Wikipedia:Speedy deletion of drafts

This is an essay.

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.

Some drafts are so obviously inappropriate for Wikipedia, that on discovery they should be able to be deleted without the extended ceremony and processes of MfD.

New CSD criteria for draftspace

Past attempts to introduce Draft CSD criteria "CSD#D*" have met strong opposition due to particular reasons:

Too broad, could be used to delete something that might not need to be speedy deleted;
Overlaps with a G criterion
Proposal is not worded right.

CSD#G*

So, the G* criteria are not to be touched by D* criteria. They are:

- G1. Patent nonsense
- G2. Test pages
- G3. Pure vandalism and blatant hoaxes
- G4. Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion
- G5. Creations by banned or blocked users
- G6. Technical deletions
- G7. Author requests deletion
- G8. Pages dependent on a non-existent or deleted page
- G9. Office actions
- G10. Pages that disparage, threaten, intimidate, or harass their subject or some other entity, and serve no other purpose
- G11. Unambiguous advertising or promotion
- G12. Unambiguous copyright infringement
- G13. Abandoned Drafts and Articles for creation submissions

CSD#A*

The A* criteria that largely could be adapted are:

- A1. No context
- A2. Foreign language articles that exist on another Wikimedia project
- A3. No content
- A5. Transwikied articles
- A7. No indication of importance (people, animals, organizations, web content, events)
- A9. No indication of importance (musical recordings)
- A10. Recently created article that duplicates an existing topic
- A11. Obviously invented

Broadening the A* criteria into D* criteria probably requires considerable tightening of the language, as leniency in DraftsSpace, for better or worse, is considerably more generous than in mainspace.

CSD#U5

- U5. Blatant misuse of Wikipedia as a web host
  (by a non-contributor, includes CVs)

U5 is often considered expandable to cover blatant notwebhost violations by non-contributors, even in draftspace.

The new criterion criteria

New criteria proposals are expected to address the new criterion criteria. They are found here: Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion/Header, transposed here:

Read this before proposing new or expanded criteria

Shortcut

WP:NEWCSD

Contributors frequently propose new (or expansions of existing) criteria for speedy deletion. Please bear in mind that CSD criteria require careful wording, and in particular, need to be

Objective: Most reasonable people should be able to agree whether a page meets the criterion. Often this requires making the criterion very specific.
Uncontestable: It must be the case that almost all pages that could be deleted using the rule, should be deleted, according to consensus. CSD criteria should cover only situations where there is a strong precedent for deletion. Remember that a rule may be used in a way you don't expect, unless you word it carefully.
Frequent: Speedy deletion is intended primarily as a means of reducing load on other deletion methods such as Wikipedia:Articles for deletion and Wikipedia:Proposed deletion. These processes are more discriminating because they treat articles case-by-case, and involve many points of view; CSD sacrifices these advantages in favor of speed and efficiency. If a situation arises only rarely, it's probably easier, simpler, and fairer to delete it with one of the other methods instead. This also keeps CSD as simple and easy to remember as possible, and avoids instruction creep.
Nonredundant: If the deletion can be accomplished 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. New rules should be proposed only to cover situations that cannot be speedily deleted otherwise.

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.

this header: view • edit

DraftProd?

Drafts have no watchers. Slapping a DraftProd tag will alert no one. It will be a de-facto speedy deletion with a one week delay. PROD does not require objective criteria, and a pseudo-deletion PROD process will be rejected as a ono-object speedy deletion process. It will be far easier to introduce a more carefully written DraftSpeedyDeletion criterion with a one-week review period, than to introduce DraftProd.

Collection of opinions

User:Legacypac is a prominent draft-crap-cleaner itching for more efficient deletion methods of crap. His wishlist for objective criteria for new criteria clauses for speedy deletion are especially invited. All others are invited to suggest objective new criteria, or non-criteria, or ideas on boundaries between what should definitely be deleted, what should be deleted only on a case-by-case basis at MfD, and what should definitely not be deleted.

Opinions of SmokeyJoe (talk · contribs)

Most NOTWEBHOST violating material in draftspace, if it is not speediable under a G* criterion, then it does little harm to wait 6 months for G13 to come into play. However, there are few reasons for acting sooner. These include:

A new user currently active is writing material that is clearly not going to be accepted. Writing D* criteria would enable objective clear communication to that effect to be given to the newcomer.
Many Wikipedians are very uncomfortable with an automatic 6 month NOTWEBHOST-violating allowance per page, as is allowed in practice. For these, I would much prefer to have an applicable D* criterion than to have these things fed to MfD. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:15, 26 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Opinions of Legacypac (talk · contribs)

Thank-you for starting this. Some key points to consider:

1. Any given topic “X” is either WP:N AND WP:V right now or not. Most experienced users can quickly figure the difference, with some investigation for the edge cases.

MfD could be a good place to sort out the edge cases if we keep the obvious deletes out of MfD
We need to delete WP:NMFD as misguided and an impediment to building a better encyclopedia.

2. Mainspace is the best place to develop N+V topics because many editors will find the page and improve it incrementally. This is the core idea of Wikipedia and why it is successful. AfC and NPP processes should be aligned with this idea.

3. There is a perennial backlog at AfC, a poor new user experience, and few experienced users find it interesting. We handle nearly every draft (other than the rare immediate accept) at least once to decline and once to G13, and often many many more times. All the resubmissions clog the system and frustrate both reviewers and creators.

80-90% of AfC submissions could be handled usually just once as either:

a) topic appears notable (would likely survive at AfD) and verifiable and is not copyvio or already existing in mainspace = PASS Let the big world of editors improve the page. The big world might find the topic is not stand alone notable and redirect it, which is perfectly fine.

b) topic is clearly NOT Notable or Verifable and title is not a good redirect = SEEK DELETION via CSD or MfD. We should clearly tell the creator why the topic is not suitable rather than giving them fail after fail that encourages them to fix the unfixable lack of notability.

c) for the edge cases FAIL so the creator can address the topic better for reevaluation. If they don’t work on it G13 rolls around in 6 months. I expect most of these will be BLPs.

I submit we should PASS a lot more pages quickly and stop failing them for reasons that are not deletion reasons (ref formating for example). We should seek deletion on far more pages to discourage wasting time on unsuitable topics. We should FAIL far fewer pages, only the edge cases or obviously incomplete pages submitted to soon.

4. There is an unbelievable mountain of useless crap in userspace that obscures some really harmful content (attack, copyvio, hoaxes etc). There is even some good articles in userspace! To surface the useful and delete the harmful requires cleaning out the useless clutter. Otherwise we just keep reviewing the same useless clutter while looking for harmful amd useful pages. No one should have an expectation that Wikipedia to host and preserve their test edits or random stuff they dropped here one day and forgot. If you edit in mainspace your work could be deleted seconds later, but some editors think OTHER PEOPLES garbage requires preserving indefinately untouch when clearly the users who put it there could care less about it.

We need to look at Userspace subpages as just a place to work on draft material for use in mainspace in the near term as part of collabertive effort. Userspace is not owned by the user.

Legacypac (talk) 10:29, 26 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Opinions of Example (talk · contribs)

copy this section for each different user offering a contained opinion.

References