Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 160

Wikipedia talk:Banning policy § RFC: BANEX exception for permissions requests Lev!vich 22:49, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Opinions are needed on the following matter: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#MOS:GENDERID being used in place of WP:Article titles and for category arguments. A permalink for it is here. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 20:47, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

On the article Resonator there is an animated gif.
This and any constantly playing animated GIF is annoying !!.
Any animated GIF should have a switch with which the gif can be switched on and off.

On my screen the gif in "Resonator" is beside the first seven lines of text (not above).
So I can't just scroll it out of sight.
And if I push the right edge of the window towards the left, the window remains beside the text.
Many animated gifs are between text that is: with text above and below and beside the gif. So there is no way to evade this constant movement.
So I, and many others too, would greatley appreciate this suggested switch.
On talk of "Resonator" there is at least one other reader who is annoyed. I'm sure, ther are many more.

This one on Talk:Resonator#The_animated_GIF_is_annoying_!!, User:Spinningspark, mentioned:
Phabricator task T61217 is relevant to this, but there has been no activity for years.

Plus: I (Steue) suggest that animated gifs are halted by default.

Please ping me. Steue (talk) 07:52, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

@

WP:BOLD and altered the image in Resonator to be hidden by default. Does this seem to be a reasonable thing to do? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me}

11:48, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

That removes the image from the mobile skin, which is a step too far. I will look for an alternative way to do that. — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 12:18, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

I reverted the hiding per

MOS:DONTHIDE. I also moved the image back up to the top. Having it below the text like that is awkward for other reasons. As for the overall wish for pausing gifs (there are animated PNGs too, by the way, and maybe other formats?), that's certainly a reasonable feature request, but I'd wager some careful thought needs to go into how it's handled. I haven't checked, but there might even be browser extensions that let you do this already. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos

) 12:28, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

FYI, phab:T85838 is open to create technical functionality for this, feel fee to add support there. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:25, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Etiquette at Phab is against voting. Comments with practical value (e.g., examples of obvious or serious problems or alternatives that you found) are highly desirable. Just saying that you want something is not. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:17, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

There's no easy way to enable starting and stopping of animated gifs on a page. It's one of the annoyances of animated gifs, and why so many websites have sections for "gifs" that actually display looping webms (i.e. videos). It seems like it would be a major undertaking to create a way to do that in mediwiki (though others will be more knowledgeable about the specificity there than me). I would be surprised if developers looked at the size of that task and concluded anything other than that it would be better to just switch to video. The downside is that, at least at first, if we switch from gif to video, if there's a case where you do want it to play automatically, that's gone (but I think it would be easier to modify webm display settings to create a template parameter to do so). Also with the way we display webms now, we don't have a way to just play it inline, I don't think, and part is obstructed by the playback controls. In the short term, Steue, there are plugins for the major browsers that pause all gifs on the internet by default and require you to click to play. It might be easier to implement on your end. :) — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:18, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

A workaround would be to capture a single frame of the animated image and display it instead, along with a link to the animated image. isaacl (talk) 23:40, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

You may wish to stop all of them in your web browser, eg see [8]. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:18, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Many thanks to all of you and

a million thanks to Graeme Bartlett.

I changed it in my Firefox to play "once" and it works!!

The add-on which howtogeek.com mentions is no longer available.

Deacon Vorbis, for which other reasons is it awkward?

Steue (talk) 06:37, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites

"GIF Viewer" can start and stop gifs, but this is a completely separate program, and I don't know wether this may help in the WP.

Steue (talk) 07:13, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

The solution from isaacl sounds pretty good and feasable to me.

Steue (talk) 07:17, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

@Steue: (and any others interested) Add importScript('User:Alexis Jazz/Hammertime.js'); mw.loader.load( '/w/index.php?title=User:Alexis Jazz/Hammertime.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' ); (sorry, I just learned importScript has been deprecated and doesn't work on the mobile site, you can still use it on the desktop site though) to Special:Mypage/common.js (source) to have a button on every article page that stops the window (JavaScript window.stop) which should halt animated GIFs in most browsers. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 10:31, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

The onus on start/stop the GIF should lie with its Wikipedia creator. Xxanthippe (talk) 10:51, 9 October 2020 (UTC).

Having to reload the entire page to restart an animation sounds like a terrible design and probably most animated image formats don't work like that. (Videos do, but they also come with controls out of most browser boxes.) There is a reason that accessibility says there should be controls and not that images should stop doing things. --Izno (talk) 14:39, 9 October 2020 (UTC)ideally

Thanks Alexis Jazz, I shall try this.

I completely agree with you, Xxanthippe.

Of course, Izno ideally the solution should not require the user to reload the page, it should be enough to click on the "switch." either to switch the gif ON or to download the animated gif, in case the page first only loads/loaded a non-animated gif or a e.g. jpeg.

Steue (talk) 21:25, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Just to add my opinion, I think animations are wonderful tools to explain STEM concepts to general readers, and should be more widely used (disclosure: I have created a number of gifs for WP articles). I suspect only a minority of readers are irritated by reasonably unobtrusive animations. I absolutely agree with the need for a prominent ON/OFF button. But I think the default should be ON; the animation running. With an opt-in, the vast majority of nontechnically-oriented readers, who would most benefit from the animation, will not notice or understand the button and will not turn it on. @Steue: --Chetvorno^TALK 19:12, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

Last I heard, the m:Community Wishlist is expected to open in a couple of weeks. It's possible that this would be a reasonable size project for the wishlist. If it's too big, then they are at least likely to produce an engineering evaluation, which would IMO still be a step forward. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:31, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

There is a discussion on the implementation of

Does WP/UNDUE hold for the entire site or just individual WP? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:46:C801:B1F0:2461:5DFD:6A2C:87C5 (talk) 10:51, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

"139 WP" What's a "WP", in this context? Where are these 139 examples? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:38, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Presumably "Wikipedia pages" is meant. The short answer is: yes, it does. I can't say too much more without knowing the exact complaint(s), but

WP:NOTNEWS that can be applicable also. But these issues plague all sorts of coverage of recent events, not just this. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos

) 14:54, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

This is basically part of it. We have a problem on WP with "hyperreporting" ( not my term) that we want to document everything that comes through the news and that causes people to create pages of great detail on current events, yet when we go back to equivalent events of the past - the Watergate scandals and the like, its clear the volume written then compared to now is far different.

There is some value in the short term of simply documenting what happens with sourcing as a sorta work in progress. That gives a way to go back and pull sources from key points to make an article with an enduring, long-term view. But unfortunately few people ever go back to these articles written in the short term to trim down and cull them down to what's needed and instead leave the blow-by-blow and hyperreporting (if you see

WP:PROSELINE, that's a good sign there's a problem). We need better encouragement of editors to come back to events after they seem to have settled down and no longer active and determine what's key and what's not. I'm sure in the example of the Trump Russia hoax thing of the 139 pages there's multiple duplications that really don't need to be there if one or two editors sit down and figure out a better structure, for example. --Masem (t

) 15:01, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

And just to add as another example: I have no idea how many articles we have but our stuff on COVID is in a similar shape. I wouldn't say it needs to be touched now while it is still an issue, but when the world's less worried about the disease, the heirarchy of pages needs to be looked at and drastically reworked. --Masem (t) 15:03, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

intitle:covid. I haven't counted, but let's just call it "lots". My personal favorite:

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on The Walt Disney Company. ―Mandruss ☎

15:52, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

UNDUE is about proper balance in coverage of a subject, so I don't think it makes sense to apply it to the project as a whole. Limiting the number of articles on X does not get you more articles on Y. Editors are always going to focus more on subjects they are interested in, and for which they can get sources more readily. I think there's something of a valid point made above about summary style and historical perspective, but beyond that "other editors write too much about subjects I don't care about" is really one of those perennial crank complaints we need to just disregard. postdlf (talk) 17:25, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

There is a difference between editors focusing more on subjects they are in, and justifying loads of spin-off article as due just because there a separate articles. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 17:35, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Also, I think it is probably significant that the original IP referred to the "Trump Russia collusion hoax". That is rather POV language and suggests an intense personal bias on the part of the complaining editor (no BALANCEd or NPOV coverage of this topic refers to a "hoax"). I'm not saying there aren't too many pages featuring Trump and Russia - there probably are - but the original post reeks of WHATABOUTISM and should probably be taken with much added salt content. Newimpartial (talk) 17:50, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Yeah the "hoax" word basically invalidated the credibility of the OP, we have to assume their judgement of Wikipedia is impaired due to their extreme bias (even the Republican-led Mueller Report showed enough evidence to discredit the "hoax" denial, it's more a matter of degree). I have seen old current-event articles refactored a decade later with recentism removed because no one is watching or cares much anymore. -- GreenC 18:17, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate those taking the time and effort to offer the constructive responses, I should've been more specific. I want to know when X future event takes place is there a WP policy to cite to lessen the endless spinoffs. The reason why is in part stated above, facts change even years later and the volume of articles needing the same changes becomes insurmountable for anyone to possibly keep track of and subsequently change. It seems a disservice and with either the example that I cited or covid, the probability of WP accurately representing the RS majority into infinity is almost zero percent. The only solution that I could come up with is a separate WP for current events which after some time then gets moved into the regular WP. The current situation leaves WP as more of a chronicle of times and events. This disservice can be rectified with lessened and more concise articles in the first place. I should've used Covid but haven't been following those pages so it did not come to mind. I'm hopeful that the above personal attack nonsense(hoax is still used in the RS minority POV see Fox et al) has not permanently ended discourse here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:46:C801:B1F0:B424:DCDD:60B9:9757 (talk) 03:16, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

a separate WP for current events. ―Mandruss ☎ 03:39, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Please see the

Reliable sources noticeboard

; Fox is not a reliable source on political issues.

That said, I actually agree that some kind of "quarantine zone" could be an effective way to deal with NOTNEWS issues, which are a real problem. Newimpartial (talk) 03:43, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

If we're not using Wikinews, we almost need like a "holding area" for current events like COVID where people can drop in current news, while it is curated into main space as reasonable stories can be written. But I have a feeling this would be really had to maintain under the open wiki approach. --Masem (t) 04:32, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Surely we already have such a "holding area", called draft space. It is currently misused as a backdoor route to deletion, despite what policy says, but this would be a good use for it.

Phil Bridger (talk

) 12:29, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Editors want to work in "real space" for these breaking news articles, nor do I blame them, but these articles are too "raw" to be final encyclopedic articles. I wouldn't say these are efforts that we "throw away" at the end of the day, and while the event is active staying in main space makes sense (in addition to gaining the benefit that Wikimedia software auto-archives all reference links, a useful feature), but after the event has calmed down and we can rationalize a better structure, we may need to pack the working versions away for something more encyclopedic (and as to keep contribution history). Whether that itself is a new namespace or something like moving the pages into a directory under the mainspace topic with indexing to allow them to be found easily, I don't know. --Masem (t) 21:30, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Several times I've gone looking for some information on a past event, and been pleasantly surprised to find a detailed article written when it was "recent". Rest assured that these article will be looked at, will be referred to, and will be maintained in years to come. Moreover, the references captured at this time will trigger their preservation for posterity by the archive bots. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:03, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

An essay on this subject is at Wikipedia:Systemic bias. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:21, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

The answer to the question posed in the heading has to be "no". The only way to get a fair balance in Wikipedia as a whole between topics relating to the Anglophone West and those relating to, say, China or countries in Africa would be to delete much of our content about the Anglophone West. This balance can only be reasonably addressed at the margin by those few editors that care creating, or not deleting, content about under-represented areas, not by removing content in well-represented areas.

No, it isn't "The only way to get a fair balance in Wikipedia as a whole between topics..." - it's just the easiest way. Johnbod (talk) 20:21, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

I would certainly go beyond "the easiest way". There is no reasonable prospect of a proportionate number of articles being produced on the English Wikipedia about most parts of the world outside the Anglophone West to those within it, so, yes, it would, in practice, be the only way.

Phil Bridger (talk

) 20:36, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Two other thoughts. The most common form of bias is selectively under covering or overcovering topics or negative or positive aspects of topics. We need to all eschew bias when building an encyclopedia and not just sit back when the bias is towards one's own side. Next, if there are too many articles on a topic possibly co-ordinating between them and removing duplicates. Also we should be very wary of and usually compound criteria titles. We need a "Dogs" article, maybe we could have a "big dogs" sub-article, but certainly not a "dogs with black fur" article.North8000 (talk) 21:22, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at Template talk:Undisclosed paid#Make talk page discussion mandatory when this template is used has stalled; more voices would be beneficial. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:17, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

Hi all, since WP:NCOIN doesn't exist, is there an existing precedent for the notability of coins? I am thinking of 5 cents (World War II Dutch coin) and 5 øre (World War II Danish coin) as examples given that they have been notability tagged for just short of 5 years. --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 07:56, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

WP:GNG seems like it would be appropriate. --Izno (talk

) 15:04, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

And I wouldn't have thought that it would be difficult to find sources that satisy the general notability guideline for any coin that has been in general circulation. Have you tried doing that for these coins?

Phil Bridger (talk

) 16:34, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

@

Phil Bridger: I am not familiar with Wikipedia articles on coins. The problem with finding sourcing is the fact that these ceased production 77 years ago. I haven't found much aside from ebay listings and the like, so thought I would check in here. I'll go ask Wikipedia:WikiProject Numismatics I guess. --TheSandDoctor ^Talk

17:48, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

I'd have thought academic sources and books would be the way to go - have you tried REFDESK and the WIkipedia Library? Nosebagbear (talk) 10:45, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

I want to talk about things that I hereby label "Scrubbing activities". By that I mean altering longstanding content in rapid response to recent real-life events. This can particularly mean changing a definition of a word, phrase or concept, deleting same, adding a new element of same, or potentially any other changes to longstanding content. I do NOT include simply adding references to recent events. An example of this (and there are more) is what happened recently at the "86" page. Such activities draw wikipedia into disrepute, because the suspicion of bad faith is inevitable in such a case. This can also poison the relations of Editors for much the same reasons. If such activities DO turn out to be well-founded, the changes involved can be implemented in the long term. It might be a good idea to have a rule against this. Asgrrr (talk) 15:23, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

What about

WP:BRD. That might already cover it. Graywalls (talk

) 15:41, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

I don't think it does. Asgrrr (talk) 18:56, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia like the rest of the internet has unfortunately joined the "Its all about the pageviews" society and despite numerous policies about current events, recentism and too soon allows current events to dominate page creations and even the editing of long standing pages. Rather than being about documenting, wikipedia has become a part of making history.

Put simply, editors know if they get their preferred facts into an article, it will shape future conversations. Slywriter (talk) 00:29, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Deletion discussions remain one of the most hotly controversial parts of the project, but the bar for participation is lower than most other controversial parts of the project.

Bad faith nominations are a common form of harassment or POV-pushing, and while such nominations are rarely successful, there are no protections in place to prevent it from taking a toll on the victim (in cases of harassment) or taking a large amount of volunteer time (for harassment or for POV-pushing). Starting a deletion nominated currently requires autoconfirmed status (4 days + 10 edits).

Once the nomination is started, it's common for people associated with the subject to use social media channels to influence the discussion (whether to support or oppose deletion). New users who sign up just to advocate a position in a deletion discussion rarely take the time to familiarize themselves with Wikipedia's deletion-related policies and guidelines, leading to large numbers of low quality !votes that complicate discussions. In very rare cases, after discussions are already severely affected by canvassing, we semi-protect them. Canvassing creates a lot of drama, rarely helps a deletion discussion, and wastes a huge amount of time and energy.

Is it time to place greater restrictions on AfD? Three inter-related questions for the community. Please note that this is not a proposal, but a discussion to see if a proposal makes sense.

1. Should there be stricter requirements to start a deletion discussion?

2. Should deletion discussions be semi-protected by default?

3. If yes to either of the above, what is the best way to allow new users to participate productively (for example, using AfD talk pages)?

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

@

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)

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)

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)

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)

• 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)

• 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)

• Generally new users can't create articles either so this wouldn't be a problem but if their article is created through AFC then they may not be able to participate. Crouch, Swale (talk) 15:01, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

• 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)
• 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)
• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

  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)

• 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)

• @
  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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• @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)

• 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)

• 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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
  • 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)
  • @
    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)
  • 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)
    • @
      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)
      • @
        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)

        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)

        @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)

        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)

        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)

  • 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)

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)

• 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)

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

  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)

  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)

• 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)

  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)

• 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)
• 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)

• @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)

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

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)

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

• 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)
• 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).

• @
  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)

  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)

• @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)

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).

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)

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

• 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)
• 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)
• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)
  • Agreed. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
• 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)
  • 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)
• 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)

  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)

• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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.