Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 01:37, 20 April 2012

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 Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion and Misplaced Pages: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

G7 as evasion of G4

Suggest that G4 (Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion) be extended to incorporate articles that were deleted under G7 (Author requests deletion). Alternatively, G7 cannot be user on 2 substantially similar articles (but is that really checkable?). In the case of Robert Young (Pro Cyclist & Triathlete) we are currently in the 4th incarnation of an article on a sportsman who fails any notability standard, but for whom the various guises of the creator responds to the inevitable AfD listing by blanking the article, then re-creating it with a slightly different disambiguator a few days later. Thus AfD, and the threat of speedy deletion of a recreation under CSD G4, is evaded. This loophole should be closed. Kevin McE (talk) 09:14, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Simply let the AfD play out—don't accede to a G7 request either explicit or by blanking, which is what is happening right now at the current AfD. The situation is uncommon and for that reason I don't see any need to consider changing any criterion to address it.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 09:27, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

I agree: although I don't see it anywhere in WP:AFD, the {{afd1}} template says "the article must not be blanked... until the discussion is closed", and that is good enough justification to revert any blanking and decline any G7 while the AfD runs. There might be situations where it would be sensible to accept a G7 and close the AfD on an IAR basis, but there is no need to do that if it seems to be being used to evade scrutiny. JohnCD (talk) 09:44, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Indeed. We can even let the AfD run its course if the article is G7'ed halfway through the deletion process too; I don't know of any rule that disallows that, and if there were, we can safely ignore it, because it would be a bad idea to follow it. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 10:03, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Agree. A call for G7 (or U1 at MfD) should be taken as a highly significant !vote, and not be allowed to sidestep completion of a community judgement. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:44, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

• Just let the AfD run its course; the advantage of using an AfD in a case like this, is that subsequent re-creations can be treated by G4. The G7 suggestion should just be treated as a !vote for delete. DGG ( talk ) 04:43, 5 April 2012 (UTC)
• I was thinking about this thread when I closed this AFD. I think what I will do in cases like this is reopen and relist the original AFD and let it run its course. --Ron Ritzman (talk) 14:00, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

• I think that in that case, you should have deleted without reference to G7. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:29, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

• You're probably right and I might have if the 2 delete !votes weren't "per noms" but this way if someone writes a new article that is "referenced" and "accurate" (the nominator's concerns) it won't be subject to G4. In any case I'm watching the red link and if it's recreated in the same state that it was nominated in, I'm going to break out the NUCLEAR TROUT. --Ron Ritzman (talk) 01:59, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Old IP talkpages

One of the problems that we are building up over time is an accumulation of IP pages with warnings. This doesn't matter for userpages because the user page should relate to the same person, just maybe a decade older. But IPs get reassigned, and a page full of warnings from 2003 isn't likely to be relevant to an editor on that IP in 2023. I had thought that we were deleting some of the old and out of date IP talkpages, but it doesn't seem to be under any of the codes. Is this an acceptable use of G6? I was thinking maybe we should courtesy blank some of them, but presumably that would result in a "you have messages" bar going to the current user of that IP. ϢereSpielChequers 16:53, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

If I'm not mistaken, minor edits from accounts with the bot flag don't throw up the orange bar. Couldn't that be a way to blank some of these? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ron Ritzman (talk • contribs) 18:13, 7 April 2012‎

See also: SharedIPArchiveBot. →Στc. 07:42, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

I don't see a problem with G6 deletion of stale dynamic IP Talk pages - we don't need them for anything, and all they do is confuse newcomers reusing the same IPs. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:52, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

This request is coming over and over (please see the archives). There is a bot going around to archive them (SharedIPArchiveBot). There is absolute no reason to delete these pages, deletion does hide in some cases important tracks in vandal fighting, or important discussions which nonetheless were blanked. Deletion of talkpages is certainly not non-controversial - admins have been blocked for this. --Dirk Beetstra 11:04, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

OK, if they get archived, that's cool - but I do see a very big difference in importance between registered user ans static IP talk pages, and dynamic ones (though I guess the latter can be useful for investigating disruption from IP ranges). -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:22, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Things that I encounter include that I find an IP spamming a certain link. Sometimes, another IP has already been warned repeatedly that their link-additions (of exactly the same link) are considered spam, and have been told what would be the following steps. Since it is very likely, that both IPs are related to the same 'organisation', and often are the same physical person (in the best case, they both work for the same company, and the manager who suggested the first employee to spam the link did not tell that to the manager of the second employee - so maybe the second employee was not aware of the earlier spamming), I dare with the new IP to start immediately with stronger warnings (even if they are two independent employees of the same company, so not meatpuppets in a strict sense of the word, it is still company responsibility that they do not spam). If I find several {{uw-spam4im}} in series of some time ago, I will now issue a {{uw-spam4im}} immediately (or even blacklist) - if I can't find those I would start from the beginning. Also, that several such warnings to different editors have been issued at some time is used as evidence that blacklisting was the only option. When such talkpages were deleted, one loses the easy access to such tracks, and might start over (and the link may escape a well due blacklisting ..).

Although I would not object to deletion of talkpages of editors who were only warned for petty vandalism, there the problem is that quite often people revert spam and warn with the vandalism templates ({{uw-vand1}}, e.g.) - still those editors should see that as a warning that the edits they perform are not wanted, and a follow-up vandalfighter may use that as a reason to start higher.

Then you have the problems with editors removing warnings, but those are still found in the old revids of a page. If I feed you a list of 20 spammers, and you have 20 redlinks, you'd take a long time to find whether these spammers were warned before - with blanked or archived pages that goes already much faster (and one does not need an admin bit for that action, do note also that many of the cross-wiki active vandal fighters are not admin here).

All in all, some of those IP talkpages with warnings may be of interest, and it would take quite some work to see which ones. Quite some are related to petty vandalism and those are generally useless in the future (but as you said, IP-range vandalism might those also interesting tracks). Others are generally quite useless edits to talkpages and those could also be deleted. But it takes a lot of common sense to see what can be deleted and what not. One admin recently did a short run of deleting 20-25 pages, of which I immediately undeleted one since it did relate to a quite recent spam case, and 10-11 after a short discussion since I felt that they were not non-controversial deletions. I would therefore not delete lightly delete user talkpages under CSD criteria .. --Dirk Beetstra 12:04, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

But how many years would you go back and still find old IP messages useful? Three? Four? I'm certainly not interested in getting rid of such pages if they may be useful, But surely there is a number of years after which we can agree that such things are stale and best archived or deleted. If we have a Bot doing this uncontentiously for shared IPs after a matter of weeks, then surely after some period of years we can do the same for IPs that are not tagged as "shared". ϢereSpielChequers 12:14, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Yep, I can see there are good reasons for not deleting, and I agree that bot-archiving is the way to go. But I also like the idea of archiving very old IPs not marked as shared too - the vast majority of even "static" IPs do eventually get re-allocated, even when one doesn't (eg a company address), there's a good chance it's a different person using it now. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:20, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

WereSpielChequers, I have seen links being blacklisted after massive sockpuppetry by users, which were over a year later de-blacklisted (by an unknowing admin who needed one link on the site), resulting in a restart of sock-spamming only a couple of weeks later. Spammers make money with their links - that is a massive incentive to do it. There is no real gain in deleting these pages, it does not free serverspace, it might take away some 'you have new messages banners' (if that IP was indeed never used in those years to browse Misplaced Pages). And that while there may be some cases where there is interest in that old data. --Dirk Beetstra 12:19, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi Beetstra, I'm not trying to hide messages that are recent enough to be relevant. The gain is that the current user of the IP probably has nothing to do with warnings from many years ago. So getting rid of such old warnings may make the site more attractive for potential IP editors. I'd be happy to exempt IP pages with spam warnings or put the test at a long enough time period that spammers would have lost patience - Would you be concerned if this was only being done to IP pages that had not been edited in two years? Or if we had some formula such as "no talkpage activity for a year and no spam warnings for more than four years? ϢereSpielChequers 14:04, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

No, you'd have to exempt spammers, not talkpages that have a spam-warning on it (see above). And if the messages are archived, then they are not bothering a new user. However, even if they are three years old, those messages may be evidence for e.g. blacklisting, or may be a reason for blacklisting. And note, spam is an example, there can be other reasons as well. Believe me, even deleting talkpages older than 5 years will result in cases which should not have been deleted because there is information there that is needed. And on top of that, it does not gain a lot, especially not when the page is already archived and replaced with a suitable, general template. --Dirk Beetstra 14:08, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Oh, and spammers don't loose patience ... they earn money with it. --Dirk Beetstra 14:09, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

OK so can I take it that you'd be OK with extending the archiving from shared IPs to all IPs, providing we don't actually delete warnings? ϢereSpielChequers 14:38, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

GOOD GOD DO NOT.

Do you all have any concept of the size of the English Misplaced Pages's database at this point? Over 64GB of uncompressed wikitext! That archive bot just creates an additional page for every single IP talk page. You're quite literally suggesting making the problem twice as large as an effective solution. The answer is to delete the pages. End of story.

Dirk has been going on about the spam problem for years, but it's a red herring in the context of this discussion. Over ninety-nine percent of these IP talk pages have nothing to do with spam (or any pattern of behavior) and can safely be deleted. I know this from sampling. Dirk knows this from sampling. It's completely outrageous that a vandal edit five years ago still warrants a separate user talk page that will be kept around indefinitely. It's patently absurd to suggest that it should now have two pages devoted to it. --MZMcBride (talk) 14:49, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

MZMcBride, yes, but get to a good and strict set of rules. I've seen an admin doing 25 deletions a couple of weeks ago - one was an active ongoing case of spam. 10 of them contained discussions where the editor was in an active discussion. I doubt if you get to 99%. You have to get the rules for deletion to a strict set, and I doubt that you can do that with a speedy. I am fine with the deletion if there is a strict subset, but look further than only spam pages. And I tell you, deletion of certain of these tracks does hamper our efforts. --Dirk Beetstra 05:38, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I encourage everyone to look through Misplaced Pages:Database reports/Old IP talk pages. Sample the collection and see what percent of these pages need to be kept. Does someone adding this vandalism really need to have an IP talk page forever? This is insane, and of course the database report only shows the tip of the iceberg. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of pages like this. --MZMcBride (talk) 14:56, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

If that was a userpage for a registered account then I'd not lose sleep about it being there indefinitely. But IPs shift so the someone who has that warning now is unlikely to be the same someone, and yes I agree that such talkpages should go, and whilst we need safeguards to keep track of spammers do we really need three year old talkpages of warnings for juvenile vandalism? ϢereSpielChequers 15:43, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

I don't have a strong opinion on the deletion of IP talk pages that contain nothing but very old warnings, except for:

1. Their speedy deletion should be authorised from WP:CSD (not WP:UP, or anywhere else);
2. There should be a new criteria, not G6, because G6 is already very broad. If G6 were to cover old talk pages, I expect some will believe that G6 can cover nearly everything.
3. "Old" would need a precise definition. I would be confortable with "one year of no edits from the IP since the warning". (If the IP is editing, replace the old warnings with a welcome).
4. There seems to be a case for the deletions/blankings to depend on the warnings. High level spam warnings seem to have more historical interest. On this point, should the highest level of spam warning call for inclusion of the name of the current owner of the IP? I also guess that the historical activity of the IP is an important factor. If the IP inserted a hundred spam links, I imagine that records would be useful. If the IP made a few isolated vandalism edits, long term records seem of less value. If the IP appears to be a static IP associated with a company, I'd want to keep the records. If the IP belonged to a library or school, years old warnings will be of little continuing value.

As per Dirk, I am not convinced of the need. Are there so many that there is an actual, described problem? Why is bot-blanking not sufficient?

I really do not see the point of archiving (copying than blanking). I thought a starting point to the logic here was that the warnings are not associated with the current owners of the IP. If so, what is the purpose of the archive in addition to the talk page history? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:11, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

I completely agree. I think we need to get back to the reason we are here which is to build an encyclopedia. Misplaced Pages is not an experiment in permanently archiving IP talk page warnings. To this end, I have personally blanked tens of thousands of IP talk page warnings, or at least replaced them with the "older warnings" template. However, to the extent that I have seen many thousands of pages consisting of nothing but one or two warnings from 2005 or before, for pages that have never been blocked or identified as shared IP addresses. I think the most sensible practice is to delete such pages outright, and there should be no procedural impediment to doing this. bd2412 T 22:47, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

I agree. Archiving to a subpage makes no sense here (and actually makes the problem worse, as discussed above). Blanking the page is a step in the right direction, but what I think people fail to realize is that keeping these pages around does have an actual cost. If this were a few hundred pages, it would be negligible. But we're talking about hundreds of thousands of such pages. The people working on database dumps most certainly notice these pages. It's simply good housekeeping to delete these pages after a specified amount of time, with no recent edits from the IP, etc. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:59, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Hundreds of thousands of such pages impacting people working on database dumps sounds a fair reason to delete instead of blank. I have started a draft criterion page here, & see below, for others to edit directly: --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:25, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Draft Old IP talk page criteria

An old IP talk page must not be speedy deleted under this criterion if:

• The IP has been active in the last 12 months;
• There is non-templated, human-to-human, correspondence in the talk page history;
• There is a record of a level 4 warning in the last 5 years or there is a record of a level 3 spam warning ({{uw-spam3}}) in the last 5 years

Other old IP talk pages may be deleted.

Special cases may be taken to WP:MfD for discussion

Note that a warning may be WP:REMOVED once the user has read and is aware of its contents

I have some qualms about the proposed criteria. Many of the oldest IP talk pages pre-existed bots and warning templates, and consist (or consisted before blanking) of nothing more than an editor literally saying, "Hey, you, stop vandalising". Even human to human contact, even a short conversation, is not worth preserving if it is several years old and represents the only activity relating to that IP address, for precisely the reason that IP addresses are dynamic, and can not be presumed after several years of complete dormancy to have any connection to the person whose activity prompted the original message. It would probably be useful to get a list of IP talk pages indicating the date of the last editing of that page, last activity by that IP, and last warning or block (if any). If we can find common patterns, we can craft a policy specifically addressing what those patterns show. Cheers! bd2412 T 03:01, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't consider "Hey, you, stop vandalising" on its own to be human-to-human contact worth preserving, but getting into this sort of detail will cause the criterion to fail new CSD criterion #1 "Objective" (top of this page). Possibly an important factor is whether the IP ever signed their talk page. I would recommend beginning cautiously. Start with the deletion of IP talks pages on a tight criteria, and then see how many are left. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:10, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I agree that it makes sense to begin with tight criteria and knock out what fits there (which will be, obviously, the least worthy of preservation); I think we still need data to generate metrics, and that the measuring stick should be the length of inactivity on the page, and of the IP. bd2412 T 03:34, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

If the IP ever made constructive edits that stuck, and the IP contributed to its own talk page, then I don't think the talk page should be deleted, ever. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:59, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Yea, I don't follow what the problem is, here (Sorry, I probably missed this somewhere up above). What's wrong with simply blanking the page?
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 05:24, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

A single piece of vandalism five years results in a talk page that exists forever. These pages don't need to sit around indefinitely. They serve no purpose and can create problems when there's such a large volume of them. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:03, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

MZMcBride - I do not have a problem with simple vandalism. The problem that I have with it is that this is very, very difficult, if not impossible, to write down as a speedy-criterion. I know that the larger volume of these pages are either 'hi, I exist' edits to talkpages, or single on-off warnings for poop-vandalism. Those can be deleted. I only object to the deletion of those talkpages which are related to any form of systematic vandalism (and spam is the easiest example of it). That makes these deletions controversial. Although that the error rate on blind deletion of every talkpage of any IP that has not been used for longer than 1 year is relatively small (I guess in the order of 1-2%) .. it is that 1-2% that makes me uncomfortable to have it as a speedy. And do note, I know that ~75% of the talkpages of IPs with a spam warning are actually more of the type 'no, your YouTube link is not necessary here' .. and even those could go. I do see that these pages can go, but there is a small, though significant and necessary, percentage of pages which should not go. --Dirk Beetstra 06:10, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

It seems we overlapped in posting replies. :-) I just posted below. I think you may be right about articulating this as part of the speedy deletion criteria. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:12, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

No, I still disagree. The point is not who is now on the page, the point is the editor that was using the account. And the point is not that the editor has a spam3 or spam4 on their page. 10 spammers with a spam1 on their page are also a reason to blacklist, and 10 spammers with a vand1 on their talkpage are also a reason to blacklist. Also, an IP shifting copyvio vandal is also a reason to have higher sanctions (which need to be visible for transparency), same goes for a NPOV-vandal. 12 months is not enough, spammers are sometimes active for years, spammers come back soon after years long blacklistings are undone. These tracks are necessary for a plethora of reasons. You are also ignoring all users who have a block-log, which are also cases which may return and which are getting hidden by deletion. Deletion is harming more than that it would help. If people are loading the database, they can ignore talkspace, or can run a deletion script on their resulting database, but I, still, strongly object to deleting any talkpages with warnings where the warnings are for spam, npov, copyvio, coi or any other form of non-petty-vandalism-vandalism, whether after 5 years, even after 15 years. --Dirk Beetstra 05:33, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I believe this almost amounts to creating shrines for vandals. In a lot of cases, you can see every contribution made by the IP address and evaluate based on this. If the edits are clearly simple vandalism, does the talk page need to exist forever? --MZMcBride (talk) 06:06, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

No. --Dirk Beetstra 06:10, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

• Blank as absolutely necessary, I suppose, but talk pages shouldn't be speedied. - jc37 05:34, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

  Why's that? --MZMcBride (talk) 06:06, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

  I think deletion of a talk page should always require discussion, unless privacy/blp issues necessitate it.

  I understand you're trying for WP:DENY, but I've always been of mixed minds on that. We should have a way to retain the history for future reference, without setting up "shrines", as you call them. And so to me, deletion would seem to be counter-intuitive. And at the very least should need a discussion first. - jc37 06:18, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I would be very, very comfortable with a replacement of the contents with a kind of welcome template, telling in a small text at the bottom that there is data in the history of the talkpage for those who are interested in the data. I even would not care if that is done after 30 days of inactivity from the IP / 30 days after the last edit by the IPto the talkpage of the IP. But I have no faith in having speedy criteria for the deletion of these pages. --Dirk Beetstra 05:41, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I'd be happy with that. My preference would be after a somewhat longer period, I think my home IP is often stable for a year at a time, whilst when I use mobile broadband I suspect it is very unstable. So blanking a stale IP talkpage and replacing it with a welcome after a couple of years inactivity would make sense to me. ϢereSpielChequers 11:07, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I have been collapsing old warnings (especially for shared IP's from educational institutions and very dynamic IP's (starhub)) for a while now when I happened across them (mostly through AIV). Shouldn't something like that be sufficient? How about a bot that specificaly archives warnings templates once they are older than x (say, a year, or some other metric, I could live with leaving at most 10 warnings, and archiving everything over a year old), and creates a link to the 'warning archive'? Is there any reason for deletion then? MZMcBride, you say these can create problems. What kind of problems? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 11:47, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I should start out by noting that I'm rather deletionist. ;-)

When I said "problems" above, there are a few different things that I was referring to.

First, just in terms of sheer size, these old IP talk pages make up a significant percent of the pages on the English Misplaced Pages. Using the most recent stats and a back-of-the-envelope guess, I'd say we're talking about somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 pages. As someone who's recently been investigating ways to search through all current wikitext in a fast manner, this quantity of pages has actual impact on what's possible and at what speed.

Second, these pages are largely unpatrolled and come with the same kinds of problems that unpatrolled pages have elsewhere. They can be filled with test edits, vandalism, attack pages, copyright violations, and the like. Most are automated or semi-automated warnings, but having gone through a good number of these, some are not.

Third, while this isn't necessarily a "problem," I'd say that deleting these pages after a certain amount of time is just good housekeeping. Any database accumulates over time—that's the point, after all. But it's perfectly healthy to perform maintenance and cleanup on the database routinely. While MediaWiki doesn't completely delete the data (it's moved to the archive table and a logging row is created), it will remove these pages from subsequent database dumps, which will in turn remove them from mirrors and other third-party uses. Even internally, when there's less data to output, things go faster. That is, with enough maintenance and deletion, the time it takes to create database dumps could markedly decrease. This is the same reason that database maintenance is done elsewhere with other types of databases. Cleanup improves performance.

I'm in complete agreement that these pages should be kept if there's any question about their future value. While I personally don't find value in them, I recognize and appreciate that Dirk and others doing anti-spam work and other good work do rely on them. However, both in my opinion and what seems to be the general consensus, a lot of these pages are simply not valuable. It's not worth blanking them and having millions of blank pages lying around. They're almost all the result of scripted warnings from tools such as Twinkle and Huggle, or bot messages from ClueBot, et al. If the IP address is actively editing or has any kind of significant contributions, keep the talk page! Of course, without a doubt. But if we're talking about a single vandalism edit made in 2007 that resulted in a quick warning via Huggle or Twinkle, I don't see any reason to keep that page in every database dump forever. That just seems insane to me and frankly unsustainable in the long term. While these pages can be somewhat filtered (as Dirk notes), it isn't and shouldn't be the responsibility of third-party users to keep our database tidy or to duplicate cleanup efforts.

That's my general view on the issue. I've also started working on a longer essay at WP:OLDIP, if you're interested. Let me know if you have any further questions or need any clarification about any of this. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:44, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

A guideline?

Hmm, maybe you're right regarding a speedy deletion criterion. This may be something best left to admin discretion. I don't think trying to prescribe a set of strict criteria will ever work. The draft criteria above are already very complicated. It's ultimately about using good judgment and evaluating the contributions of the IP. Perhaps a guideline could be written instead? --MZMcBride (talk) 06:11, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Sounds like a way forward. --Dirk Beetstra 06:13, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I rewrote Misplaced Pages:Old IP talk pages just now. It doesn't incorporate all of your points (or mine), but it's a start. I'll take another look at it tomorrow when I'm not so tired. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:34, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Hello. I've made some edits to the 'essay'. I hope they're agreeable, since I can't say I've read everything above. A couple of things I'll mention. I have quite an interest in old pages like these, both in terms of good housekeeping as MZMcBride puts it above, but also tracking long term patterns of various sorts over multiple ranges. I would generally agree with Dirk, whatever he's saying now. For me however the ones you can't delete are IPs explaining why they made an edit, on their own talk page. Some of them are priceless. I've seen a few get deleted in the past, probably with a bot and a sql query. Another thing I'll mention is that sockpuppetry was previously explicitly an issue; this time it's hardly mentioned. Half of those sockpuppetry user pages should go, imo, but that's another issue. Oh and these criteria look very similar to what they would be for indef'd vandal accounts. Just saying. -- zzuuzz 07:06, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

an idea

I dunno if this would fly, but... why do we have IP talk pages anyway? Yes we're the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. But one can edit without needing a talk page.

IPs choosing to not register really probably don't need a personal talkpage.

As an option, when asking for the removal of IP talk pages, we could ask the devs to open access to Project:Unblock requests as a special page for anyone who is blocked. (Though that isn't entirely necessary as we have a specifically purposed mail list.)

It's not as if they have a watchlist or any of the other features that come with an account. And collaboration can happen on one of the myriad other talkpages, whether in article space or wikiprojects, etc. - jc37 06:31, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I think the biggest reason for having IP talk pages is so that IPs can have the "new messages" bar when there's a message delivered to them. This is particularly important in the case of behavior warnings. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:35, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

(ec)Hmm, no, some of us do choose to edit as an IP, and not register. I know some who are very active editors, and we do need to communicate with them too (and we need records for that). Moreover, where would you leave a warning if such an editor needs a warning? --Dirk Beetstra 06:36, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

What might be worth pondering, is that an IP-editor should not be allowed to edit until they have read the message on their talkpage (or at least, loaded their talkpage, as we don't know whether they actually read what is added).. --Dirk Beetstra 06:38, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Stale warnings may not be relevant to the current editor on that IP. For example I've now stopped logging in from insecure IPs. I recently spent a quiet hour in an airport terminal fixing typos and in similar situations in the future I think I'll stick to IP editing. If someone needs to send me a message whilst I'm editing that way then fair enough and they'd need an IP talkpage to do so, but I wouldn't need to see old IP messages. ϢereSpielChequers 11:21, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I was considering the issue of warnings. and I'll just say: I'm not sure. Though I suppose we could do it in some way similar to the "you have new messages" banner (having it link to the warner's talk page, and maybe a button confirming the warning has been read). And the warning would be logged like the block log (an IP warning log). Simple, standardised, and saves on kb : )

And I disagree that IPs "need" a personal talk page for collaboration, any more than they "need" a watchlist. - jc37 06:46, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

• Shared IPs such as schools definitely need a talkpage, if only as a place to notch up the warnings and past blockmessages. But there have been longterm valuable members of the community editing from stable IPs and using the talkpage, and of course there have been instances where IPs have been incorrectly warned and need a place to respond. ϢereSpielChequers 11:21, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

• All of this seems a bit OT here, but what the hell, right? The way that I've always thought about things, IP talk pages really belong to the "community" anyway, so I have no qualms about imposing any sort of standards on them, in terms of content or deletion or anything else (I'd put known static IP addresses in that category as well, by the way... although we could certainly be more lenient with them, I think that they still belong to the project rather than the unregistered user. Those who have a problem with that can simply register a user name). I can at least understand the perspective that brought all of this up in the first place now (the whole DENY aspect is a perfectly reasonable concern), although it's nice to see this moving away from being a speedy deletion criteria. I don't particularly care if "old IP talk pages" are deleted or not honestly, but I didn't understand the desire to do so at all, prior to asking. I still think that blanking is perfectly sufficient (I think that adding some sort of standardized IP talk page template, similar to what is done with known school IP pages, is something to seriously consider), but if you guys want to delete them... I'm certainly not going to stand in your way. It's your time to use as you like, after all. *shrug*
  — V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 20:17, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

On A9

A9 seems oddly specific, and seems like it was just created to combat people using Misplaced Pages to promote their garage band. Shouldn't this rule apply to any work of art? --WikiDonn (talk) 17:17, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

CSD criteria are deliberately specific, and shouldn't be construed broader than the letter. Is there an actual need to have a possibility to speedily delete other works of art? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 17:21, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

I think you hit the nail on the head. Many new editors write about their favorite band (or their own band), and then they start writing articles about the band's records. — Malik Shabazz /_Stalk 17:23, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

If I recall correctly A9 was created with the thought that if a band is non-notable, it is unlikely that its musical recordings will be notable. →Στc. 20:02, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that's correct. Which is also the reason why it does not cover any other works of art. Regards SoWhy 20:05, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Redirects to itself?

I find it REALLY annoying when an article redirects to itself. Could something be added for that? If there already is something, and I missed it, I'm sorry... Youngril 23:20, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

If an article redirects to itself, without an intervening redirect, the link is bold. If it points to a redirect it's a different issue. There are ways to catch that, but they're not automatic. --Walter Görlitz (talk) 23:29, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Circular redirects are already, well, not forbidden but an editorial problem to be fixed immediately when noticed. It should never happen but sometimes gets missed when cleaning up after a merger or other major change to the pages. Rossami (talk) 02:58, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Correct. They are certainly not a problem for CSD. Usually the problem can be fixed by redirecting it to the proper target and therefore this is the correct solution. Regards SoWhy 20:24, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Three new criteria for speedy deletion

I think that this new criterion should be added for speedy deletion, in order to deal with various issues on Misplaced Pages which result in many articles being PRODded when they should be deleted straight away. Here are the criteria:

G13. Unambiguous support of morally repugnant views.

Any pages which unambiguously:

1. Condone, advertise, or support the views of individuals or organizations who perform crimes against humanity or acts of terrorism,
2. Condone, advertise, or support the performance of crimes against humanity and acts of terrorism themselves, and/or
3. Intend to incite the reader of the page to perform the said actions,

shall fall under this criterion. This criterion is not applicable to pages which cover the topics of terrorism and crimes against humanity in accordance to Misplaced Pages's policy on writing articles with a neutral point of view. The definitions of "crimes against humanity" shall be according to the definition provided in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal court, which is available in the lead section of this Misplaced Pages page, and the definition of "terrorism" shall be the one which has been mostly accepted by the international community with some disputes with regard to applicability to nation states, available here.

A11. Words, organizations, and religions which have been clearly been made up in one day.

Articles which discuss obvious neologisms, organizations, or religions, which have clearly been created and have existed for only a short period of time, for which the scope of knowledge of the concept is limited to an extremely small group, and in a fashion which makes it inherently impossible for reliable sources to give significant coverage (e.g. the word "kiurreqhdqq" made up by a small set of students in one fifth-grade classroom), shall fall under this criterion. Any articles which can credibly indicate why the subject of the article is important outside of the context of the extremely small group in which they originated shall not fall under this criterion and are eligible to be nominated for a proposed deletion, or, if criteria for the proposed deletion are not met, a full articles for deletion discussion.

:A12. Articles that state clear logical impossibilities.

Articles whose sole purpose is to advertise logical impossibilities shall fall under this criterion. "Logical impossibility" shall be defined as everything which contradicts established and uncontroversial common knowledge (e.g. "the Earth is round"), obviously false political offices (e.g. the President of Japan), false holdings of actual political offices (e.g. Ui Reqqq is the President of Mexico), false holdings of false political offices (e.g. Bob is the current King of Argentina) The definition expressly excludes religion, for which logical impossibility is extremely subjective and untestable. The domain of applicability for criterion shall specifically exclude all articles which treat logical impossibilities with a neutral point of view.

I believe that these will greatly reduce the load on AfD by eliminating all of the articles which can be caught by this broad net, and use AfD for its original purpose of bringing community scrutiny to more contentious deletion discussions. Wer900 _{essay on the definition of consensus} 19:45, 15 April 2012 (UTC) e.

And a fourth criterion

:G14. Mislabeled official-status pages.

Wer900 _{essay on the definition of consensus} 19:59, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

A11 To the extent not already covered by Criteria A7 or G3 Hoax, Neologisms can be tricky to determine if they are notable, there is no bright line and so aren't a good candidate for a CSD criteria.

A12 Criteria G3 Hoax already adequately covers this.

G14 Criteria G3 Vandalism covers this, a proposed or claimed policy that doesn't rise to the level of clear vandalism should be discussed not summarily deleted.

G13 It seems like the applicability of the criteria would be in the eye of the beholder. It would be an invitation to delete potentially controversial articles. Is this type of article even a common problem? Monty₈₄₅ 20:11, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

I think you misunderstand what CSD is about. The policy explicitly is designed in a way so that the criteria are not "broad nets". Anything that needs an admin to make a decision that might replace a discussion at AFD is not a valid criterion for speedy deletion. As Monty says, G3 covers both the proposed G14 and A12; A11 was proposed and rejected multiple times, please consult the archives for very very very long discussions as to why that's not a good idea. As for the proposed G13, if they really only serve to disrupt, G3 covers them. But as Monty says, I really doubt those are a common problem and the top of this very page says that new criteria have to be for pages frequently deleted at XFD - to an extent that XFD cannot handle it anymore without the criterion. None of your proposed criteria fit the requirements laid out at the top of the page (G13 fails #1, #2 and #3, A12 and G14 fail #4 and A11 fails #1 and #2). Regards SoWhy 20:22, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

I have retracted A12 and G14. However, as for A11, I know that neologisms in and of themselves have been discussed and consensus has not been found to support the issue of that becoming a criterion for speedy deletion, but my criterion is different. It specifically defines a line which a term has to cross (ability to be covered by reliable sources) which does not include the whole category of "neologism" but only a subset. As for G13, "crimes against humanity" are by definition covered in international statutes, and while the international community has not agreed on any set definition for terrorism, a good definition for the purposes of this criterion would be . Both are clear-cut, mostly accepted by the international community, and are hence not a broad net for deleting everything. Wer900 _{essay on the definition of consensus} 20:45, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

An admin reviewing a speedy request cannot judge whether something might be covered by reliable sources - that's why we have discussions in the first place. I understand what you intend to cover with that criterion but the wording might encompass any term that the reviewing user simply doesn't know. If the term is clearly made up in a disruptive way, G3 covers it. The rest can be handled by PROD and AFD. Regards SoWhy 16:33, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

G13 is redundant to G11. Promotion can extend to POVs, see WP:PROMOTION. →Στc. 20:58, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Oppose due to risk that these might become broad nets. Also once you start needing to check reliable sources to see whether something should be deleted then you really need to use AFD or prod, not speedy. "Unambiguous support of morally repugnant views." One persons morally repugnant view will be different to another, if we implemented this and then re-staged the image filter debate we would risk having both sides delete user pages setting out the case for the other's position. As it is we already do this sort of deletion for pages advocating paedophilia; If you are hoping to treat other views in a similar way you would really need to be specific as to which views should be unacceptable here. Consider the endless arguments as to who is or isn't a terrorist re various national and religious conflicts I think we need to be very cautious here. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the neologism one, but in practice we shouldn't do this as we've had recent and very contentious neologism deletion debates - speedy is for instances where it should be uncontentious for an admin to delete. ϢereSpielChequers 21:07, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

I have changed the definitions. They are now extremely precise and based upon international law or what is almost international law with some debates on applicability. Remember, these are just draft proposals.Wer900 _{essay on the definition of consensus} 21:23, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Can you provide some examples of AfD discussions, which resulted in article deletion, that would meet your proposed criteria G13? Monty₈₄₅ 21:29, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

MFDs would also be acceptable as examples of things which would have uncontentiously have been deleted by these extra criteria. However I'd add that these various proposals entail a lot of extra complexity, and the speedy deletion rules are already too long and overly complex. Really we should be aiming to make them simpler, and at a minimum every change that adds a sentence should remove at least as much verbiage. So to add whole paragraphs you would need not just to demonstrate that such uncontentious deletions were indeed uncontentious, but also that they were already common enough to justify adding these clauses, and that there were less frequently used clauses which could be removed in order to make room for them. BTW AFD's role is not just "bringing community scrutiny to more contentious deletion discussions" Originally all deletions went through that sort of process in order to see if there was a consensus for deletion. AFD remains the default process for deleting articles. CSD is just there for some tightly defined types of deletions where the community has come to a consensus that admins can be empowered to delete such articles. That's why it isn't a problem that many AFDs are actually quite uncontentious. ϢereSpielChequers 22:59, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

I have found AfDs which fall under G13:

• The Jihad Foundation Organization in Mesopotamia - defended al-Qaeda against the Western press
• Army of God against Jews, Jihad, and Atheists - sounds like a (non-notable) militant group's POV article.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Wer900 (talk • contribs)

The first of those was in 2007, the title was kept as a redirect so that needed an AFD - speedy deletion rarely leaves redirects behind. The second was deleted in 2008 but could have been speedy deleted per G7. How many examples can you find so far this month? We are halfway through April 2012, if you can formulate a clear simple rule that would have enabled several April deletion debates to be pre-empted by a speedy then it might be worth seeing if we can incorporate such a change without making the rules as a whole more complex. But if the only effect would be to speedy one article every few years then it is much better to leave those sort of things for AFD. ϢereSpielChequers 09:19, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

This proposed G13 is unworkable. CSD criteria must be instantly recognizable by any responsible editor reading the page. They must be self-evident and not require detailed prior knowledge. We are not all lawyers who have a deep understanding of any statutes, much less the international definition of a "crime against humanity". Anything requiring this level of detailed knowledge also requires group discussion.
The proposal for A11 fails because as individuals we are remarkably bad at identifying things which "have clearly been made up in one day". A number of articles have been nominated for deletion on that basis and discovered to be legitimate, though obscure. This is the same reason why hoaxes are explicitly not speedy-deletion criteria. The only ones that are sufficiently obvious to qualify for this criterion already qualify for deletion as vandalism. Rossami (talk) 03:41, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

• These are all way too subjective to be speedy deletion reasons. These are all excellent reasons to give for an AFD, though.
  — V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 03:51, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

• The proposed G13 is completely unsuitable. Leaving aside the issues of interpretation (it isn't reasonable to expect the reviewing admin to be familiar with international criminal law, for instance) this situation simply doesn't arise frequently enough to warrant a CSD criterion. Even the least frequently used criterion (A5, if anyone's interested) gets over 100 deletions a year. Pages supporting war crimes don't appear at a rate of anything like one a week. A speedy deletion criterion for made-up concepts would get a lot more usage and is frequently proposed, and I would support such a thing in principle, though I don't like the wording of this one. Hut 8.5 11:24, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Rewriting proposed criteria for speedy deletion

G13. Support of terrorism, violence, hatred, and crimes against humanity.

Any page which defends or condones terrorism (defined as "actions specifically designed to induce shock or fear") or crimes against humanity (defined as "systematized and non-tranient commission of violent acts for political aims") on account of racial, ethnic, cultural, tribal, political, and/or religious factors, defends or condones the organizations of individuals who commit these actions, or attempts to incite hatred or violence against a particular racial, ethnic, political, cultural, tribal, or religious group, shall fall under this criterion. Pages covering these actions with a neutral point of view shall be specifically excluded from this criterion.

A11. Words, religions, organizations, or concepts created in an extremely short period of time without hope of coverage by reliable sources.

If an article covers a subject of the title, knowledge of which is limited to an extremely small group in which it originated, and which clearly has no hope of being covered by reliable sources and which gives no indication of importance at all, shall fall under this criterion. If an article can demonstrate credibly the importance of the term, it does not fall under this criterion. No page, even technical or academic terms, falls under this criterion if it can demonstrate importance outside of the extremely small group it originated in or is attested to in reliable sources.

The new definition for G13 covers many, many more articles (at least a few hundred) and very likely even more PRODs. The new A11 definition is more constrained, specifically excludes technical terms, and requires a clear impossibility for a term to be covered by reliable sources; it does not just say "neologism."Wer900 _{essay on the definition of consensus} 22:36, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

• Even after rewrite, these two proposals fail to satisfy the requirements for a good CSD criterion. The proposal for G13 excludes itself by definition. The correct repair for a page that can be written in a neutral tone is to do just that, not to delete it. (Or, if the title itself is problematic, to redirect the title to a better, more neutral title.) The definitions of things which qualify are less specific and no longer require a law degree to recognize but at the expense of being more subjective. The current wording would result in speedy-deletion nominations for any page that someone thought positively defended the Gulf War, pretty much any page about Israel or Palestine and, well now that I think about it, almost any page on any armed conflict in the world. No matter how clear the situation seems to you or I or how neutrally the page is written, someone will accuse the side they don't like of those sorts of actions. It might be appropriate to delete the article but that does not mean that it should be speedily-deleted.
  A11 still fails for the same reason that "hoaxes" fail - as individual editors, we have a poor track record of making the kind of distinctions required. Too many pages are nominated at AfD for exactly this kind of reason and are discovered during the discussion to be real and significant, though obscure. Rossami (talk) 02:36, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

What of the pages which do now qualify as G1, G12, or A7, but still have political messages? If someone is creating a page which unambiguously supports terrorist organizations, Islamophobic organizations, or the like, and inciting terrorism, hatred, or crimes against humanity, should it have to go through the full AfD process or even be seen for a few days while it is nominated for a PROD?Wer900 _{essay on the definition of consensus} 22:03, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

If it does not fall under G10 (attack pages), G11 (spam) or G3(vandalism/hoax) and nobody performs an wp:IAR deletion, then such a page would indeed end up at AFD/PROD. However, this would only be a problem if it happened regularly, as somebody said we don't make CSD criteria for situations which arise once or twice a year. How many AFD's/PRODs of such pages can you find dating from 2012? Yoenit (talk) 22:26, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

• why this is completely wrong in both principle and application
  • A11, original version, or in its revised version, "clearly been made up in one day" is too vague a criterion--clearto whom? there are 700 active administrators. The term we use otherwise is unambiguous, nd anything unambiguously of this nature is already deleted as vandalism or test page. Words, phraews, memes, jokes, etc. should not normally be deleted speedy as made-up, because made-up in cases like those tends to mean "I personally have never heard of it" Very few of these ever reach AfD, and they tend to have snow closures, which isn't much of a burden. Of all the things we have to concern ourselves with getting rid of, these are by far the l3east troublesome.
  • G13 no matter how worded is an offense against NPOV. A page about the purposes and goals of a terrorist organisation can both advocate their views, and describe them. All we need do, as for any promotional article, is remove the advertising--and it would be exactly the same as if they were out to advocate the brotherhood of mankind. Too many things have been called terrorist. some countries have a very broad definition of crimes against humanity, which tends to mean crimes against the part of humanity that they consider all reasonable people should affiliate with--which is a clear matter of bias. We already have far too many decisions showing some sort of bias, and a rule like this no matter how worded would encourage to it. Rossami gives a few, and I can think of others. It's the totalitarian definition of free speech--free speech for all except those who would destroy the established society. Articles intended as abusive of defamatory are already well dealt with by speedy, and whether what they abuse is good or bad is irrelevant to their unsuitability for an encyclopedia.
  • The real problem at AfD is not those things which clearly need to be deleted. It's the ones that aren't clear. To the extent there's a burden of too many AfDs , it's the ones that are nominated for deletion when they could be improved. To reduce the burden on AfD , require WP:BEFORE--then the stuff that really does have no sources for notability & no hope of improvement or merging will be obvious & easily deleted, and the others won't be nominated. DGG ( talk ) 04:50, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Diffs for proposals

This page is prone to endless debates about proposals that fail at the first hurdle. Would people mind if I amended the edit notice to include at least point three from the section at the top of the page, by requiring proposers of new criteria to link multiple AFDs or MFDs from the last week that would have been speedied by their proposed criteria? ϢereSpielChequers 13:09, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

The linking thing seems a bit wonky. I wouldn't mind anything that anyone could come up with to slow down the endless proposals, though. What about a specific sub-page? (Misplaced Pages talk:Criteria for speedy deletion/proposals?)
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 15:48, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the benefit would be of a designated subpage, it wouldn't get the same watchers for a start and how would one steer proposals for new criteria to it? As for why diffs are useful, if someone can't find recent AFDs or MFDs illustrating their opportunity to add more speedy deletion criteria, then we know their idea won't fly. ϢereSpielChequers 15:58, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

I agree with WSC. If you cannot provide links to at least a couple of recent XFDs, there is no point of further discussing the proposal, so requiring those diffs to be provided might limit the amount of proposals to ones where the proposing user can actually demonstrate the need for the change. Regards SoWhy 16:24, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Possible change to G11 (spam)

I have a thought on revising G11 (spam) to be more objective:

A new article about a company, organization or product that is unsourced or whose only source was written by said organization, company, or product AND that said article provides a link or any form of contact information.

Since anyone using Misplaced Pages for spam will provide a link or contact information for what they're advertising, this should insulate well-meaning new editors. Consider this an early first zeroth draft. Any thoughts? D O N D E groovily Talk to me 19:52, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

I like the idea of making G11 more objective as currently there is a judgement call between promotional and excessively promotional. There is a problem with the written by bit as we usually don't know. Of course we assume and we may usually be right, but at present it doesn't matter whether the article is written by a company, a subcontractor of that company or indeed a fan. Even if we broadened "written by said organization, company, or product" to "written by said organization, or someone commissioned by said organisation" we'd still be creating a loophole which would allow editors to decline speedies because they were fans not current employees. As for the contact details aspect, it depends on the product sold. A G11 article about a cigarette or chocolate bar would be highly unlikely to contain any contact details as the manufacturer doesn't sell directly to the public. ϢereSpielChequers 20:25, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

I also like the idea of making that criterion more objective. The second clause, however, would appear to contradict existing practice since the majority of our notable WP:CORP articles since a link to the company's website in the references section is routine. That reference arguably meets your "contact information" rule. I don't have a better idea, though. Rossami (talk) 20:54, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Adding that any negative information about the subject disqualifies the article from this criteria perhaps? D O N D E groovily Talk to me 21:40, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Some samples from the last couple of hours:

• American Unit Multiple non-company sources, article written by experienced editor, might not meet deletion criteria Note: after further thought, this article did not qualify for speedy delete, but is now nominated for deletion D O N D E groovily Talk to me 00:37, 18 April 2012 (UTC)
• AVJ Infotech Obvious spam, includes street address
• Digital Arrow Obvious spam without contact info
• MYTHLOGIC Obvious spam, one sourced provided and that was company website
• Yasir Moize Khan Niazi no contact info, but wasn't spam, was A7

So, this criteria seems like it would stamp out most spam, but some might get missed. The American Unit, in particular had a lot of sources, but a lot of business journals and the like. Adding a business journal as a self-source would make things complicated. D O N D E groovily Talk to me 21:42, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

we will never find a criterion that stamps out 100% of spam, and simultaneously fails to delete promising articles. What I'm,much more concerned with here is the probability that this criterion would remove promising articles. First, as Rosaami indicated, calling something spam because it includes the web site is nonsense, because an article on a business or the like is supposed to include the site if there is one. And as for the street address, though it does not normally go in the article, there is a specific place for it in the infobox. Second, Calling it spam because it does not list third party sources is wrong, in both directions; very often the sources are perfectly obvious and can easily be added, so at the most this would be a reason for prod--and prod is what normally does happen in such cases. The Misplaced Pages rules for sourcing that seem so obvious to us are not that obvious to outsiders. Even for unsourced BLPs, something potentially much more dangerous to have around, we adopted the rule of sticky prod to provide 10 days for someone to find them--and about half of such do get found in that period. And very often just the company website is enough to indicate the very high likelihood of clear notability for a company. Nor will it remove commercial spam very well--the professional pr writers are very adept at finding ostensible 3rd party sources that nonetheless are not truly independent or substantial. Third, such an article if about a company or whatever that deserves an article can often be fixed--the current criterion includes that the article must be unfixable by normal editing--which includes removal of inappropriate material. The stuff that is G11 spam, is usually such because there is no core of encyclopedic content or that too much rewriting would be needed. Before we adopt any rule of this sort,we should examine it on a sample of not 4 or 5 , but several hundred cases. If we were to have such a rule, it would go much more on the nature of the content than such matters as unreferenced.

I'm as concerned about spam as anyone--I spend most of my time here dealing with it. But I'm also concerned at the variability of our G11 and G7 decisions for organizations. There are too many admins here who don't want to keep an improvable article, because they want in some way to punish the person with COI who did such a bad job of writing it. DGG ( talk ) 00:03, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

The problem is when you get an article about a company that passes A7, but that is so promotional that there would be nothing left once all the promotional language was removed. When every sentence is full of flowery marketing speak, and there is hardly an objective word present, what choice is there? At that point it either needs to be deleted, or written from scratch thereby rewarding the blatant COI POV pusher... Clearly we shouldn't use deletion as a punishment, but its sometimes the only reasonable result. Protecting an article with a single reliable source, but where every sentence is blatant advertising doesn't seem wise. Monty₈₄₅ 01:12, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of established articles - should there be a time limit?

Lately I've stumbled across a number of articles that have existed on Misplaced Pages for many years that are suddenly speedy-deleted (in my view, typically inappropriately). For example, see True Religion. I restored this article and deleted two or three peacock sentences, but it has $360 million in annual revenues and stores in 50 countries and is an article that obviously should have been cleaned up instead of deleted. Thinking about this general problem, it seems crazy to me that an article that has been on Misplaced Pages for seven years is likely to be an appropriate, uncontroversial deletion target. Has a time limit ever been proposed for ad/non-notability/etc categories (as opposed to attack pages and copyright violations, which should be deleted on site) so that there is at least five days' notice through PROD before articles that have been around for years are deleted? Calliopejen1 (talk) 17:06, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Support as to G11. G11 is by far the most vague deletion criteria, and a time limit on that one would reduce the risk of it getting used inappropriately. Generally I think a better approach is to help educate admins on proper speedy deletion procedure so that they stop making inappropriate deletions. Has anyone left a note on that admin's talk page letting them know of the error and explaining why it was a bad choice for G11? Monty₈₄₅ 17:39, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Support, except for U1, G6, G8 and G10. Copyvios can be blanked, with everything else the risk of incorrect deletions outweighs the occasional benefit of finding an old article that genuinely qualifies for speedy. I've caught fellow admins speedying per A7 articles that had survived AFDs before now, so yes I'd agree to this reform. ϢereSpielChequers 22:23, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I would not be in favor of a firm rule. I do not see how these are any different from new articles, for which an equal effort should be made. For G11, Misplaced Pages is overloaded with promotional articles entered several years ago , when we were not properly looking out for them, that never would be accepted under current standards. Many of them can be rewritten, or at least improved considerably, and I have begun doing it as I come across them, but some of them are as hopeless as some of the new ones . (for the article you restored, you added no third party sources even though they are easily findable in GNews; this is not my idea of a satisfactory rescue.) A7 has a somewhat different problem: our standards of notability have changed in various directions for various types of articles, and something which seems to clearly show no importance may well have sources for them, so an attempt should almost always be made to find sources for notability. For copyvio, the advantages of blanking apply equally to new articles. That admins speed an article that has passed an AfD is a different problem--possibly we should find some of forcing the history to display before the deletion can proceed.

For the more general question of inconsistency between admins, the solution is education in public. We should abandon the rule that we must consult with the deleting admin, thus facilitating restoration when one of the two admins thinks it justified. We should still require notice, because the notices should appear on the talk p. both so the deleting admin can contest it at AfD, or that the message will be communicated visibly. But when it's a persistent practice of an admin, the only good solution is to bring the errors to deletion review, instead of just restoring them, and let us all see them. The reason this is so infrequent is because Del Rev unfortunately has often not overturned speedies on articles that would clearly pass speedy, but equally clearly not pass afd. The standards there can of course be changed the way any practice can be changed, by greater participation; in this case, participation of people who do not speedy deletion on the basis of I don't think its a supportable article at AfD. DGG ( talk ) 01:30, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Hashtag ABJproblems

My article is intended to inform people about the Ultimate Scavenger Hunt and help my team gain points, please do not delete my article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by USHkris9 (talk • contribs) 23:18, 19 April 2012 (UTC) Note: I believe this user is talking about Hashtag ABJproblems, THE USH! (Ultimate Scavenger Hunt!), which was speedy deleted under A7 earlier today. D O N D E groovily Talk to me 00:49, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

• USH, thanks for joining Misplaced Pages. Could you please provide some background on the Ultimate Scavenger Hunt you refer to? Since the page was deleted, I obviously can't see it, so it would help to know what the page was about. Also, when you post, please place ~~~~ at the end, which will place your name on your post. Thank you, D O N D E groovily Talk to me 00:53, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Well, since I can see it I looked at it. It's an article about a scavenger hunt at a high school, with absolutely no indication of significance; it is indeed intended to promote participation by the eds.classmates. There is no way in which something like this is a fit subject for an encyclopedia , and it was rightfully deleted. I urge you to contribute more usefully, and I suggest you start by adding sourced material to articles in your field of interest. (And, btw, the place to have asked this is the p. of the deleting admin, User talk:Gogo Dodo, who would no doubt have given you the same advice; I've told him about this disucssion in case he wants to add something. DGG ( talk ) 01:37, 20 April 2012 (UTC)