Wikipedia:Drafts are not checked for notability or sanity
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This page in a nutshell: The criteria that would get an article in mainspace deleted mostly don't apply to drafts. |
Notability
Notability standards do not apply to draftspace; indeed, the weaker
The archetypal "12 year old's Minecraft YouTube channel" draft is, if it's harming no one, entirely unproblematic. In fact, the
Unproblematic non-notable drafts can happily sit for six months, and nominating them for deletion only makes them problematic. By nominating a draft for deletion, and by extension editing it, you reset the clock on
Sanity
Article speedy deletion criteria do not apply to drafts. Most such criteria don't check notability – they check sanity.
The corollary of this is that matters such as "could never conceivably be an article", "obviously made up in one day", or "not in English" are of much less concern in draftspace. This is not to say they have no value in MfD discussions – certainly the same draft has much less of a shot in Albanian than it does in English. (Be careful, however, that the Albanian draft isn't actually a notable topic needing translation!) However, there's no urgent need to nominate them either. The same caution above about the issue of leaving a lasting negative impression holds.
This may seem bizarre, but there's a method to the madness. The purpose of speedy deletion is to chunk out the most going-down-in-flames obvious cases, the matters for which it is unambiguous and inescapable that the topic is inappropriate for Wikipedia. Drafts are almost never unambiguously and inescapably inappropriate, particularly on the matters of their content. There is very little a draft can do to cause harm to its subjects; draftspace is an unindexed "storage bin" that's only accessible if you know what you're looking for and actively look for it. Letting the garbage collectors get it in six months solves everyone bureaucracy and frustration, rather than causing it.
Userspace drafts
All these considerations hold even truer for userspace drafts. "But userspace isn't self-cleaning!", you say. Yes, and it isn't meant to be. Userspace is a scratch pad for the person who has it. Unless a page (of any kind) in userspace is either an attack or blatant advertising, there's not much reason to mess with it.
Speedy deletion
The General speedy deletion criteria apply to drafts. Drafts may be deleted if they are any of the following:
- WP:G1"Patent nonsense", which refers to gibberish of the "fuurger8t8eg9grgnwe7e8rwnieaioad8" keysmash kind and absolutely nothing else
- WP:G2 "Test pages" ("Can I really make an article here?"); note that, per the consensus found in a 2021 RfC, this criterion does not apply to drafts that if in mainspace would be deletable under A1/A3
- WP:G3. Vandalism and blatant hoaxes
- WP:G4. Pages entirely identical to those previously deleted under AfD or MfD[note 2]
- WP:G5Creations by banned or blocked users after their block or ban, e.g. by sockpuppets
- WP:G6Uncontroversial maintenance
- WP:G7Requested deletions by a sole contributor
- WP:BLPprivate identifying information
- WP:G11Unambiguous advertising
- WP:G12Unambiguous copyvio
Consider the repetition of 'unambiguous' and similar insistence on clarity. The key for CSD is "do you have literally any doubt that the criteria applies?". If so, assume it does not.
So when is MfD appropriate?
It's possible, though rare, for a draft that isn't a speedy candidate to require deletion pre-
- A draft is being tendentiously resubmitted without approval, especially if combined with a deleted mainspace article
- The G13 clock is being reset through minor edits near the end of the six-month window, without substantial improvement
Both of these will generally be uncontroversial MfDs, and are the major indicated use case for draft deletion discussions.
A more controversial indication for MfD can be a draft that's harmless but clearly inappropriate well past "not checked for notability or sanity", usually involving
Serious
See also
Notes
- ^ Your essayist still has conflicting feelings about the unsympathetic speedy of an (out-of-scope, rightly deleted) article when he was eleven.
- ^ This does not mean 'pages recreated after deletion', it means 'the exact same page'. If you're unable to see deleted revisions, there's a good chance you're putting this on mistakenly.