Wikipedia:Deletion and deletionism

Each of these processes is dealt with in more detail below:

Speedy Deletion

As mentioned above, the "Speedy deletion" policy is a way to delete some very limited types of articles or other pages "on sight" without further debate, as in the cases of patent nonsense or pure vandalism. Speedy deletion is usually the first step in the process of deletion analysis.

What are the Speedy Deletion Criteria

These are the most common criteria you will use. See the pages on criteria for speedy deletion for the full list.

Ensure you use the right reason. Ensure, doubly so, that your reasoning is both logical and factual. Do not simply throw a tag on an article. Take some time, at least five minutes, to research it properly.

How exactly do I list an article for Speedy Deletion?

Once you are assured that the article is indeed a Speedy Deletion candidate, you follow a two-step process.

• Step One: Place the appropriate template on the page of the article, at the very top of the page. A list of the templates can be useful in identifying the proper one to use.

• Step Two: Place a notification on the author's talk page. There will often be an example of what code to use at the bottom of the template you apply; for instance, you can type {{
  nn-warn
  |name of article}} ~~~~ when warning a user about an article that you've nominated for an A7 speedy deletion. This allows the person to fix the article if needed, by using a {{hangon}} tag.

Tips on Speedy Deletion

1. If the article is clearly garbage, make very sure you review the entire history. Some things may look like crap but have been vandalized. You should do this with all deletions, but it's particularly important in speedy deletion.
2. Speedy deletion can work quickly, but remember that the speedy tag can be removed by the author. It's generally not worth it to make a huge edit war over this, just take it to AfD instead if it happens.
3. If someone uses a hangon tag, it's generally a good idea to be helpful in trying to fix the article. Some articles are created as frameworks and don't immediately show notability.
4. ALWAYS make sure you leave the user notice when you speedy delete. Since speedy deletion can happen quickly, not doing so leaves you open to charges that you are not following process correctly.

Proposed Deletion (Prod)

Proposed Deletion is pretty simple, and straightforward. If an article meets the standard (not speedy) criteria for deletion, such as violations of

To prod an article (in informal terms), place a prod tag on the article page like this: {{subst:prod|reason goes here}}. If the prod is removed, take the page to AfD if you think it still violates policy.

Tips for Proposed Deletion

1. Prods are best used on articles that haven't been edited in several months, have a single editor, and appear inactive. An active article that is inappropriate for Wikipedia should be taken to AfD instead, since a prod can be undone legally by removing the tag.
2. Prods are usually deleted with some rapidity, but there can be a backlog. Sometimes, the deleting admin will remove your prod if they feel it doesn't apply.

Deletion debates

The main way to delete an article is to use the Articles for Deletion page. The AfD page has a very good explanation of how to list an article for deletion so I won't repeat it here. Instead, I'll make a few observations:

1. This is not a vote: When articles go up for deletion, users examine the article and the deletion argument and make suggestions that resemble a vote, such as "keep" or "delete". However, the purpose of XfD is to decide whether an article fails a policy. Even if 40 people vote to delete, if they don't have a reason to do so, the article will be kept. -
2. A good vote has a policy attached: The best votes, for keep or delete, include the proper policy to back that vote up. Don't just say "per nom", come up with your own reason.
3. Don't vote keep because you like it.
   : The idea of voting is bad, but voting based on your personal stake or impression of the article is worse....
4. Don't vote delete because you hate it.
   : This is even worse than voting keep without a good reason. If you want something deleted, find a policy that supports your view. Don't just spam (delete, stupid author) or whatever.
5. Civility is paramount: Being rude only undercuts your argument, and makes it less likely people will view your AfD in the impartial atmosphere you need.

Administrative Deletion

In very rare cases the administration of the Wikimedia Foundation will step in to resolve a dispute, such as when the bureaucracy of Wikipedia is being abused, or a conflict spirals out of control and is wasting an inordinate amount of human resources. Such was the case with the deletion debates concerning Brian Peppers, in which Jimbo Wales finally stepped-in and personally deleted and temporarily "salted" the article until February 21, 2007.

In the unhappy event you are the author or significant contributor to an article that has been deleted at AfD, you may have two options open. If the article was speedily deleted as nonsense, an attack page, a copyright violation, or if it was deleted by administrative oversight, then you are better off leaving it deleted. Recreations of such content can be construed as trolling.

However, if you feel you can work on the article enough to fix it, or that the deletion process was unfair to the article, you have two choices.

Deletion Review

Userfication (aka: "Content review")

If a deleted article is not inflammatory or otherwise disruptive, and you want to work on it in your user space, you can ask an admin to give you a copy to put in your user space. Or you could post your request at

In your userspace, such articles are usually immune to XfD attempts as long as you are working on it to make it fit wikipolicy. Do NOT link to it outside of your user space, or attempt to get things to link to it. Don't game the system.

Once the article has been brought up to standard, move it to article space, and then request that the history of the original page be restored, at

Article re-creation

There is no policy against article re-creation, provided you act in good faith and did your best to adhere to Wikipedia policy. But in the case of a topic which has been repeatedly voted down, it may be "salted" (replaced by a protected notice page) to prevent re-creation. If the topic becomes eligible (like a previously obscure web site which has suddenly garnered a lot of popularity and press), then you may make a request for page unprotection so that you can re-create the page. (Requests for unprotection are handled on the same page as requests for page protection).

If the topic of an article is deemed inappropriate (due to lack of notability, for instance), then the article should not be re-created (until the notability of the topic itself changes).

For example, an article is written about a virtually unknown author who wrote a single book which sold no more than 500 copies which received no coverage in the mainstream or even field-specific press. According to Wikipedia policy, the author is non notable and should not be afforded an article. Therefore the article gets nominated for deletion and during the debate the "delete" votes prevail. But a few weeks later, the author appears on Oprah and the book sells a million copies. The topic now qualifies for inclusion in Wikipedia and the article can be re-created.

If an article is nominated for deletion because the quality of its contents are not up to par (such as lacks references and depth), you can save a copy to your user space before the article is deleted. Once you have fixed the article and it no longer violates Wikipedia policy, it can be moved back to article space. Be sure to explain on its talk page how the article no longer violates policy, and how it has been improved.

Tip: If you believe an article (which you find useful) is in danger of getting deleted, you can save a copy of the article in your user space or off-line on your hard disk.

Tip: To keep your user space from getting cluttered, you can save articles vertically in a "stack" by using a single page in your user space to store them. Each time you wish to add an article to the stack, blank the page, cut and paste the new article to the page, and save. The previous article is preserved in the page's history. Be sure to indicate the name of each article in its edit summary, to enable you to find it later.

Here are some relevant guideline shortcut pages.

Here are some quick guidelines:

Copyright

• If it violates copyright in any way, it has to go.
• If ALL the pages in the history are copyvios, place a copyvio deletion tag on it ({{
  db-copyvio
  }}).
• Otherwise, revert to the first page that doesn't contain the copyvio.

Verifiablity

• Check the verifiability of the article yourself.
• Make sure you do at least a quick search for sources.
• Articles without any sources that make large claims are almost always deletion worthy.

Notability

• Be aware of sub-types of notability, such as
  WP:LOCAL
  .
• Notability is under a lot of changes recently, so review
  WP:N
  when you can.
• Subjects that aren't notable generally get deleted, but most things that fail notability tend to fail verifiability as well.

Encyclopedic

• Review
  WP:NOT
  for a good idea of what not to make into the subject of an article.
• Instead of deletion, encourage transwiking topics to other wikis like
  Wikitionary or Wikibooks
  .
• Remember that Wikipedia is not censored. Offensive content can still be encyclopedic.

Deletionism and Inclusionism, while most often represented as black and white opposites which completely oppose each other, are really two ends of a continuum. Wikipedians' inclusion standards all lie somewhere along the line between "include everything" and "delete everything"; inclusionism and deletionism are shorthand terms which describe the Wikipedians whose views sit at the lower and higher ends of this continuum.

Inclusionism holds that articles that do not violate instant deletion issues (such as blatant copyright violations or attack pages) should not be deleted if there is a way for them to be expanded. They tend to point more towards expansion of stubs, finding sources for articles without sources, and editing to make most articles suitable for Wikipedia. Or to simply leave the article in place so that others can come along and improve it. However, a common criticism of Inclusionists is that they advocate cleanup and sourcing but rarely perform such acts themselves, which only leads to ever-increasing backlogs of unsourced articles.[1] Inclusionists may point out that Wikipedia is by default unsourced, and that WP:Verifiability isn't applied consistently – if it were, then most of Wikipedia would be up for deletion. Inclusionists bitterly dislike the idea of notability, stating that it is being used as a club to prevent anything non-mainstream from being included in Wikipedia. They may argue that if a subject or field is mainstream enough to have an article on Wikipedia, then its subtopics are eligible for inclusion as well.

Deletionism holds that articles that do not meet the basic policies of Wikipedia and cannot be immediately fixed with a minimum of effort should be deleted. Deletionists tend to rely on the direct and literal reading of particular policy and dislike the idea of putting things such as sourcing articles or removing original research off, since it usually never gets done. However, deletionism is under increasing criticism due to the fact that many deletionists spend more time deleting things than creating articles, and that many deletions are either railroads of articles that could be expanded or rely on increasingly specific deletion criteria that continue to tighten. Deletionists bitterly dislike the principle of rules like

It is worth noting that there are roughly 400 to 500 inclusionist editors, and perhaps a total of 200 deletionists. This is out of over 3,000,000 users.^[