Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

— Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:10, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion (AfD restrictions)

• Some context for why I started this thread: For years I've participated at AfD and have seen the problems caused by canvassing over and over again. So question #2 has long been on my mind.
  What has me thinking about question #1 took place over the weekend: a Wikipedian created an illegitimate
  sock puppet for the sole purpose of nominating for deletion three related articles: Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, Corina Newsome, and Earyn McGee. It's not the first time I've seen people use AfD to nominate groups of related articles in bad faith, nor the first time I've seen it used to to target biographies of women or people of color in particular. It didn't take long to cause a stir on Twitter, etc., perceived as yet another example of systemic bias on Wikipedia.
  Of course, those of us insiders know that this was actually an example of process working in the end -- that this was just one illegitimate sock puppet causing trouble, and the articles had little chance of being deleted because it's "not a vote" and whatnot. Here's the thing, though: it's still damaging. Bad faith nominations are not only a huge time sink to the community, requiring people to make sure process does win out; it's also a terrible experience for the article creator/editors, it's a terrible experience for the article subject, and it's a terrible experience for anyone else who looks in and cannot be expected to see what we see. They see Wikipedia working on deleting a topic they care about, and cannot be expected to understand the "don't worry, it's not a vote, and process will win out" part that we might say to ourselves while grumbling.
  So I, for one, do think it's time to raise the bar a bit. How much to raise it is the big question as far as I'm concerned. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:10, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]

On the last two of those, unless I'm missing something, that was an empty nomination ? I would say that admins should feel empowered to close empty or bad faith nominations, especially if they believe they may draw external involvement (Which should be taken as a given for any BLP for anyone of an underpresented minority on WP). If an experienced editor believes the article does merit deletion, let them open a fresh deletion discussion with proper rational (and there should be no penalty here if that's opened even the same day as the rapid closure of the previous one). We may not catch all the bad faith ones, if they are nominated with a reasonable cause (as the first of your three appears to be on a first quick read), but at least we shouldn't let the clear bad ones linger for the 7 required days and cause long term problems --Masem (t) 22:26, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Right. Like I said, process usually wins out, but why is this permitted to begin with? How often do you see successful, good faith, policy-based nominations from new users, as compared to the kind of problems caused in this example? How many of those positive examples could be handled through other means (e.g. requesting an AfD at WT:AFD, PROD, etc.)? My central point about question #1 is about new users' nominations being a net negative, and that the negative effects probably reach further than most people would think, because we tend to think of AfDs as being behind-the-scenes projectspace business. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:32, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think the deep problem is identifying bad faith nominations. I worry that closing empty nominations is not a robust solution to the problem, because it doesn't take much for disruptive editors to learn how to give the appearance of a rationale. Just quickly looking back over the (all presumably good faith) AfDs I've participated in this year, the modal deletion rationale is typically one sentence along the lines of "This article does not meet the notability guidelines", and (very reasonably) nobody blinks an eye when that's written by an editor with a few hundred edits who stacked a dozen pages in AfD in one afternoon with identical rationales -- most of the time, that sort of deletion is just a user who spent a few hours helping to build the encylopedia by patrolling for non-notable pages, and decided they found several. So I worry that resting everything on an idea like "admins should delete any rapid string of AfDs by a new editor with empty/totally trivial deletion rationales" just moves the problem to a question of how to tell the difference between good faith (but perhaps rather lazy) tagging on the one hand, and disruptive trolling on the other. In this situation, for example, it seems reasonable to guess that with a bit more effort the person who started this AfD might have been able to write a persuasive appearance of a sincere deletion rationale, since they openly admitted to being a sockpuppet during the AfD (as was noted at AN). And that same AfD but with a policy-motivated deletion rationale would still have been subject to all the same canvassing, spam, and trolling. - Astrophobe (talk) 23:06, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Empty nominations are easy. And given that most experienced editors know of the BEFORE process and how to nominate, I could see that when we have a sub-par nomination (no sign of prior research, maybe just claimed "person is non-notable", and a quick check of the target AFD page shows 20+ sources with clear reliable sources being used, they can do this rapid close and add something in their close "Any experienced editor, believing this was a valid AFD, may reopen/restart this". Heck, that's even better, just have the rapid close if the admin thinks it is a bad faith AFD, but if an experienced editor thinks it is valid, they can ask to have the nomination opened again on the admin's talk page, mimicking the process one uses to question the standard admin closure process.--Masem (t) 23:49, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@

blacklisting The Epoch Times, I can understand why someone wanted to shield themselves from the backlash of a self-righteous Twitter mob crying racism and sexism. --bender235 (talk) 13:57, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

I would never base a "bad faith nom" on the basis of the account only, unless I know that editor has some type of block/warning or the like specific on using AFD in that topic area or in general. (eg, someone that I know has a AP2 DS on them that they are not to make any edits in that area, and they nominate a topic clearly in the AP2 topic area, that's a bad faith). Barring knowledge of that, the only assessment of "bad faith" is the nature of the nomination and the actual sate of the page - is there a massive disconnect that indicates that this may be a POINTy or nonsense AFD that AFD doesn't need to waste its time with. I agree we should not judge the editor - IP, new editor, or experienced - otherwise in evaluating whether an AFD is good or bad faith normally. --Masem (t) 14:07, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That is good to know, but I felt like having to emphasize it because the general conclusion in WP:ANB seems to have been along the lines of "three AfDs were started by sockpuppets accounts with a vengeance," i.e. not worth being taken seriously (I'm quoting Silver_seren specificly, but it was more or less the general opinion). --bender235 (talk) 16:20, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, if this solution I suggest is implemented, and one finds that a single user has been submitting several AFDs in a row that have been quick closed as these bad faith noms and suspects possible sock activity, by all mean then check to see if the editor is a sock. But the editor should not be pre-judged outside of any known DS/bans attached specifically to that editor's name if we all for evaluating bad faith noms. --Masem (t) 16:28, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• First off, I would be against semi-protection by default because many articles listed for deletion are from new editors, and they should be able to participate in the deletion discussions of their articles. While this doesn't always wind up for the best, I imagine locking them out of the discussion or bunting them to an unseen talk page would have even worse outcomes. However, I would be in favor of raising the bar for filing a deletion to extended confirmed, as virtually all new page patrollers will meet that standard easily, and it will create a significantly higher hurdle for bad-faith actors. This won't stop PROD or CSD tagging - but that's a feature, not a bug. Both are easily removed in cases of abuse, and let people that are not extended confirmed and still want to help address the worst new articles. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 23:03, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• This is a good point. I actually intended to be less specific than "semi-protection by default" in order to allow for that one exception (article creators/editors weighing in), but forgot when it came time to hit save. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:35, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Thanks for starting this discussion Rhododendrites, and I think it's worth reinforcing that this problem of targeted and high-profile bad faith deletion spam is not at all new, and that with the growth of conversations about Wikipedia across other major platforms, I expect this sort of canvassing to only grow more severe. Per the opening paragraph of the discussion and per The Squirrel Conspiracy, I expect that I would agree with a proposal to require a higher bar to begin AfDs. But requiring a higher bar to contribute to AfDs is, to my mind, much more complicated. On the one hand, I am really sympathetic to the argument that it would be dangerously discouraging to new editors. I remember vividly my early experience editing Wikipedia: I believed that about ${\displaystyle 3/4}$ of whatever you do on this website will get rapidly undone for completely opaque reasons, with lots of giant paragraphs full of
  WP:BB from their very first edit, including writing pages from scratch, and if their page comes up for deletion they should be allowed to participate in the discussion on it. From personal experience I believe that good faith participation in AfDs by brand new editors who don't yet have a clue is a huge net good for the project, especially as a hugely important (if often unpleasant) learning experience for them. Nothing motivates you to wade deep into notability policy like trying to come up with an argument for why your afternoon of work shouldn't be undone. Having said all of that, not raising the bar for AfD participation leaves half of the problem we're talking about unaddressed: it means that canvassing good faith and constructive deletion discussions is still just as easy, whether you're trying to sway the discussion towards keep or delete. It's very easy to imagine a good faith editor questioning the value of a page about someone with tens of thousands of twitter followers and that person reacting by canvassing support, just as happened in this instance, in which case we would be in the same exact position that we're in now. So I would be very interested in discussing further policies that would allow people with a sincere connection to the page to participate, while ruling out the kind of canvassing that is already a very serious problem and that looks like it will only get more serious over the next few months and years. - Astrophobe (talk) 23:44, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• I honestly don't see it as a problem. Most of the time canvassing is obvious and the topics are notable. I actually got stuck into the project because I wasn't specifically canvassed, but I read something about whether something should be on Wikipedia off of Wikipedia. Not being able to participate may create a "walled garden" effect for the entire community. That being said, there is a bad faith nomination issue, it was obvious in the cases you mentioned, and we need to do a better job of a community of not defaulting to "no consensus" when a deletion discussion goes off the canvassing rails, but I don't really support increasing the standard threshold. For instance, this should be very unlikely, but there may be instances where a low profile BLP realises there's an attack page written about them here and needs to deal with it. I might be willing to support a specific action item, though, such as a flag when a non-extended confirmed user starts an AfD. SportingFlyer T·C 01:47, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• I would oppose these type of changes. Its hard enough to delete an article as it is. Think about it, it only takes one person to create a bad article, but many to have it deleted. And when we can't agree and the AfD is closed as "no consensus", it gets kept by default. This actually contradicts
  Rusf10 (talk) 02:07, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]

• can show up in any discussion anywhere sure, but in structured discussions they can be more disruptive. it's also a place where it's much less likely they'll be able to contribute positively. in an article talk page, there's at least an argument from the perspective of knowing the subject; arguing about notability is a bit more, well, technical from a procedural standpoint. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Let me amend
  single-purpose accounts. Unfortunately this strategy had success, and as I already elaborated elsewhere, I am afraid that without proper adjustments on our part, this will be the "new normal," i.e. the new go-to strategy for medium-scale Twitter personalities who always wanted a Wikipedia shrine for their personal vanity. --bender235 (talk) 04:07, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]

• Right, canvassing for keeps is a huge problem. And isn't that what Rhododendrites's suggested point 2 addresses? The way I read it, the problem you describe is a big motivation for that remedy. - Astrophobe (talk) 04:52, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  I would even equate off-line canvassing by a subject or by a connected contributor to COI editing. Point 2 of the proposal would not take care of the issue (most of these accounts were autoconfirmed, just dormant), and probably has zero chances to pass at any RfC anyway.--Ymblanter (talk) 05:51, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Bender, are you suggesting that the three articles in question should have been deleted? That they are "Wikipedia shrine[s] for their personal vanity" in your book? Axem Titanium (talk) 07:39, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• @
  crying racism and basically compared the AfDs to people being killed in the streets). As I wrote elsewhere, once the word spreads that this is a viable strategy for any minor social media personality to brute force their way to a Wikipedia vanity shrine, we're pretty soon facing chaos. --bender235 (talk) 13:05, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]

• I do agree with you that offline canvassing is essentially just COI editing. What I do not think is clearly true that most of the accounts in the recent spate of canvassed AfDs were autoconfirmed editors -- look at the two rapidly closed (and therefore actually readable) AfDs at Corina Newsome and Earyn McGee. Both of them were absolutely overrun by IPs and single-purpose accounts. It's easy enough to say that the suggestion as written here so far wouldn't perfectly solve the problem or is pretty much guaranteed to fail at RfC, both of which I agree with. More interesting is asking how we can tweak AfD to make it robust to these sorts of multi-front attacks from the outside, which have already been seriously disruptive and I believe will only grow more severe. It could very well be that the answer is there is no possible reform and we just have to live with this issue, but I don't think that's possible to conclude without some more discussion. - Astrophobe (talk) 08:14, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• I think if every instance of canvassing on twitter would result in a COI template appearing on top of the article, and potentially in an appearance of a paragraph explaining how he subject was canvassing on twitter then they will start thinking twice before starting canvassing. I agree that semi-protecting AfD would generally help (though not entirely) to this issue, however, it is not really desired from other points of view, and this discussion so far shows a clear opposition to this proposal. In addition, I have no idea what to do if (i) a Wikipedia editor canvasses other sympatheric Wikipedia editors outside Wikipedia (which happend a lot and in the past resulted in keeping clearly non-notable articles) and (ii) people are showing upat AfD and it is clear that they are correlated but the source of canvassing could be found. --Ymblanter (talk) 10:02, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• The really harmful perception that encourages canvassing seems to be that it's a straight up or down vote that everyone in the world has an inherent right to participate in. We already have Template:Not a ballot, but it's clearly highly ignorable for motivated people. I wonder if there is a template that is garish and intimidating enough to actually persuade people that canvassed votes won't work. Maybe a pop-up like some web sites have to discourage ad blockers, and an mp3 that autoplays a siren noise when you load the page ;) - Astrophobe (talk) 18:31, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• @Astrophobe: as Ymblanter correctly pointed out, a lot of the Wikipedians canvassed to those AfDs were inactive but established accounts. A rule limiting the participation of newly created accounts therefore wouldn't help. Of course, generally restricting sporadically active Wikipedians for !voting isn't a viable solution, either. After all, we are a project of volunteers and clearly not everybody finds time and means to contribute on a regular basis. It's just that in those particular three AfDs the canvassing was so blatantly obvious, with person after person basically copy-pasting the same rational referencing the rarely cited WP:BASIC over and over again. When I was looking for fellow veteran Wikipedians to intervene on the evening when all of this unfolded, Sulfurboy reassured me that "any admin worth their salt will see past meat and spa votes." Unfortunately that never happened. --bender235 (talk) 13:05, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• As I see it, there are two separate issues. One is people who have (almost-)never used Wikipedia before, who have no investment whatsoever in the site, either being unaware of our rules about things like canvassing and COI or having no reason to care about them. Anecdotally I think this is one of the most far-reaching problems confronting Wikipedia. I know that when I've tried to explain things like "you shouldn't write a page for your dad" to people in my life who don't edit here, the most common response is something along the lines of: nobody cares about Facebook's terms of service or Twitter's terms of service or The New York Times's terms of service, why should I care about Wikipedia's terms of service? It's easy to imagine that a bunch of the first-time editors who were canvassed into that discussion would tell you that the principle they were following in voting keep is more noble than abiding by Wikipedia's policies would be. That's the issue that I think there's room to fix. The second, separate, issue is people who actually are editors here, or who have been active editors in the past, who may or may not be breaking COI/Canvassing rules. I'm not interested in accusing anyone of anything so I'll just assume for the moment that is a problem that exists in the abstract. It's hard to imagine a policy-based solution to that problem other than sanctioning the user, because if somebody has an investment in the website and is ignoring policy anyways, then I definitely agree that we shouldn't adopt a suboptimal global policy to handle that; we have a whole other set of rules for user misbehaviour. So I see the former as worth trying to fix with a policy change, and the latter as just a matter of users breaking rules and all the various policies we have to deal with that. - Astrophobe (talk) 18:47, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• XfD is already biased too heavily towards indiscriminate inclusionism. We smile benevolently on keep vote canvassing, and allow personal attacks on nominators to pass without comment. Now here is a proposal to skew the conversation even further away from discussion of article subjects and contents and further towards lawyerly rules about who is allowed to talk. I am not in favour. Reyk _YO! 08:42, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure I've ever seen an indiciation of AfD being a hotbed of indiscriminate inclusionism, nor indeed community encouragement (or at least, lack of notice or reticence) on canvassing of Keep votes. Nosebagbear (talk)

WP:GNG. Not that I strongly oppose this, and in some areas (such as localities) it probably makes sense, but this definitely backs up the inclusionism claims.--Ymblanter (talk) 09:51, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

Well, by its nature XfD tends to attract pages that ought to be deleted so in that sense it leans towards deletionism. But what I mean is that the lenience we show to misbehaving editors correlates directly with whether they voted keep. For instance, I once objected when some pretty blatant keep vote canvassing was allowed to determine the outcome of an AfD/DRV. All I got in response was blank looks and a (hopefully not serious) suggestion to counter-canvass if it bothered me so much. That's not advice I intend to take because, even if I felt like being unethical, a delete voter could never get away with it. I could give other examples of keep voters free to make insulting personal commentary and delete voters getting in trouble for backchat but of course if I did it would only be dismissed as a list of personal grievances. Reyk _YO! 10:26, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I could understand this position regarding #1, but #2 is much more likely to apply to canvassed keep !votes than canvassed delete !votes (at least in my experience). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Call me a cynic if you like, but I don't see that ever being enforced consistently. Reyk _YO! 12:22, 14 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• So, I get both the base concern(s), but also the issue with SP - that the creator in particular is disadvantaged. On the thought of Extended-Confirmed to start an AfD - does anyone know what % of good-faith AfDs are started by non-EC users? That seems relevant here. It's a shame we don't have PC2 - this would be a great area for it. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:44, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• AfD needs improvement, for certain. Some kind of competency requirement for nominating articles could help, so could a quicker closing process for bad nominations. Unfortunately, it's hard for me to come up with a good way of accomplishing...Jacona (talk) 12:58, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• AFD will never be perfect and it is 100x more "friendly" than it was 10 years ago. Participation is lower as well. I see no benefit to suppressing participation any further and that is what more rules will do. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 13:48, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• This would be solved if we had more mechanical and less subjective notability rules. Then it wouldn't matter who was being canvassed. We should repeal WP:N altogether and just amend WP:V to require two independent, in depth, reliable secondary sources for every article. Then AFDs will just be about whether there are two qualifying sources or not. If there are, it can have a stand alone page. If there aren't, no stand alone page. Simple and no need to discuss whether or not something is "notable". No SNGs to argue about. Basically, make GNG a hard policy and be done with it. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 16:21, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • We've seen editors try to work with more mechanical/objective application of notability "rules" , claiming things like "I have three sources, that's enough", but this makes things worse because now you have people gaming the system worse than what we see now. Also, this underminds the purpose of notability on WP, which is to reflect topics that are likely to be able to be fleshed out to fuller articles but need sourcing work to help get there, and because we have no DEADLINE, require the flexibility of judging what sourcing exists at AFD rather than rote rules to keep them. --Masem (t) 16:34, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @
    reliable sources (i.e., verifiable facts) is necessary for someone or something to be notable, they aren't sufficient. --bender235 (talk) 16:50, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • Going to echo Masem here and agree that this would be susceptible to gaming the system. Axem Titanium (talk) 16:57, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • @
      WP:GNG criteria. The current system is already being gamed, and has been gamed, for a long time. Gaming is what led to this thread in the first place. Restricting the conversation to just be about the quality of sourcing and nothing else, will lead to less gaming, nor more. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 17:30, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
      ]
      • @
        notability would turn Wikipedia into somewhat of a repository for everything that was ever written, and every person that ever existed. I mean, I might be able to find a census entry and a birth announcement (two reliable sources!) of some 19th-century John Smith of Iowa, but what's the point of writing up an article recounting his dull biography of plowing the corn field from the cradle to the grave? At some point we have to be firm and say Wikipedia is just not the place for this. --bender235 (talk) 17:39, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
        ]

        WP:GNG), so no, a census entry and birth announcement wouldn't cut it. Requiring two GNG sources for every article will reduce, not increase, the number of stand-alone pages. Of this much, I'm sure. What makes my proposal radical is that if it were implemented, millions of articles would be eligible for deletion, which are not currently eligible for deletion, because meeting GNG isn't currently universally seen as a requirement. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 17:57, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply

        ]

        @Bender235: (sorry for the multiple pings), as one concrete example, under "my" suggested system, this AFD would have resulted in "delete" because there aren't two qualifying sources. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 18:27, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

        No matter how you slice it,

        WP:PROF almost certainly needs to remain a standalone rule. Many academics are worth having an article written about them despite never having appeared in a newspaper. Significant coverage in secondary sources is not a requirement; merely having one's research (a primary source, albeit a reliable one due to peer review) cited heavily by other papers is sufficient to meet the bar. And we can write an article on their work using mostly those primary sources, with the reassurance that they are reliable because they have been thoroughly vetted by the academic community. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 19:01, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply

        ]

        King of Hearts, if we did this, I would support having exceptions (specifically to the "independent" and "secondary" requirements), including PROF exception, as well as for other specific areas where there is a lack of independent or secondary sourcing, but where the community feels non-independent or non-secondary sourcing is nonetheless reliable enough to satisfy V.

        Instead of asking, at an AFD, "is it notable?", we ask, "is there enough verifiable information to support a stand-alone page?" A statement, to be verified, needs to come from a reliable source (a source with a reputation for accuracy), it needs to come from an independent source (or else there's a bias concern, usually), and it needs to come from a secondary source (to avoid OR interpretation of primary sources). For an entire page to be verified (or in other words, for a topic to be verified), we also need in-depth sources: enough content to fill a page.

        Even if the community adopts this view of verification, it can still decide that there are some topics, like PROF, where a "reliable source" need not be independent or secondary, and so exceptions could be made. This is also the sort of exception that could be made to address under-coverage of historically marginalized people and topics. Thinking of whether to have a stand-alone page as a matter of V instead of N is a better framework all around. And then, in AfD discussions, the only keep !vote that would count would look like "keep - [source 1] [source 2]", and it wouldn't matter if people were canvassed or IP editors or socks or whatever, because instead of counting votes, or assessing votes, we would just be counting sources and confirming that they meet "the test" and that there's two of them. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 20:26, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  • I agree with those who argue that an uninterpreted WP:V is not enough of a basis for deletion policy, but I agree that notability has not served us well. The problem that deletion policy is there to solve is that there are forces out there that aim to undermine the encyclopedia, so we need to choose the ground that we can defend. The notability criterion is a solution: it says the topics we should have articles for are those on which good articles could be written. I have thought since 2006 this is wrong: the criterion we should apply is maintainability, not notability, and we should deal with articles as they are, not as they might be (although I am all for editors who transform bad articles into good ones during the AfD process). The events that convinced me of this led to this AfD:
    WP:INHERIT criterion has frequently been used to delete high-quality, well-maintained, encyclopediac content; cf. Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2020 June 8 for the most recent example I aware of; there are have been better exmples. We should drop the abstract ideal of notability as the criterion we use and adopt the pragmatic criterion of maintainability that I think in time would lead to a more intuitive deletion policy. — Charles Stewart (talk) 06:45, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
    ]

Speaking as a proud simpleton who loves hyper-minimalist rules, I would support this, but it seems like a different (though of course related) proposal. - Astrophobe (talk) 18:37, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• I think one of the issues is that AFD, unlike a lot of other Wikipedia processes we think of as happening "in the background", slaps a big red notice on top of an article in articlespace. I'm not suggesting that we change this at all, but it is worth keeping this fact in mind when we discuss solutions. The notice demands your attention when you're on an article and even invites you (yes, you!) to participate in the deletion discussion. You can imagine that a new/IP user would feel confused if they're not allowed to participate at all at this point. Axem Titanium (talk) 16:57, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  If a change were made, we could update the template accordingly. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 18:02, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  This is a good point, thanks. If we enacted some sort of restriction like this, at very least the wording of that notice should be changed, but I'm not sure in what way. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm sure that banner is responsible for a good chunk of the hollow "keep" votes that show up for pop-culture articles. It stands to reason that if you're looking up the article for a particular thing, you beleive that particular thing should have an article. (Even if there's no particular policy-based reason for it to.) ApLundell (talk) 14:52, 18 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Personally I would support automatically adding extended confirmed protection (30 days/500 edits) to all AfDs as they are created. Positive contributions from editors not meeting these criteria are incredibly rare IMO, and it would stop SPAs, socks, IPs called from social media etc. Number 57 17:46, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree with this suggestion. Article creators who are not EC can make their case on the talk page (along with other non-EC editors). EC editors can read those talk page arguments and take them into consideration in their AFD !votes. The closer can also take into consideration arguments made on the talk page. But it'll help keep the discussion more focused if only EC editors participated on the AFD page. Frankly, non-EC editors do not have the experience necessary to meaningfully contribute at an AFD, even if they wrote the article. And I say this as an editor who participated in AFDs before I was EC (and I shouldn't have, because I had no understanding of notability guidelines then [or now really]). Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 18:01, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• I would like to see some facts here. How many AFDs in the past month/year can we reasonably classify as being disruptive in the senses concerned in this proposal? I would say that if that number is less than 5 or 10%, I don't see a need for systemic change. --Izno (talk) 18:13, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• What happened in the AfDs mentioned above is being repeated at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone now. What happens on Wikipedia doesn't stay on Wikipedia. With every AfD like this, someone on Twitter will be more emboldened to post their vanity shrine on Wikipedia. EC protection will really help in cases like that. TryKid ^{[dubious – discuss]} 22:21, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• @TryKid: Also the same tactic was just tried by MethanoJen at CfD/Black geoscientists. Something needs to change before this really becomes the new normal. --bender235 (talk) 23:26, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Will editors who are not admins be able to nominate articles for deletion? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:52, 10 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Under these suggestions anyone who is extended confirmed could nominate AFDs. Personally I would support limiting nominations and participation to extended confirmed users and the article creator because it would give more time to block the sockpuppets who seem to zero in at AFD whether they are nominating or voting, imv Atlantic306 (talk) 00:20, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Atlantic306. Mccapra (talk) 12:01, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Under normal circumstances I think our AfD process works fine and don't need adjustment - usually no or minimal disruption and no need to protect the AfD until something problematic happens. For example, I recently dealt with an case where an article creator was blocked during an AfD of their article and suddenly brand-new accounts showed up to !vote. SPI, checkuser, semi-protected just because of the sockpuppetry, bam - dealt with. What we need to have a process for is cases like these, which are the exception rather than the rule - demonstrable and widespread off-wiki canvassing that turns the AfD into chaos (a flood of mostly-new users using non-policy-based arguments). I think semi-protection is the right call in most cases, but what do we do if there's demonstrable canvassing of experienced editors, for example?
  talk) 00:45, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Some of the examples listed above are quite extraordinary, I agree with bender235 that “something” needs to be done before this becomes the normal. Whilst it would not deal with bad-faith nominations and canvassed inactive users, perhaps upon presentation of evidence of off-Wiki advocacy, !votes be restricted to extended confirmed users and !votes already cast by non-XCON users be struck/deleted. Cavalryman (talk) 03:42, 11 June 2020 (UTC).[reply]

• @
  crying racism right away without even bothering to consider the arguments presented up to this point. That's what concerns me the most. Apart from slandering the Wikipedia community unjustly, it makes certain subjects and topics toxic to a point where our usual (bureaucratic) processes can no longer be applied. Who wants to be the Wikipedian permanently branded as a racist in the Twitterverse simply for questioning the notability of a social media starlet? The nominator of AfD/Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman stated that he/she created a sock puppet rather than use his/her established account to avoid online harassment, and perusing the comments and replies of the self-righteous Twitter mob above, I don't think that was a stretch. To me, this whole incident and its likely future copy-cat versions are worrisome. (And just to show that I am not exaggerating, here is a now-deleted tweet by MethanoJen singling me out by name, simply for questioning whether her newly created Category:Black geoscientists doesn't fit our existing category pattern.) --bender235 (talk) 16:39, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  Please write to T&S about the tweet, this is a cleart wiki-harassment. I have warned her in the morning (qand may be this is why the tweet has been deleted), but if I have seen this I might have indeffed.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:41, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• @Ymblanter: I don't think it will be necessary to block her. After all, she deleted the tweet immediately after I told her it was uncalled for. But it goes to my point that the social media canvassing tactics used in AfD/Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, AfD/Corina Newsome, and AfD/Earyn McGee, will soon be the "new normal," because they clearly worked. All three articles are now even being pushed for DYK (see DYK/Black Birders Week, DYK/Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman). With this much success, why wouldn't this strategy be copied? --bender235 (talk) 19:05, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

bender235, I agree completely, aside from the utterly appalling conduct of that editor the broader trend in identity politics is to brand anyone who presents a rational and articulate counterpoint a racist/bigot/Nazi etc, thankfully not a common issue in the dog articles I tend to edit and to be honest one of the reasons I usually give anything political on Wikipedia a very wide berth. I tend towards supporting the idea of BLUELOCK for AfD discussions (less article creators), I suspect SILVERLOCK would be no impediment. One of the reasons I proposed a middle ground above is to protect closers from the inevitable social media targeting that would follow from a close that went against canvassed IP & SPA opinion. Kind regards, Cavalryman (talk) 22:48, 11 June 2020 (UTC).[reply]

• Wikipedia has already strayed too far from being the encyclopedia anyone can edit. Keeping that in mind, further restrictions on editing abilities for newer users should only be implemented when absolutely necessary. I think our admins are pretty good at recognizing canvassing and meatpuppetry by SPAs and the like. Since AfD isn't a vote, closing admins are expected to throw out !votes that are frivolous and/or not based in our policies and guidelines. Even if that weren't possible, I'm not convinced it happens often enough to justify such drastic action. We also have to consider the effect this would have on editor retention. Wikipedia is already confusing enough to newbies, with its byzantine policies, litany of jargony acronyms, and Kafkaesque bureaucracy-that-isn't-a-bureaucracy. I'm convinced this would be a net negative. AfD has far more pressing concerns to deal with anyway. The biggest two that come to mind are careless nominations where
  WP:NOTAVOTE. In particularly extreme cases, admins should semi-protect the page as they sometimes do now. That's far better than the current proposal which throws the baby out with the bathwater. −−− Cactus Jack 🌵 05:11, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]

• While I appreciate the argument on principle, I don't know if being an encyclopedia that anyone can edit is the same as being "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and anyone can jump into the behind-the-encyclopedia technical processes without spending time learning about them first". As for WP:BEFORE, I don't necessarily disagree; don't you think that requiring more experience would make it more likely that someone is familiar with (and follows) that guidance? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• We need to remember that AFD is just one of our deletion processes, if we were to restrict people from filing AFDs we shouldn't be surprised if they tag more articles for Speedy deletion or simply draftify them. That said I'm OK with the idea that we restrict some people from deletion generally. Over the years I have seen a number of editors who didn't realise they were overly deletionist until they ran an RFA and had their deletion tagging checked and criticised. So I would be OK with 6 month bans from the deletion process where people were only allowed to participate in the deletion process re articles that they had started. I really really don't like the idea of restricting people from a deletion debate where it is their work that we are considering deleting. So restrict the people who have been making mistakes in their deletion tagging, not a blanket restriction on new or newish editors. ϢereSpielChequers 13:32, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• I don't know how we've escalated past the early suggestions of SP for participation to ECP, which is seriously, seriously OTT. While their average edit quality is certainly worse, I've seen many legitimate !votes from editors in that group. Shifting to talk page for all of them brings multiple issues: that's fiddly to spot, so some just won't note to participate there (that is, they'll know the TP exists, but not that they'll be read) & also massively drops that chances that every person in the AfD will read the !votes or comments, which disrupts and weights the discussion inappropriately. We also should be using the least disruptive method, and disrupted AfDs are relatively rare. We aren't implementing a "have more experienced participation" restriction. Nosebagbear (talk) 14:49, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• AfD is infested with socks. You can see it with old AfDs (a few years back) and seeing how many participants have a strike-through (with that userscript installed). They get busted eventually, somewhere else, and leave behind fossil evidence. I would support reasonable moves to address this problem. -- GreenC 16:51, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes, there is a problem, but it is only a problem with a very small percentage of AfD discussions. Far more discussions have the problem of a lack of participation, which this proposal would only exacerbate. Maybe we need to encourage people to be less tolerant of canvassing, or of other abuses of this process, but I don't think this is the right way to go about it. I remember that my very first logged-in edit to Wikipedia 13 years ago was made to an AfD discussion in response to canvassing on another site, but it was not supportive of the canvasser.
  Phil Bridger (talk) 19:50, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• I wonder how typical my own experience is. I began editing in any serious way in 2013. I think it was late 2017 or early 2018 before I even knew AfD existed. Once I discovered it I spent many weeks just observing it before I commented. It was months before I put my first article up for deletion. How many people in this discussion have a completely different experience? I simply don’t assume good faith for ‘new’ editors who show up and are busily nominating articles for deletion in the first couple of weeks. There are all kinds of productive ways new editors can contribute to the project but sitting on your hands for a while before you start nominating articles for deletion seems entirely appropriate. Mccapra (talk) 20:02, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• @
  creffett immediately spotted the unusual frequency of WP:BASIC citations in AfD/Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman. --bender235 (talk) 20:37, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]

• A couple of points worth mentioning here. Other language wikis It would be great to both explicitly encourage editors to look at other language wikipedias for sources and to encourage editors from other language wikis to participate in AfD's, especially in situations where there is the likelihood of sources being in non-English languages. Draft namespace Draft namespace is relatively new compared to AfD and moving good-faith contributions to draft to enable relatively slow-moving editing to occur should be encouraged, particularly for topical subjects. SPAs and paid editing my feeling is that a large numbers of the SPAs involved in articles that end up at AfD are undeclared paid editors. This is a larger issue than AfD, but it may be worth thinking about what can be done in this specific context. The best I can think of is a bot that creates a table on the talk page listing all the AfD participants and editors involved in the article and gives edit counts, how many are related to the issue at hand, and also scans for their names in sockpuppet investigations and other administrative actions.
  Stuartyeates (talk) 21:21, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• I am very against default ECP. I'm open to reasonable suggestions for how to resolve the identified problems, but ECP is not one of those. To comment on Rhododendrite's questions: (1) I think this is reasonable. We have technical restrictions on who can move pages, so I think it's reasonable to have slightly more stringent requirements to nominate for deletion. (2) I'm not a fan, but am open to it. I would prefer the first option and see how that goes before default protection. Perhaps more practical is expanding the protection policy to allow protecting AFD discussions for sock/meatpuppetry or obvious canvassing. (3) I think just encouraging use of the talk page by everyone would work, but why have newbies go to talk just to be ignored? We're basically telling them to send their emails to
  /dev/null. — Wug·a·po·des​ 23:31, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• 2. Should deletion discussions be semi-protected by default? Can I suggest some alternatives?
  • Grouped edit notice for Template:Editnotices/Group/WIkipedia:Articles for Deletion
  • Some type of edit filter warning for non-(auto)confirmed users
  • Something similar to Wikipedia:GettingStarted, but it pops up when you enter WIkipedia:Articles for Deletion/***** for the first time; if for non-(auto)confirmed users, it pops up something similar to {{Not a ballot}}.

If the above aren't going to work in any circumstances, okay then go ahead and semi- protect it and hope those SPAa and canvassed users don't gets 10 edits after 4 days. This will prevent new users from participating, but 99.999% of the time, they think it's a ballot. Nobody uses the AfD talk pages, so let's direct them there. With that comes with more very complicated ideas, like moving policy based votes into the actual AfD by experienced AfDers, and considering if the talk page will be additionally used to addresss the consensus outcome. {{

reply to|Can I Log In}}'s talk page! 05:34, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

• I'm certainly not against less restrictive interventions like these; I'm just pessimistic they would be helpful. I've seen {{
  notavote}} added to lots of AfDs, and [just based on anecdote of course] I've not really seen it help much. Call me cynical, but when I add it, I'm really just trying to signal to other experienced editors (and the closer) that there may be canvassing/SPAs going on here. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]

• Thanks for starting this, Rhododendrites. Something that deletion discussions and move requests have in common is that, because they have a mandatory period and appear to readers, they can do damage when bad ones are launched. For move requests, we're trying to help by making the notice less prominent, but for deletions, it needs to be prominent. I wish there was a way we could signal to readers "this article is currently nominated for deletion, but it's very unlikely to pass", but we can't exactly just have it display the running !vote total (either technically or editorially). Still, there might be some changes we could make to Template:Article for deletion to help make it clearer what being up for deletion actually means. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 08:06, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• We already have strict requirements for starting an AfD:
  Twinkle
  has subverted this to make a deletion nomination much easier than other, more productive actions such as searching for sources, working on the article or starting a discussion on its talk page.

Another problem is that the readership tends to be excluded from these discussions. An article may be read hundreds or thousands of times while it is at AfD but we rarely see these readers joining the discussion. I myself got started on Wikipedia when I saw a deletion notice on an article that I had been reading. Perhaps I have more aptitude for the Wikipedia interface than the average reader but if there had been greater barriers in place, then I too might not be here now and the hundreds of articles that I have started might not have been written. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit and so we should freely accept comments rather than engaging in voter suppression by restricting discussions to a dwindling number of incumbents and insiders.

Andrew🐉(talk) 11:01, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• It strikes me as odd that we have concluded that the project is best served by creating some filters around article creation for new editors (I don’t know, maybe that’s still controversial?) but we continue to treat AfD as a free for all. It’s true that the best barrier we have is WP:BEFORE but I guess we’re having this discussion because it doesn’t seem as effective as it once was. Mccapra (talk) 11:15, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Agreed. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Quite frankly, I think concerns over this matter are completely overblown. People have constantly been predicting doom and gloom over small problems, but it seems to me that AfD is more sturdy and capable of dealing with sockpuppeteering and canvassing than many give it credit for. New editors do not find AfD and immediately start making bad edits. It takes a lot of time for the average editor to even build up the confidence to start making proper edits, never mind contributing to AfD. There are really only two ways in which a new editor will even get exposed to AfD, either an article they created was nominated, or they were canvassed there. The former is an important learning experience, and being able to contribute gives a new editor valuable insight into how the process works. Stopping these editors from contributing will just further the image of Wikipedia as a bureaucratic nightmare where decisions are made by elitists in ivory towers. In the second case, such instances are isolated and so painfully obvious that dealing with it really does not require pre-emptive punitive measures. This sort of goes without saying, but default ECP is a terrible idea and I am opposed to it in the strongest possible terms. Devonian Wombat (talk) 05:02, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Not doom and gloom. More about tons of wasted time, harassment, and possible external influence on our process (whether in good or bad faith). One of my original points was that we're typically able to deal with this, but there's so little benefit in forcing good faith participants to do so. Lots of wasted time, lots of attempts to influence the outcome. I don't disagree that the article creators/editors themselves should be allowed to participate, though. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Follow-up - apologies to start this thread and only come back a few days later. Several good points here. If these were actual proposals, it seems like were firmly in "no consensus" territory here, at this point. One thing that I think would make sense for me (or someone else) to do if formally proposing these measures would be to gather some data. My perception is that, putting aside the article creators/contributors themselves, new users almost never make valuable, policy-based contributions to AfD. That applies to nominations especially, and !votes slightly less. But I appreciate that not everyone may have the same perception. One open question for me is how to allow article creators/contributors to participate while preventing other new users? Maybe the only way is to direct them to the talk page, and to rework the notifications to be very clear about how to do so (i.e. to do everything we can to encourage participating there). Not sure. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:58, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  As somebody said above (or elsewhere, I do not remember), there are only three categories of IP / new users taking part in AfD discussions: (i) they have been affected (created or significantly contributed to an article being discussed, typically by getting a template on their talk page); (ii) they have been externally canvassed to the discussion; (iii) they evade a block. If this correct (and research probably could be made about this - canvassing is difficult to detect but it must be visible by clusterization of new votes in the same discussion), then these issues probably should be separated -canvassing is not just about new users, and we certainly want creators of the articles participate in the AfD on the articles they created.--Ymblanter (talk) 09:15, 14 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• I strongly support reforms to streamline the AfD process. In my time I have closed well over a thousand XfD discussions, and have observed two key patterns of sockpuppet manipulation. The first is where novices desperate to keep an article create numerous obvious sockpuppet accounts; the second is more sophisticated, typically connected to paid advertising, where the sockpuppet accounts are crafted with a veneer of legitimacy through the creation of nominal user space pages and through perhaps commenting on a handful of other AfDs or making a handful of other minor edits before engaging in the AfD of concern. Nevertheless, it should not be possible for an account created after the initiation of an XfD to participate in that XfD. I don't think that this is at all problematic for new users, who should expect that some time and experience is required to obtain certain rights. This should also not be a problem with respect to editors creating new pages. Quite frankly, editors should not be able to create new pages at all until they meet some minimal threshold of activity, so the ability to comment in XfDs should coincide with the ability to create new pages at all. BD2412 T 19:00, 14 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• These concerns raised seem pretty well addressed by
  WP:DRV). It also appears some of the generalisations about new users (who may or may not be new, given some new registered users have previously been editing Wikipedia for years as non-registered users) has some undertones not in keeping with the spirit that Jimmy Wales had for Wikipedia (that the value of an editor was not in how long their registered account had been in use, or even how many edits they had made, but in the quality of their contributions to Wikipedia, which may come from registered editors both new and old). Some form of artificial class system based on seniority/tenure/clique would seem contrary to that - even the auto-confirmed class (which has been deliberately set at the low threshold of just a few days) isn’t really such a class system. Like Devonian Wombat stated, New editors do not find AfD and immediately start making bad edits... There are really only two ways in which a new editor will even get exposed to AfD, either an article they created was nominated, or they were canvassed there. Therefore, there does not appear to be an issue with the current framework for AfDs that requires re-invention in my view. Kangaresearch 08:16, 18 June 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• What Dennis Brown said: AfD is one part of WP that really works well, participation at AfD is down, newcomers who are there are apt to be defending pieces they personally have a stake in, there is no better way to learn the notability standards than to actually participate in deletion debatese, there would be nothing gained and much risked by tightening standards for participation there. Carrite (talk) 14:08, 18 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Perhaps all that's needed is a guideline that says that it's acceptable for an experienced editor to move the banner to the talk page in cases where it doesn't seem likely the AFD will pass. Or perhaps BLP shouldn't have the banner at all? It's not hard to see how it can be percieved as an officialy endorsed slight against the BLP subject. ApLundell (talk) 15:02, 18 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Remove AfD from Twinkle. You used to have to go and create the deletion page yourself and copy and paste the correct templates in. This was fine. Some things shouldn't be made easier. It takes two separate people turning two separate keys to launch a nuclear misslile. This could be streamlined, but would that be an improvement? I haven't seen any evidence that either way that adding AfD to Twinkle was a net improvement. It's not helping, so end it. Herostratus (talk) 02:22, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• 1. Should there be stricter requirements to start a deletion discussion? What kinds of requirements? At a glance, imposing more requirements would just make it so some deletion-worthy articles remain on the wiki. A lot of stuff can't go through PROD, and isn't eligible for the strict CSD criteria, but is clearly deletion-worthy and should go to AfD. I don't see stricter requirements helping the process.

2. Should deletion discussions be semi-protected by default? Canvassing is a problem, but I've seen less active Wikipedia users contribute helpfully to AfDs before, particularly AfDs that would benefit from more niche knowledge, particularly AfDs for some non-Western topics. I don't know if making discussions semi-protected would help in that sense. An experienced closer can deal with arguments from SPAs and effects due to canvassing, but the process does not benefit from suppressed views of the kinds of users I mentioned.

AfD has problems, but I'm not sure these are solutions. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:16, 23 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Stricter requirements: Yes. Notification of the article creator and any other editors who have edited the article significantly should be required, not recommended, in the instructions. Some people don't use their watchlists, some have watchlists so long that an AfD can slip by, some are inactive but have preferences set to notify them of edits to their user talk page, and it is a basic courtesy that also increases the chance of participation by people who know the topic. I'm not sure how it would be enforced, but
  WP:BEFORE should be required. Deletion nominations by editors who don't know the topic and haven't looked to discover it is, in fact, a topic, or who simply don't like the topic, are an increasing problem as the number of articles grows and participation at AfD dwindles. They waste other editors' time and risk our losing useful articles. Restricting participation, for example by semi-protection: No. Apart from the principle of minimizing barriers to participation by unregistered editors, on which I am firm—they include not only potential new editors but also experienced editors whose wisdom and knowledge we should value, and it's their own business if they choose not to register an account—many people are first drawn into the discussion and collaboration aspect of Wikipedia editing through AfD. I saw an AfD on recent changes and was able to provide the rescuing source, and hadn't realized till then that such discussions, where we might lose a valid article because someone didn't have access to a book, were happening. And that is indeed the venue where most of us learn the ropes of notability. In any case, COI editors would be far more likely able to bypass restrictions than good faith newbies, including subject-matter experts. So attempting to restrict AfD participation would do more harm than good. Yngvadottir (talk) 00:58, 6 July 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]

• Just noting yet another brand new account nominating yet another biography of a woman for deletion. Created an account, made exactly enough edits to be autoconfirmed, then came back a few days later and nominated here: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sarafina Nance. Like the examples that immediately preceded my opening this section, and like the many other new accounts nominating/proposing articles by Jesswade88 and others, it's awfully hard to see this as something other than harassment by deletion process and demonstration of how easy our very low bar for creating these nominations is to game. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:31, 7 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Mm. As a frequent AfD flyer over the last fifteen years, there are many changes I would want to make. I would love to stipulate that articles cannot be taken to AfD until at least three days after creation. I would love to stipulate that closing admins cannot make headcount-over-policy closes, nor consider the opinions of any Keep voter stating that there are sources out there, who does not then put those sources into the article. I would love to stipulate that editors who haven't been auto-confirmed for at least a month cannot participate in the process, either filing or voting. Hell, I would love to stipulate that any editor who votes Keep based on a perceived flaw in one element of the nomination, while ignoring the valid elements that remain, should be taken out and shot.

  But other than requiring extended confirmation in order to file -- a harmless enough stipulation -- I don't see that there's a lot we can (a) do about it, (b) agree upon, or (c) enforce, given our obvious competing interests. This is an area where our respective hobby horses clash skulls as hard and often as anywhere on Wikipedia. Ravenswing 02:28, 21 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment on process it seems like there are lots of different things happening in this discussion around highlighting issues and solutions but its all getting mixed together so its difficult to know if there are common themes and agreements on ways forward. Is there a way to collate comments into different themes or something to 'see what's going on'? I'm not sure if there is an established process for this? John Cummings (talk) 15:36, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Notability in AFD

Not sure if this discussion is still active, but thought it worth adding my perspective/experience.

First, just as I've seen stacked IWANTIT discussions, I've also seen IDONTWANTIT steamroll discussions as well. (I'm avoiding the "inclusionisn/deletionism" labels, as, in my experience, most people do not tend to completely reside in black/white boxes.)

I remember a long while back, when blp first started being an issue, and around that time, "notability" really came to the fore.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."—Jimmy Wales

That quote pretty much was undermined by the apparent necessity of blp.

I even remember a discussion about forking blp's to a separate Wikimedia wiki (WikiBio, or some such).

So to bring it back around to this discussion, What if we just restrict "notability" rationales for deletion, to biography articles (article named for a real person or a group of persons, living or not)?

I welcome discussion on it, but I think WP:V / WP:NOR / WP:RS should easily take care of the rest, thus addressing concerns about the "subjectivity" of the application of "notability" in a particular discussion.

pinging user:Rhododendrites, user:Masem, and user:Astrophobe - the first 3 to comment in this discussion.

I hope this helps as a way forward. - jc37 03:15, 24 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You cannot restrict notability rationales at AfD without first changing the notability and deletion policies. The former says stand-alone articles must be notable and the latter says they can be deleted if they are not. If an article cannot be nominated for notability reasons at AFD, that leaves no practical way of deleting it. Contrary to your claim, there are numerous articles that go through AfD that have verifiable information, but not enough to meet WP:N. What you propose goes way beyond a change to the AfD process. SpinningSpark 15:41, 24 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Do you want any old completely non-notable company, product and theory to have an article? We have policies of deleting due to notability for obvious reasons. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 15:50, 24 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To be clear, I'm not resolutely against a fundamental rethink of our inclusion criteria (in fact I think that would be highly beneficial), but I'm not in favour of the (implied) change in this proposal. SpinningSpark 16:40, 24 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think there are problems with our notability standards that I won’t expand on here. However I don’t see a reason why we would restrict notability to BLPs only. I think our fundamental problem is that we aspire to collect and share the sum of all human knowledge but we’re not completely clear about what ‘knowledge’ is. Is it the same thing as ‘stuff’ or some kind of subset? Personally I’m very relaxed about small town mayors and other people we currently AfD out of existence so I don’t have a problem with significantly widening our definition of notability. But we also need to recognise that there is a tidal wave of rubbish pushing its way onto Wikipedia - promotional material about every pizza restaurant in Akron, Ohio, every ‘AI startup’, and all sorts of bizarre POV stuff about history and nationality. If we let all of that in we’ll rapidly become Opinionopedia. If we’re the world’s intellectual junkyard that’s a significant change of mission and why we should continue to require notability for BLPs but not for other articles doesn’t seem consistent to me. Mccapra (talk) 18:37, 24 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

On the subject of notability

I agree whole-heartedly that we have a participation problem at AFD, in the fact that it is too easy to nominate, and too easy to Ivote "Delete" based on that catch-all "notability". Do we still allow stub articles on Wikipedia? Because one thing I'm seeing with select really prolific nominators, is the tendency to go through a whole category (geographic, institutional, etc) where stubs have been set up (not necessarily with a "stub" template at the bottom), and AFD them as "Not notable". That is followed by ivoters who are new enough to have not much clue on Wikipedia stub policy, who ivote a delete. And you end up with hundreds of deletions of what would have previously been acceptable as stubs. Because "notability" is not established. We have a really serious problem with this. — Maile (talk) 22:48, 10 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• This is often the fault of the closers, who could pick one of the alternatives to deletion such as redirect. the remedy is to use Deletion Review more frequently, asking for not an overturn, but a relist, on thegrounds of insufficient discussion. Relists usually attract more attention. (Generalizing a little, there is almost nothing in Wp which would not be helped by more participation) DGG ( talk ) 16:11, 12 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• I agree; I'm pretty new here and already two of my articles are nominated for deletion on the count of notability (
  Olivia Harkin if you're interested).
  
  Lucy's Heart is a short film that was shown on at least one film festival (that I could verify) and has an extensive IMDb listing, but because of its very nature (independently produced short film) it didn't get coverage in media outlets that count towards notability. So: not notable according to WP:NFILM. So basically, a whole subgenre of film isn't notable. The deletion voters' argument is that there are numerous other outlets on the internet where you can list those films. By that logic, we could basically call it quits on wikipedia, because that goes for pretty much any headword on here.
  
  Olivia Harkin is an actress, to my personal frustration not notable by current WP standards (I imagine that must hurt if you'd read that about yourself), so: AfD. Again, no citable sources discuss her as a person, only her work. Rave reviews on her drumming in Fame: The Musical, but not about who she is or where she was born. But what if someone would like an overview of the work she's done? You can only find where she's in if you know where she's in in advance this way.
  
  The deletion voters' argument on the latter again is to put this information in other places (IMDb), and again I reply: then why bother with wikipedia project in the first place? IMDb is a commercial entity; if Jeff Bezos decides to pull the plug, it's all gone. If he decides he wants to make more money, he could make you have to pay to access it.
  
  Jimmy's vision is to have a place for our collective knowledge, so that anyone could look up anything. Sure, examples given in other posts here make sense, as articles can be very easily used as political battlegrounds, but aren't we enforcing too strict a rule when it comes to notability? After all, what's notable or not differs per person. In my research I often scan databases of old newspapers. The kind of articles or subjects you stumble upon there is remarkable. Sometimes very useful, as it might put me on the right track of finding something, but those same articles wouldn't be notable on WP. Those would be lost for future generations if it was up to some people here.Sjokhazard (talk) 07:41, 8 September 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]

I am interested by the idea spoken about elsewhere in this discussion about asking AfD nominators to show they've exhausted other avenues - including re-directs and mergers. I would certainly approve of this functionality, as it might make the 'clear up' of stub articles into more general article spaces easier and more convenient. However I would also like to recommend that the community draws up a policy on political party notability, so we can say for certain what exactly makes a political party worthy of a full article in mainspace. doktorb _words^deeds 07:24, 5 September 2020 (UTC) 07:23, 5 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Contrary to your claim, Wikipedia

is a gazetteer, but that does not mean that every political party needs an individual article. SpinningSpark 09:02, 5 September 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

Well, hush my mouth, I became so used to using that phrase in successful AfDs that I didn't stop to check that I was contradicting page one, line one, of Wikipedia's founding principles! All the same (and to sound a touch like a politician) I stand by the general point. Wikipedia contains elements of a gazetteer but is not specifically a gazetteer of political parties. The fact remains that there is fuzziness around GNG and ORG guidelines with regards to political parties and I will be interested to see if we can agree on what to do about the substantial number of articles about them. doktorb _words^deeds 09:15, 5 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

An XFD Idea to Toss Around - Discretionary Sanctions

This is an idea that has occurred to me from time to time, and then sometimes I have thought it was a good idea, and sometimes I have thought that it wasn't such a good idea. That is to impose Community General Sanctions (or ArbCom Discretionary Sanctions) on XFDs. General Sanctions are imposed on areas in which there is a high tendency to disruptive editing, such as areas that are real

We need to decrease the use of DS, not increase it. Discretionary sanctions gives any one of the 500 active administrators the power to block in a way which requires exceptional effort and consensus to overturn. It was adopted at a time when Wikipedia had a real problem with the so-called "unblockable" editors, who, however much they misbehaved, would be unblocked by one of their friends; it was necessary to have a sticky block like this to deal with them. The approach worked, and there are many fewer such editors now. So exceptional circumstances where the ability to give a sticky block in contentious topics if necessary. I don't think AfD is in such a desperate condition at this time. Considering that there are some very different philosophies of what consititues an acceptable WP article in some fields, this gives any admin from one of the sides the ability to remove those who disagree, in a way that is exceptionally difficult to reverse. There are editors who abuse the afd system, and ordinary blocks are sufficient to deal with them. DGG ( talk ) 00:35, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Requiring alternatives to deletion be exhausted before nominating an article for deletion

Hi all

I spent a while looking at what is going wrong with AfD because of several issues I had with articles being deleted (mainly of biographies of women). One way that I think would reduce the issues with articles being nominated for deletion is that currently the rules do not require contributors to explore the alternatives to deletion before nominating an article for deletion. If nominators had to show they had exhausted alternatives for deletion before nomination this would both provide additional motivations to improve the quality of articles (e.g more references to improve notability) and take most of the 'fun' out of malicious and low effort nominations.

John Cummings (talk) 15:23, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

On this basis how would you suggest we modify

WP:BEFORE? There are times when nominators are too quick to put an article up for deletion, but if there are decent sources it does not take long for other editors to flush them out. If there are articles you think we should be keeping that are actually being deleted (as opposed to being wrongly nominated and then kept following discussion) this suggests that nobody at AfD is doing their job properly, not just the nominator, but this isn't a pattern I recognise. Mccapra (talk) 16:41, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

Phil Bridger (talk) 18:07, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

That may be true, but if it is a behavioural pattern there are ways of addressing it that don’t require us to change the AfD guidelines. Ultimately if editors active at AfD do their job collectively, then nominators who haven’t done a proper WP:BEFORE won’t get very far. There’s a case that such nominations waste other editors’ time, but not that we lose decent articles because of bad nominations, AFAICS. Mccapra (talk) 18:33, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree. Many AfD discussions are closed with a couple of "me too" votes, without anyone actually considering alternatives to deletion.

Phil Bridger (talk) 19:12, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

Phil Bridger, that is dishonest, offensive claptrap and you know it. Instead of calling people names, how about you try characterising your opponents' positions accurately and fairly, and debate them on their content instead of wild speculations as to their motives? Or is that too hard for you? Reyk _YO! 18:39, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

Please link to any AfD discussion where I have not done as you ask.

Phil Bridger (talk) 19:09, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

I want to say that this (BEFORE required before launching an AFD) has been a

WT:AFD that the idea has been proposed and rejected many times. What I will say is that if you see any AFD nominated, and keeping in mind the history of the editor nominating it, that you do not believe in good faith that they have executed a proper BEFORE search appropriate for the topic, mention and call this out. (This would be the case for where we're talking topic pre-Internet, where sources more local to the event may be needed in print and thus not easily found just be a google search). --Masem (t) 18:23, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

@

Phil Bridger

: exactly, WP:BEFORE says they should be considered but doesn't require it, either of the nominator or anyone taking part in the process or to use them to reject deletion nominations if its clear alternatives are possible. Making it a requirement would put the onus on nominators to explore alternatives and save the time for people taking part in AfDs discussing articles that shouldn't have been nominated in the first place, it would cause no change for people already following the recommendation. I've thought about this quite a lot and cannot think of a downside to this change, am I missing something?

I'm unclear how exactly this could be implemented in practice, my suggestion would be the nominator would be required to show they have exhausted alternatives in nomination process, not just say 'have you considered the alternatives to nomination = yes' but to actually show the work e.g showing there aren't enough reliable sources in common places for that topic e.g Search results, Google Books, Scholar and News etc. John Cummings (talk) 18:40, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think you may be missing

WP:ARS stalwarts across a broad swathe of discussions such as this. - Sitush (talk) 18:40, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

@

WP:BEFORE from 'Consider whether the article could be improved rather than deleted' to something like 'Exhaust opportunities to improve rather than delete the article' (that wording needs some work) and then an extra line in the AfD nomination form asking the nominator to show they've actually done this. John Cummings (talk) 18:50, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

First, I would recommend reading the

WT:AFD archives because again, making BEFORE mandatory, while not a perennial suggestion, has been asked many many times. Also, not all AFD requests are based on lack of notability, which BEFORE is specifically about. There's also reasons that may be based on notability that BEFORE can't address, like if the sources available - maybe established in a previous AFD as exhaustive - still don't give significant coverage per the nominator, and they seek deletion. BEFORE is not a one-size-fits-all approach prior to all AFD, basically. --Masem (t) 18:58, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

But this discussion is not about notability. It is about looking for alternatives to deletion, which are also addressed by

Phil Bridger (talk) 20:56, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

The problem with BEFORE is that making it a strict requirement turns the discussion away from the article, it content, and its sources and towards a lawyerly checklist and procedural shutdowns. It's best to regard BEFORE as advice on how to write a convincing nomination. That it keeps getting used as the delivery mechanism for personal attacks on deletion nominators doesn't help either. Reyk _YO! 18:44, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A much better way of reducing the load at AfD would be to create a new permission called article_creator or something like that, give it to every editor who has shown that they can create articles that don't have notability or other serious issues, and require that every new article created by editors without the permission goes through AFC. Black Kite (talk) 18:46, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Since 2018, we've already had article creation restricted to autoconfirmed accounts, after the Foundation reversed its unilateral prohibition on implementing the plan which had been first approved in 2011. (See

WP:ACTRIAL for the full history of this long contentious issue). Based on my experience with the issue, I believe that 1) The restriction to autoconfirmed accounts is sufficient in keeping the worst abuses to a minimum and 2) It took the Foundation 7 years to come around to what was a WIDELY supported community initiative. I think your proposal is dead in the water, as I see no way the Foundation would support any additional restrictions on article creation, given how hard the fought against the community on this one. --Jayron32 19:00, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

Oh, I didn't think it would. But I can't think of any other way to at least restrict the large amounts of spam, cruft, paid editor creations and other crap which isn't coming through AFC. Black Kite (talk) 19:58, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the balance needs to be tipped a bit in the opposite way. A significant part of creating a article in Wikipedia is to find and include references. That's why they are called editors and not title generators.North8000 (talk) 20:09, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Going back to the original proposal to require alternatives to be exhausted, I’ve been giving it some more thought. First of all my question is do we think that articles on decent, notable topics are getting deleted at AfD constantly? Regularly? Occasionally? Very occasionally? Because I think to make a major revision of WP:BEFORE we’d need to agree that there is a problem of sufficient magnitude to warrant it. For my own part, I’m not persuaded. I look at AfD every day though I don’t scrutinise each individual discussion closely, and my impression is that overall, it’s doing fine. Yes there are nominations what are not grounded in policy, but other editors contributing to the discussion deal with that. I’d support some thresholds for allowing editors to make an AfD nomination at all in order to reduce the number of pointless nominations but I know that doesn’t enjoy support here.

The main alternatives to deletion, other than just leaving the article alone, are going to be redirect or merge. If we’re going to say that we won’t allow an AfD nomination until both redirect and merge have been tried and failed, I don’t support that. Often articles nominated at AfD don’t have suitable merge or redirect targets anyway. Also I think this will impose much too high a burden on the nominator. Merge proposals can take months, and any time we’d save at AfD we’d lose in hugely expanded merger discussions.

To me the main benefit of an AfD over alternatives is that it gives us to opportunity to reach consensus. If I find a BLP that I think doesn’t belong in Wikipedia I don’t want to engage in a potentially endless ping pong of doing and redoing redirects while the article creator undoes them before I’m allowed to seek consensus on what should be done. We should be able to seek consensus quickly, not only as a last resort. If the conclusion of an AfD is to redirect then there is a good chance that can be made to stick, and that is less of a waste of everyone's time than expecting an individual editor to doggedly pursue alternatives for days, weeks or months before being allowed to nominate at AfD. Incidentally I would expect one unintended outcome of taking this approach would be to increase incivility and edit-warring. AfD is a formal, rule driven process where we can air differing views on notability dispassionately and without making it personal. Only letting editors into that forum after they’ve done a dozen rounds of slugging it out one to one with the article creator isn’t really going to help us build the encyclopedia any better. Mccapra (talk) 04:58, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think @Mccapra: has made some good points. The only difference of opinion I might have is if, after trying to redirect, it gets reverted, then take it to AfD. Same with a merge. However, a merge can consume more time and if that gets reverted, for me it is not a happy occasion. I haven't been able to read this entire page. I've only gotten through about 1/3 of the page. I intend to read the whole thing over time.

This is a really good discussion. I think AfD nominations only by extended confirmed users is a good idea. Also, an article created by social media canvassing should have a COI tag placed on it, and may brought to the COI noticeboard for discussion.

As an aside, it is upsetting to see claims of social injustice by Twitter personalities just because an article is nominated for deletion. That is not the issue, period. We have notability criteria which is usually a neutral arbiter for keeping or deleting an article. One more thing - perhaps AfDs of canvassing Twitter personalities' articles should be automatically posted at WP:AN to garner admin eyes in case the canvassing is too overwhelming (something like that). ---Steve Quinn (talk) 06:45, 23 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose per CREEP I really don't see the necessity in this. Yes, there are users who abuse AfD. They can be topic banned for repeated disruptions. Articles are usually brought to AfD not for quality control but because someone believes the topic lacks notability. Thus, aside from a BEFORE check, there is nothing that can be done to "improve" the article if it simply lacks notability, so urging editors to exhaust themselves in improving an article that can't be improved or shouldn't be improved is unhelpful. -Indy beetle (talk) 16:46, 4 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. I am absolutely against wasting more editors' time by forcing them to jump through more hoops in order to earn the right to nominate an AfD. The unintended consequence of this, I fear, will be that Wikipedia will simply fill up with more promotional BLPs of non-notable people. There is an absolute plague of these, dozens every day. Every one is created and defended by a fan or a UPE. There is generally nothing to redirect or merge them to. It is hard enough to get editors to deal with these as it is and much of the backlog at AfC and NPP is accounted for by them. I hesitate to nominate them for deletion myself because often this leads to a week of back and forth in the AfD discussion and on my talk page, draws in sockpuppets and kicks off a major effort by the creator and their real/sock friends to talk the nomination out with bluster and irrelevance. If I'm going to be told that instead of having to deal with these muppets for seven days I'm going to have to argue a merge and a redirect with them too, I just won't bother and will leave them to someone else to deal with. Perhaps I'm not typical and there's no shortage of other editors to take on this task. If there are, could they sign up for NPP please as we desperately need them - we need more articles coming to AfD, not fewer. There is a constant daily battle to get crap off Wikipedia, and we're not keeping up with that even as it is. I am in favour of trying to reduce the number of frivolous or badly-argued nominations by requiring a higher threshold of editor experience to be able to nominate an AfD, though I recognise that's not what is being proposed here and that it has been discussed and rejected before. Mccapra (talk) 11:29, 5 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• oppose as instruction creep. Either flesh them out early on and properly in draft, or refund them to draft. And there is no problem to recreate them with proper sources if you think an article has merit. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 03:49, 6 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This section is pinned and will not be automatically archived.

I've pinned this section because it needs closing before archiving. SpinningSpark 14:47, 21 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to discuss what the policy is, or should be, on images that were once used in articles but no longer are. To my mind, such images should be retained, either here or on Commons, because they form part of the history of the page. Deleting old images breaks old versions of the page. It also removes some of the attribution, which becomes a licensing and legal problem for any reusers of old versions of the page relying on hyperlinks for attribution. In my view, we should also retain images used as part of talk page discussions. Sometimes, the discussion makes no sense without the image.

Some background; I deprodded around one thousand images back in May that had been mass proposed for deletion on the grounds that they were not used in any article (although the vast majority of them had once been so used) and the "poor quality" made them unsuitable for Commons. These deprods went largely unchallenged, but there is still a steady stream of simmilar cases turning up in

I dunno, how important is it for images to display in old versions of the page? In practice it may also be difficult to know about a file's past usage. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:42, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The importance of old images is exactly the same as importance of old text for precisely the same reasons (which are in my opening statement). If you think this is unimportant you need a better rationale than "dunno". As for "difficult to know", on the contrary, in the vast majority of cases it is very easy to find out. One has only to check the edit history of the uploader; the image is often used in an article in the very next edit. Not checking this is just pure laziness on the part of the nominator. SpinningSpark 13:08, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure I understand why old images need to be deleted. If the image was good enough for an article at some point, then it should be moved across to Commons. If the quality is seen as poor, then tag it somehow as "needing a better version". If the image is re-used and somebody is motivated by the poor quality, then a new version will happen. — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 12:39, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm assuming this is about fair-use images? One of the fair use conditions is for images to be used on pages. We can't be an image gallery for copyrighted materials. If items are free, they should be moved across to commons anyway, so I'm not sure what the policy change here is being proposed? Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 13:18, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

No, this is not about fair use. The images being discussed here were all nominated for quality reasons. They were all uploaded with a free license, usually self-created. SpinningSpark 13:38, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Depends on WHY the old image was removed. If it was simply because editors thought that a new image was better, then we have no problem with maintaining the old image somewhere (such as commons). However, if the old image was removed for cause (such as violating copyright), then we MUST purge it completely. Case by case situation. Blueboar (talk) 13:30, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, of course, we should not keep copyrighted images. You say "we" have no problem keeping but the NFF

FFD page is absolutely causing such a problem. Its reasons for nominating include orphaned, obsolete, low quality, and unencyclopedic, all without any reference to policy or guidelines. All of these can include files that appear in article histories. And on the last criterion, I have created files in the past to clarify a talk page discussion. These are clearly unusable in an article but are open to deletion (some have been) under these criteria. SpinningSpark 13:47, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

• I believe that how we handle files is outside the rest of all parts of the other contributions to the history of a article page, and thus retention of older, unused files is not necessary, though we retain the file: space history aspects related to that file that relate to who had uploaded the file and the source/other details. All of our disclaimers to users, and our upload notifications all suggests that the hosting of images (and other AV file types) is wholly separate contributions from mainspace contributions, and while you are still agreeing to make your contribution to the project, it is not being tracked as part of the contribution of the article it will belong to. When looking at contributions to an article, it is not the image that we look at as the contribution, but the text/code that puts the image in place as the contribution, since that image can change independently after that text is added to the article (by a file update). A reuser of an article that is taking images would be required (if they are following the letter) to point to the histories of both the article and all used images to track contributions. So no, I don't think we're required to keep old images. That said, obviously we delete unused NFC, but I see no reason why we need to delete unused free images unless its clear they are completely unusable or otherwise clearly violate other policies (eg: graphic nudity beyond what's necessary for articles on human anatomy). Poor but not unusable is not a good reason to delete a free image --Masem (t) 13:57, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • The argument is not that old images are needed for attribution, it is that old images allow inspection of previous versions of an article, including meaningful diffs. We don't purge revisions with unused text on the basis of "orphan" or "unnecessary". That's because it can be useful to view old revisions, for example, if wondering why a certain section is the way it is—has an edit from long ago accidentally damaged or omitted an important point? Johnuniq (talk) 04:00, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • But we do have to reconcile that we are required to delete unused non-free images from a copyright and WMF standpoint. When the unusued image is free (for the stuff that can't go to Commons) I fully agree, lets keep it to help with previous revisions of articles, but my point is that if the old image was a proper non-free but since replaced, the file: page should be present that a user checking an old revision can see from the source on the file: page to get an idea of what it is (and even if that's not the case, the description should be sufficient to get an idea, this is why we have this information). We need to delete the "pixels" from the File: page and while we need to "delete" the non-free file page to remove that from being included in scope in article scope, we shouldn't purge the deleted text revisions on the file: for this reason. --Masem (t) 15:53, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Images not currently in use that are of lower quality than others that do not have any other (offsetting) added educational value are not in scope for commons. A recent dicussion on commons concluded that "image was formerly in use in a wikipedia article" was not a reasonable basis for keeping an image tagged for deletion. One of the reasons mentioned there is an important one unrelated to images directly...we routinely make widescale changes that make previous revisions of a page no longer "as they were at the time" when viewed in article-history. A simple example is a change to a template that makes some formerly-used field no longer visible (same effect as if an image in use at the time were deleted). Images solely for discussion of wikipedia issues and brainstorming (no encyclopediac or educational content) obviously aren't in scope for commmons...they should be tagged {{Keep local}} with some rationale so others will be less likely to mis-handle them. DMacks (talk) 14:13, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  I also note that

  WP:CSD F1 and F8 have existed for a looooong time. Some deletion...speedy, not even discussed, of some free images that were once in use, making the old revisions of articles that once had them no-longer-render-as-they-did, is currently a policy. DMacks (talk) 02:36, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply

  ]

  @DMacks: F1 and F8 apply to duplicated images, the former on Wikipedia, the latter on Commons, and what "unused" means is here is open to interpretation. Virtually none of the thousand files I deprodded was a duplicate — that's why they weren't speedied. Of files that are duplicated on Commons, the vast majority are moved there with the same name as Wikipedia. There is thus only a speedy problem with a tiny minority of a tiny minority of files, and in any case, they are probably an oversight of the original policy draft. The original proposal for F8 is here. This was clearly controversial as the proposal had failed multiple times previously. Part of the agreed compromise says "If the image is available on Commons under a different name than locally, it must not be used on any local page whatsoever." In other words, don't delete the local copy if our article uses a different name from Commons. I also note that the original version of F8 – then I9 says "bit-for-bit identical", in line with the original version of F1. It got changed in this edit as a result of this discussion with poor participation. I don't think any of this shows consensus for these deletions. In fact it shows that we have got where we are largely through undiscussed scope creep. SpinningSpark 14:00, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  It's a policy that supports deletion of currently-unused files in a way that breaks layout of old revisions of an article. DMacks (talk) 15:15, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  We strongly discourage (if even recommend against) image placement layout on articles ("pixel perfect placement") over placing images at relevant text in the document with minimal hints guiding sizing and location. That deletion of images causes these "layouts" to be broken that are not supported by policy is not something we should be worried about. --Masem (t) 15:26, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  That is entirely not the issue in hand. SpinningSpark 15:40, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  Perhaps "layout" was an imprecise term on my part. Better would be "display" or "content" (whether the image is present at all) let alone the pixel positioning of objects. DMacks (talk) 15:59, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Deleting old images because anyone can prod is ridiculous. It makes looking at old article revisions very hard; it does not save space; it does not save anything; it's a waste of time. Sure, put some energy into deleting old dick pics and similar because discouraging people from using Wikipedia for non-encyclopedic self gratification is useful. However, File:Null-balance voltmeter.png is part of the history of an encyclopedic article. If that should be deleted, why not permanently delete old revisions of text that are no longer used? Johnuniq (talk) 00:10, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Response from FFD nominator: User:Spinningspark says they deprodded a thousand images in May. I believe that I have nominated two of those and File:Null-balance voltmeter.png from June at Wikipedia:Files for discussion. I believe that it might be useful for other editors to see more than this one cherry-picked example of what they think is valuable to keep. I notice that while at least two people from this discussion have !voted on the image mentioned above, nobody appears to have found reason to !vote on File:Roodog2k-roo1.jpg that is also being discussed currently.

You will notice that (a) I have not voted for keeping the roodog image, even though was aware of the nomination, and (b) it has not actually ever been used in an article so is irrelevant to this discussion. It is easy enough to template images that have been reviewed once so that they need not be looked at again. That's a really poor jsutification for mass deleting images. SpinningSpark 23:33, 23 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The policy justification for these deletions is

This. I've previously PROD'd such files as well. The choice to use PROD over FFD was deliberate; if someone *really* wants to maintain old page histories, then I'm not going to stop them, the file may be restored without fuss. But IME, this is neither a common want nor need. -FASTILY 00:04, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal on images in page histories

So let's make a definite proposal to focus this and bring it to a conclusion. I'm deliberately not proposing a definite wording to guidelines so we don't get bogged down in the minutia and address the principle, but the pages that might need editing if this passes include, but are not limited to;

• Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion
• Wikipedia:Proposed deletion
• Wikipedia:Files for discussion

I'll make a separate proposal for article and talk pages as I suspect there will be a difference in attitude to the two. Note that the example I raised at the beginning is heading for keep at FFD, so there is prima facie evidence that this has consensus for at least some images. SpinningSpark 11:45, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• @Jo-Jo Eumerus, GhostInTheMachine, Lee Vilenski, Blueboar, Masem, Johnuniq, DMacks, BigrTex, Wikiacc, and Fastily: pinging previous participants in this discussion to try and finally get some consensus on this. SpinningSpark 10:25, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• I disagree with your proposal, but have spent the last two weeks declining to participate because there was no discussion (which implied to me that there is not great interest or support for your proposal) and because there are no instructions for how to participate.  ★  Bigr Tex 15:16, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Should files be retained so that the appearance of a historical page can be preserved? 17:56, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Proposal on retention of images in article histories

Proposal: That images that have appeared in past versions of an article should generally be retained. SpinningSpark 11:45, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. Images that were used in articles should be retained unless there is a specific reason to delete them. I'd make an exception for images that were exclusively used for vandalism, but that's the sort of thing that can be worked out when we get to the detail stage. Thryduulf (talk) 13:04, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support as nom. SpinningSpark 13:08, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose because there's usually an alternative or other reason. If an image has novel educational value, it should be moved to commons. That's what happened with the image that started this discussion (
  WP:V role.
  
  We routinely make changes that cause "old revisions" of large swaths of articles to no longer look the way they did at the time, including being completely broken, content missing, etc, especially in the world of templates, and the site-wide CSS and rendering engine itself. Now that we have section-transclusion and pulling content from wikidata (and have always had embedding of images from commons), there even are tons of "regular edits" (not just widespread things) that make looking at an old revision of page not the same at a later date (or even looking at the current version of a page). Therefore, I don't accept "to see how it was" as a generally valid reason to keep. DMacks (talk) 15:37, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  There is

  WP:NODEADLINE. If old images should be moved to Commons, then why not actually do so before deleting them locally, instead of leaving a redlink behind? If you can't be bothered to do that, then you shouldn't be cleaning up unused local files. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 18:22, 12 July 2020 (UTC)[reply

  ]

The question is "should we keep", which I assume because we're here on enwiki means keep on enwiki. That's why I opposed the question as written based on giving alternatives such as moving to commons. DMacks (talk) 03:53, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Importing another thought I mentioned in the previous discussion but forgot to include here in the formal RFC... "delete enwiki images, leading to redlinks in previous revisions" is a fundamental effect of CSD#F8 when commons has a different name for it and of CSD#F1 in general. That's a consensus policy for speedy without discussion, so the proposed policy-change here (keep if formerly used in good faith) seems like it would require abolishing those criteria. That policy talkpage should be alerted. DMacks (talk) 04:03, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@DMacks: I interpret the proposed policy in a completely different way from you. To me, the fact that images can be speedied locally under F8 after transfer to Commons is so untouchable that I can't imagine a new policy changing that, and any proposal which does not explicitly overturn F8 should be read in a way that does not imply that. So for me, the only effect of opposing this policy would be to allow deleting images without transferring to Commons, which seems counterproductive to me. Regarding Commons potentially having a different name for it, we can always create redirects on Commons. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 14:31, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose - I find the supposed need to be able to see exactly what a page used to look like doesn't match the history of how page history is primarily used (for crediting edits toward the existing version, and for tracking editing problems), nor with how we treat anything else here. There are a number of things we do that make looking at an historic (say, 2010) edit different from seeing it exactly as it appeared at the time (for example, we don't subst every template, so the templates all have their modern appearance when we look at the historic edit.) And the upshot of such a policy would be to incentivize putting in pointless photos, because any picture you once put into an article stays on forever, relevant or not. --Nat Gertler (talk) 16:26, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support if they are free images, with some clear encyclopedic value (no random pics of people's genitalia for example). If they can be moved to commons, they should be. If not, kept on WP. But considerations should be made for when improvements have been made and otherwise keeping an equivalent image (eg say a line-and-text drawing at 300x300px is reuploaded at 2400x2400 for better resolution, the 300x300 version is clearly not needed). Oppose for any non-free unused image as per the WMF resolution, we simply can't do that. Comment that I don't see the need to distinguish between image use on mainspace or talk space, because this is near impossible to track when starting from the image page, and would make for an admin nightmare. --Masem (t) 16:42, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support strongly per m:keep history. MediaWiki was designed as an improvement over UseModWiki, and one of the main features was keeping all history, not just some. It's important that we keep our history in a useable state because editors may want to go back to find images to re-use, figure out how a page's appearance has changed over time, or revert to a previous stub. There's little value in deleting free images, and a potential for harm. Having been used (and stable) in an article should be a sufficient reason to keep a file. — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:51, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Keeping history is important. Deletion does not save space and only wastes time and energy in pointless discussions. It is useful to delete images uploaded for non-encyclopedic reasons in order to discourage self-gratification. That does not apply to images that were useful in articles and which might have some detail that would throw light on article wording. Johnuniq (talk) 23:47, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support (for free images) as long as the image has remained in the article for a significant time (say, at least a month). Storage is cheap, and having an old revision look as close to it used to is very helpful to editors who want to compare an article throughout its history. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 00:19, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per DMacks globally, and oppose for non-free images per Masem. --Izno (talk) 17:53, 12 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Images that were part of an article and still meet the tests in
  WP:MTC should be moved to Commons so that the article history is preserved. (Otherwise, why not just purge old article versions as well??). — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 20:35, 12 July 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Oppose - As others have said, there are already a variety of changes that make pages in the history distinct from how they were at the time. Images form a relatively small proportion of this perceptual gap; the logic that deleting images "breaks" old versions of the pages is incorrect - they are already "broken". I also don't see any convincing reason why images should be retained, apart from "it's part of the history", which in my opinion isn't a convincing reason on its own. Many sites like the Internet Archive already retain a lot of these images anyway. -
  T C 01:03, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Oppose We should move to commons any image has proper source and licensing information and a possibility of future encyclopedic use, here or elsewhere. If it doesn't, we've listed that we are
  not a File Storage area for more than 10 years and it should be deleted. We have existing processes in place to determine into which of those categories an image belongs and some of which have been in place for even longer. I also find arguments about other history-breaking changes compelling.  ★  Bigr Tex 03:38, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Support for free images. Keeping a non-free image is problematic as per minimal use. Whether it is on commons or en.Wikipedia makes not difference. But commons really doesnot care to keep this old stuff for en.Wikipedia, so if deleted off commons it should be restored back here. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:46, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per
  it happens for a reason. The purpose of revision histories is not to serve as facsimiles of how pages used to appear. We delete unused/deprecated templates as well. Orphaned pages would be nothing more than a maintenance (and watch) burden. But above all: images deemed realistically useful not just in the past but for the future should, can, and are habitually transferred to Commons under current policy. If a need truly arises to see a deleted image in a revision history, you can always ask an admin and a copy will be provided to you. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 20:38, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Oppose - Images are deleted for a reason. "We used it before" is not a sufficient rationale for countering our deletion reasons. -Indy beetle (talk) 02:45, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Indy beetle: this proposal will not override other deletion criteria such as licensing. It is for when "unused" is the only deletion rationale. That is why the proposal says "generally" and not "always". In other words, images previously used should not be considered "unused" but can still be deleted for other reasons. SpinningSpark 07:15, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support File space is not a problem and the images don't actually get deleted anyway. What's most important is maintaining our audit trail as the years pass so that we can fully understand earlier versions of articles which may get munged or distorted. Copyright is not a long-term issue because all copyrights expire as the years pass. We should be planning for Wikipedia to last for centuries and it will then be interesting to study the evolution of its content. Consider the state of content from classical history which is now fragmentary as a result of attrition, decay and malicious destruction. Andrew🐉(talk) 17:42, 25 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per above. We are
  not a file hosting service. If necessary, useful images can always be copied to Commons. Without an obvious way to check if an image was previously used in an article, this is not enforceable. -FASTILY 22:47, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Oppose Solution without a problem that's likely to cause new problems. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 17:04, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support to keep history. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 10:09, 3 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal on retention of images in talk page histories

Proposal: That images that formed part of a meaningful talk page discussion (in any namespace) should generally be retained. SpinningSpark 11:45, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. If an image has been used on a talk page in any meaningful way then it should be retained unless there is a specific reason to delete it. Thryduulf (talk) 13:05, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support as nom. SpinningSpark 13:09, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. If the loss of images makes a discussion in a talk page archive unintelligible, it may be necessary to hold the discussion all over again, which is likely to be a waste of everyone's time. If an editor who provided a useful image in the past is no longer a participant, the results of the redundant discussion may be inferior to the result of original discussion. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:14, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Semi-support as long as two tagging processes are used:
  • An image whose discussion reveals a mistake gets clearly tagged as having a mistake (comparable to c:Template:Disputed diagram) to alert anyone who stumbles across the image (for example, looking at an older version of an article!).
  • An image that is incorrect, clearly lower quality than alternatives, or created solely for discussion and workshopping gets tagged {{Do not move to Commons}}. License-compliant images are generally moved to commons for benefit of all, but if there's no benefit for anyone else to have or it's not in their scope, they will just delete it and we'll have lost what we wanted to have.

And this is all predicated on discussion/image itself being in good faith and seeing the image likewise being useful (per one of Nat Gertler's concerns in previous section). We routinely remove talkpage content for NOTSOAPBOX or spam purposes, so a discussion of such an image might be valid but the image itself in bad faith (bad-faith content even of images should be removed). DMacks (talk) 15:46, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose only because from the file: space standpoint, we cannot easily tell when images have been used elsewhere after they have been removed. It doesn't make sense to create distinctly different policies here. --Masem (t) 16:43, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per above. If a discussion centers around an image, deleting it removes the context of the discussion and makes it more difficult to understand if not completely useless. — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:53, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support It is sometime necessary to dive into history to understand why an article is the way it is, and what might be done to improve the article. Deletion does not save space and only wastes time and energy in pointless discussions. Johnuniq (talk) 23:49, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Images used on talk pages are often central to the conversation, which cannot be easily understood otherwise. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 00:21, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per DMacks globally above, and oppose per Masem specifically for talk pages. --Izno (talk) 17:54, 12 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Images that are part of a meaningful talk page discussion and meet the tests in
  WP:MTC should be moved to Commons so that the talk page history is preserved. (Otherwise, why not just purge all talk archives??). — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 20:35, 12 July 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Oppose An image that is in use on a talk page or it's archive is not what is being discussed here. We are talking about an image that was used on a talk page but at some point in time was removed from that talk page. In either case, we have deletion processes that allow for review and movement to Commons for images with valid source and licensing information. The idea that an editor is going to find a deleted discussion in the history of a talk page to save time from repeating that discussion without understanding how to obtain access to the deleted image or mention it to someone who might feels somewhat far-fetched to me.

If an image has a possibility of future encyclopedic use, here or elsewhere, we should move it to commons. If it doesn't, we've listed that we are

not a File Storage area for more than 10 years.  ★  Bigr Tex 03:04, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

If an image is moved to Commons, it already can be speedied under F8. So opposing this is pointless unless you explicitly want to delete such images without taking the few minutes to move them to Commons, in which case: why? -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 14:25, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

King of Hearts Is that question to me? If so, can you rephrase it?

I'll try to address it, but I may be answering something different than you were asking: I have no desire to spend time to move an image to Commons if it is going to result in a deletion discussion on Commons because the image has no expected future encyclopedic use; That is a waste of my time, the nominator's time at Commons, the admin's time at Commons, and more of my time when I have to try to remember and justify why I moved it. I prefer using the Proposed Deletion process for those images, but am also happy to use the

Files for Deletion process if necessary. Again, I am talking here about orphaned talk page images that someone uploaded in the (generally distant) past for use on some talk page and is no longer in use on that talk page and for which the discussion in which it was used has not been permanently archived.  ★  Bigr Tex 03:25, 29 July 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

I see, I think we are interpreting the proposal differently. I assumed that it was referring to images used in talk page archives, because almost all talk page discussions get archived (unlike mainspace edits, which I suggested a separate set of rules for). If an image is part of a legitimate talk page discussion and somehow didn't get archived, then that is an oversight and the discussion should get archived. If an image was used on a talk page and quickly reverted, then I agree that it can be deleted. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 03:37, 29 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I am basing my understanding off of the beginning of the discussion that led to the proposal (above), "I would like to discuss what the policy is, or should be, on images that were once used in articles but no longer are."

I suspect that this part of the proposal was prompted in part by Wikipedia:Files for discussion/2020 June 12#File:Essjay 666.gif where one former editor posted a screenshot of a memorable edit count on another former editor's talk page (edit link). It remained there for four days and then was archived by the recipient. It lived in the archive for almost a year before I lose track of it; the recipient asked for all of their userspace content to be deleted when they left the project.  ★  Bigr Tex 04:14, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose per my comment in the above section and Masem's comment in this. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 20:38, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per above and per my comments above. -FASTILY 22:47, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose If they're currently used in an archive, that still counts as in use. If they got blanked off the talk page, they're probably not that important anyway. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 17:05, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Gratuitous deletion in such cases is disruptive and is mostly a waste of time as the files aren't actually deleted. Andrew🐉(talk) 13:12, 25 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support for future historians, and when no useful purpose served by deletion. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 10:12, 3 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]