Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-11-29/Deletion report

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Deletion report

What we lost, what we gained

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By JPxG

Most editors are familiar with the existence of Articles for Deletion (AfD), the process by which we determine the suitability of articles for inclusion in Wikipedia. Indeed, many of us have had direct experience with the process, whether we liked it or not: working your ass off on an article only to see it flushed down the drain is close to an official rite of passage around these parts. That said, there are plenty of articles that have no place on Wikipedia, and plenty of subjects that have no business getting an article written about them. Love it or hate it, AfD is one of the most publicly-known processes on Wikipedia; it's referenced often enough in mainstream publications for us to have an article about it. And it looks like the largest AfD of all time has graced us with its presence this month.

But what do we really know about it? Statistical analysis is rather hard to come by. Earlier in 2021, I wrote a piece of software that analyzes AfD logs, from which I was able to create a

live dashboard of current deletion discussions. I was also able to analyze all 480,000 AfDs (statistics on which can be found here). There were some interesting revelations, including a sortable list of the longest AfDs
of all time for the drama-minded.

The topic of this report, however, is what was going on with AfD in November 2021, including the monthly statistics and sortable tables of each AfD.

Overall statistics

These figures are current as of November 28. More detailed statistics can be seen at the monthly Oracle page for November 2021, including numbers and percentages for all closes in the month.

There were 1,767 AfDs listed in November, of which 1,172 have closed and 595 remain open. This is slightly below the 2021 average of 1,794 per month (and well below the 2005–2020 average of 2,400 per month).

This comes out to an average of 63.1 per day, with the least on the 5th (35) and the most on the 27th (92); the average for 2021 has been around 54 per day.

205 of the November AfDs were relists from October, meaning 1,562 new nominations have been made since the beginning of the month. Additionally, 15 were closed without a !vote being cast (one was withdrawn, one was deleted, four were speedily deleted, and the rest were closed as no consensus).

The most common outcome was "delete" (as has been the case for all months since August 2005); "delete"s and "speedy delete"s combined made up 61.8% of closes. Meanwhile, 19.2% closed "keep" or "speedy keep", slightly below the 2021 average of 20.5%. There was only one type of close that didn't happen a single time in November — the elusive unicorn of deletion, the "transwiki" close to move content to another wiki, has occurred only 324 times in nearly 500,000 AfDs.

Mass killings under communist regimes: The largest AfD of all time

Note: The discussion's final size was 510,874 bytes, with 174 !votes across 217 editors. It had the {{
fully protected by Joe Roe five hours later to allow the closers to work. It was closed as "no consensus" on December 1, by a four-administrator panel consisting of Jo-Jo Eumerus, Joe Roe, Rosguill and Seraphimblade
.
The previous champion (the third nomination of List of notable converts to Christianity in 2007) was a paltry 234 kilobytes. It is not the AfD with the most !votes, however: that would be the 60-article batch nomination at Esoteric programming languages in 2006, which garnered 301. Or at least, it isn't the one with the most !votes yet. It still has a few more days to run, and it's apparently been picked up by a few blogs and media outlets. It's had 65,696 pageviews so far, which probably puts it high in the running for the most-viewed AfD of all time.
This is the article's fourth stint at AfD: the first three discussions (one from 2009 and two from 2010) were no less contentious, weighing in at 31, 67, and 206 kilobytes respectively. Prior to that, the article was
Communist genocide
.
This Polyphemian (or, if you prefer, "huge-ass") discussion concerns a similarly massive article: currently 297 kilobytes, it's existed since 2009, and in that time has had over five hundred distinct editors. The talk page is festooned with twelve talk page headers, and links to 52 archive pages. In fact, the
WP:DRNMKUCR
, whose incomprehensibility seems apt for the situation). This subpage is, itself, 184 kilobytes. And it's on hold because the article is at AfD!
The current AfD, nominated on November 22 by cygnis insignis, has seen a variety of established editors coming down on both sides. In the interest of full disclosure, the writer of this article is one of them, and will do something smart for once in his life by refraining from giving further commentary.

Other discussions of note

  • Four discussions, each with 21 !votes, are tied for the spot of fourth most-active:

"I just want to offer my thanks and appreciation for all of the advice on my article. This is the first article I've ever written for Wikipedia and I am grateful for all the suggestions you have provided! I am going to look into contributing to other related articles -- thank you for including me in this valuable discussion!"

Well, Pippalenderking, here's hoping you find something good to write about -- there's always geostubs!
  • The shortest AfD was the
    non-admin closed
    after a whopping five minutes.
  • The longest-running AfD from November was a tie between two nominations with remarkably similar stories: they were both open for 39 days, from October 10 to November 18, and closed by Scottywong within an hour of each other. Relationship anarchy, with sixteen !votes, was closed as "no consensus". Hearns Crossroads, Delaware, a batch nomination of four GNIS-based stubs of alleged unincorporated communities in Delaware, was closed as "delete all" after seventeen !votes.
Next "Deletion report" →
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http://notabilia.net
I'll have to take a look at those when I get home. That one about analyzing 2 million AfDs is very strange if true (there have been a little under 500,000 from 2005 to 2021, and even if you assume that some pre-2005 discussions were held without their own separate pages, I don't think there should be 1.5 million of them). Were they using multiple projects? jp×g 03:43, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Good point - the headline there was relying on the paper's abstract ("an analysis of 1,967,768 AfD discussions between 2005 and 2018"), but in the "Data Collection" they explain more precisely that this means "1,967,768 recommendations" in the sense of "votes"...
Anyway, the underlying corpus was published (by other authors) here: https://github.com/emayfield/AFD_Decision_Corpus . It might be interesting to compare the metadata they extracted with your own.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:57, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • The Oracle data is very cool, thank you for putting that and this report together. Levivich 03:48, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Another rather nice visualisation is http://notabilia.net with left spiralling lies indicating 'keep' votes and right spiralling lines indicating 'delete'. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 04:15, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • I remember the Michael Z. Williamson afd, I see it got an honorable 22:d place.
  • working your ass off on an article only to see it flushed down the drain is close to an official rite of passage around these parts Is that really the case? I've created around 120 articles and never had one deleted and only once or twice had to defend one at AfD. Is that unusual? Am I naïve to believe that if you pick a notable subject, make sure you've got enough material to write a few hundred words, and cite your sources, that your new article will be largely immune from AfD? HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 21:21, 1 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

AfD

The lack of mention of immense canvassing across the internet and even by media articles being written seems rather wrong. Not only 4chan, but also people like Larry Sanger have been canvassing to get the article kept. Isn't all of that something that would be appropriate to mention, especially as a reason on why the AfD is so big? SilverserenC 18:16, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I did mention that it'd been picked up by a few blogs (the Fox story came after this article was published). I think it's a stretch to call the 4chan thread "canvassing" -- maybe there was another one that nobody's linked to, but the one I see on the talk page header for that AfD had only six posts, all within one hour, after which point it dropped off the board into oblivion. A typical thread on a high-traffic board will get hundreds of replies, so that would have been a very unsuccessful thread even by >2011 standards. jp×g 23:57, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Is media coverage considered canvassing? Are critics of WP considered canvassing if they're not contributing to the project? I may be mistaken but I don't think that was the intent of WP:CANVASSING. When a controversial topic is up for deletion, it will naturally garner public attention and people will talk about it. Regardless, the AfD is in the process of being closed as I type this reply. Atsme 💬 📧 20:41, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Much of the media attention was solicited by the groups that were indeed trying to canvass and were the reason why so many newly made accounts showed up. Not to mention dormant accounts that hadn't edited for months or years. Again, isn't all of that something that should be mentioned in regards to the AfD and why it became so big? SilverserenC 20:48, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Dormant accounts probably have more to do with socking than canvassing. Publicity and the opinions that are shared off-wiki are just that, which is not a violation of canvassing to my knowledge, unless an involved editor is behind it; i.e., an actual WP editor has to be the "canvasser" and I'm not aware of that happening. Publicity brings people in and I don't see a work-around for that, much less consider it good reason to dismiss the AfD. In fact, it would be great if more people showed up at AfDs instead of just 3 or 4 involved editors making a final determination to keep or delete an article. Atsme 💬 📧 21:10, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    In regards to publicity bringing in people, I definitely agree. For me,
    ☖ 07:26, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply
    ]
My personal opinion is that admin corps is generally overburdened, sometimes leading to actions that are hastier than they ideally might be. Scores of AfDs must be closed every day, some requiring an hour or some few hours to consider (which in a few cases may not be provided -- a symptom of the overburden, perhaps). Surely this is a significant timesink for our fine but very busy admin corps. We do have Wikipedia:Non-admin closure, but this is only useful in a few cases.

There is an open discussion (started by yours truly) of an idea to address this, at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#Adding "AfD closer" status, in which participation is here invited. Herostratus (talk) 22:05, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • A major problem may have to do with fairness. This was the fourth AfD for the page, at least one more than maybe should be allowed. If a page has been saved two times, and then goes for broke again, with all three keeping the page either by Keep or No Consensus, then a "let's really get it this time!" fourth AfD ignores that enough editors have spoken or commented with silence. When articles have successfully gone through the gauntlet numerous times, triple-jeopardy seems as far as we should take it. Randy Kryn (talk) 22:10, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Never mind canvassing, call it what it is: fake news. There's no such thing as a "moderator". Anybody [not banned/blocked] can nominate a page for deletion, the omission of which (whether due to malice or lack of basic journalistic research) renders all implications by these news sources completely wrong. Other overtly misleading nonsense permeates the other content.
    The news here is that an unremarkable discussion by a direct democracy over how best to arrange freely available information that the same community actually wrote resulted in... nothing (at least not yet, and probably not at all). That a
    WP:SYNTH for the first time in this AfD.) Actually stupider than anything in a far-right reddit subreddit that weighed in on the issue, which is quite the achievement. — Bilorv (talk) 22:30, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • So far as I can discern, this bears no relation to my comment. — Bilorv (talk) 21:22, 30 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think it's fair to hold mainstream news outlets to lofty Signpost standards... understanding of the project seems to be in pretty short supply across the wider Internet. For example, there are about ten thousand Google news results for wikipedia moderators (and 31 for "Wikipedia moderators" in quotes). Heck, even the New York Times references Wikipedia having "moderators". If anything, I appreciate stuff like this, because it inches us a little closer to breaking our
Gell-Mann amnesia... jp×g 00:07, 30 November 2021 (UTC)[reply
]
Good journalism is in short supply in the modern day, and generally found in obscure gems within the field of non-mainstream or specialist news sources. Such as The Signpost, of course. — Bilorv (talk) 21:22, 30 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • One one hand, I emailed The Daily Caller regarding their story to ask for a correction; they seem to have additionally gotten the date on when the article was tagged for deletion wrong. While I included the link to the diff where the deletion notice was added, I've yet to see anything corrected. On the other hand, to lump in the report from The Telegraph as "fake news" seems like a stretch-and-a-half. —
    talk) 06:25, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • Is it expected that when someone is mentioned in a 'report' that they be notified? ~ cygnis insignis 06:47, 30 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • No. Our policy is to get the facts right. If you are mentioned, e.g. in "The current AfD, nominated on November 22 by cygnis insignis" and we are certain that you indeed did nominate the article for AfD (see link in that section), then we likely won't contact you. If there is some controversy involved about what the facts are, we likely will ask you for a comment. Of course anybody who does have a comment (even if they aren't mentioned) can comment here, but please don't use that as an excuse to just keep a controversy going here that has been addressed ad nausem in other places. So, first question: did The Signpost get the facts right? If so you probably don't want to complain to us. Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:13, 1 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Cygnis insignis: This is the first article I've written for the Signpost, and I ended up having to throw the part about that AfD together at the last minute (since it wasn't showing up in AfD logs until a day or two before the publication deadline). If it weren't so rushed, I probably would have thrown a ping on the talk page or something. But as Smallbones says above, there wasn't a whole lot of commentary on your specific role in it (just that you were the one who made the nomination), so I'm not sure there would have been much to dispute or amend. jp×g 06:53, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • JPxG. Thanks for the insightful article. Quick question. It says that 62% of AFDs close delete and 20% close keep. What does the rest of the pie chart look like? What percent are redirect, merge, draftify, no consensus? I ask because I want to calculate the % of articles that are deleted including alternatives to deletion. I suspect that number is much higher than 62%. Thanks. –Novem Linguae (talk) 01:21, 8 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • JPxG. The prose you quote from WP:SPORTSEVENT is a result of the students' efforts as we both found the previous prose confusing. So a beneficial consequence of this incident has been that I think the notability guideline is now more clear. -Reagle (talk) 17:35, 8 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]


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