Wikipedia talk:Speedy deletion

See also Wikipedia talk:Speedy deletions for discussions which took place in 2006-07 before it was redirected here.

When to draftify instead of delete?

Are there any cases where an editor is obliged to return a draft/sandbox version of a speedy deleted article (e.g. under A7) to its creator, or is it just common courtesy to do so? Xpander (talk) 20:28, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

There are cases when a speedily deleted article should not be restored to a draft/sandbox (e.g. copyright violations and attack pages) but I can't think of any cases where it must be undeleted without a consensus to do so (e.g. at Wikipedia:Deletion review). If someone asks in good faith then it is, as you say, common courtesy to restore unless there is a reason not to - pages that clearly could become a good article about a notable subject or otherwise useful to the project need a much stronger reason than other pages, but in all cases the reason should be articulated to the requester if it is not fulfilled. Thryduulf (talk) 20:12, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

A7 wording

The A7 wording currently comes up as "Article about a real person, which does not credibly indicate the importance or significance of the subject."

The comma shouldn't be there as it's a defining relative clause. Valenciano (talk) 12:11, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

I don't see that exact text in the policy. For a simple incorrect comma, I'd encourage you to WP:BE BOLD and fix it, even in a core policy. Tazerdadog (talk) 12:02, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Please provide a link to the quotation. Grammatically, if the quote is correct, it should be changed to "Article about a real person that does not credibly indicate...", removing the comma and changing "which" to "that".--Bbb23 (talk) 12:54, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

That wording is used in the deletion logs, eg. "00:29, 6 May 2025 Bbb23 deleted page Chameli Basu (A7: Article about a real person, which does not credibly indicate the importance or significance of the subject) " Pawnkingthree (talk) 00:03, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

That summary is what comes up when an admin clicks the link in {{db-person}}, which in turn wraps {{db-a7}}, so this is a matter for Template talk:db-meta. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 04:29, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

@Tazerdadog I would have, but it wasn't clear where to do that. I'll go to Template talk, then, thanks. EDIT: I see someone has beaten me to it. Valenciano (talk) 08:10, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

R2

SilverLocust: The example you put in the edit summary when you re-inserted the parenthetic statement is already covered by the exception that redirects to the Template: namespace are not speedily deleted. Green Montanan (talk) 19:55, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

That's true. T:MP is an example to the talk namespace. JensonSL (SilverLocust) 22:51, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

OK, so at least T:MP is covered by the parenthetic statement that you re-instated. However, it was up for discussion in a Redirect for Deletion, and it survived because is was determined that this redirect is a very unique case because the Main Page is not an encyclopedic page, yet it resides in the main namespace allocated for encyclopedic articles.

So would there be a point to keep the parenthetic statement in R2 just for this one special case? Green Montanan (talk) 13:14, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

The introduction to the policy already states "If a page has survived its most recent deletion discussion, it should not be speedily deleted" so a specific exception for T:MP is not technically necessary. —Kusma (talk) 15:28, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

Proposed U6 criteria for WP:FAKEARTICLEs

A lot of the time at WP:MFD, user pages come up that are copies or forks of content that has been copied from elsewhere on Wikipedia, which the user does not appear to be keeping for any constructive purpose. I would like to propose a new criteria for these, as they're often pretty uncontroversial and it would significantly cut down on volunteer time spent at MfD. The proposed criteria might go as follows:

U6. User page that is duplicative of material which already exists in another namespace with no constructive purpose
User page whose content entirely or nearly entirely consists of a forked article or other content that presently exists outside the creator's userspace, where the user shows no intention of merging the content back into the existing page.

This would allow us to speedily delete pages that are obvious and incontrovertible violations of the WP:FAKEARTICLE guideline, while not applying to constructive instances of copying content into userspace where a good-faith editor intends to workshop it before merging it back into the extant mainspace article. This proposed criteria is also written to avoid overlapping with other extant criteria, particularly G4, as it requires that an article or other content exist in another namespace that was copied from. If a case is more complicated than that, it would need to be taken to MfD.

Pinging User:Robert McClenon here, as he initially suggested this criteria at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Doritoboritoa121. silviaASH (inquire within) 23:05, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

After a bit of thought about the wording, specifically choosing the words "outside the creator's userspace" so that it applies not only to users copying articles but also drafts, project space stuff, the content of the user pages of other users, and so on, and doesn't apply to, like, users copying their barnstars to a subpage in their userspace or something like that. silviaASH (inquire within) 23:21, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

Why not just blank and redirect them to the mainspace content then, if they're stale userspace drafts? And if they're not stale, and the editor is still working on them, you'll need to prove that they aren't going to merge their improvements back to the mainspace article, which would require an MfD anyway. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 23:28, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

I guess that's a good question, and the only answer I have for that is that, yeah, that's probably a good idea. I've thought about it a bit more and I'm not certain how useful this would be, so we probably don't need it. silviaASH (inquire within) 23:43, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

I think this is overbroad as written. Depending on whether the admin pays attention to the "with no constructive purpose" that's in the title or only the body of the rule, and whether they consider it "constructive", this could incorrectly apply to customized templates and such in userspace (for their userspace or for substing elsewhere). Also, without actually checking with the user it may be difficult to evaluate the "no intention" part. At the very least, I think you need more wordsmithing before this is both Objective and Uncontestable. Anomie⚔ 23:57, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

That's all pretty fair, I think. I have some thoughts about how it could be reworded to be more objective, but I'll wait to see if anyone else comments with opinions about its necessity or lack thereof first. silviaASH (inquire within) 02:48, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

Looking through the MfD archives, I don't think something this broad is necessary. The pages that seem to be uncontroversially deleted and which are not covered by an existing criteria (particularly U5) were all copies of articles and seem to be very old. Restricting the proposal to copies of mainspace content that have had no non-trivial edits in a long time (at least 2 years, maybe even 5) would significantly narrow the scope without seeming to exclude anything it seeks to delete. It would still need careful wording to make it objective. Thryduulf (talk) 10:52, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

I can see no advantage of recommending speedy deletion over blanking of such pages (and WP:FAKEARTICLE explicitly mentions {{Userpage blanked}}). I certainly don't want people going through other people's userspace to determine what the other user's intentions are. So it is a no from me. —Kusma (talk) 11:57, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

That's a good point. Maybe a specific template (or parameter) for state article drafts (to be applied to anything that both looks like an article and is stale, regardless of apparent intent) would explain why the blanking happened, but it's not vital. Thryduulf (talk) 13:30, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

That makes sense. If no one else comments in favor of this proposed criteria, I'll probably be abandoning this proposal. silviaASH (inquire within) 16:46, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Thank you, User:SilviaASH, for raising this issue. These are not stale article drafts that we are talking about. These are copies of mainspace articles in user space. That is, the article was already in article space when the copy was created. We at MFD don't know why the copies are created. Sometimes they have been in user space for years before being sent to MFD. Sometimes a user registers an account, creates a userspace copy of an article, and then makes no further use of the account. We at MFD don't know why the copies were originally made. They are redundant forks of the original article. In my opinion, they are Objective, Uncontestable, Frequent (as in frequently sent to MFD), and Non-Redundant. Could they be blanked and redirected to the original article? Yes. Would that imply that they had a purpose? I don't know. These are copies that never had any purpose, and they are more common than one would expect unless one has been reviewing MFD, where they go to be deleted. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:37, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

The problem is (and this is why I attempted to flesh the criteria out to something more than that) sometimes the copies are intended for a constructive use. See for example Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:DecafPotato/drafts/Celeste. So I was trying to write the criteria to allow instances such as these. The notion of having it only apply if the user has not edited the copy within a certain period of time seems to be the most workable proposal for allowing this.

Another potential use case for this criteria would be to deal with copies of content from elsewhere, for example drafts copied from draftspace to avert G13 deletion or otherwise avoid scrutiny. After some thought, though, those cases are probably much less common, and it would be better to deal with cases like those individually. silviaASH (inquire within) 16:43, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

I think the procedure at WP:STALEDRAFT is sufficient. Routinely deleting such pages at best wastes a tiny amount of extra space on the server and at worst drives away good editors returning from inactivity. —Kusma (talk) 17:58, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Fair enough. I think I agree with this, so I will not pursue this proposal further. If anyone else feels that this criteria is a good idea, they are welcome to borrow and adapt my proposed U6 wording and revive the discussion. silviaASH (inquire within) 20:00, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

I think the issue is point 4 from the procedure. It is being followed and so we are regularly seeing quite a few copied main space articles that have been abandoned for some time with little to no changes, and no attribution being nominated for deletion at WP:MFD. These are invariably deleted. -- Whpq (talk) 20:09, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Wouldn't adding the obvious attribution + blanking be faster (one edit) and more helpful than nominating for deletion (even for speedy)? I can see the attraction of speedy over MfD, as it wastes fewer people's time, but blanking or leaving alone wastes even fewer people's time. —Kusma (talk) 20:53, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

After some thought (yeah I changed my mind about not pursuing this further I guess), I came up with a potential U6 wording that would address these issues such that it deals with only the most unambiguous cases.

U6. User page that is duplicative of a current or previous revision of a mainspace article, where no substantive edits have been made
User page whose content entirely consists of a current or previous revision of a currently existing mainspace article, which does not substantially differ from that revision, and which has not been edited by the user in at least six months.

The stipulation that it is only eligible if it is a direct copy of a present or previous revision of an article, without any substantive additions or changes, naturally excludes any copies of mainspace articles that were at one point being worked on in good faith with the intent to merge them into the mainspace article, but abandoned. The "not edited in six months" stipulation offers some leeway to the creator, similar to G13, but is more forgiving since while G13 clears abandoned draftspace articles procedurally, this proposed U6 would have no such process attached to it and would require someone to have found the copied article and then tagged it themselves, but only allow them to do so after six months have elapsed. (The window could be tightened or loosened to like three months or a year or whatever of course, but the same principle would apply.)

To put it simply, this would only apply to userspace drafts where someone simply copy-pasted an article into their userspace without making any substantive changes ("substantive", so U6 would still apply if it was like 99 percent exactly the same but they went finding-and-replacing a specific word as a joke or something) and then never touched it again. I think this would work to avoid any issues with being too broad and deleting the good-faith work of well-meaning editors, since it would only really apply if the creator didn't put any work into it. Anything more than that, and the regular process for dealing with userspace forks would apply.

Also should go without saying, but placing U6 on a userpage would require the tagging user to specify in the template which revision of which article it's a copy of, similar to how one supplies a link to the past deletion discussion when tagging G4 cases. silviaASH (inquire within) 00:43, 15 May 2025 (UTC)

My immediate reaction is that some indication that there is a time component would need to be stated in the bold title otherwise there will be nominations of pages that are much too recent to qualify (and some admins will delete them). Perhaps something like "U6. Stale, substantively unmodified duplicates of mainspace content"

My next thought was "no substantive edits" and "does not substantially differ" are not quite the same thing - e.g. if substantial edits were made but reverted, need to pick just one. Beyond that I need to think more about whether I support it in principle or not. Thryduulf (talk) 03:17, 15 May 2025 (UTC)

I would support it being refined to "stale, substantively unmodified". Maybe don't have any exact time window. However it seems from most of the comments here that, outside of the regulars at MfD, the community would probably not support adopting this criteria, so oh well. silviaASH (inquire within) 02:22, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

Honestly, I have never even understood what the point of all this is. Seems like a time waste for everyone involved if they just keep looking through everyone's userspace to find a copy of an article just to delete it. It's not like you are saving Wikimedia's server space by doing this. All those articles still stay in the servers, just not visible to you, yet visible to admins. Unless someone is abusing the freedom of having userpages by creating a copy of every article they come across, this entire process is a waste. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 13:34, 15 May 2025 (UTC)

I really have never understood what the purpose of even taking these to MFD is. If there's some sort of problematic attribution issue; blank the page. There are standard CSD criteria for the truly problematic stuff; if it needs to go away but doesn't meet the CSD that's what blanking is for, or MFD in an extreme case. Going around ragpicking old userspace stuff seems like a very unproductive use of anyone's time to me. Hog Farm _Talk 13:40, 15 May 2025 (UTC)