear, unnotable spam, it would have been deleted there. This just means that we're not speedying material the community has already said they're not comfortable deleting. --badlydrawnjeff talk 10:34, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well, it's not obviously true of all CSD criteria at the very least. CSD criteria dealing with core or foundation issues can override AfD (G9, office actions is the most obvious... If an AfD resulted in speedy keep, and the article was discovered to be a copyvio within 48 hours of creation, then A8 would still trump the keep... if an MfD is run against a user page, and is kept, the user is still free to U1 it in most cases).      Still, this is orthogonal to the fleshlight/wikitruth issue, since A7/G11 weren't invoked, and it doesn't seem like A7/G11 could be correctly invoked to delete those two articles. --Interiot 05:02, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • A8 trumps everything - copyvio is copyvio, and it's one of the few times I'm ever okay with a speedy deletion. Wikitruth was deleted as "fails WEB", which is based off of the horrid expansion of A7 [6], and Danny deleted Fleshlight with Brad Patrick's new spam considerations in mind, which would probably qualify it under a G11, but we can quibble on whether that was indeed the case. --badlydrawnjeff talk 16:57, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • As this does not appear to be controversial, I'm adding it. --badlydrawnjeff talk 21:04, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Stating the obvious

If an article has been kept after an AfD, then it clearly has some notability (and at very least an assertion). Stating the fact that it shouldn't be deleted because it's survived an AfD is wholly unnecessary since it wouldn't qualify for A7 anyway. I can understand why this might need to be clarifed in G11's description, but not in A7's. -- Steel 12:04, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It absolutely has to because it's important to note not only for the reviewing admin, but to the tagging user. What's the harm in being absolutely explicit? --badlydrawnjeff talk 12:06, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
In order to survive an AfD, an article has to be pretty notable, thus making it ineligible for A7. It was ineligible for A7 long before it was even sent through AfD. Being kept at AfD making something ineligible for A7 is both blindingly obvious and totally irrelevant. Not to mention altering the whole principle of A7. Let's not fluff up these criterion descriptions with what doesn't need to be said. -- Steel 12:23, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see how this changes the principle at all - A7 isn't for notability asserted articles, and this simply clarifies that if an article has been reviewed already, it shouldn't be speedied. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:11, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well that just raises the question of how this is specific to A7. -- Steel 14:13, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
A7 is about speedy deletion of articles with no asseriton of notability. An article may have survived AfD without having that assertion entirely clear in the article. A7 is probably a mistake in terms of its objectivity, but this forces taggers and admins alike to be aware of the possibility that it has already been approved for inclusion by the community, or there's no consensus to remove it. --badlydrawnjeff talk 14:26, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Which just comes back to what I said in the first place. If it's notable enough to be approved by the community then it's notable enough not to be an A7 candidate anyway. Two exceptional circumstances (Wikitruth and Fleshlight) really aren't enough to justify telling people what's obvious the rest of the time. -- Steel 14:42, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
And if it's obvious, there's no harm in adding it there to be safe. --badlydrawnjeff talk 14:44, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
And if it's obvious, why the need to say it? (and strongly defend it's inclusion) -- Steel 14:47, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Because I don't feel that it is obvious, thus I'm an advocate of including it. You feel it is obvious, but can't point out any harm in adding it anyway, so I think it should be included even by using your standard. --badlydrawnjeff talk 15:08, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
AfDs should not be closed until sources are provided. I am sure Uncle G will agree. Carcharoth 14:35, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
And that has what to do with this discussion? -- Steel 14:42, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I was responding to this bit by Jeff: "An article may have survived AfD without having that assertion entirely clear in the article.". I should have been clearer and said that if AfD decides that something is notable enough to keep, then sources should be added to document the notability and to help prevent it being returned to AfD. That is wholly relevant to this discussion about why the fact of a previous AfD is not always entirely clear. Sadly, previous AfDs aren't always noted on the talk page either. See Wikipedia:WikiProject_AfD_closing. Carcharoth 14:57, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
We're in agreement, but it still doesn't change that there's a responsibility for closing admins to check these things before clicking the button, obvious or not. This statement simply makes it explicitly clear. --badlydrawnjeff talk 15:03, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think it would be better to move the question of previous AfDs to a general guidelines section (already present, but needs expanding). This would say that, in general, it is good practice to perform the following checks (some more obvious than others): (a) Read the page; (b) check the page history; (c) check the talk page (if it exists); (d) check the article log; (e) check 'what links here'. It really shouldn't be necessary to explain why these steps are performed and why missing out any of these steps is a bad idea. In case it is needed, the previous AfDs should be found on the talk page, and previous deletions and restorations and/or recreations should appear in the article log. I refer Steel to the discussion at the bottom of this page for more on this, plus an example of what can happen if simple, basic checks like this are not carried out. Carcharoth 14:35, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

By all means add some general statement to the top of the page. -- Steel 14:42, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a bit late to the discussion but would like to point you to this comment made in a recent DRV discussion. Steel, I really wish that this were as patently obvious as you describe. Rossami (talk) 19:17, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! Could someone please explain "A7" and "G11" to me or point me to the page(s) that explain them? Thank you. :) Jecowa 03:35, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry for overusing the jargon! :-) A7 and G11 are terms for the speedy deletion criteria being discussed. 'A' stands for 'articles' and 'G' stands for 'general'. The criteria are explained at these links:
Hope that helps. Carcharoth 09:15, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you! :) Jecowa 18:34, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Userpages of users without contributions

Increasingly, Wikipedia is being used by some newcomers who contribute nothing to the encyclopedia as a Myspace-like webhost and chat forum. There is some agreement at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#User:Centrx for deleting such user pages created by people who have done nothing to contribute to the encyclopedia or its functioning. That is, for users who are "nonexistent" in the sense that they do not exist with respect to the encyclopedia. So, I propose that we change the criteria to include non-recent user pages created by users "who have no productive contributions to the encyclopedia". They are of course allowed to become productive contributors, but people are absolutely not allowed to use Wikipedia as their personal web host. Users who have done nothing related to the encyclopedia are a clearcut instance where the user pages are not related to the encyclopedia and where we are not stepping on the toes of any Wikipedian who rightly has leeway in what they put on their user pages. —Centrx→talk • 22:03, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I strongly support this proposal, but I think it would be better worded as "very few productive contributions" rather than "no productive contributions". -- Steel 22:09, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I oppose this until we can come up with an objective standard for this, and even then, I'm not sure I'm in favor for a variety of reasons (biting newbs, good faith, etc). At what point do we figure out when they've obviously not here to contribute? What efforts would be made for reformation? Do we offer the option to undelete later once they've proven they've looked to contribute? Do they get warnings first? Too many questions. --badlydrawnjeff talk 22:14, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
An extreme minimum objective standard could be something like 1 month with no edits whatsoever outside of userspace. There are such users, and they are just putting up userboxes and chatting. It should be broader than that, but there is no problem with coming up with an objective standard. It is actually quite remarkable that someone has an account with few or no productive edits; random readers who have simple reading accounts make edits all the time and someone having just a user page with nothing else almost indicates that they do not even read Wikipedia let alone have some right to user page.
A simple minimum time is enough to not bite any newbies. We already have help desks, help tags, and anyone can ask a question of anyone; we don't need a mentorship program for the whole world of people who aren't doing anything on Wikipedia. —Centrx→talk • 22:24, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Do you have any examples non-admins can see? How many does this entail? --badlydrawnjeff talk 22:27, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't have any numbers (probably some server-taxing bot work), but I encounter it fairly frequently and people doing recent changes do as well. For one example, User:Naruto 2.0 is the one referred to on ANI and there's no need to restore it (it had fair use images so it shouldn't be done anyway) as it is easily describable. The user account was created on September 3, the user had no contributions whatsoever except to his user page, and the user page consisted solely of 4 rows of user boxes, a bouncing Wikipedia logo, two fair uses images of some cartoon, and a statement like "I will take over the world using the fist of randomness". His talk page was just his friend talking to him and the user hasn't edited even his userpage since September 21. I'm not going to go pick out the fair use image and the page should not be left sitting there on Wikipedia. Admins should know that they can and should delete such page and the many similar and more active ones. —Centrx→talk • 22:46, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure how I feel about this. It requires more effort than other speedy deletion pages, as the deleting admin will have to check the user's contributions in addition to checking page history. It's not that much effort, but it is an extra step. Would this be used for users whose only contributions are outside the mainspace? Is one minor edit to an article enough? What if the user has tried to create new articles that were speedily deleted? Would that suffice? If this passes, I would insist on the deleting admin leaving a templated message explaining that the page has been deleted per WP:NOT. This message should probably incorporate a number of links from a welcome message, to guide the user in question to ways to contribute constructively. -- Merope Talk 00:24, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't require anyone to delete them. It merely states that it is a good, accepted idea for Myspace party users; active ones can be notified. —Centrx→talk • 01:18, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Here are a couple more examples: User:Elfred, User:Sporks.Are.Loverly. Put it this way: why should anyone who comes across these pages not delete them? —Centrx→talk • 01:32, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, Elfred has edits in the mainspace. Sporks.Are.Loverly does not, nor does their friend User:The.almighty.one. I'd endorse deletion of the latter two because of that. -- Merope Talk 02:24, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Look at Elfred's mainspace edits. They are essentially nonsense or spam and it looks like every single one of them has been reverted or otherwise no longer remains in the articles. —Centrx→talk • 02:31, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I can see that. But a user making bad edits may be making them in good faith. I don't like the idea of a CSD criterion that enables a person to evaluate the quality of someone's contributions. Better to let cases like Elfred's go to WP:MFD. -- Merope Talk
I just don't think this needs a speedy deletion criterion... in fact, I don't think we should be deleting those pages necessarily. Not that deleting them would be much harm, but I just think it doesn't help anything. And there is the potential for harm if the criterion isn't carefully worded or is incorrectly used, or even if it's correctly used but the user we figured would be gone comes back and gets annoyed. Mangojuicetalk 04:52, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I doubt there is much harm in deterring someone who just adds random Runescape links to every article, that is, in the unlikely event he ever comes back and if he remembers his password or that he had a user page at all. —Centrx→talk • 15:05, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I think we can all agree that any userpage for a non existant editor or any userpage that is pretty much spam can be shot on sight. I've heard of people using Wikipeida user pages to increase their Google pagerank of all things... it's a growing problem -- Tawker 05:16, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Right, and those are addressed via CSD U2 and CSD G11. After thinking about this some more, I really feel that these cases should not be speedied, but should go to WP:MFD. There are too many factors to consider. -- Merope Talk 05:19, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Spam, yes. But if it's not spam, no. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:17, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I tagged about 50 userpages for speedy deletion which were spammy yesterday. Most of them were on the order of "<company> is a company specialising in web services" without any further elaboration. 90% of them got deleted. As for other non-productive users, I guess we should give them a week's notice via email before their user pages get deleted. By the way, what about Category:Temporary Wikipedian userpages? MER-C 05:29, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a typical spam finding search: [7]. Notice how some of the pages are borderline but deletable under CSD G11. I think this is the concern here. MER-C 05:38, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I object to this not only based on the subjective nature of "productive contributions", but also because a person who has not yet contributed may still have a normal and sensible user page ("I'm Bob, from Ohio, I'm interested in contributing to articles about trains"). Deleting these is counterproductive as they serve a legitimate purpose in structuring future contributions even though the person has not yet edited. Deco 05:42, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've expanded U2 based on WP:AN/I#User:Centrx (unfortunately before I realized there was some opposition to this - I guess it might get reverted). The text of U2 now reads

User pages of users who do not exist or have made negligible encyclopedic contributions.

This is not meant to cover a Hi-I'm-Bob page of someone with 10 edits; this is meant to apply to a userpage of someone with 200 edits to their own talk page and 1 edit to mainspace, someone trying to googlebomb via their user page, or just general WP:NOT-style nonsense. I would rather avoid instruction creep with any specific numbers or minimum time. Obviously, admins should exercise judgement; for example, G7 allows deletion if the author blanks the page, and admins should not honor any request just because the first person to edit a page now wants it deleted. In practice, I don't believe this expanded U2 requires much more precautionary work for the deleting admin than checking the validity of other speedy-delete tags. —Quarl (talk) 2006-10-08 10:26Z

  • It's not a bad idea, but we should probably make an exception for such pages that are recently created. A new user may start with a user page and go from there; but someone who created a user page a month ago and hasn't done anything since does not appear to be a productive 'pedian. >Radiant< 12:56, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Note that it's not necessary to check Special:Listusers; what matters is if the user made contributions to the encyclopedia, which is visible from the contribs log. If the contribs log is empty, there are no contribs to the 'pedia and it's irrelevant whether the user is found in listusers. >Radiant< 13:12, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've removed the addition to the criterion since there is clearly disagreement here about how it should be worded, and about whether it should be expanded in the first place. --bainer (talk) 14:36, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

To chime in my two cents, I agree with the concept but strongly disagree with the expansion of the criteria. Things have been fine without the modification of the criterion, and adding that phrase, which is clearly subjective, will only create more problems than it will solve. As mentioned above, each userpage is unique and should be considered on a case-by-case basis, as we've been doing. Also, unless the pages are created for spam (which, as also mentioned above, are speedy-able anyways) or are disruptive, there's no urgent need to delete user pages of inactive users. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 14:54, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia will work just fine without most of the CSDs; that doesn't mean they aren't good. Altering the CSD is to advertise it more and refine under what conditions it should be done. This is not to delete the user pages of merely inactive users, this is to delete the user pages of never-active users. —Centrx→talk • 15:03, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) The other CSDs (well, most of them at least, but that's another story) are clear-cut, not subjective, and are critical to the project because not only of the uselessness of the pages, but because of the potential harm that comes if the pages are not speedily deleted. This proposed addition isn't. Again, I agree with the concept, but see no need to place it in, as all user pages should be taken on a case-by-case basis. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 15:24, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have changed it to "or old users who have never made encyclopedia contributions." which is a minimum that most everyone agrees with. —Centrx→talk • 15:03, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is still not worded to address the problem that is alleged. There are a number of valid explanations for a user without any mainspace contributions to have a userpage - a user from another project, for example, or a user who has an account to read the wiki.
If it is intended to delete pages used for linkspamming, then choose a wording directed against linkspamming. If it is intended to delete pages used solely for social networking, then choose a wording directed against use for social networking. Don't use an overly broad wording where a specific wording is appropriate; it will only lead to confusion and possibly abuse.
I don't see any strong need why this can't be dealt with through MfD, given that the clear cases are not going to be controversial at all, and given that many of the pages intended to be affected will fall under other criteria, such as G11. --bainer (talk) 15:21, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Actually you're the first to mention this problem, which is a good point. I've proposed a revision below to address it. —Centrx→talk • 15:54, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No-one is going to delete a userpage which contains "Hi, I'm active on de.wiki, this is my en.wiki account which I rarely use.". This proposal is about deleting the userpages of people who, in one/two/three months, have done nothing but fill up their userpages with userboxes, fair use images and "funny links". -- Steel 15:26, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The current wording, though, allows for the deletion of such a page. If we continue taking it on a case-by-case basis, as we've been doing, then such a page wouldn't be deleted. Fair-use images should be removed regardless, and "funny links" used for spamming as well. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 15:31, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
"My friends", "My interests", "Userboxes I've created", "My favourite TV shows", etc.
But yeah, perhaps it needs to be re-worded so it's clear that we're deleting WP:NOT (a social networking site) type userpages, and not just any userpage where the account isn't used much. -- Steel 15:37, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) Please don't add in anything while we're still discussing the issue; until we come to a consensus, nothing should be added. (For that matter, I don't agree with the addition, either. What defines "old"? What is an "encyclopedia contribution"?) As such, I've removed it while we continue to discuss this and reach an agreement. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 15:24, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, making revisions is useful to coming to an agreement on the wording; collaborative editing can often be more useful that repeating things over and over in discussion. —Centrx→talk • 15:47, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
True, but policies generally shouldn't be edited or changed while discussion is still ongoing and consensus has not been reached. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 16:01, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

WP:NOT-oriented revision

3. Uncontributive user pages. Pages in user-space used for social networking, advertising, or other violations of Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not or Wikipedia:User page, by user accounts older than three weeks, who have made negligible contributions to the encyclopedia.

This is precisely what is meant, and is forbidden. Note that even if there were some error, though negligible is quite a clear word and it is trivially simple for someone to make non-negligible contributions, all that is lost is a page filled with things that shouldn't be here anyway, and we can loudly state on the text they see when creating a user page that uses in violation of those policies are forbidden. —Centrx→talk • 16:11, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I would advocate striking the entire latter half of the proposed CSD; in other words, any user page being used for "social networking [or] advertising" or in any violation of current policies should be deleted (or fixed), regardless of the age or number of edits of the user account. But then the criterion becomes redundant with other already-existing criteria... Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 16:38, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
People sending "Wikilove" messages would then qualify, and the best response with established users for other sorts of things is not to delete the page but to tell them to stop. Also, the proposed wording is to include user pages that are mostly used for social networking, etc., whereas with "solely used" wording it would not include pages with simple comments about themselves or things would not be mentioned in WP:NOT but that are largely unrelated to Wikipedia. —Centrx→talk • 18:12, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
"Negligible contributions" is entirely arbitrary. That makes the criterion worthless. --badlydrawnjeff talk 16:46, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
How is it arbitrary? At the minimum extreme it is zero mainspace contributions, a little bit above that we have several mainspace contributions that were then reverted, and at the maximum extreme we have a user with only a handful of spelling corrections (and again, this is over the course of weeks). There are ways the wording could be restricted, referring to "non-reverted and non-minor edits" but this is just nitpicking; negligible is a clear word—it is quite clear what is going on with a user when they have 20 times as many edits to their user page and friends' user pages than they do to Wikipedia—and the pages being deleted are worthless with respect to Wikipedia anyway and can nevertheless be restored. There is no loss in deleting them and any loss due to an interpretation that ignores other parts of the criterion can be corrected. —Centrx→talk • 18:12, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I like "negligible". It is concise and avoids instruction creep. We could also say "no encyclopedic contributions" knowing that CSD are often stretched (compare how G1 and A3 are frequently used). —Quarl (talk) 2006-10-08 19:29Z
Couldn't we define "negligible" as "zero non-reverted/non-vandalism mainspace edits" or something very similar to that? I'm saying let's use "negligible" in the actual definition, but then define negligible in a concrete way somewhere else (on the page, on another page, etc.). Perhaps Wikipedia:Neglibility is in order. (I'm half-kidding). | Mr. Darcy talk 01:09, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

So why is this a speedy criterion? Such things should be deleted, but WP:MfD exists for the purpose, and is not backlogged (and there may be benefit to getting more eyes on the problem). Septentrionalis 19:44, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It would be backlogged if we put them all up there, and the purpose is to minimize the time and effort used to deal with people interested in Wikipedia only as their playground. —Centrx→talk • 20:29, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I'm aware, admins (not myself) have been speedying these generally without objections, so this criterion is meant to legitimize that. —Quarl (talk) 2006-10-08 22:05Z
You mistake lack of knowledge of it occurring with lack of objection. If this is being done right now, I have a major problem with it. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:54, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

None of these arguments for expansion appear to follows as necessary from the stated problem. Are we suggesting that, if people are activly using their talk pages but not contributing to main space, that a summary deletion of the talk page is an appropiate response? Because that seems wildly out of line with the open and welcoming environment that I prefer to work in, and that I believe most wikipedians prefer. Clearly advertising is already a deletion criterion. (As well as ineffective, thank you nofollow.) For any truly pernicious userpages, MfD should suffice. For those who just don't get it, how about a nice long chat and schooling them up to be good contributors? Outside that, this looks like a visceral response to a percieved problem: "Yea, let's blast those Myspacers!" Or something.
brenneman {L} 23:37, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm conflicted about this matter. On one hand, I don't care if a Wikipedian spends all of his edits on his user page & talk page, & never contributes as much as a typo fix to the rest of the project, as long as said person doesn't get in my way of contirubting. On the other hand, I can't work up the effort to care if someone like Centrix goes around & blasts people who don't contribute off of Wikipedia. Either stance we take, we risk offending borderline cases -- either encouraging freeloaders or discouraging people who might just be putting their toes into the project. Call me a process fetishist (but only if I can wear the appropriate garments ;-), but I suspect that before much more is written we should hold a non-binding poll on this issue just to see which way the wind is blowing. If I had to lay a bet on the poll, I'd guess as more established Wikipedians cast their votes the more likely the result would be less than two-thirds for either stance. -- llywrch 00:36, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Isn't there an actual cost to this sort of Wikipedia behavior in bandwidth and server resources? It might be tiny now, but if the practice were to spread, it might become an issue. | Mr. Darcy talk 01:11, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Deleting a page does not save any disk space. It's still sitting there, as is made clear by the fact that any administrator can see/restore the page. For a user page to be so heavily trafficed as to present a drain on bandwidth beggars belief, particularly when the squid caching is taken into account.
brenneman {L} 04:37, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't referring to disk space; storage is cheap and getting cheaper all the time. When I mentioned server resources, I was thinking of connections to the server, and processing time on the server to handle requests, changes, etc. As I said, it may be tiny now, but if a few hundred users decided to myspace on Wikipedia, wouldn't it be a resource drag? | Mr. Darcy talk 04:53, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • We'd of course have to refer to a developer for this one if we wanted a definative answer, but I'd wager my uncle's nuts that that answer is "no." The amount of traffic the servers handle currently is simply massive, and any particular bit of text is infinitesimal. If these pages contained large images that changed frequently, then there might be an argument based upon this. My understanding is that this is instead intended to "send a message." - brenneman {L} 05:17, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Your uncle would like you to know that he'd prefer it if you'd wager your own nuts next time :) And I say "thanks for the answer." If there's no actual cost to what they're doing, and they're not disrupting anything else, I guess I'm neutral on the topic of whether or not to delete their user pages. | Mr. Darcy talk 05:21, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Those pages should be deleted. We're just debating how fast. —Quarl (talk) 2006-10-09 18:25Z
If it's not a server drag, no backlog at MfD, and there's question as to how fast we should do this, then the logical conclusion is to not be speedying them. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:57, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There's no backlog at MfD because they are depending on the admin either deleted immediately or ignored. —Centrx→talk • 00:08, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I do not quite understand what would actually qualify, ie, how close would messages have to be to the criteria, in order to qualify a whole page for deletion. Is a message about a topic, that isn't specifically related to that article somehow totally illegal. And what is the impetus for cracking down on bad behaviour, will it improve the encyclopedia in the end? Thats questionable. Ansell 12:20, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

A8: statute of limitations?

Why is there a need for "statute of limitations" for A8:db-copyright, which says that "The page was created less than 48 hours ago and is almost or totally un-wikified"? The article creation time, or whether it has been wikified is irrelevant, as far as the purpose and procedure of CSD is concerned. Given that about 2000 articles are created each day, most such violations won't be discovered within days, if not weeks.--Vsion 07:16, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia mirrors. Articles created less than 48 hours ago are almost never picked up by mirrors, so any other copy of the article is likely the original. With older articles, it may be neccessary to investigate which came first: the Wikipedia article, or the purported original. --Carnildo 07:52, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This explanation should be added to the guidelines. Otherwise, inexperienced admins will make mistakes. Carcharoth 09:50, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Explanations are at Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion/Explanations. I haven't gone through the other ones, but the A8 one explains the reasons for the parameters rather completely. —Centrx→talk • 14:53, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I added the link under "see also". Carcharoth 17:06, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Require admins to check the talk page before deletion?

I am worried that inexperienced admins are making mistakes, due to the complexity and size of the guidelines here at CSD. Could the procedure for admins be expanded? One point in particular that I would like to see emphasised is that the deleting admin should not only: (a) check the page history; (b) notify the creator where applicable; and (c) note the criteria in their edit summary. But they should also: (d) check the talk page of the page in question. In particular, I see that G8 says that talk pages shouldn't be deleted if "they contain deletion discussion that isn't logged elsewhere." The case I have in mind here is being discussed at DRV here. My concern is that speedy deletion of pages, without checking the talk page, can disrupt an ongoing debate on that page. I've had this happen to me twice now, and it is extremely annoying. Essentially, what I am asking is whether the criteria for deleting a page should also apply to its talk page, which may contain good-faith debate contributed by editors. I feel that these debates should be archived somewhere in some way. This would require some judgement from the admin on whether the comments should be kept, which would depend on the relevance of the debate, whether the debate has finished, and how extensive it is. The case at DRV is complicated by the fact that G5 was invoked, and this often arouses strong feelings. I would welcome fresh input over there, where there has been extensive discussion. In my opinion, the procedure should be to use the 'move' function (this preserves the edit attributions) to move the talk page to a suitable archival location (usually an archival subpage of the relevant policy talk page), add a note explaining that the page being debated has been deleted, and then to delete the page and talk page. If this seems too lengthy and involved for CSD, then I suggest that pages with an active talk page should be dealt with at XfD, rather than CSD. Carcharoth 10:09, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A few problems: People don't follow instructions. The complexity and size of the guidelines at CSD is only increased by your suggestion! We can't require people to do anything on Wikipedia. There is no need to encumber the process by granting a total get out of jail free card by someone writing "skwdlhfdskjlgfbdslkjfnbdslfj" on the talk page. -Splash - tk 23:47, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sure. I'm only asking for common sense, and a short sentence upholding the principle that talk pages should be checked before deletion. The judgement as to whether to delete the talk page would be up to the individual admin. Carcharoth 00:22, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I already use common sense when I delete pages which fall under the CSD guidelines. -- Ξxtreme Unction 00:30, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Any adminstrator who doesn't check the talk page when deleting needs a good kick up the arse. But writing it down won't make it so.
brenneman {L} 00:47, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I entirely disagree with this. There's often no reason to check the talk page when something clearly meets a CSD. --Improv 04:33, 9 October 2006
  • Something can easily meet the criterion while still having mitigating information on the talk page. Comments like "I totally saw this band during their European tour, does anyone have a citation?" are not uncommon. - brenneman {L} 05:23, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If that's the case, then we should change all the deletion templates that say you should put any anti-deletion arguments on the talk page. Fagstein 06:01, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There's no reason not to check the talk page. Right now, the speedy template doesn't say that you should put arguments against deletion on the talk page. I tried to edit it to say something like that, but I got reverted. -GTBacchus(talk) 06:11, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
On dewiki, discussion about speedy deletions takes place on the article page itself (right below the speedy nom), which looks like a much simpler approach than using the talk page as we do here. Kusma (討論) 09:38, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Aaron that writing this down won't necessarily make admins check the talk page, but at least it will help when I ask an admin why they didn't check the talk page and they bluster and say that there is no requirement to do so. I would like to be able to point to this discussion and this page and politely ask them to check talk pages in the future. Carcharoth 10:02, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

To respond to Improv, I would point out that if people see a CSD template on a page, they may try to contest it by putting a comment on the talk page, rather than just removing the CSD template. The reason for the CSD might be obvious to you, but it would show respect if you took the time to read the talk page and check that someone hasn't thought of something you haven't. Some admins also perform CSDs on sight, without any warning. If I want to contest these, I generally ask the admin to take it to XfD, and usually there is no problem. Sometimes I have to take the case to DRV instead. I also notice that you have not responpded to my point that failure to check the talk page can result in deleting an ongoing debate. To give you an example, how would you feel if this page suddenly disappeared because an admin speedy deleted the accompanying page and this talk page, without checking the talk page first? Even if the speedy deletion was justified, it would be courteous to check the talk page. Also, you say there is "often no reason to check the talk page" (my emphasis), which implies that sometimes there is reason. By this logic, you still need to check the talk page every time, just in case it is one of the cases where there is a reason to check the talk page. Not doing this sounds like trying to speed things up and not taking the time to carefully check things before performing the deletion. Another thing that could be checked is 'What links here', as that will also tell you whether a speedy deletion (or any deletion) would disrupt other areas of the encyclopedia. I dread to think how many admins do not perform checks like this. Carcharoth 10:02, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Finally, while checking the talk page should apply to all namespaces, including article space, it is particularly important in the case of Wikipedia space, where essays, guidelines and policies are extensively discussed on the talk pages, and it is often more desirable to preserve these discussions than the discussions on article talk pages (indeed, many rejected or historical policies and their talk pages are preserved for precisely this reason). Also, this 'delete on sight without checking' mentality is particularly evident (understandably) in cases of G5 (removing content added by sockpuppets of banned users after they were banned). I would urge anyone contributing to this debate to first review the two cases here and here (last one still ongoing, available from page history after case closes) before responding. I have written a lot about this, but it could all be covered in just a sentence or two in the guidelines: (1) Check talk pages before deleting; (2) Preserve relevant debate from the talk page before deleting (the precise application of this usually depends on the namespace and the nature of the debate). This is already partially and indirectly covered in G8, but I feel the principle should be made explicit and generalised. Carcharoth 10:02, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The "contested" template (I think that's what it's called) refers CSD cleaners to the talkpage anyhow -- it would probably be wise when that tag is there to pop one's head in to see what's going on there if there is any possible doubt. In the end, if something is very clearly inappropriate, it's not worth doing so (that is, if people are just dragging their feet), but given that people are expected to delete the talk pages too, it seems courteous and doesn't take much extra time to look in most cases. As for squashing ongoing debates, sometimes they have substance, sometimes they don't. If they do, I would hope that admins would not stomp them until they're over (If AfD were less broken (as in vote-centric rather than policy_based_discussion-centric), I'd suggest sending them over to AfD if there's room for reasonable disagreement). If they don't and someone really is just dragging their feet over materials inappropriate by policy, it's appropriate to ignore the contested tag. The point in speedy deletes is to allow it to be fast in cases that are either 1) Obvious, or 2) Allowing us not to deal with the brokenness of AfD. The need for speed is to deal with the enormous amount of junk people add to articles every day - following a complicated process is not what we need when we regularly have hundreds of things on CAT:CSD. I suggest that relevant debate can be dealt with if people care to take it to Deletion review - otherwise people should make short, clear policy discussions and it should come down to good judgement. --Improv 14:11, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • It's already the case that having new information not previously present in a speedily-deleted article is a good reason to recreate it. So if an article is speedied and good info is on its talk page, recreating is easy and uncontroversial. >Radiant< 15:00, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think we are talking past each other here. I am talking mainly about talk pages outside article space, and you are both talking about talk pages for articles. Most CSD articles won't have talk pages, and most of the CSD criteria are usually applied to articles. I would guess that a common case for a CSD criteria to be applied to a Wikipedia: namespace page is G5, but in most cases G5 is applied after a sockpuppet of a banned user is uncovered. As most people will have been unaware that the sockpuppet was one, extensive debate may have taken place (I strongly disagree with the idea that nothing useful can be obtained from such debates), and I think that if the page has changed sufficiently, then it should be kept on its own merits, regardless of who started it. I fear that some admins, maybe due to an excessive fear of trolls and vandals, when they uncover such a sockpuppet, delete the pages they created "on sight". Is it possible to get G5 modified so that admins are asked to check whether the page has been modified since creation, and to check the talk page, and if there is activity and debate, to post a notice saying that the creator of the proposal was a sockpuppet. Then the people currently debating it can deal with the page how they see fit. Surely this is reasonable, and avoids the disruption caused by "delete on sight". Carcharoth 13:12, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Okay, I see. However, as far as I know we don't have all that many banned users and they don't write all that many pages in Wikispace. The fact that an admin can delete such pages at sight doesn't mean that he will do so. Could you please point out some evidence to show that this is actually a problem? >Radiant< 14:30, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The two 'here' links above. I suppose you want more than that, but that would require someone who can check deleted pages to see what was deleted. Incidentially, I think this is a problem of temperament between two different styles. I do things slowly and cautiously, checking things and talking them through with people before doing stuff. Others are more decisive and rush ahead and run around making decisions, but they shouldn't be surprised when occasionally something comes back on them. The backlogs are also something to do with it, as I think some admins feel rushed to clean up backlogs. Making that a valid excuse won't solve the problems though. Incidentially, it should be really easy to set up the AfD templates (indeed any XfD templates) to include links to (1) the page; (2) the page history; (3) the talk page; (4) the article log; (5) What links here. That way, AfD regulars can check these things. But for speedies, the admins are the ones that should carry out these checks. I regularly see people debating stuff and completely missing obvious stuff that is in the page history, the talk page, or the logs. Really, this is basic stuff, and it worries me that it appears that some admins don't grasp the basics of how to investigate a page. Oh, and edit summaries is another bugbear of mine. Sometimes, while rummaging around in the Wikipedia undergrowth, I come across something that might be worth looking into, but the edit summary is so hopelessly abbreviated and lacking links to the discussions, that it requires a huge effort looking through archives and cross-checking with the date of deletion. Carcharoth 15:41, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
PS. The first 'here' link was wrong. I've corrected it now. Carcharoth 20:14, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sorry, but that indeed didn't convince me there was a problem. One of the pages you mention is on MFD, not speedily deleted, and surely MFD has mandate to discuss that. The other page (numbers need citations) is a rather dodgy issue but the talk page didn't contain any meaningful support for the proposal. It probably should have been {{rejected}} instead of deleted, but since nobody looks at rejected pages anyway that's pretty much a moot point. I'd be more interested in seeing if there are actual articles by banned users that are deleted in knee-jerk fashion. >Radiant< 09:39, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I understand. Thanks for taking the time to read those pages and respond. I am slightly concerned though that what I thought was a reasonable suggestion to remind admins to check talk pages, article logs, page histories, and 'what links here' before deleting, is being opposed. I was under the impression that this was a basic procedure everytime something was deleted? Please see my further points below in other sections. As for articles by banned users being deleted on sight, I'll try and keep an eye out, but that sort of thing tends to be hard to spot. For what it is worth, I recently removed some edits on a WikiProject talk page by a banned user's sockpuppet after the sockpuppet was revealed. It is the removal of other people's contributions that I object to. ie. A very blunt tool being used to surgically remove stuff and taking other stuff with it. Again, I think my reminder to check talk pages and histories would help here. Carcharoth 09:52, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

CSD U1 and WP:UM

It has come to our attention lately that some users oppose WP:UM (formally known as WP:GUS) because of this criteria. Therefore, I propose that there is either a line added to that criteria to state that it does not apply to any userboxes userfied per WP:UM, or something to the effect of that. Maybe add that userfied userboxes can only be deleted through community consensus at WP:MFD. Thoughts? Suggestions? -Royalguard11(Talk·Desk) 02:19, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me like a commonsense exception that people can't just have a subpage of theirs speedied on demand if other editors are using it for transclusion. At the very least, one must check for incoming links before speedying, which would certainly raise a flag. That said, I don't oppose amending the criterion to reflect this contingency. -GTBacchus(talk) 04:14, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that any well respected editor who has userfied boxes would do it, but people who oppose UM still cite that as one reason. If it is added that you can't, it might make them feel better, and maybe will get more people on board with UM. -Royalguard11(Talk·Desk) 04:51, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
U1? Are you talking about T1 (divisive and inflammatory)? I don't see how U1 applies, but that said, T1 would still apply whether I made User:nae'blis/The Pope screws goats or Template: User The Pope screws goats. Userbox migration allows latitude, not carte blanche. -- nae'blis 22:28, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No, U1, which allows a user to ask for the deletion of their subpage. Userboxes are migrated to user subpages per WP:UM. People keep saying they don't like it because the user could possibly adopt a ton of userboxes, then request speedy deletion of them. Again, I don't believe that anyone with an archive would do so, or that any admin would do the deleting, but it still scares some users silly. -Royalguard11(Talk·Desk) 23:48, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Oh. I hadn't even considered that conspiracy theory... -- nae'blis 03:28, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
And really, if anyone ever did, then there would be an uproar across several project pages (VP, AN, ANI, multiple talk pages, I'd imagine ArbCom). But, people still think we're going to do that. We mine as well calm everyones mind, and just put in what is currently practiced into U1. If nobody opposes it in the next week, I'll go and do it myself. -Royalguard11(Talk·Desk) 03:59, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not aware of more than one person making the argument. Still, I can't see any harm in adding a mention of the common-sense exception we're talking about. -GTBacchus(talk) 04:05, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Isn't it this sort of situation that WP:IAR is for? --ais523 09:43, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
It's been my experience that IAR is used for "things the rules say I can't do/don't say I can do, but need to be done", rather than "things that I won't do, but that the rules say I can do", at least when it's cited explicitly. Still, I don't think the exception does any real harm (would they go to TFD or MFD?), just largely superfluous. -- nae'blis 13:15, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

(back to margin) That's actually a good question. We have a sort of precedence at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Xaosflux/UBX/User religion flying spaghetti monster not really, which was a keep per WP:SNOW. The only thing is that the MfD deletion box is big and ugly and unless noincluded, will show up on every transclusion (which then of corse brings up DRV when its deleted and nobody knew because there was no thing saying this will be deleted, discuss here above the box), as opposed to the small TfD line. Maybe we make a smaller MfD for userfied boxes? I've also never seen IAR user for ignore what it says I can do. I think IAR was made for outside the box/policy things that may need justification and a split second decion. -Royalguard11(Talk·Desk) 03:49, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Back in the Dark Ages (okay, not really) when userboxes were in templatespace, {{tfd-inline}} was useful for keeping the disruption down to a minimum. Maybe something similar could/should be created at {{mfd-inline}}? -- nae'blis 21:56, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That would be a good idea. Would we have modify the deletion process to have that inserted? -Royalguard11(Talk·Desk) 18:39, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This seemed noncontroversial and optional, so I was bold and made it (at {{md1-inline}}, actually, to keep it in line with the main template. -- nae'blis 17:36, 15 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Since there has been no opposition on this page, I have added the line to CSD U1: This does not include userboxes that have been userfied per the Userbox migration. I have also added it to the explanation page. If anyone thinks that it isn't clear enough or that it should be added to, I won't be at all offended. And I believe anything imflamitory on a userfied box would be included under attack pages. -Royalguard11(Talk·Desk) 22:39, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

CSD A7: Avoid the word "vanity"

The word "vanity" in deletion discussions causes us real problems. I would strongly suggest we avoid such in deletion logs too. Unless you can prove they were in fact personally responsible (which isn't very speedy), such usage would likely be defamatory in conventional English discourse, and asserting "no no we were using a local jargon term" would I suspect not cut much ice. The note is clunky, please reword without losing the important point - David Gerard 10:35, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Has anyone ever been sued, or even had suit filed, for calling someone "vain"? Surely that is too much even for the US! -Splash - tk 00:03, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. I also see many edit summaries just saying CSD G8, CSD G11, CSD A7, etc. That could equally be too much jargon, but this is a 'no brainer' change. Being more civil does not cost anyone anything. Carcharoth 09:59, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Expanding admin guidelines

Following on from the above, does anyone object to the following expansion of the admin guidelines (the bold bit at the end of the lead section). The changes should also apply to the section at the end, called "Procedure for administrators". My proposed additions are in italics.

  • "Note that administrators should always verify the legitimacy of a speedy deletion candidate before taking action. It is the administrator's responsibility to make sure that speedy deletion tags are accurate; to do this the administrator must examine the history of every page , the talk pages, 'What links here', and the page logs before deleting it."

This should, of course, be done anyway, but I don't think it does any harm to remind admins, as they may be rushed or inexperienced. I realise this is meant to be speedy deletions, but these are basic checks that really, really should be carried out. (Talk page may have additional information, 'what links here' will show what will become red-links and provide more information, and the page logs may reveal that the article is a recreation, and why previous pages at this title were deleted). I realise most CSD candidates won't have previous versions, or links from elsewhere, but you can't say for sure until you check. If the deleting admin doesn't do this, and someone else does and uncovers a reason why the CSD shouldn't have been performed, it just shows that the decision was too speedy and embarasses the admin. Carcharoth 13:27, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • I oppose this - sometimes things are perfectly clear from the article and the talkpage can have no possible relevance. The current phrasing is fine. In any case, making mistakes here and there isn't that embarassng - sometimes these things happen. If it becomes too frequent it can become a problem though. It's better to be bold and fix what needs fixing and occasionally not have things stick in the end than to be stagnant out of fear of error. --Improv 14:52, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Are you seriously saying that if a talk page exists, that you don't look at it before deleting? I will quote what Aaron said above: "Any adminstrator who doesn't check the talk page when deleting needs a good kick up the arse." I will also quote a good piece of advice I saw someone else give once: "if you don't have time to do something, let someone else do it!" Seriously, rushing things is nearly always bad. One click on the talk page, one click on the history of the page, one click on what links here, one click on the logs. If you carry out speedy deletions faster than this, then it is probably too fast. As for being bold, I see below an example of what happens when you do that. How much time will now be expended on those AfD debates that you could have spent doing other stuff? Carcharoth 15:18, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I can quote people too. I already read what he read -- I'm sure we have better things to do than quote ourselves and others at each other :) There are times that I don't read talk page, and as noted above, there are times that I don't think it's necessary. As for time being spent, spending time establishing sensible policy now is time we're saving for the future of the project, so it's worthwhle. If you disagree, why are you spending the time here disagreeing? :) --Improv 15:29, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, on similar lines, you could just agree with me. :-) Let's wait and see what others think. Carcharoth 16:42, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A couple more things, Improv, seeing as you don't always check talk pages. Do you check the page history before deleting, in case the page has been vandalised from a previously acceptable state? Do you check that the article has 5 edits, rather than 500? And if it had 500 would you take the time to look for an acceptable previous version? And do you check the deletion log for the article to see if the article had previously been created before? If you do all this, what is the harm in checking the talk page as well? Now, I've looked at your history on your user page, and I see that you almost certainly do understand all this. But at some point you didn't know this, and learnt how these things work. So at what point did you become confident enough to start ignoring talk pages and thinking that everything about an article can be seen by just reading the bit on the front page? Please don't think I am focussing on you personally, but I suspect that overconfidence can be as damaging as inexperience. I'm not saying to be "stagnant through fear of error", but to be methodical and make sure you understand the full history and connections of what you are about to delete. Carcharoth 17:14, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The heated debate on cookie brands speedy deleted by Improv (talk · contribs) prove that some admins are interpreting G11 way beyond what it is intended to cover and way beyond what the community deems reasonnable. I suppose this talk page is the best place to gather comments and suggestions to avoid similar problems in the future. I particularly invite Improv to state his case here since he maintains that his deletions were in line with the criteria. (I'll stay out of it for now, as I have already lost my cool in the DRV debate...) Pascal.Tesson 14:58, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I had a quick look, and it looks to me as if Improv confused product placement with cultural history. If these articles were written from a cultural history standpoint, G11 would not apply. A good example is articles about 'products' that are no longer sold. This is clearly cultural history. The amount of coverage thus needs a set of 'cultural history' guidelines to be drawn up. Carcharoth 15:07, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • The articles, by and large, made no claims to be part of cultural history, nor did they, to my memory, even mention the term. Instead, they looked like simple product listings, making them fit under G11. I find it disappointing (but not entirely surprising) that some members of the community choose to interpret G11 in a very narrow way. When necessary steering comes from above, ignoring it and sending things to AfD makes it very likely that this advice will be ignored because AfD is both inherently keep-prone and inviting for people to come vote to keep things, without any policy justification or (often) even any reasoning. In the end, I believe eventually we'll see (and will probably push for) more guidance to come down from above that will help us clear product directories and other such things frolm Wikipedia. Almost no cell phone, brand of toilet plunger, or cookie is noteworthy, and the few that are need to be phrased carefully to make it clear why and how they are. --Improv 15:24, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Part of the problem is that some articles aren't given a chance. The wiki process sometimes leads to seemingly non-notable stuff being edited up into good articles with well-chosen references. It just depends whether they have been deleted first. Sure, sometimes stub articles hang around for years, but sometimes it feels like the atmosphere is one of rushing towards Wikipedia 1.0 by deleting everything else. Also, there is a lot of deletion when merging is perfectly possibly. Too many people see "a mess" and automatically reach for the 'delete' button without looking for the 'improve' button. Even a slight improvement can start a cascade of other improvements that lead to an article gradually taking shape. Carcharoth 15:50, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Arnott's Biscuits Holdings did cite cultural history, but to your credit you did undelete it when you realised (after being prompted) you had been too hasty. Still, reading the complaints about the number of redlinks you left behind because you didn't have time to fix them doesn't fill me with confidence that you put much effort or thought into many of these. Also, I've never read an explanation of why you protected Wagon Wheel (biscuit) against recreation.
Now, as I managed to get in the last post on the deletion review: can you please provide a link to the appropriate foundation-l discussion archive so we can all read it and draw our own conclusions? Thanks, --Canley 16:03, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Part of it could be simply using one's head. Even if something like Pepperidge Farms or Famous Amos looks like an advertisement, it probably isn't, and should be rewritten or, at worst, sent to AfD.. --badlydrawnjeff talk 16:16, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Brad Patrick wrote:
> Dear Community:
>
> The volume of corporate vanity/vandalism which is showing up on 
> Wikipedia is overwhelming.  At the office, we are receiving dozens of 
> phone calls *per week* about company, organization, and marketing 
> edits which are reverted, causing the non-notable, but 
> self-aggrandizing authors, to scream bloody murder.  This is as it 
> should be.  However, I am issuing a call to arms to the community to 
> act in a much more draconian fashion in response to corporate 
> self-editing and vanity page creation.  This is simply out of hand, 
> and we need your help.
>
> We are the #14 website in the world.  We are a big target.  If we are 
> to remain true to our encyclopedic mission, this kind of nonsense 
> cannot be tolerated.  This means the administrators and new page 
> patrol need to be clear when they see new usernames and page creation 
> which are blatantly commercial - shoot on sight.  There should be no 
> question that someone who claims to have a "famous movie studio" and 
> has exactly 2 Google hits - both their Myspace page - they get nuked.  
> Ban users who promulgate such garbage for a significant period of 
> time.  They need to be encouraged to avoid the temptation to recreate 
> their article, thereby raising the level of damage and wasted time 
> they incur.
> 
> Some of you might think regular policy and VfD is the way to go.  I am
> here to tell you it is not enough.  We are losing the battle for 
> encyclopedic content in favor of people intent on hijacking Wikipedia 
> for their own memes.  This scourge is a serious waste of time and 
> energy.  We must put a stop to this now. 
> Thank you for your help.
>
> -Brad Patrick
> User:BradPatrick
> Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
    • IMHO the key phrase in Brad's post that relate to this discussion is "when [administrators and new page patrolers] see new usernames and page creation which are blatantly commercial - shoot on sight" (emphasis obviously mine). Most, if not all of the pages were established pages, with contributions from established users. They weren't new pages being created to spam the wiki, although they might have been poorly written and fanboyish (for want of a better term). The intention of the post you quote, as I read it, is to declare war on new pages that are unquestionably blantantly commercial, not on poorly written existing pages about products that may or may not be notable. Thryduulf 17:41, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • If you can't see the difference between 'someone who claims to have a "famous movie studio" and has exactly 2 Google hits - both their Myspace page' and Pepperidge Farm, I really don't know what else we can say to you. Turnstep 17:48, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I had a suspicion people would ignore my invitation to look further into the discussion. I'm not keen to repost the entire thread here - go take a look. The fact remains that a number of pages that would've and should've been shot on sight were not because the policy was not around, and Danny, myself, and hopefully others will clear the crap away (even if we make a few mistakes) to get us moving towards where we need to go. It will necessarily anger the most ardent of inclusionists, but that's predictable. --Improv 18:01, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well I said I'd stay out of it but sorry, I can't. I've taken you up and read the threads on corporate vanity policy enforcement and it is a very interesting discussion indeed but even Brad Patrick's message which started the discussion and which is probably the most blunt of the bunch cannot be reasonnably interpreted as "please destroy Chips Ahoy!". You say your conduct will necessarily anger the most ardent of inclusionists, well I for one consider myself as an ardent deletionist and have been criticized as such. Yet I find your conduct irresponsible and bullyish. Your contempt of others' opinion and your belief that your conduct is beyond criticism because you know you're doing it for the greater good is shameful. Pascal.Tesson 19:20, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Pascal, you might be interested in the thread above this one, about admin guidelines. Carcharoth 19:22, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Improv, I'd like to ask you if you looked at the page histories, the 'What links here' listings, the talk pages, and the article logs, before speedy deleting those articles? It might be interesting to see what looking at those pages would reveal. Give me a sec... Carcharoth 19:22, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Detailed analysis

OK, have a look at User:Carcharoth/Sandbox. The immediate conclusions that can be drawn from this, and which suggest speedy deletion was unwarranted for several of the articles, are the following:

I hope I've managed to convince you (Improv) that looking at the history of the articles a bit more might have avoided some of this speedy deletion controversy. Carcharoth 22:31, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, my analysis also found what may be two anomalies. They are both cases where the deletion of the article shows up in the log, but the restoration is not there!

Does anyone know what is going on here? Carcharoth 22:31, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Boy, thanks for the great effort. Pascal.Tesson 23:58, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Shows just fine for me, today. -- nae'blis 13:17, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. They've been corrected. What happened was that red links popped up everywhere when Improv deleted articles without fixing redlinks (something clicking on 'what links here' would have told him), and people recreated the articles, naturally thinking "Why doesn't Wikipedia have an article on that?". Those two articles were recreated. In each case, the page histories of the articles before and after deletion have now been merged by Thrydulf, so everything is fine now. Carcharoth 13:45, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Another addition to G11

A lot of the cookie debacle could have been averted, I think, if we had something similar to this in the criteria:

If established users disagree with such a decision in good faith, the article should be restored and sent to the proper XfD

Obviously, the wording should be better put together, but it would be a good way to avoid a flood of DRVs. --badlydrawnjeff talk 17:49, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You do not need to add that to G11 because that is an explicit requirement for all the speedy-deletion criteria. The speedy-deletion process was established to clear out those cases which are completely obvious and non-controversial. Any speedy-deletion which is contested in good faith is to be immediately restored and nominated to the appropriate XfD. That was a non-negotiable control which the community insisted upon before approving the concept of speedy-deletions. Rossami (talk) 05:56, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It is natural to think that, isn't it? But the deletion review I'm involved in (you have participated in it) was over a CSD, and I made precisely that argument (I was prepared to move it to MfD) and got met with an insistance that G5 was not contestable. It is true that G5 is so terse it doesn't allow any wiggle room at all, and I think that is bad, as it encourages those who stick rigidly to procedures. Carcharoth 10:30, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
if that were indeed the case, it wouldn't be such a struggle to get speedies overturned when requested. I did just that w/Improv on his recent deletion spree, and he said no. I did the same with an A7 a month ago, User:King of Hearts said no. It needs to be explicit. --badlydrawnjeff talk 11:07, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately, a number of people do seem forgotten the promises we all made when the speedy-deletion process was approved. Nevertheless, that is the rule for all CSDs and will remain the rule until it is explicitly overturned. Rossami (talk) 11:54, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Then it needs to be made much more explicit. Admins aren't doing so, and deletion review is endorsing said speedies regardless of good faith protests. --badlydrawnjeff talk 12:04, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

G11, A8, admin discretion

There seems to be a large disconnect between the amount of admin discretion allowed by A8 (don't delete if it's older than 48 hours, because admins supposedly can't figure out whether the other site is a mirror or the original source of the data -- most cases I've seen were basically 100% clear with not much time spent) and the amount of discretion required by G11 (determine whether the article creator is an established user with no history of spam, determine whether the original author intended to spam or whether they're just trying to fulfill notability criteria (A7) and went a bit too far, determine whether the backlinks existed long before this article was created, ...). Maybe people are just fishing by nominating articles that might be deleted under G11, but I'm seeing a lot of nominations that are pretty iffy. I know I've written prose that was later removed as inadvertantly sounding too much like an advertisement, so I'm a bit hesitant to make a call on what the original creator's intent was.

Would it be possible to make G11 only apply to new or anonymous accounts, or accounts whose talk pages indicate an obvious problem with spam? --Interiot 18:17, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Or (as suggested above) maybe have a 'quick restore' option - something like 'if three users in good standing...' (we could use the foundation/arbcom election suffrage rules) '...request it, the article will immediately be undeleted and listed on Afd'. This would avoid tying up admins in useless red tape, but act as a safety valve against misinterpretation/abuse (depending on your opinion). Cynical 19:31, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You'd have to define 'good standing' much better than is currently done to avoid a flood of sockpuppets. I think our effort would be better spent on refining G11 than trying a distributed load system, at least at present. How would an admin know a talk page had garnered three opposers? Categories can't count the number of times a template is included... -- nae'blis 19:37, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, as I said we could use the Arbcom/WMF Board suffrage rules (which I can't remember offhand, I think it has an editcount and a minimum time requirement) which have (I presume, since we're still using them) proved fairly successful in fending off sockpuppets. It wouldn't necessarily need a talkpage message for the article itself. There's no real reason why we couldn't set up a page specifically for speedy objections (WP:SDR anyone?). Then admins could simply monitor one page, and any article which was listed (with the necessary support from established users) could then be restored and AFD'd. I'm not sure if three is a high enough threshold though - thoughts anyone? Cynical 19:44, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
IIRC, ArbCom election said three months and 150 edits; Wikimedia board said four months and 400 edits, although "good standing" has a different definition sometimes; see Wikipedia talk:Established Wikipedian or [8] (specifically as its used in CAT:AOR. I'm not sure this is a necessary process though, DRV does already speedily-undelete articles on occasion when the consensus is clearly against the original deletion. A separate page just adds more process to our system, which is already overburdened for the new editor IMO. -- nae'blis 22:19, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't mind being aggressive on A8, as copyvio is copyvio, but I would rather a preference of copyvio text being removed, the article being stubbed, and then, if there's inclusion issue, taking it to AfD. Copyvio deletion seems to be an easy way to remove otherwise useful material just because people don't understand the GFDL and our need to be aggressive on copyright. With G11, unless we're going to remove it entirely (which doesn't seem to be on the table yet), some common sense has to factor in. Outside of that, I'm becoming a larger proponent of a "good faith challenges get undeleted and AfD'd" than anyhting else, because, otherwise, they will be sent to DRV and we'll see more shitstorms like with Improv's deletions. --badlydrawnjeff talk 19:54, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Expanding A7

(Sort of.) In our new spirit of intolerance to advertising, and just because it makes sense, would anyone object to adding "product" and "service" to the possible targets of an A7 deletion? This is from the G11 criterion which allows for not just companies, but these two, and it follows logically from the spirit of A7. Dmcdevit·t 03:34, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Works for me. I always thought it should include obvious hoaxes also, but ahwell. ~Kylu (u|t) 03:37, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't mind on principle although I'm worried about how this will be used in practice. CSD is mostly used by people patrolling new pages and I'm afraid that this will lead to frustrating deletions of valid stubs, especially as far as products are concerned. Pascal.Tesson 03:49, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflicted) If the product or service isn't notable enough to qualify for your suggestion, then it already qualifies under G11. I don't think this is needed. If A7 and G11 are to be compared so much due to their involvement in recent controversial events, they should be combined, otherwise their differences must be kept clear. I don't think advertisements are notable, hence any G11 could qualify for A7. --ZsinjTalk 03:50, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm for it, and even more remove G11 and incorporate company, promotional, and organizational articles in one all inclusive A7. Teke (talk) 03:53, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm for that. --ZsinjTalk 03:54, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I would note that there is a difference between lacking an assertion to notability, and being blatant advertising. Dead people, ruined businesses, and discontinued products can all lack assertions of notability per A7 and strictly qualify as advertising, but only the latter doesn't currently qualify. (Note it could just be questionable whether it's advertising, but without an assertion of notability. That's where this is helpful.) Dmcdevit·t 04:37, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I could write an article on Target gift cards. I've got a bunch of them at home (lots of gifts), and the designs are nifty, but while it'd be non-notable, it wouldn't really be spam, do you think? A7 non-notable products/services might be a good reason to delete my article on Target gift cards... ~Kylu (u|t) 04:47, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

To provide a case study for Dmcdevit's point: This is a quote cut directly out of a press release, which is available here. This press release fails to mention why this particular stock scam is notable and contains a number of lies. Some assertions of notability are highlighted.


Similar press release style articles should be deleted on sight under G11, but are not eligible for deletion under A7. Then there's the problem of userspace spam. I've tagged upwards of 150 user pages for speedy deletion over the last week.

General comments on expansion - Why not? MER-C 06:37, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The biggest question I would ask is why is it reasonable that these things can be identified on sight, as all the other speedy criteria can be. Making up new criteria, or expanding old ones, which are not clearly based on that presupposition is making a total mockery of the process. Ansell 07:11, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
The implementation of new criteria might in part be motivated by the belief by some admins that AfD is 'broken', and the idea that extending CSD is the best way to get things deleted. See what Improv said further up this page: "The point in speedy deletes is to allow it to be fast in cases that are either 1) Obvious, or 2) Allowing us not to deal with the brokenness of AfD.". I agree with (1), but not with (2). Carcharoth 11:04, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely not. Can we please stop trying to expand A7 so it becomes more and more controversial with every use? --badlydrawnjeff talk 11:05, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

G11 is a joke right?

How did that sneak through? Why speedy something that just needs a rewrite. That is abusing the entire DRV/AfD system IMO. These things should be a PROD at least, as one sysop cannot be expected to know whether the thing is okay. Ansell 04:58, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Anyone is free to re-write such an article to not be promotional, but the promotional form gets deleted and Wikipedia may not be used for advertising. —Centrx→talk • 05:03, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There's a block quote above from Brad Patrick (the Foundation legal guy) who rather dropped G11 into place at once. He also mentions blocking commercial-spam users. So no, it's no joke. If there's a valid version of something, of course revert it. If Coca Cola comes up as a big Wiki-ad, no sane admin is going to delete it, they'll just revert to a good article version. Hope that helps! ~Kylu (u|t) 05:27, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder if the "Foundation" thought about the mess that would be made of the entire CSD->DRV->AfD process. Is it really worth it to have snowballed processes that waste contributors time. A better idea may be to just tell people to remove the information that they perceive as advertising. Some sane admin deleted Arnott's which is arguably one of "the" most famous australian companies. I imagine that an aussie admin may mistake a US icon in the same way. Maybe not Coca Cola, but one of the other companies that has not ventured down under yet. Overall, the criteria is a misunderstanding of what the speedy process is about IMO. Ansell 07:08, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I don't subscribe to the wikien-l foundation mailing list, though I can, like everyone, read the web pages of the mailing list. I know that the mailing list is where lots of policy discussion takes place. I wonder if someone could make sure these arguments are being noticed on the mailing list. Carcharoth 09:44, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
We've already had an admin delete Pepperidge Farm with this in mind. --badlydrawnjeff talk 11:02, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Arguably, many of the "crusade" deletions do not conform to the letter of the rule; but that just demonstrates its subjective interpretation. This rule is much, much too broad, and will continue to upset people as it is applied by people who may not have sufficient knowledge to determine whether a brand is notable, particularly across nations. At the top of the page, it says a criterion should satisfy:

  • The criterion should be uncontestable: it should be the case that almost all articles that can be deleted using the rule, should be deleted, according to general consensus. If a rule paves the path for deletions that will cause controversy, it probably needs to be restricted.

It seems to me that G11 has done just that, created controversy, because it allows deletion of articles that not everyone believes should be deleted. Although uncontestable is just a guideline, I think it's a very important one for keeping deletion productive and limiting unnecessary community friction.

I suggest we severely restrict its scope to account for these issues - better to see some advertisements "fall through" to PROD/AFD than to see the rule meet an early death due to a violent backlash. If Brad Patrick wants to force our hand, let him commit an office action; meanwhile, I think we should pursue a less aggressive course that we believe is prudent. Deco 09:51, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It is probably better to say that CSDs should be based on easily defined criteria that are easy to demonstrate without requiring extensive arguments. Saying criteria are uncontestable sounds like you are saying people should be forbidden from contesting them (I know that is not really what you are saying, but it could sound like that). I'd also note Rossami's comment above: "The speedy-deletion process was established to clear out those cases which are completely obvious and non-controversial. Any speedy-deletion which is contested in good faith is to be immediately restored and nominated to the appropriate XfD. That was a non-negotiable control which the community insisted upon before approving the concept of speedy-deletions." - in effect, that makes it more like PROD, but CSD is more likely to generate controversy when contested.
I agree totally with your suggestion to restrict G11 to prevent a backlash. Carcharoth 10:41, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps the rider ("and which would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become encyclopedic") needs tightening up, although I think if properly applied now it would avoid the borderline cases. It's had teething troubles because it went from a vague statement from Brad Patrick to policy in record time, but I don't see any problem in its existence if it is applied as the policy is stated. An article doesn't actually need to speedily deleted under G11, just as an article failing A7 doesn't need to be, but prodding such an article would inevitably lead to an AFD, and since we don't have a "non-speedy speedy delete" this is the best place for it. Yomanganitalk 10:53, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Something needs to be done - about 20 hours after 30 articles that had been speedily deleted were listed on AfD:

  • 19 have discussions where there is a majority to kept
  • 6 have already been speedily kept
  • 4 have no clear majority opinion
  • 1 has a majority to delete (and this is because its already covered elsewhere).

If everything is working properly then I would expect there to have been no speedy keeps, and maybe one or two with a majority to keep. For this to be repeated would be truly farcical.

Perhaps we should add an article age limit to G11. If it is older than 5 days* it should be sent to XfD. From what I can tell this would have meant that most, if not all, of the biscuit deletions would not have been eligable for speedy. I suspect, the majority of really trully spammy pages will have been identified in that time, meaning there would not be a significant workload impact on the deletion debate processes. *This is just a figure to start discussion, I'm not attached to it in any way. Thryduulf 11:50, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I did not realise that the percentage of actual deletes was that high. However, it is still not high enough. A deletion discussion based on a cross-section of the wikipedia community, would be much better to avoid the false-positives that have been generated so far by the criteria wording--and possibly just by the fact that it is a speedy criteria. If a page truly has no value, and the duration of an XfD is not enough to improve it then I agree that deletion is the best option as I am as anti-spam as the next editor.
It brings into view how fast wiki-policy can actually change, and also, how annoying it can be for the average editor who doesn't constantly watch pages like this. Ansell 12:29, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, that is me having a brain freeze. The 19 articles have/had a majority to keep, not delete. Thryduulf 12:45, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
A lot of those are now generating delete votes due to lack of notability rather than because they meet the G11 criteria - it is simply because they were deleted under G11 and then restored that they have been highlighted. If the G11 criteria were properly applied, I too would expect to see a majority of deletes (and would have expected neither an overturned decision at DRV nor an application at DRV in the first place). I think the problem here was that the deletions were carried out with Brad Patrick's request in mind rather than by the following the policy as stated, and I wouldn't expect to see such a rash of overturned deletions in the future. These things take a while to bed in. Yomanganitalk 12:49, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You certainly had me fooled with this "19 have a majority to delete"! In any case, I think we should also be careful not to read too much into that: there is certainly a backlash effect due to what most felt was an abusive interpretation of G11. I did not get involve in these discussions but, like Ansell, I feel that keeping all the cookie articles is not the grandest of ideas... Pascal.Tesson 13:02, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately an age limit would only be a temporary solution that works because the rule did not exist before - if this rule had existed at the time Chips Ahoy! was created, it might have been deleted then instead (and again shortly after each subsequent recreation). Speedy deletions should be rarely contested, and this rule is not.
I believe the heart of the problem is that this rule completely ignores notability, which is the essential quality that has been raised over and over by defenders of the deleted articles. We need an objective restriction that will only include non-notable advertisements. Here are some potential examples:
  • a product or business with no impact outside a small, localized vicinity
  • a minor variation on another product with almost no differentiating qualities
That sort of thing. Deco 12:41, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with Deco that an arbitrary time limit won't actually help. It is to be expected that a newly created policy will be subject to controversy on borderline cases until the details are worked out. The intent here is to put a stop to people using Wikipedia as a forum for advertising, by (among others) quickly deleting their articles. The intent is not to delete articles on any and all commercial goods and services; it sounds reasonable to keep the iconic and famous ones (Pepsi, as an extreme example) and do some creative merging to e.g. List of brands of peanut butter. The trick is in distinguishing between pure advertising and actually known products, since of course any decent advertisement will make some sort of claim of notability. >Radiant< 13:26, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Which is why this doesn't really work as a speedy. Most of them are going to be controversial and not-clear cut. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:40, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Not all speedies are meant to be noncontroversial. That's not a reason to remove them as speedies. When decided policy is to delete something, and it's not up for discussion (e.g. WP:OFFICE decisions), speedies are appropriate. G11 is another case where helpful policy comes down from above. --Improv 00:00, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Come on, you cannot compare the G11 to WP:OFFICE which is meant to be used in exceptional circumstances. It is ok for the foundation to push for G11 but it's also ok for the community to discuss its application and its range. Pascal.Tesson 00:16, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
To speak of tossing out something that both comes down from above and is so clearly needed, especially on the basis that rabid inclusionists might side to keep such things around on such a badly broken process like AfD is ridiculous. Ignoring foundation pushes (or intentionally interpreting them so narrowly that they mean nothing) is done at your (and the project's) peril -- either way something important is going to be lost. --Improv
Speedy deletion criteria are meant to be both "objective" and "uncontestable". You are wrong when you say that "Not all speedies are meant to be noncontroversial". Ansell 01:44, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Once again Improv, you seem to be suggesting that people who have disagreed with your questionable speedy deletions (and other "rabid inclusionists") are campaigning to have G11 "tossed out", are going against the unambiguous wishes of the Wikimedia Foundation and want to keep all the spam. Once again, I have to tell you this is not the case - myself and many others who have responded to you agree G11 is necessary and vital. I don't even think G11 is worded particularly ambiguously - and yes, I've read and re-read the foundation-l discussions and Brad's message - I think it's fairly clear what it's targetted at: blatant, commercial spam - but several of the articles you are targetting in your self-proclaimed cull are so far out of this intended target that I'm amazed that you continue to justify your actions as performed at the behest of the Foundation (including bypassing the "broken" AfD process). --Canley 05:42, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I too have read the foundation-l discussions and Brad's message, and I agree with Canley that Improv's continual pointing to Brad's post is not justified for some of the speedy deletions Improv has performed. Brad's post is quite clear and specific. Improv's criteria appear to be much broader than the ones used in Brad's post. Again, I would appeal to Improv to engage in discussion at AfD and see if it really is as broken as he thinks. I would also appeal for those posting to the foundation mailing list to make clear that this has caused confusion 'on the ground', and to ask for clarification, and some thought before policy is issued like this in the future. I will repeat what I have said elsewhere, generating confusion like this (however unintended) takes effort away from the process of building the encyclopedia. Carcharoth 11:32, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Improv, how many respected Wikipedians have to weigh in and argue that your interpretation of G11 is way too broad before you seriously question your attitude. Canley, Carcharoth and myself are not "rabid inclusionists" we are experienced, well-informed editors and we're trying to tell you that your actions are hurting the efforts to make G11 acceptable by the community. Pascal.Tesson 12:31, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I like the idea of G11, and used db-spam once. However, I still have some reservation on the current wordings. For example, some editors may consider many articles on music albums (with pictures of albums cover, tracks listing, and little else) serve to promote the product and come under G11. Same for many short articles on books and films. Similarly, notability should not be a criteria for speedy-delete. These articles should be nominated for prod or afd. I think the articles to be speedied are those that contain advertisment-like languages with unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims such as: "This company is one of the leaders in this business and offers a wide range of excellent services to clients, ...". Hope G11 criteria can be tighten to provide clarity. --Vsion 06:33, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
One thing that I think will help would be rigourous enforcement of the so-called "tag and bag" process - i.e. the first user sees something that they beleive meets the speedy criteria, so they place a speedy deletion template on it. Then another user looks through CAT:CSD and makes sure they agree with it before hitting delete. This ensures that at least two pairs of eyes see every article. I don't do much speedy deletion work, but most times I do I find a couple of pages tagged as speedy deletion that don't meet the criteria and so I xfd them. IMHO if Improv had tagged the articles for someone else to delete, most of them would not have been. I know there are warnings not to remove CSD templates, but imho it is within the spirit if these are removed to be replaced by AfD nominations. Thryduulf 12:23, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This is very similar to PROD, where someone other than the PRODder makes the final decision. It is just that speedies don't have to wait 5 days. I would support this "one person tags, another deletes" approach. Carcharoth 10:37, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

incorrect lemma

Shouldn't "incorrect article name" be added to general criteria? In many cases (like Red Book of Endangered Species, waiting for someone to merge the info to an article on the same subject with the correct name is unnecessary and wastes editors' and administrators' time. I suspect many normal users often notice the problem of two or more articles being created on the same subject, but because there is no user-friendly method of informing administrators, they don't do anything. As a result, editors waste time creating the same article more than once instead of in collaboration. And then later, huge merge discussions and possible edit wars waste huge amounts of administrator time.

As i've proposed before, WP needs a new tab called "report problem" in a prominent place, for example to the right of "watch" to be able to tap the huge dormant reservoir of help with basic, serious problems that normal users could provide. Normal users are quite capable of explaining in normal English what's wrong with a page but it is ridiculous to expect them to look for cleanup and delete templates. There are thousands of discussion pages with comments about serious problems that nobody does anything about for very long periods of time. Such a "report problem" tab can then have buttons for the templates addressing the most important problems, many of which can be quickly solved by administrators. --Espoo 11:24, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • If you find an article with an incorrect name, you can fix it yourself by using the 'move' tab, or by merging or redirecting the article. Adding a 'report problem' tab would be a nice idea, but since it involves a software change you really have to ask the Developers about the details. Educating new users on the ways they can help is always good. >Radiant< 12:06, 12 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • By the same argument we should speedy stubs because in many cases we end up waiting for someone to expand them. There's no reason for impatience - if you feel compelled to hide it, turn the page into a redirect, and move the content to the talk page of the correct article for later merging. Deco 03:19, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What's wrong with PROD?

Surely G11 is the kind of situation PROD was meant to deal with. Brad states that VfD (sic) isn't working, but is he aware of PROD? In my view we simply need new page patrollers and others to be slightly more aggressive in prodding spammish articles. The obvious crap gets deleted, acceptable articles get contested, kept and possibly some cleanup attention. Sure a spam article might stay for 5 extra days in a backwater of Wikipedia where no one is likely to see it, and even if they do it has a big notice saying "we intend to dump this". But in my view this is infinitely preferable to articles such as Penguin biscuit being speedy deleted. the wub "?!" 09:12, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Spammers promptly unprod articles, resulting in a five day formal deletion debate about unsalvagable crap. And you cannot prod userspace spam. In fact, since G11 came around, I've tagged about 200 user pages that were nothing but spam. But there are teething problems as have been described. Since {{db-web}} and {{db-spam}} were implemented, the workload on AFD has dropped by about a third. MER-C 09:25, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Citation please on the "spammers promptly unprod articles" claim? The last data I saw spotchecked prod and found 80-90% deletion rates, but maybe spammers have gotten more savvy since then. Also, why does "a third" link to MD's RFB? -- nae'blis 22:25, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think the argument from bureaucrats is that even waiting 6 days to delete spam is a concern and in effect fails to discourage spammers. I often patrol new pages and G11 is really handy for a number of articles I previously had to prod and I believe will eventually deter at least some of the spam. Not sure where you got your stats but it's pretty interesting: I would have thought that % would be much lower than that. On the other hand you have to be careful about using it as an argument that spammers don't bother removing PROD tags. I think PROD tags are most used by Newpage patrollers and people cleaning up articles tagged with importance or notability and linkless or orphan articles. In my experience the percentage of PROD tags removed in the second case is definitely below 10% but I'm not sure that's the case for newpage PRODs. Pascal.Tesson 23:38, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

{{nn-bio}}, {{nn-band}}, et cetera

These are templates that redirect to {{db-bio}}. Unlike db-bio, "nn-bio" has a connotation that implies that CSD criterion A7 is for deleting any article on a non-notable subject. The text of A7 has, for a long time now, used the wording "does not describe the importance or significance of the subject", and WP:CSD, under the heading non-criteria includes "non-notable subjects with their importance asserted". Obviously, this misuse occurs with db-bio, not just nn-bio, but I want to get rid of nn-bio as a speedy deletion tag because (1) I have never, since becoming an admin in July, seen nn-bio used appropriately, (2) about a quarter of the time I see this misuse of CSD A7, there's a nn-bio tag, and (3) even the existence of nn-bio as a deletion tag perpetuates this misuse of speedy deletion. I was going to list this debate on WP:RFD, but (1) using an rfd tag would break the template for now, and (2) this is the community that should really discuss the issue, and (3) I want to have these redirected to Template:Notability, just as {{nn}} is: having them disappear would just cause confusion: since I'm not seeking deletion, listing for deletion doesn't make sense. Mangojuicetalk 14:25, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Actually I was not aware that these templates existed but it sure is misleading that the templates {{nn-bio}} and {{bio-notability}} would result in utterly different things. Actually I would be in favor of deleting all speedy deletion templates and template redirects that are not of the form {{db-xxx}}, including {{nonsense}}. Pascal.Tesson 22:03, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't have a strong opinion on the actual templates but do have a strong opinion on the process. These tags are widely used or referenced throughout the project. If you are going to obsolete some of these templates, do not just delete them. Instead, tag them with {{historical}} or some other marker to show that they are no longer to be used. That way, users know not to continue using them but new readers/editors will be able to follow the old discussion threads and see what was actually being discussed. Rossami (talk) 22:27, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Second Rossami. Carcharoth 23:15, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Of course I think both Mangojuice and I were not proposing to just zap them to oblivion without some care. Although I'd like to point out that there is much less risk of serious mistakes being made if we change the nn-bio redirect from a CSD tag to a notability warning since the worst that can happen is that some nn article escapes the axe temporarily. The other way around would have had some people screaming bloody murder. :-) Pascal.Tesson 23:29, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like to address Rossami's concern even more strongly. Does anyone have an idea how to make an "officially deprecated" template? Mangojuicetalk 01:16, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Probably one of the templates at Category:Template_templates will do. I like the look of Template:Tdeprecated. It doesn't mention 'officially', but that is probably as official as you get on Wikipedia. See also Category:Deprecated_templates. Carcharoth 01:23, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Try looking at nn-bio's deletion discussion for some background on this; it was closed as 'no consensus', possibly because it was nominated at TfD rather than RfD. --ais523 08:14, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I think it failed because a fair number of people didn't understand my point, and thought I was trying to get rid of a legit speedy tag. Ultimately, I think neither WP:RFD nor WP:TFD are the right venue (I chose TFD before so that I could avoid breaking the template while the discussion was going on): this is really about speedy deletion rules and how they are used, so I think the discussion belongs here. Mangojuicetalk 12:35, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thinking about just that problem, I invented {{rfd-t}} (along the lines of {{sfd-r}}) to file a mass nomination of speedy templates inspired by this thread (on RFD); they're all redirects to {{db-reason}} (so I've left nn-bio, etc., out; if another discussion is wanted, that can be done separately, but I'd like to see how this one turns out first). --ais523 12:44, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
  • If you're going to change a template's purpose, you need to find some way of informing the community of that, otherwise they will keep on using it for the old purpose. >Radiant< 09:19, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Clarification on CSD A7

Okay, maybe my brain is just numb, but I'm having a hard time interpreting "doesn't assert the importance or significance of the subject" to articles on companies, websites, products, et cetera. Take, as a case in point, Wapedia, where I have removed the speedy deletion tag. This article doesn't claim that the product is important or historically significant: it just says what the product is. To me, the description sounds fairly unique... but there's nothing in there that claims the product is important or significant. I decided not to delete this one because .. well.. what if the community, if given a chance to input, thought that Wapedia was a notable product? There probably isn't a lot more that can be written on it than what's there: if it starts claiming importance it doesn't have, that's a step in the wrong direction. If we speedily delete this kind of article, it preempts the possibility of even having a debate. I guess my question is: what is an "assertion of importance" in an article about a company / product / website? I think if we can't answer this clearly, we HAVE to do away with this CSD: I think it was always part of the idea that A7 would never be an unpassable threshold for an article, and I think it might be one now for certain things -- that's bad! Community input should occur at a certain point. Mangojuicetalk 20:58, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is, essentially, the reason why many people oppose A7 and its continued use: the idea that a topic can be notable without necessarily making a claim of notability. Original authors often are not aware of this requirement, and so don't feel compelled to provide such evidence. Deleting admins frequently exercise discretion in not deleting articles that appear to have an implicit claim of notability, or appear to have merit, but this becomes increasingly subjective and is not a protection against future admins with different standards deleting it. Supporters of A7 claim that it's necessary to shift the burden of establishing a claim of notability onto the article creators in order to prevent time-wasting proliferations of new pages on trivial subjects that are considerably more difficult to delete than to create.
How can A7 be fixed? For one thing, it would help if users could "disqualify" an article for A7 by leaving a note on the talk page saying that they believe lack of notability is not clear. This would help prevent the most deletion-oriented interpretation from trumping all others. For another, it would help to always notify article creators in the case of A7, in order to properly inform them of the requirement to include information on notability. Another would be to inform users on Mediawiki:Newarticletext of this requirement. Another, suggested by some users, is the use of "tag and bag", where an A7 article must be tagged and deleted by different users. Deco 22:31, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
A7 cannot be "fixed" in any specific way as currently written. The problem is inherent - it is unique from any other CSDs in its subjectivity. The only "fix" possible is a wholesale move of A7s to PROD, which lacks support due to people erroneously believing PROD doesn't work on these types of articles. --badlydrawnjeff talk 14:36, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yet more talk about G11 spam

I'm still seeing a number of articles tagged as spam that don't, in my opinion, qualify. Would it help to create a policy page containing spam criteria? Since we're supposed to "know it when we see it", surely we can articulate some of the characteristics of spam and incorporate that into the speedy criterion. Here are some of the criteria I've been using:

  1. article is written by user with same name as article (this is criterion alone is not enough to justify a speedy)
  2. article is written in first person (e.g., "Our mission is to...")
  3. article addresses the audience (e.g., "Widgets will meet your every need")
  4. article contains only external links (instead of wikilinks)
  5. article contains inflated/PR language (e.g., "visionary", "ground-breaking", "incredible", etc.)
  6. article is copied from official press release or website (when CSD G12 doesn't apply)

Etc., etc. Maybe I'm being naïve, but set rules like this might help cut down on the number of false positives I've been seeing. Input? Additions? Invectives? -- Merope 14:27, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think the only thing that's really going to help is direct education. I haven't been good enough about this myself either but we have to tell editors when we think db-spam is being misapplied: most of these people don't really read the CSD contents, they just plop "db-spam" down on a page and move on. Mangojuicetalk 15:02, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
A point about your qualifier to (1): in cases of G11 (which purposely excludes articles about people), then speedying on this basis is probably OK - accounts named after a company or product are effectively self-identifying as single-use advertising accounts (and should be banned anyway). It is only in the case of biographical articles written by accounts named after the person, that WP:BITE should apply. Newcomers to Wikipedia do often write about themselves before they learn better. A welcome and correction (userfying the article) applies in those cases, with a follow-up later to delete the pages if the user does not add any further contributions (this identifies them as a drive-by vanity spammer). Carcharoth 15:37, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  1. ^ I'm happy with how this conversation turned out, so this is not a slag on the big I.
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