Wikipedia:Don't assume negative notability
 | This is an essay on the deletion policy. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Sometimes when a new article is created, it's quickly deemed as lacking notability. So it gets tagged for speedy deletion. Or maybe it doesn't qualify for speedy deletion, and so it's proposed for deletion (prod). Or maybe it's 'known' that a proposal for deletion will simply be removed, so, off to Articles for deletion (AfD) it goes!
Right?
Alas, all too often, this happens. An article is seen that, from its title and contents, fits a likely or believed pattern of articles about non-notable subjects, so it's put in the round file - sometimes less than ten minutes after it's created, even while the author is still working on expanding it, and sometimes when a search would show notability, or at least the potential of such. Not everybody works on a page in userspace to get it Wiki-Ready before having it go live; in fact, newcomers to Wikipedia may not even know you can, and could easily be scared off by having their tender young contributions bitten in this way.
And this applies to older articles stumbled across, as well. Yeah, that article's been there for years without references - that doesn't mean it can't be referenced. And this other article doesn't assert notability - that doesn't mean its subject isn't notable.
So assume good faith, take a look to see if the article's subject could be notable after all, and give a new article a little time before playing at cybermen and shouting "DELETE!". And please, don't automatically assume non-notability. After all, when you assume, you make...