Wikipedia talk:Speedy keep

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Low-effort mass nominations

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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In a discussion with others including Star_Mississippi and OwenX about a recent spate of low-effort nominations, a suggestion was made that we add a speedy keep criterion for "low-effort mass nominations". As a reminder, a speedy keep criterion isn't generally evaluated in isolation by a single administrator like a speedy deletion criterion is, but is a quick, canned way to indicate that the AfD nomination isn't meritorious enough to be taken seriously. I'm going to call it SK Criterion 7 for now. We want it to be simple, objective, and such that most nominations that meet its criteria should be so tagged. So, here's my first proposal:

• A low-effort mass nomination identified by one editor initiating five or more deletion discussions during a day without any of them articulating any pre-nomination research consistent with WP:BEFORE

That is, if any editor wants to do high-quality nominations ("here's what I found in a search, and here's why I think it doesn't have potential...") that editor can nominate an unlimited number of articles for deletion in one day. Likwewise, if an editor doesn't want to do the work of WP:BEFORE, which remains optional but encouraged, that editor is de facto limited to five nominations per day.

What does everyone think? Jclemens (talk) 22:33, 13 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good to me. Owen× ☎ 02:11, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I whole-heartedly support this. (Except for the passage "editor can nominate an unlimited number of articles for deletion in one day". This should not be allowed due to the burden being too high for those who want to participate in the various discussiosn.) Geschichte (talk) 05:16, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'd favor walking before running, and there is currently no hard limit on ANY AfD nominations, good or bad. I see your point, but a really good AfD nomination is perhaps 10-15 minutes of work for an experienced nominator. If someone is going to do a bunch of those that actually show effort and fairly present the evidence of notability, then there becomes a point of diminishing returns... Jclemens (talk) 00:30, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Don't put those problematic words in any official policy, and other policies may place limits on deletion nominations. And users putting in the effort of BEFORE are unlikely to make a huge number of nominations in one day. Animal lover |666| 08:28, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Notified: WP:Village pump (policy). HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 03:19, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If this is going to be a thing, it should be at CENT because anything seen as making BEFORE less (or more) "optional" than it currently is would be a massive firestorm when people claim they were not properly notified. I don't think the speedy keeps should apply retroactively (using the initial proposal, I would say the first four should be left alone); doing otherwise strikes me as unfair. I might also change the wording; my initial parsing gave the impression that identified by one editor meant that one editor's identification of a low-effort mass nomination would be the arbiter of whether this qualifies. But that might be a HouseBlaster-only issue. And as a representative of CFD editors, how does this interact with other XFDs? BEFORE doesn't really apply in the same ways... maybe just call it "without due diligence". Best, HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 03:19, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I am OK taking this to CENT before attempting to implement it. I very much want to wordsmith things here. For example, "identified" in my original wording refers to the definition of low-effort mass nominations (LEMNs). Whether they are identified by one or more editors, the identification doesn't really matter, per how the original wording is conceived. Rather >5 with no BEFORE triggers "don't bother reviewing, just close them".

I primarily work at AfD, with an occasional foray into PROD, to the point that we can legitimately say that I don't work at CfD, FfD, RfD, etc. So my question on those is 1) is it a problem like we occasionally see at AfD? and 2) If so, what should we do about it? Jclemens (talk) 04:50, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I can only speak to CFD, but it is such a rare problem that I think "go and talk to the editor in question" suffices. (I can think of a single editor who maybe crossed the line in the past year.) I oppose rules which make actions retroactive violations (c.f. ex post facto). HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 23:11, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Generally sympathetic. Some minor tweaks suggested for clarity and tighter scope: five or more separate deletion discussions intiated by a single editor within a 24 hour period, all of which lack indications of pre-nomination research consistent with WP:BEFORE. I think to some extent "lack indications" is better than "articulating" since this covers problems with simple assertions - eg "Fails GNG" by itself could be considered consistent with "articulating", whereas if a simple search easily identifies at least one RS, this would indicate inconsistency with BEFORE since the nominating statement should say "Fails GNG, multiple RS unavailable". Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 03:58, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that we're talking about separate discussions, not separate articles. One multi-AfD is... one multi-AfD and should count as one for these purposes. I also agree that there's a potential issue where we don't want people arguing against a well-reasoned deletion rationale because one of the more obscure clauses of BEFORE seems only partially met. I want to have confidence that the nominating editor has done a BEFORE and described what they did and what they found such that if I try and re-do it and get a significantly different outcome, that becomes evidence of improvable performance, and repeated or egregious evidence of a disconnect between stated BEFORE vs. someone else's BEFORE findings becomes a conduct issue. Jclemens (talk) 04:50, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong oppose: until there is a similar speedy-deletion category for low-effort article creations, this simply sets up a situation where mass-created articles can stay on the encyclopaedia forever. Additionally, WP:BEFORE is not, and never has been, mandatory. EDIT: I'll also add that this offends against WP:TNT - sometimes its better to delete articles and start over even if theoretically sourcing can be found. EDIT2: I've also got to say that WP:BEFORE recommends a lot more than just researching sources, yet the support voters appear to be focusing only on Section D (i.e., the part of WP:BEFORE about searching sources). Requiring evidence of "pre-nomination research consistent with WP:BEFORE" would mean having to give evidence of having done the checks in Section B and the consideration of alternatives to deletion in Section C - that's quite an onerous requirement. FOARP (talk) 08:32, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  However WP:BEFORE should be mandatory, and this will be a useful incremental step in making it so. Thryduulf (talk) 08:41, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Only when it is mandatory for article creation, and any article (regardless of creation date) which was created in violation of it can be speedy-deleted. FOARP (talk) 08:55, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  If you want to make standards apply retroactively to article creation then they must also apply retroactively to article deletion. I'm sure you'd be horrified at the thought of mass undeletion because BEFORE wasn't followed in the nomination. Thryduulf (talk) 09:38, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  This is already the case. You can already re-create articles for which you have found sourcing (or indeed, re-create them with no sourcing). You already have this thing. FOARP (talk) 10:11, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It is not already the case that the deleted versions of articles can be restored automatically just because the deletion nominator did not do a BEFORE regardless of any other considerations, including the state of the article or any consensus in the deletion discussion. Thryduulf (talk) 10:34, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Why would that be a horrifying thought? If a large number of articles had been mistakenly deleted because of a lack of BEFORE I would 100% support immediate mass undeletion and I'm sure almost everyone else would too. Maybe I don't understand the point you are trying to make. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:31, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Disagree. WP:BEFORE and WP:NEXIST move the burden of proof from the person claiming notability to the person demanding that the claim be supported. A massive portion of deletion issues would be solved if we expected notability to be demonstrated in the article, and if the response to AfD was to add the sources to the article. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 19:35, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  But that burden is satisfied by simply being unable to locate sources which support notability, at the end of the day you can't prove a negative so the burden will always finally rest with those arguing for notability. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:36, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree in principle that new articles created directly in mainspace should follow all our P&Gs, including notability. I don't agree that we need to tie the two changes together or make one wait for or contingent upon the other. Jclemens (talk) 00:09, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @FOARP The way I read it, this restriction would not ban bundled nominations; a bundled nom would count as one nom. If someone is mass-creating stubs, you can still nominate them all as one AfD. Toadspike [Talk] 18:23, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Unfortunately most efforts to handle mass-created articles via AFD fail due to allegations of WP:TRAINWRECK, so this is not correct in my experience. FOARP (talk) 22:57, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The recent spates of mass-noms were even more of a trainwreck because they weren't bundled – five different closers closed 52 GI Joe nominations as variations on "procedural keep" because there obviously wasn't enough time to discuss each article, so editors instead copy/pasted "procedural keep" !votes fifty times. A proper bundled nom, after getting a precedent by having one or two deleted in individual AfDs, would have had a much better shot at getting anything deleted at all. Toadspike [Talk] 10:06, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't think you're addressing the problem with your response - this isn't a gotcha for preventing deletion of mass created articles, it's to ensure people are using AfD in good faith. SportingFlyer T·C 19:55, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Personally I see groundless accusations of bad faith pretty regularly at AFD, the idea that people nominating articles for deletion "just want to delete the whole encyclopaedia" or have a personal animus against the person who (mass-)created the articles is bafflingly common, as is the idea that WP:BEFORE requires investigating offline archives and/or paid-access archives that cannot possibly have been looked at by the article-creator. FOARP (talk) 10:36, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  FOARP, I agree that mass-creation of non-notable articles is a bigger problem than inadequately "befored" mass-deletion nominations and proposals. Nevertheless, low-quality mass-deletion proposals and nominations are a bane of my work here, which mostly consists of screening PRODs, CSDs and AfDs. So I will be !voting to support this initiative and when the time comes, I will enthusiastically !vote to support speedy deletion of mass-created, low quality articles (ping me when the RfC appears). --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 02:02, 17 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. The whole retroactive application thing is a red herring. What are we afraid of, exactly? That some good-faith low effort mass nomination will get caught in an ex post facto trap enforced by a mindless Lua/Javascript bot? If we happen to have a cluster of low effort mass nomination AfDs ongoing when this proposed SK criterion #7 goes live, an experienced admin will judge it on merits, rather than enforce it blindly.
  The proposed new criterion, perhaps with Goldsztajn's amended wording, is already an improvement on what we have today. Wikipolicy has always been a Stone Soup effort. The initial version of a policy is rarely what we end up with. Once we see how this works in practice, and need to refine it, we come back here and do that, as we always do. And if we need a new policy to handle low-effort mass article creation, as FOARP suggests, we do that as well; the two are not interlinked. Although at this point, our policy for handling speedy deletions is much more mature than that for handling speedy keeps. Owen× ☎ 12:08, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I think "retroactive" is about how the proposal applies to nominations made before the threshold was met, not nominations made before the proposal went live. jlwoodwa (talk) 06:57, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree that's the only sensible way to interpret that clause. Jclemens (talk) 09:19, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  HouseBlaster specifically mentions "ex post facto", a legal principle that refers to enforcing a rule on an action taken before the rule was in force. When someone makes four low-effort nominations in one day, knowing that the fifth one would trigger SK#7, there's nothing "unfair" in speedy closing all nominations under this rule once they post the fifth one. Even one low-effort nomination can be disruptive. The fact that we chose to draw the line in the sand at five does not mean the first four of them must enjoy a free ride. Owen× ☎ 11:15, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  To be clear, my allusion to ex post facto was a c.f., not a "this supports what I am trying to say". I am concerned about nomination 5 meaning that nominations 1, 2, 3 and 4 are disallowed, which is the opposite stance you are taking. Best, HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 22:14, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support This is a necessary solution to a recurring problem at AfD which extends beyond any one individual editor. Regardless of whether there should or should not be comparable measures implemented for article creation, without this rule, the status quo is AfD being overwhelmed with nominations that do not have adequate WP:BEFORE searches. When AfD is overwhelmed like that, genuinely unmeritorious articles that do not pass our guidelines are less likely to reach a consensus decision (and vice versa) because they get hidden in a sea of noms. Introducing this guideline will strengthen AfD by adding another tool in the box to reduce the volume of nominations only to the most meritorious. Flip^andFlopped ㋡ 16:24, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• :Support, for the reasons everyone have stated, and I certainly look forward to the usual suspects spewing theie usual insults toward users who they bullied off the website. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:27, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose The problem I see with this is that it's one editor saying that in their opinion the BEFORE hasn't been done. It's unlikely to make discussions more civil, in part proven by this very discusion. Editors who make mass disruptive nominations should be dealt with as disruptive editors, for which there is already a guideline. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 23:36, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  BEFORE has a very specific set of expectations. Saying "I don't think you did a good BEFORE" should itself be immediately challenged as "Ok, which step was not done or done badly, and how do we fix that?" That's a discussion I have all the time: "Nom: I did a BEFORE and found nothing. Me: Here are three Google Scholar articles..." and to be perfectly clear that's not what this is aimed at. This is for nominations that don't even make a credible claim of effort at BEFORE, in the process of disruptively high number of separate deletion nominations per day--my initial proposal is five, and I've not seen anyone really advocate for a higher or lower threshold. An imperfect BEFORE or a stated-but-not-done BEFORE is a different problem than not even saying one was done, and should be handled through education.

  However, your point about civility is well taken, as my efforts to educate people without or with terrible BEFORE efforts have not been as well received as I would like. It could be just me, but I think there's some element of trying to educate being incompatible with trying to "win" a binary outcome. (Which, I love that more ATDs are being considered and taken, reducing the win/lose dynamic... but that's a different aspect of deletion process) Jclemens (talk) 00:16, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The problem is that this will be likely used to try and win, just by a different side. Maybe a better solution would be to rate limit accounts until they are EC. After that point editors should know what they are doing, and if the don't incompetence is again disruptive. What I fear is that this will just be used against any and all mass nominations, the whole inclusionist/deletionist already creates more heat than is useful and this is going to pour fuel onto it. Deletion discussions are one of the most toxic parts of Wikipedia. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 00:24, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Accounts that have not reached EC are not the issue when it comes to high-volume mass nominations. In fact, it is the opposite: the nominator is typically an experienced editor who is capable of using a tool like Twinkle to mass nominate, say, dozens of articles in a short time frame. In that instance, policy requiring a more specific and curtailed WP:BEFORE rationale in the nomination seems logical. If the nominator fails to do so, it gives editors at AfD responding to an influx of dozens of noms the ability to say, "Procedural oppose per SK Criterion 7". It discourages hasty mass nominations, but if a mass nominator truly does explain each and every nom with clear evidence of an additional BEFORE search, then the point is moot. Flip^andFlopped ㋡ 03:26, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Precisely the goal: Reward/encourage GOOD nominations for deletion... and discourage hasty others. Jclemens (talk) 03:40, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  "GOOD" Nominations perform a WP:BEFORE proportionate to the research done to create the original article. In some cases - particularly articles mass-created from a database - this will be minimal. WP:BEFORE is not and never should be mandatory. FOARP (talk) 07:21, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  No, the standard of BEFORE is not and should never be based on the nominator's opinion of how much research was or was not done in creating the article (which is in any case not reliably knowable from the content of the article). Treating database sources differently was, iirc, explicitly rejected by community consensus.

  Unless your goal is deleting as many articles as possible rather than improving the encyclopaedia, there is no justification for not doing a BEFORE search. Thryduulf (talk) 09:07, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  "which is in any case not reliably knowable from the content of the article" - Yes, an editor creating 866 articles in one day in alphabetical order all referencing the same sourcing, it is indeed a total mystery as to what research was done before hand. I guess we will just never truly know... FOARP (talk) 09:52, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I said it is "not reliably knowable" not that it is not knowable in every single case, but even for the case you mention we cannot know whether the creator spent 5 minutes, 5 hours or 5 days looking for and at that source, nor how long they spent looking for and at other sources which they didn't explicitly include in the article text. I really shouldn't have to say it (but experience tells me that I actually do), but even if that editor did spend little time doing research before creating that set of articles, this is not a reliable indicator of how much time other editors spent creating other articles. Thryduulf (talk) 10:04, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  "we cannot know whether the creator spent 5 minutes, 5 hours or 5 days looking for and at that source" - "Since the guy didn't tell me he wasn't the wallet inspector, then we should always keep our minds open to the possibility that they might actually have been the wallet inspector and therefore I should just keep waiting for them to return with my wallet to tell me that everything was in order."

  Meanwhile that article-set was just one day of article-production, and the same editor (who I am not calling out here as they have changed their ways) did pretty much the same thing the day before. C'mon, you know that nothing was done in the way of research for these articles beyond "this is a name on a list", probably GNS which is an unreliable source for whether a place is populated or not but was commonly used alongside GNIS in all these GEOLAND mass-creations.

  Hours? Even working a 40 hour week before creating these articles would give bare minutes per article, and they clearly didn't do that. FOARP (talk) 10:39, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It is nobody's business how much effort a nominator actually spent. "Low-effort nomination" in this context means "one that can be improved or disproved by a competent editor with minimal effort, to the point where the original may be seen as lacking substance". We are judging the result of the effort, not its amount. Owen× ☎ 11:59, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @FOARP the point is that regardless of how much time one article creator did or did not spend creating an article, the amount of effort is cannot be reliably determined from just the amount of words in the article. It's exactly the same as why we treat The Daily Mail as an unreliable source even though sometimes it gets things right - we cannot rely on it to get things right. Also, even if there was a reliable way to determine the amount of effort put in to creating an article, that is completely independent of the minimum effort required from someone wanting to delete that article. That minimum effort should include looking for sources in the place they are most likely to exist. Thryduulf (talk) 12:06, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Asking editors to spend hours researching articles that were created in seconds simply to prove the negative (i.e., that they don't exist as described in the article, because no effort at all was spent checking that they did exist) is a fool's errand, and a recipe for making it impossible to address problematic mass-creation. But I've said this already. Good luck on taking this discussion to VPP and CENT for a wider audience. FOARP (talk) 12:33, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm not going to read through all the replies, I'll just restate - if an experienced editor is behave in a disruptive manner take them to ANI. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:06, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Not only should we be discouraging low-effort nominations (it is clear there are select editors who do not complete BEFORE), but we should also stop allowing editors with low AfD success rates to continue nominating. If an editor keeps nominating articles for deletion that are ultimately kept, stop letting them continue to nominate over and over! It is such a waste of editor time. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 15:40, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose for a few reasons. (1) Criteria 1 (Absence of a deletion rationale.) and 3 (The nomination is completely erroneous. No accurate deletion rationale has been provided.) already deal with individual nominations that are entirely substandard, so if either of those apply they should be used instead and if neither does the mere number of nominations does not seem to me a good enough reason to broaden the scope for immediate disqualification of the nominations. (2) I am generally opposed to making WP:BEFORE more mandatory without first making it either more difficult to create deficient articles or easier to delete them, on the grounds that the effort involved with identifying and deleting content that ought to be deleted dwarfs the effort involved with producing it (Brandolini's law); bad content creation is both a more serious drain on the community's resources and more detrimental to the overall quality of the encyclopedia than bad nominations for deletion, and trying to solve the latter problem first is likely to exacerbate the former substantially. (3) I expect this proposal would lead to a more adversarial atmosphere at AfD; we already have a problem with comments focusing on the person rather than the content when the editor(s) responsible either for the article or the deletion discussion are perceived to not have put sufficient effort into it, and this would likely be seen by some as a kind of endorsement of that attitude. TompaDompa (talk) 18:31, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Closers are very hesitant to use these speedy keep rationales in cases like the three we've seen in the last few months. No single nomination is bad; only the extreme speed of nominations gives away that insufficient effort was put in. Lacking BEFORE is also not the main issue; it's the overwhelming of editors that leads to low-quality AfD discussion. On Brandolini: We remove harmful content on sight, by editing. These mass-noms have not aimed to remove harmful content, they've aimed to remove non-notable cruft, which is not nearly as serious. Toadspike [Talk] 18:40, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Outright harmful content (in the sense of libel and whatnot) wasn't what I had in mind. The general principle that it takes significantly more effort to identify and deal with non-notable cruft and other kinds of content that should be deleted (hoaxes, original research, WP:NOT violations, and so on) than it does to create it applies regardless, and while it is indeed not nearly as serious it is still a serious drain on the community's limited resources and detrimental to the overall quality of the encyclopedia. I would think that the overwhelming of editors by bad content is a rather more pronounced problem at present than the overwhelming of editors by bad AfD nominations. TompaDompa (talk) 19:07, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  (edit conflict) I might add that there are actually circumstances where a couple dozen WP:BEFORE-less WP:AfDs in short order can be appropriate. I would point to the 40 "Line of succession to the former throne of X" articles that were deleted back in 2020 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40), where the reason for deleting the articles was not something that WP:BEFORE would be helpful for (in short: the articles were essentially historical "what if" exercises). They were not all nominated at once (rather, in batches), but there's no reason they couldn't have been. In such a situation, this proposal (or at least a straightforward reading of "without any of them articulating any pre-nomination research consistent with WP:BEFORE") would be counterproductive. TompaDompa (talk) 18:44, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, with the caveat that a bundled nomination counts as one nomination. I realize that this wouldn't apply to well-reasoned nominations anyways, but I don't want people trying to shoot down all bundled noms as violations of this rule.

  AfD is already capable of handling disruptive mass nominations and the case-by-case approach has worked okay. However, this rule might be reassuring to the community at large and prevent the huge community uproar after each incident. It would also save time for closers and participants, which at AfD, as elsewhere, is our most precious resource. Also, fun fact, WP:MASSNOM points to an essay that's been around since 2014!! Toadspike [Talk] 18:32, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Update: I also support closing as "procedural keep" instead of "speedy keep" or otherwise specifying "no prejudice against speedy renomination". Our goal isn't to prevent AfDs, it is to limit low-quality AfDs that don't stand a chance in resulting in productive discussion. Toadspike [Talk] 10:12, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose: Just because a nomination doesn't explicitly state how they performed WP:BEFORE doesn't mean the nomination is invalid. I often say I did before searches, which I do, but I don't go into great depth about the various things I found that don't contribute or what explicit things I did not find. Aside from that, your opinion of a thorough BEFORE search may be different than mine. This would do more to dissuade nominators altogether as opposed to dissuade bad mass nominations. Hey man im josh (talk)

  The fact we didn't state that BEFORE results should be shared in the AfD nomination statement appears to be a bug. Rather, something we just assumed, apparently. I've BOLDly added instructions to that effect. Since this is already pretty common practice, we'll see if it 'sticks' as is, or whether there is some disagreement. Jclemens (talk) 00:19, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  And that change has rightfully been reverted. It's not a bug, and I'm opposed to that inclusion as well. That simply discourages nominations that may have been thorough by making it an expectation that folks must thoroughly document what they did. That would lead to more bureaucracy of "You don't mention in your nom what you did as a before search, what'd you do?" in the comments instead of people actually discussing the nomination itself. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:24, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  If you do a BEFORE search there are exactly zero downsides to documenting and/or summarising that search in your nomination. If have done a BEFORE search, don't mention anything about it, and someone asks you about it then you should reply with the answer to that question. It only becomes any sort of problem when you haven't done any sort of BEFORE, and that's a problem of your own making and the consequences of your decision are entirely on you. Thryduulf (talk) 19:21, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  There are times when a WP:BEFORE search adds nothing. This can happen when the WP:Reason for deletion is unrelated to WP:Notability, and I have provided a list of 40 examples (of the same kind as each other) above. In those cases, a search for sources is a waste of time, our editors' most precious resource. There are other times when the effort involved in a WP:BEFORE search is disproportionate (a kind of variation on Brandolini's law, basically). TompaDompa (talk) 20:01, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong support, this could even be called as a shortcut "G.I. Joe" nom'ing. In the spirit of the recent spate of G.I. Joe nominations that numbered over 50+ and were all procedurally kept. Iljhgtn (talk) 19:24, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per FOARP. Give us more ways to address low quality mass-creation before restricting our already limited ability to combat it. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 19:32, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. I appreciate the sentiment, but this proposal will only lead to more issues going forward. I've nominated articles in the past for deletion, even in isolation, that have had a BEFORE rationale questioned on wildly insufficient grounds, such as missing a single source during searching, or having a disagreement over what sources should be used for establishing notability. As an example of one of these cases, at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gallifrey, I had my BEFORE questioned because of a disagreement over whether plot summary counted as a piece of SIGCOV; this is inherently not an issue with the BEFORE of a nomination, but rather a matter to be settled through editorial discussion. Regardless, the issue stands that the BEFORE was brought into question for an issue that was not entirely related to the actual extent of the BEFORE, which I articulated in depth in my nomination. If a BEFORE can be called into question under any grounds, then what would happen if I happened to nominate multiple articles in the same topic area at the same time? Would I suddenly have to have all of those nominations be re-evaluated because of an editorial disagreement? I've seen this be even more prevalent in cases where BEFOREs were performed but not done with as much specificity, such as cases where those who have done BEFOREs make blanket statements for simplicity that get rebuked on similarly weak grounds ("I searched Google News hits and found little in the way of SIGCOV", "Google Books had no hits," etc).

  Obviously any admin worth their salt will not see these discussions and go "Hm, yes, this is a low quality nomination". My problem is not with that, but the fact editors could potentially use this system to potentially game the system and delay or derail discussion. I've seen many AfDs dry up simply because they look unapproachable to a casual reviewer due to overly detailed and technical discussions. If a discussion has to go through a process of re-verifying a BEFORE, which can be potentially scrutinous depending on how vigorous an editor is about questioning it, I worry it could not only have the effect of wasting editor time on whether or not speedy keep applies, but also could be used to disengage other editors from wanting to engage in the discussion, as the amount of time needed to evaluate what's already been said on the topic of the BEFORE, as well as any other aspects of discussion, may be too daunting or time consuming for them to be able to participate, thus losing discussion participants. This is not even mentioning editors who may want an article kept on non-editorial grounds, who may use increasingly thorough and ultimately arbitrary methods of questioning a BEFORE to exacerbate the above issues to derail discussion.

  Sure, you can also just say "Make more detailed BEFORE noms", but a large amount of the time, and especially in areas where I participate, the noms are typically sufficiently detailed for the particular subject. Missing sources in a BEFORE summary are often chocked up to unpredictable editor differences in how useful a source is, or an occasional missed source, more than it is that a nom's BEFORE summary is incorrect or inaccurate. For instance, when I nominated Vislor Turlough for deletion a second time, I missed a source that was genuinely useful SIGCOV, and had it pointed out to me that a source I dismissed did meet the SIGCOV bar. My nomination for this discussion was very thoroughly detailed, but there were still methods of arguing I was incorrect. However, with this rule in place, if I nominated multiple articles at once, I could very easily have this be used against me and result in one of or all of my AfD nominations either being closed or derailed due to having to clarify speedy close accusations.

  There's also the fact that these mass AfD nominations are exceedingly rare. I've only seen, maybe three? In the past year or two, and one of those was caused by me when I was inexperienced with nomination limits. Very few newer users are familiar with deletion systems, and very few experienced ones are going to mass nominate so many articles. A few exceptions does not make a standard. I will concede I only am primarily active in a few areas, so this might be more prevalent elsewhere, and if that is the case I may be more open to this, but to my knowledge this is an exceedingly rare and not so pressing issue.

  I will also concur that nominating five or more AfDs in the same topic area, while not exceedingly common, does happen frequently enough to where it isn't like encountering a Yeti. I've had many times where I've nominated multiple Doctor Who characters or Comic Book characters for deletion in bulk because a thorough analysis of the group told me they were all non-notable and needed discussion. Implementing this rule, per my above rationale, will only cause more issues with a more common type of nomination style than it will with the nomination style it's actually attempting to target, which is exceedingly rare and as a result an inherently minor issue.

  Given the impacts it could have if used in bad faith by editors with bigger agendas, the potential for it to derail discussions, and the fact it's as a whole just an unnecessary and unneeded proposal for a rather minor issue, I feel this kind of proposal is just not needed as it stands. I appreciate the sentiment and thought put into the nomination, and if this issue becomes more frequent I feel this would be worth reconsidering, but on the whole I just simply do not feel it should be implemented.

  (As an aside, any user I mentioned in the above discussions I linked are not under any accusations from myself. They were all acting in good faith, which I felt only exacerbated my point. Even in good faith this kind of policy could derail discussion, which is inherently a problem.) Magneton Considerer: Pokelego999 (Talk) (Contribs) 01:14, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  How many times do you initiate more than 5 separate deletion discussions (a multi-page nomination counts as one) without documentation of a BEFORE? This is intentionally worded to exclude normal disagreements over whether a BEFORE search was adequate: Unless there's >5 in one day, this isn't relevant. Most of the time I engage in an AfD, I find something that the nom should have found, but that doesn't mean that the BEFORE was so obviously absent that this proposed SK criterion would apply. Jclemens (talk) 02:03, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  1) Where the grounds for deletion are not WP:N or WP:V, but instead WP:NOT, why should a WP:BEFORE be done? 2) when the article is simply one of a mass-created set of hundreds or thousands of articles all based on the same unreliable source and/or negligent editing, it is impossible to perform a detailed WP:BEFORE on every single one of them: sampling them is sufficient, 3) this offends against WP:TNT - sometimes it's better simply to delete and recreate.

  And if you question that we ever do this (or ever should do this) we did this when we mass-deleted thousands of Carlossuarez46's fake "village" articles that literally said they were about unpopulated places. We also did this when we mass-deleted C46's "company town" articles that were just places of business. Is it theoretically possible that some articles with the same name as real, actual existing Iranian villages were deleted in this process, that a detailed WP:BEFORE lasting hours for each of the many thousands of articles in these sets might have found? I'm sure some would say "yes", and if this speedy keep rationale were introduced these deletions, that have only improved the encyclopaedia and reduced the impact of harmful incorrect information on the internet as a whole (not least of which was Persian Wiki having to deal with the tens of thousands of articles about non-existent places continually being trans-wikied on to their encyclopaedia), would have been blocked. Negligent mass creation sometimes needs a WP:TNT approach. FOARP (talk) 10:19, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  when the article is simply one of a mass-created set of hundreds or thousands of articles all based on the same unreliable source and/or negligent editing for hundreds of thousands get consensus that this is the case and that they should be deleted without further review at an RfC or similar. For tens, do batch AfDs that explicitly include the results of a BEFORE search done on a sample.

  What the Persian Wikipedia wants or does not want is a matter for the Persian Wikipedia, not us. Thryduulf (talk) 10:24, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  "What the Persian Wikipedia wants or does not want is a matter for the Persian Wikipedia, not us" - It certainly should matter if mass-created articles about fake locations which we host here cause harm elsewhere. We are repeatedly told of the importance of improving coverage in disadvantaged parts of the world: is your argument that we should not care about carry tens of thousands of articles about "villages" that don't exist, but which end up getting transposed on to maps of these areas, to the point where Google Maps shows many "villages" in open and empty desert in Central Asia and the Middle East in large part because of mass-created EN Wikipedia articles that took 0.0 seconds of thought or effort to create? Surely if we're caring about "representation", that should start with listening to what people from those parts of the world say they want rather than what we choose to impose on them?

  I note you are effectively confirming that AFDs such as the "company town" one (which was in the hundreds, not tens) can no longer be held as a single discussion at AFD if this motion passes. FOARP (talk) 10:57, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @FOARP Hm... I see your point. In truly extraneous circumstances like that I would not be opposed to such a proposal. Even if a BEFORE was done, it's just not feasible for editors to review that many articles in the allotted period of time. My argument is more focused on how it may used in cases where there's a reasonable number of nominations but still extraneous, but I have to admit I completely overlooked a case like this where there's just way too many at once. Though rare, I do agree having a rationale for a situation like that is valuable based on what you've said.

  @Jclemens I believe I may have misinterpreted the wording of your proposal. I'd support so long as it's clarified a bit more clearly that this is an inherently an issue where no BEFORE is present or there are simply just too many articles at once to be feasible. My issue is if this could be used against editors who have researched several articles but chose to nominate at the same time; so long as this is addressed clearly in the proposal, I'm willing to Support, especially per FOARP's rationale of the truly extraneous cases that do have a documented impact on wiki affairs. Magneton Considerer: Pokelego999 (Talk) (Contribs) 14:30, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  My issue is if this could be used against editors who have researched several articles but chose to nominate at the same time As long as those editors make it clear in their nominations that they have done a BEFORE (e.g. by giving a summary of it) then this proposal will not impact them. Thryduulf (talk) 14:40, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. Wikipedia is, quoting WP:PURPOSE, supposed to contain the sum of all human knowledge. Now, at some point, a line does have to be drawn - but there are many editors who make...let's say questionable judgement over where, exactly, that line should be, and making mass nominations of the sort this is intended to combat is a community time sink, and can - and often does - result in salvagable articles (and, I suspect, salvaged articles, i.e. those whose content was already acceptable by policy) being tossed in the bin, either because of editors not being able to contest it, willing to contest it, or enough editors presuming a suitable BEFORE was peformed over the course of a full week's AfD. Allowing SK for cases where it's clear a - as mentioned - 'low-effort mass nomination' has been made can only improve the encyclopedia, and help sustain its mission. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 01:40, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support but close them as "Procedural Keep" so they can renominate some of them. Some of the mass nominations I see (those "[X] in [Y] Television' articles) are textbook examples of hasty generalization. Warm Regards, Miminity (Talk?) (me contribs) 01:59, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Sure. No procedural keep triggers WP:RENOM's expected time delays to the best of my knowledge, and there's no intent to create that here, else one could game the system to (self-censored per WP:BEANS) Jclemens (talk) 22:01, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose as lack of notability is not the only reason an article can be deleted on Wikipedia. Traumnovelle (talk) 07:28, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Traumnovelle WP:BEFORE says "Search for additional sources, if the main concern is notability". If the main concern is not notability, no search for sources is required. Toadspike [Talk] 10:16, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The proposal does not say that. It says "without any of them articulating any pre-nomination research consistent with WP:BEFORE", but WP:BEFORE recommends (but does not mandate) a whole range of potential checks that you could carry out outside section D, including checking inter-wiki links, merge targets and so-forth. Documenting that all these have been done would be onerous in the extreme. FOARP (talk) 22:37, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The proposal says "any", not "every", precisel for that reason. Jclemens (talk) 22:45, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  So you're saying that saying that you had carried out WP:BEFORE B.4 ("Read the article's talk page for previous nominations and/or that your objections haven't already been dealt with.") would be sufficient? Because I don't think in reality that's how this will be applied. FOARP (talk) 21:59, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong oppose per FOARP. There would need to be a level playing-field permitting mass creations to be similarly deleted. And this occurrence does not seem to be sufficiently common to necessitate a blanket policy. Stifle (talk) 08:03, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  So, aside from the WP:WAX argument, do you have another rationale for opposing this? As I've said above, I have no issue with things created directly inside mainspace being expected to meet all P&G's from day one that they are live... but this isn't that problem and a fix to this issue shouldn't be contingent on that unrelated fix. Jclemens (talk) 15:37, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I think the obvious counterpoint to that is that the issues are not unrelated. WP:AfD activity is downstream of article creation, after all. In terms of throughput, AfD is much more rate-limited than article creation is. If one is wary of detrimental article creation outpacing deletion, it would then be logical to oppose suggestions that would slow down the latter until and unless the former is slowed down by at least the corresponding amount. A reduction in detrimental article creation would also have the downstream effect of freeing up AfD resources by reducing the number of articles created that go to AfD. TompaDompa (talk) 16:06, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  (posting the same thing twice to two different editors on purpose) The proposal does not rate limit demonstrably well-thought out nominations. It only limits those with no articulated BEFORE. Do you favor unlimited, poorly documented deletion nominations? Jclemens (talk) 21:59, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  A straightforward reading of the proposal (without any of them articulating any pre-nomination research consistent with WP:BEFORE) would indicate that it does indeed rate limit demonstrably well-thought out nominations in cases where those nominations do not include a WP:BEFORE check. As I stated above, there are situations where such a pre-nomination step is not relevant—typically cases where WP:Notability is not the WP:Reason for deletion. Do you favour rate-limiting demonstrably well-thought out nominations where a WP:BEFORE check is not relevant? TompaDompa (talk) 22:23, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Ok, TompaDompaI accept that 1) Most of the problematic mass AfDs do center around an asserted lack of notability, that should be evaluated in a BEFORE search before a nomination, and 2) I am absolutely looking for this proposal to appropriately address edge cases.

  Having said that, I'm not sure what a BEFORE-less, non-notabilty nom would do to trigger the assertion that it's poorly researched. #2 after notability is alleged NOT violations. So... "non-encyclopedic cross categorization" absolutely would benefit from a BEFORE. Consider Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of James Bond villains where a good BEFORE should have caught that the concept is itself notable (full disclosure: I did file an SPI against that nominator for AfD behavior, which was adjudicated as not ripe). Some others, like NOT#PLOT almost always lead to rewrites or ATDs. Others like NOT#STATS have no benefit from a BEFORE search; the page either meets guidelines or it does not, and there's no assertion by either side that more research will settle things. Jclemens (talk) 00:09, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It is not my experience that nominations unrelated to notability really need to do anything to trigger that kind of response; it's not entirely uncommon for the response to such nominations to be along the lines of "keep – clearly notable" regardless.

  I also don't think speedy closures of nominations that lead to rewrites or WP:Alternatives to deletion are desirable. Article improvement is one function AfD serves in practice, and there are many cases where fruitful discussion has happened at AfD with that as the outcome. Regrettably, such discussion tends not to happen outside of AfD, and tends not to continue after AfD. Closing discussions early would then be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. TompaDompa (talk) 11:33, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. Mass AfDs for articles with similar problems can be an appropriate response to the mass creation of such articles. Sandstein 19:10, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  (posting the same thing twice to two different editors on purpose) The proposal does not rate limit demonstrably well-thought out nominations. It only limits those with no articulated BEFORE. Do you favor unlimited, poorly documented deletion nominations? Jclemens (talk) 21:59, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The problem I see is that "demonstrably well-thought out nominations" will mean very different things to different people. We have some editors who insist that a BEFORE be conducted for BLPs in native language sources during the time the subject was most active, even when mass article creators such as Lugnuts did no such thing when they created such articles. As such, I have to oppose this proposal as it is currently constructed, Let'srun (talk) 12:52, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• I think that a limit of five is on the low side. I'd also prefer to limit this to similar subjects. A bunch of Olympics athletes from the same small, non-English-speaking country at once is difficult to process, whereas one athlete, one car, one book, one company, etc., spreads the work out. I suppose that speedy keep is an optional thing anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter much. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:00, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Five AfDs is not many, but five AfDs "without any of them articulating any pre-nomination research consistent with WP:BEFORE" is five too many. Toadspike [Talk] 10:15, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Not if the DELREASON is not related to verifiability/notability or is a TNT nomination. FOARP (talk) 12:21, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @FOARP WP:BEFORE says "Search for additional sources, if the main concern is notability". If the main concern is not notability, no search for sources is required. I think this entirely addresses your rationale for opposing this change. Toadspike [Talk] 19:01, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  WP:BEFORE has four sections, three of which recommend some kind of research. You've just quoted part of Section D, but it doesn't apply to Section B and C, both of which also recommend research (one is checking article history, the other is checking ATDs). For some reason the supporters of this proposal are focusing on Section D when WP:BEFORE, when you read it, is a lot longer than just Section D. FOARP (talk) 08:51, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  You're right, and I think the clear implication is that section D is the section that is 1) often (most often? unsure) not done, and 2) would clearly have had an impact on the nomination if it had, in fact, been done. The rest are important, of course, but this discourse is absolutely focusing on a perceived gap. Jclemens (talk) 16:04, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. I already see way too many unfounded accusations of "no evidence of WP:BEFORE" and erroneous "snow keep" !votes at AfD. I strongly believe this encourages that problem much more than it will prevent the problem of mass-nominations, which I do agree are a problem. What I think would be much better is if we simply had admins procedurally no-consensus close the really obviously absurd cases, which don't come up that often. I'd have closed all those GI Joe ones myself if I'd noticed them on day 1, but I usually only look at the AfDs that are at 7 days already, by which point it was too late to do anything useful about them. This is a problem that doesn't need new policy to solve. It just needs an admin to notice the problem before it becomes a really big problem. -- asilvering (talk) 18:40, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Please ping on reply, I'm not watching this discussion. -- asilvering (talk) 18:41, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Asilvering: I'd have closed all those GI Joe ones myself if I'd noticed them on day 1 - closed them as what? Under what section of our existing Deletion Policy? I ended up closing most of those G.I. Joe AfDs on day 8 as "procedural close", and even that I felt was pushing the limits of our existing policy. To close it on day 1, it generally needs to fall under either CSD or SK. If this is already common practice or understood to be the right thing to do, then by all means, let's document it. Owen× ☎ 19:48, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @OwenX, I'd have gone with just a no-prejudice "no consensus" close and advised the nominator to bundle them or otherwise deal with the "giant bulk nomination without obvious deletion rationale" problem. There's nothing in our deletion policy that prevents admins from stepping in to prevent disruption when they see it. -- asilvering (talk) 20:07, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Asilvering: very few AfDs have a consensus on day 1. Closing an AfD on day 1 as "no consensus" has no basis in policy. If there is a procedural reason to close such disruptive AfDs, that means there is a procedure listed somewhere that allows us to do so. Where is this procedure? It sounds to me like you want to exercise the proposed SK#7 criterion without actually having it codified into policy. "IAR speedy" closes are usually overturned at DRV, and rightly so. Owen× ☎ 20:32, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @OwenX, what I'm saying is, nominating a gajillion articles with identically useless deletion rationales is obvious disruptive editing, and we're already perfectly well empowered to stop disruptive editing. We don't need a new policy to do that, especially not one that, in my view, is extremely vulnerable to scope creep. -- asilvering (talk) 20:46, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @OwenX: I want to emphasize Asilvering's point here, because your support seems to hinge on this point, and I strongly believe you are mistaken. Admins are not empowered to close early on the merits except when speedy close criteria apply. But we are empowered very broadly to deal with disruptive editing, and this includes closing disruptive nominations. A quick skim of my closures yielded these 1, 2, there are probably others. I, too, tend to work from the back of the queue at AfD, and consequently don't often notice the discussions needing procedural closure. I do wonder if some means of flagging admin attention to those discussions would be useful. Vanamonde93 (talk) 17:01, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I understand your point, Vanamonde93, as I do Asilvering's. Letting each admin decide, based on a rather loose definition of "disruption", what is or isn't a disruptive nomination is how we get abuse of admin rights. We've had admins who blocked editors for questioning their actions, under the catch-all "disruptive" label.

  Of the two examples you gave, the first ran for the full seven days, and the second was a laughingly obvious sock parade. You closed both correctly, but neither was the kind of situation we're discussing here. If we already see low-effort, mass nominations as disruptive, then by all means, let's codify that understanding in our policy, and reduce the opportunity for tool abuse. Every CSD we've added to the policy was met with the same resistance from admins: "We already delete those now!". Yes, we do, which is why we need policy to describe it. Documenting common practice has always been our way to create new policy. We want to make sure not only that these disruptive low-effort mass nominations are dealt with, but that they're handled in a consistent way regardless of which admin happens to stumble across them. I believe that is what Jclemens is trying to do here. It's certainly what I am trying to do. Owen× ☎ 20:26, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @OwenX: There is a cost to creating any policy, and a particular cost to crafting policy that creates procedural barriers to consensus building. In some situations, it is still a good idea - for instance, it is plain that a prohibition on frivolous nominations is a good thing. This proposal, in my view, imposes costs (in the form of procedural objections to valid nominations) with minimal benefit (speedy closure of invalid nominations) because nominations that are genuinely invalid per the spirit of the proposed criterion are already eligible for speedy closure. You are of course free to disagree as to the cost-benefit ratio of codifying the proposal, but I do think you are underestimating our current power to handle the genuine problem at the heart of this, whether via existing speedy closure procedure (I cannot find examples off the top of my head but I am quite certain that we routinely close overlarge bundled nominations, for instance), or via behavioral sanction. Best, Vanamonde93 (talk) 22:43, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose unless someone can name a way to establish that BEFORE hasn't been followed which doesn't make a mockery of AGF. Doing a bad or incomplete job at BEFORE isn't the same as not doing BEFORE and unless someone admits it what would we be going off of? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:38, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Oppose per HEB; this sort of situation is too subjective for a blanket rule like this. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 07:22, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. I don't understand the opposition here. If someone mass nominates a ridiculous number of articles with zero effort, why should we be required to have them all run full-course and waste a tremendous amount of editor time? BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:13, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  And how do you intend to establish that they exerted zero effort while respecting AGF? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:19, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  If someone were to nominate 50 Olympic gold medalists for deletion in 25 minutes, all with only the explanation "not notable", and SIGCOV was easily found for 10 out of the first 10 checked, would it really be worthwhile to have to check the other 40 and have all the discussions run full course? BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:33, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  You still seem to be making a value judgement, what is easy for you might not be easy for others. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:41, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Should the hypothetical 50 Olympic gold medalist AFDs be required to run full course? BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:43, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That isn't the question, the question is how do you establish that they exerted zero effort while respecting AGF. Someone can exert a great deal of effort and still be completely wrong (perhaps they misunderstood or did not know the existence of a relevant SNG for example, maybe they didn't have access to the right historical newspaper database) on 10/10. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:47, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  To quote you, "AGF is not a suicide pact". If its abundantly clear that no BEFORE was done, then we can say that no BEFORE was done. The question is whether we should be allowed to close AFDs as SK if its obvious no BEFORE was done – should the 50 Olympic medalists be required to run full course under AGF? BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:58, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Making this personal is not appropriate, everyone has a history with everyone else but dredging it up like that borders on WP:NPA. On the actual content there you're going in circles... In that case how would you establish that it was abundantly clear/obvious that no BEFORE was done instead of bad, cursory, or incomplete BEFORE? Don't they look the same? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:04, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Sorry. Well, I'd say that if its a "bad, cursory, or incomplete BEFORE", so bad that the nominator is "completely wrong ... on 10/10", and its mass nominations, then those should be closed as well – would you agree? The point is that poor-quality, mass nominations should not be required to run full course. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:15, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  My understanding of how things are supposed to work is in that scenario the nominator would withdraw the nominations. I would support sanctions against an editor who refused to do so after 10/10 without a really good reason. "If you change your mind about the nomination, you can withdraw it. This might be because the discussion has produced new information about the topic, or because you realise the nomination was a mistake." WP:WDAFD Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:20, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  In my experience, perhaps 10% of nominations that should never have gone forward will be withdrawn. When withdrawn, it's most usually on the nominator's own initiative. Almost never when I've pointed out that a nomination is so bad it's reflecting poorly on the nominator has that advice been taken; overt hostility is unfortunately the normative result. Jclemens (talk) 00:11, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  To me that sounds like a behavioral issue at the end of the day... Meaning that this change would be a positive one but would be the equivilent of putting on bandaid after bandaid when someone is cutting you... I see above that your attempts to resolve these issues on behvioral grounds has yielded unsatisfactory results, I'm sorry thats happened but I think the solution here really is to address the small number of people doing the cutting instead of requiring a large number of people running around slapping bandaids on cuts. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 00:17, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Fair enough. So... is there an outside-the-box or alternative way of addressing this where it's clear that people can make as many good nominations as they want, but the low-effort ones are discouraged, and mass amounts of low effort ones are party fouls? Regardless of how this is accomplished, I don't think anyone is arguing that we technically rate limit AfDs, but your suggestion that we make expectations clear before later slamming mass nominations as disruptive is well taken. How should we do that? Jclemens (talk) 00:32, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  What if we explicitly added the expectation to WP:WDAFD? Even just changing "can" to "should" would do the trick. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 00:45, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Ok, but I'm not sure I follow. Lots of people don't change their minds in the face of contrary evidence. In many cases, that's driven not by the sources found, but the current state of the article is not a WP:SURMOUNTABLE problem. That's a valid philosophical difference, even though I believe it is unsupported by our core policies and contrary to the purposes of Wikipedia.

  How would you change or what would you add to WP:WDAFD? Jclemens (talk) 04:52, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  In the context described above failure to change their mind would be clear evidence that WP:COMPETENCE and WP:IDHT need to be invoked and a separate behavioral discussion started... They would basically be signing a topic ban from AfD if not more. Making a mistake is not generally sanctionable, but refusing to change your mind is generally sanctionable. We are actually required to change our minds when shown that we are wrong, especially where clear cut P+G is concerned. In terms of the concrete change "If you change your mind about the nomination, you can withdraw it." to "If you change your mind about the nomination, you should withdraw it." It doesn't really matter what their philosophy is... P+G are all encompassing even if the policy invoked is IAR. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 13:52, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Ok, BOLDly did this small rephrase at WDAFD. We'll see if that draws any opposition. In my experience, though, it's far too common for people to NOT change from their original position even when given sufficient evidence. For example, the nominator and first !voter never did on the List of James Bond villains AfD. Jclemens (talk) 19:10, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Given that the AfD you just linked went stale only two days after being opened with no additional comments at all from the OP and was not a part of a mass nomination (I see only two other noms from that editor, both of which ended in a consensus to merge) I think in that instance its your expectations which are unreasonable. This also makes me question basically everything you've said, your example is a nominator who was 2/3 right not 3/3 wrong but because they were wrong about the one you cared about you're throwing broad aspersions against them? How does that work? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:02, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I never said that was part of a mass nomination; I said it was an example of a nominator failing to withdraw an obviously defective nomination. If you want to see more of the backstory, feel free to review my contributions to that editor's talk page. Jclemens (talk) 05:44, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It is not an example of a nominator failing to withdraw an obviously defective nomination. In context your contributions to that editor's talk page read as borderline harassment and bringing it up repeatedly (as you did here) also feels like borderline harassment. If that is the sort of behavior you mean to legitimize... Hard pass. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:21, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Of course it is a nominator failing to withdraw an obviously defective nomination. It was never withdrawn, so I'm thinking this means you think that the nomination wasn't obviously defective. A single "james bond villains -wikipedia" vanilla google search, ignoring all the non-RS (Fandom, etc.) and VALNET, still gets first-page hits in MSN and Esquire (magazine). That is what I call obviously defective: a single, cursory search yields multiple presumably RS sources, which should in turn have triggered a more detailed search that would have identified at least some of the additional nine RS'es identified in the AfD. Nomination argued that this list was an inappropriate split, which clearly fails when the "split" has RS backing it up at the existing title. This wasted multiple editors time, when the would-be nominator should have identified the sources and added them to the article or its talk page instead of making a deletion nomination.

  I acknowledge that it is likely not pleasant to the nominator for another editor to point out ongoing failures to use BEFORE appropriately; it's not really supposed to be. If Jontesta wanted to answer for his conduct here, he's had three and a half months to do so. While I would much rather that such editors actually made BEFORE-appropriate nominations, ceasing to make obviously defective nominations is still an improvement. You see several editors in this discussion calling inappropriate deletion nominations a conduct issue, and I agree with that, but continuing to offer to help editors who make ongoing poor nominations is how I've chosen to encourage appropriate nomination behavior, knowing that for those who have no interest in following best practices it will likely be perceived as unpleasant. How would you propose improving on that? Jclemens (talk) 02:38, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Please stop harassing Jontesta. As you said the argument for deletion was not solely based on a lack of sources, it was based on a complex argument which included significant overlap with other lists like List of recurring characters in the James Bond film series. This was not a failure to use BEFORE appropriately. It isn't an obviously defective nomination, its premise is reasonable even if you disagree. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:04, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Concur with Jclemens - I think this method is actually a better than treating this as a behavioural issue - it allows an editor to AGF and correct a problem without seeking a sanction. It seems to me there is a consensus that this is an issue of occassional concern, but there are clearly editors at AfD who are regular, have full trust of other editors and will remain free to continue posting more than five nominations a day. In my experience, I've come across very, very few WP:CSK that satisfy either c.1 (not the exceptions) or c.3 - and I've opined before that the bar is (well, should be) pretty high to satisfy those criteria. I don't see this propsoal as any less; showing someone has done no BEFORE whatsoever will be a fairly high bar to demonstrate, and participants or a nominator will be able counter a speedy keep proposal of this type quite easily if it has been done in good faith. Essentially, this simply allows a disuptive action which may have been done unintentially or without effective understanding to return to the status quo. One way to allay concerns could be that a 12 hour time frame is placed on a CSK of this nature - ie if a speedy keep for this type is proposed, at least 12 hours must elapse before a SK closure is undertaken. Regards, Goldsztajn (talk) 01:07, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  In my experience, it's quite rare for any declaration of 'speedy keep' to actually result in an early closure of an AfD. Is there someone who is able to run those numbers for, say, the past year? Jclemens (talk) 19:10, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Surely six is not a ridiculous number ꧁Zanahary꧂ 07:21, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Six good nominations is fine. Six poor nominations is too many. The fundamental goal is to reduce the number of bad nominations while allowing good nominations to continue unhindered. Jclemens (talk) 08:36, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. As above, we need a lot more "BEFORE" for creations (as in, "Before you create an article, have in hand the necessary source material to demonstrate that the subject is notable, and cite them within the article"), rather than yet more of it for handling cases where article creators fail to do that. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 10:56, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Regardless of whether or not we need to deal with low-effort creations, and if so in what way, we still need a way to deal with low-effort nominations of articles that have been created. Low-effort deletion nominations are not restricted to articles that were mass created, dealing with one does not require first dealing with the other (regardless of which comes first). Thryduulf (talk) 11:53, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  dealing with one does not require first dealing with the other assumes that one is not downstream of the other, even in the sense of resource allocation. As I said above, In terms of throughput, AfD is much more rate-limited than article creation is. If one is wary of detrimental article creation outpacing deletion, it would then be logical to oppose suggestions that would slow down the latter until and unless the former is slowed down by at least the corresponding amount. A reduction in detrimental article creation would also have the downstream effect of freeing up AfD resources by reducing the number of articles created that go to AfD. TompaDompa (talk) 12:02, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  While deletion obviously cannot happen without creation happening first, that is the only way that they are dependent. Low-effort deletion nominations are not exclusive to low-effort creations, and low-effort creations are rightly not exclusively dealt with by deletion (let alone low-effort deletion nominations). If you think that low-effort creation needs to be slowed down then get consensus for something that will achieve that aim - opposing efforts to deal with low-effort deletion nominations will make no difference to that problem (if it actually is one) at all. Thryduulf (talk) 12:19, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  As I understand it, the reason low-effort deletion nominations are viewed as a problem here is that they are (supposedly) a drain on community resources at AfD. I think it is a reasonable position to take (1) that low-effort creations are a much bigger drain, and (2) that curbing low-effort deletion nominations is likely to have unintended consequences exacerbating the problem inasmuch as it may lead to a slower rate of deletion of articles that ought to be deleted, a more hostile environment at AfD discouraging participation, and/or other effects. TompaDompa (talk) 12:33, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Whether or not low-effort creations are a drain on the community, opposing this will not have any impact on it. Low-effort deletion nominations that remove (intentionally or otherwise) articles about notable subjects from the encyclopaedia are actively harmful to our readers - especially as they decrease editors ability to improve content by demanding others do the work nominators should be doing. Nobody is saying that articles that should be deleted shouldn't be deleted, we just need to make sure that nominators are actually making sure that only those articles are being nominated.

  Civility at AfD is a behavioural issue that is independent of this proposal, opposing this will not make things better but might make it worse by green-lighting the inappropriate AfD nominations that spark such incivility. Thryduulf (talk) 13:08, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I suppose this comes down to whether you think we have more of a problem with presence of bad content or lack of good content, articles being deleted when they shouldn't be or articles not being deleted when they should be, and incivility by or towards AfD nominators. If one thinks the presence of bad content, articles not being deleted when they should be, and incivility towards AfD nominators are the bigger problems at the moment, then it makes sense to oppose this proposal on those grounds. One might, for instance, expect that this proposal would embolden editors to hurl abuse at nominators when the nominations are perceived to be deficient. Likewise, one might argue that WP:BEFORE decreases editors ability to improve content by demanding others do the work article creators should be doing. TompaDompa (talk) 13:24, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I think TompaDompa has hit it pretty well here. Above, Thryduulf, you refer to the work the AfD nominator should have done in finding sources, but that's not going back far enough—that is work the article creator should have done. Basically, "BEFORE" lets people create a hundred "articles" with a few factoids sourced only to a database, while expecting anyone who wants to nominate any of those for deletion to do what they should have done to begin with—look for better sourcing than that. Now, people can still have the workflow that "I'll create these hundred skeleton pages from the database and look for more sources later", with a simple expedient, that being to create the hundred out of the database as drafts, not mainspace articles, and then move them over if and when substantial sourcing actually gets found and added. But basically, we should not be expecting such efforts of AfD nominators if we do not expect it of those creating articles in the first place. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 23:47, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support I think this has been an issue lately. Exact numbers can be debated, but I agree that posts that simply state "not notable" or something similar are inadequate for mass nominations. This policy doesn't prevent editors from nominating numerous articles since they can still be bundled. I'm not understanding the opposition based on creation guidelines. If we want to improve those start a discussion on that separate but similar issue.Anonrfjwhuikdzz (talk) 11:32, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per TompaDompa and Seraphimblade. The playing field is already tilted in favor of keeping unencyclopedic, garbage content. I would rather institute a hard requirement of all page creations to include evidence of notability. (t · c) buidhe 19:14, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Notability isn't now, nor has it ever been, a policy.

  To the above, the problem is that low-effort creation is often good. We improve when people identify junk and improve it. Look at the first and current versions of Yellow Star (novel), my favorite GA. In contrast, low-effort nomination is sometimes OK, but each low-effort nomination is a potential near miss or incorrect deletion if the system is too overwhelmed for people to properly evaluate them. So, yes, the field is and should be tilted in favor of keeping garbage content, because garbage content, overlooking the pejorative, is what should eventually become good content. Jclemens (talk) 20:28, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That line of reasoning discounts the possibility of such content being a net negative in its unimproved state. It could be so directly by being bad in itself and/or indirectly by inspiring the creation of additional similar content. TompaDompa (talk) 20:36, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It doesn't discount it, so much as accept it as part of the social contract. Wikipedia is for people who are OK cleaning up other people's messes, because we're writing for fun or altruism (or surreptitiously for profit, but I digress) and the bar is intentionally set low to draw people in. Jclemens (talk) 21:15, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  (edit conflict) If the content is a net-negative in its unimproved state then either improve it or, if you cannot do so, then a quality AfD nomination should easily result in a consensus that the page should be deleted. There is no justification for deletion without effort. Thryduulf (talk) 21:18, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. There is a massive backlog of content that needs either improvement or deletion, and we are not equipped to handle that—AfD does not have nearly enough capacity for throughput, and editor time is stretched too thin. This is an untenable situation, the only two real options being doing something drastic to address the problem and accepting that Wikipedia will indefinitely be, on the whole, pretty bad. TompaDompa (talk) 21:26, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  If it helps, I agree with your assessment of the problem. I just don't think that we can delete our way out of the current structural challenges, and certainly not by going so fast we risk deleting things that should have been kept and improved, regardless of whether or not there is anyone around to actually do the improving. Jclemens (talk) 21:29, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Common ground always helps. Do you have any thoughts about alternative ways to approach the problem? Or do you view the current state of affairs as the least bad option?

  As for me, I think we could delete our way out it, but only if we (1) combine it with reducing the de novo creation of bad content (at least temporarily) by increasing the threshold to do so substantially, and (2) accept a certain level of collateral damage. I know that some think that basically any level of collateral damage is unacceptable, but I don't. As an example (not particularly carefully thought out, mind you) of a drastic action that could move us in the right direction, we could move anything with an orange maintenance banner dating back at least 15 years at the top to draftspace, with a special provision that it will not get deleted for five years of inactivity (rather than the usual WP:G13 six months). That's not a suggestion (not least because I haven't taken the time to think about the drawbacks or unintended consequences of implementing it), just to be clear. TompaDompa (talk) 21:47, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  As far as my suggestions? I'd go with semi or ECP level needed to create a new article first. Must register is such a low bar, given how much of everything else requires registration. I mean, there's some libertarian free-as-in-speech folks who will oppose that to the bitter end... but they're wrong. As far as deletions go? I really like merge/redirect as a default outcome for allegedly NN content. That is, if I say "This Magnum, P.I. episode is NN!" the default should be to redirect to the season, with both outright deletion and keeping requiring showing evidence to overcome that default action. I prefer AfD becoming a "discussion" rather than "deletion" venue, because I think a lot of content should be kept... but hidden under redirects until someone wants to come along and clean it up. Jclemens (talk) 21:54, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I could get behind most or all of that. TompaDompa (talk) 22:03, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Isn't that already the case? Since the WP:ACTRIAL in 2017, article creation has been restricted to autoconfirmed editors. jlwoodwa (talk) 22:06, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Is it? I think that was one of my less active periods, and I haven't tried to create a new article in forever. Oh, well, then if autoconfirmed access is required but isn't cutting it, I support ECP level for new article creation. Jclemens (talk) 22:14, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I personally think we should toss WP:NEXIST out entirely; it make sense in 2005 when sourcing was a luxury, but there is no excuse in 2025 not to confirm notability when creating the article. But if we're not ready for that yet as a community, I'd be willing to compromise and say that all current page creations going forward should be held to the same standard as AfC. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 01:58, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  NEXIST applies to existing articles... you know, then ones that were created up to 20 years ago? Changing the social contract under which text was donated is, on the whole, not a good thing. Jclemens (talk) 02:31, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't think it is unreasonable to hold articles from 2005 to 2025 standards if they haven't matured since. I don't see it as any more of a change of the social contract than holding an adult to stricter standards than when they were a child. TompaDompa (talk) 13:42, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I do. Or more specifically, I do not believe it appropriate to hide or delete articles that were valid at time of creation. I suspect we fundamentally differ on this, but my solution is to incentivize maintenance and improvement editing, and never delete articles on the basis of perceived quality or guideline compliance. Changing the MOS for television show season titles is, on the whole, pretty useless compared to upleveling the episodes of random TV shows to the level of GoT or The Simpsons' coverage. Jclemens (talk) 00:08, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I mean, the understanding has always been that once you add something to Wikipedia, it can be edited further by others—even to the point of unrecognizability—or be deleted altogether at the discretion of the community. That includes the community deciding that entire categories of articles are no longer considered valid, so I don't think deleting articles that were valid at the time of creation is a problem—that happening has always been a possibility. I would prefer improvement to deletion, but realistically speaking we already have more content than we can satisfactorily maintain to an acceptable standard. One approach would be to move inadequate but theoretically fixable articles to draftspace as "not ready for mainspace" (and perhaps "[...] and never has been") and then hold them to modern standards before they could be moved back to mainspace. TompaDompa (talk) 05:25, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Of course... and yet, watching something you started blossom into a GA or FA through the benevolence of strangers is a much more rewarding/reinforcing feeling than watching a bunch of other random strangers call it cruftycruft and argue it should be deleted. I do believe deletionism is a serious contributor to our declining editor retention: it only inspires those who enjoy "winning" at deletion, while at the same time demoralizing our potential future contributors. Go look back at any great editor's first few contributions. Unless they're a clean start, they probably suck--I know mine did.

  Right now, draftspace is just a really long PROD. Most things that are relegated there are automagically deleted G13. Unless anyone knows to look there, they're out of sight and out of mind. I started a brand new article on a new film straight in mainspace a couple of years back even though there was a draft because it didn't even occur to me to check for one there. Thus, I prefer redirection, which leaves thing hidden but accessible, to drafting, which hides things until their near-inevitable deletion. Jclemens (talk) 05:40, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I think it still makes a ton of sense for topics where the lions share of sigcov is more likely to be found in a language other than english. At the risk of cutting of my own nose I will submit my own article creation Dogmid Sosorbaram as an example, the only coverage in english is about him winning a prominent international lifetime achievement award... But I think we can safely assume that oodles and boobles of sigcov exist in Mongolian... But I neither speak Mongolian or have a working knowledge of their media landscape. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:25, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Lukewarm support conditional on the obvious carveouts for Lugnuts, Carlossuarez46 and any others who, according to community consensus, have abused the autopatrolled flag to bypass NPP. If you've spent 10-15 minutes on a reasonable search for sources before you start an article, then a full WP:BEFORE is a perfectly reasonable ask that I'm happy to work within. If you've started three articles a minute from some online database, then a full WP:BEFORE is entirely unreasonable and bureaucratic. The carveout for these editors does need to be written specifically into the new rule and not implied from it.—S Marshall T/C 01:14, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak Support - Many of the oppose !votes seem to see this as affecting, in some way, good faith nominations by experienced users or arguing that we shouldn't improve one part of the project because we haven't already fixed another part. The first doesn't appear to be the point of this proposal and the second just seems like a bad argument in general (anyone can resume working towards a proposal for that separate subject). This is intended to catch a particular type of low-effort, disruptive mass nomination. Mass nominations in general are relatively uncommon, and even if an experienced user wanted to do so in bad faith, without regard for the deletion policy, anyone with a modicum of wikisavvy would have no trouble writing a deletion which got around this CSK. As with any CSK, it only applied in extraordinary circumstances. Perhaps it would help put some folks' minds at ease if Jclemens offered some examples of the kinds of nominations he's talking about. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:53, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Rhododendrites I think you mean CSK rather than CSD? Thryduulf (talk) 15:35, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  True. Fixed. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 16:49, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Rhododendrites:
  "If Jclemens offered some examples of the kinds of nominations he's talking about."
  – You can find some examples here:
  • Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1176#User:Bgsu98 mass-nominating articles for deletion and violating WP:BEFORE.
  (Yes, I do understand that my behaviour there was not up to high standards. But I am not experienced in this kind of debates.) --Moscow Connection (talk) 17:10, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  There's more here:
  • Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#User:Bgsu98 mass-redirecting articles about major figure skating competitions.
  (Not AfDs, but similar. And I got into trouble again. Fgs, don't reopen the thread or anything. It's already over and forgotten. I wanted to attract attention to what was happening and thought there existed a quick solution, but apparently, no one cares and those articles aren't worth saving.) --Moscow Connection (talk) 17:10, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong support. Wikipedia was supposed to be a collaborative project where people write articles together. Now, there are people who think there are some kind of "forest cleaners". They want to delete as many articles as possible with as little effort as possible. They don't care to do a WP:BEFORE search and to write a proper deletion rationale. And moreover, they try to overall discourage any attempts to actually improve the articles that they have decided have to be deleted, appearing at their own AfDs just to quickly reject sources other people find. There should be a rule against this kind of behaviour, along the lines of "If you don't care to try and improve the article, then we, too, aren't obliged to do that" or "Since you haven't put any effort in writing a proper rationale, we aren't obliged to discuss your proposal and can dismiss it outright." --Moscow Connection (talk) 16:00, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per FOARP. Anyone is still welcome to call for a keep if there is justification to keep the article. Nominators should bundle AFD articles where appropriate and respect !voters time in having to review multiple articles, but this proposal is unnecessary and seems to give priority to lazy editors who write very short and poorly sourced articles. It's not everyone else's job to write articles or do the BEFORE for you; it's crazy what the community burden is to have multiple people participate in an AFD compared to the negligible research some people have put into mass-creating uninformative or non-notable articles. Reywas92^Talk 16:20, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong oppose, and I'm baffled as to why this is gaining traction. 1) This is unnecessary. The extant speedy keep criteria 1 & 3 cover nominations that lack a deletion rationale. 2) Mass deletion nominations are often (not always, but often) a response to mass creations that were not individually determined to be notable. I oppose any blanket restriction on mass nominations until, for instance, the LUGSTUBS are dealt with, and there are other situations where mass nominations are quite justified. 3) Where the mass nominations are not justified, or are an overreach, they are usually part of a behavioral issue that requires a direct response, and specifically, a user making mass nominations not founded in PAGs should be sanctioned for it. Tweaking speedy keep criteria to allow procedural closure is a waste of electrons. 4) WP:BEFORE is usually implicit. I always search for sources before nominating an article, but I rarely say as much in as many words. This would be rule creep of the worst kind, allowing procedural stonewalling of valid nominations without materially impacting our ability to handle invalid nominations. Vanamonde93 (talk) 16:28, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  1) It's perceived to be necessary in good faith by some of your peers. In fact "not notable" as the sole substantive content of a deletion statement does not meet criterion 1 at all, and the entire notability issue needs to be researched and presented for criterion 3 to make sense to other participants, and, even so, AfDs being prematurely closed on the basis of a correctly argued SK rationale is not a common occurrence in my experience.

  2) I'm not seeing this, either. I see people decide to nominate a bunch of different articles within a greater topic area with difrering notability footprints. I agree better characterization and data could help us here.

  3) Absolutely agreed. Unfortunately, my experience is that people who haven't dealt extensively with the behavioral issues are often willing to give disruptive editors the benefit of the doubt, for example, excusing the lack of BEFORE because an article on a fictional topic lacks appropriate sourcing and has too much PLOT--this is by far the most common time I see a missing BEFORE, whether singleton or mass nominations.

  4) I can't pick up where an implicit BEFORE left off. You're a known, trustworthy nominator, of course, so I would assume the basics and start on the more esoteric things like Google Scholar... but again, problematic nominations tend to come from people who don't know the system well. This is a sort of perverse outcome, where the people who least need to document a BEFORE search are the most likely to have done so.

  I look forward to your further insights here. Jclemens (talk) 17:07, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Jclemens: Replying belatedly as your reply was lost amid other notifications. 1) I am not alleging bad faith among any of the supporters here, but I don't believe they have adequately thought through the implications. I said a lot of this above to OwenX, so I will be brief - I don't see how this can reasonably prevent invalid nominations that SK1 & SK3 don't already prevent. 3) & 4) People make lazy AfD nominations, both bundled and otherwise, but requiring them to type out "I was unable to find evidence of SIGCOV" instead of "Not notable" does not in any way fix this problem: repeated disruptive nominations still require us to deal with the editor. Conversely, I see a real cost to creating procedural objections to valid nominations. Also, fundamentally, I think it isn't reasonable to expect an AfD nominator to expend more effort in determining notability than the creator did. I am not a deletionist by inclination - there are indeed many mass nominations that are overreaching - but there are cases (LUGSTUBS, some mass-created geography articles) that require mass nomination and where we should not expect thorough BEFORE effort. 2) Yes, bundled nominations are sometimes too large, and require procedural closure; and sometimes require multiple outcomes. We already handle those. I can immediately recall two instances where I closed bundled nominations with differing outcomes.

  At the root I believe there's fundamental issues with both the philosophical position here, and the practicality. Philosophically, requiring a deletion nomination to meet a high threshold presupposes that the articles we currently possess are by-and-large valid. In areas where our definitions of notability have been contested over the years (NSPORTS being the biggest example, but there are others) this just isn't true (for the record, I would love it if we got to the point where we had enough confidence in our extant articles t oraise the threshold for deletion). Practically, requiring one editor's declaration that they have failed to find SIGCOV doesn't materially improve the validity of most nominations. Editors differ in their search skills, in their thresholds for what constitutes SIGCOV, and their honesty. You can't legislate due diligence, and anything else (dishonesty, overreach in terms of scale) can already be handled.

  That was longer than I intended, apologies: but I think this proposal is revisiting a lot of the issues that led to the ARBCOM case on deletion, and to the failures of the RfC that followed. Vanamonde93 (talk) 17:09, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Vanamonde93: - "I'm baffled as to why this is gaining traction." - it's explicable by the non-neutral framing of the question here. I mean, who can possibly object to preventing "low effort" nominations? But reality what they are talking about are any nominations that don't include an explicit explanation of the WP:BEFORE work that was done - i.e., making WP:BEFORE mandatory. FOARP (talk) 10:41, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I very much agree that the shadow of the Lugstubs is looming over this discussion. The reason you're not seeing this, JClemens, is because we don't currently have any editors with the stomach to start the next mass nomination, requiring as it does the patience of a saint and a fireproof talk page.—S Marshall T/C 09:07, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Right now I'm engaged in discussions involving Lugstubs that circle around:

• Whether the individual "medals" won at an event that did not award individual medals indicate notability.
• Whether a Greek blogpost indicates notability.
• Whether the count of hits for a very common French name in an inaccessible archive of Belgian newspapers indicates notability.

In every discussion you are confronted with the burning certainty that the Lugstub in question is a FA just waiting to happen and that there must be sources, and anyone who denies this must be someone whose sole burning ambition is to delete the entire encyclopaedia.

All of this - all of this - being the result of an editor who dumped these stubs on to the encyclopaedia with zero actual research at a rate of dozens a day for years, with some of the people posting here either cheering him on or very noticeably avoiding the topic of his articles altogether, and then when Lugnuts was finally called out on it he literally just flipped off the entire community and told us flat-out that his articles were fakes. FOARP (talk) 08:35, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support I don't think any of the opposes are actually opposing this. This is a way of preventing specific disruption. It's not a loophole to keep the LUGSTUBS, or to prevent any editor from doing a mass nomination, but a way of allowing us from preventing disruption before it happens and protecting valid articles from spurious or incomplete nominations. I will admit it may need a little more wording. SportingFlyer T·C 19:59, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I fully agree. I see a lot slippery-slope arguments about situations that are explicitly not included in this proposed rule; hoping a closer can weigh those accordingly. The real problem, as described by OwenX above [1], is that mass nominations consisting solely of "not notable" don't fall under any speedy keep criterium, despite being widely seen as disruptive. Toadspike [Talk] 09:05, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I would note that Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kobolediator does not articulat[e] any pre-nomination research consistent with WP:BEFORE, but was closed early as delete per WP:SNOW. Had there been an additional four such nominations by that editor within 24 hours, this proposal would make them all eligible for a speedy keep closure. That's a situation that is explicitly included in this proposed rule. TompaDompa (talk) 15:14, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, here's an even better example: on August 24, 2020, I initiated no fewer than seven deletion discussions without any of them articulating any pre-nomination research consistent with WP:BEFORE. Those seven WP:AfD nominations were:

1. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Line of succession to the former throne of Bhopal
2. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Line of succession to the former Greek throne
3. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Line of succession to the former Italian throne
4. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Line of succession to the former Montenegrin throne
5. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Line of succession to the former Nepalese throne
6. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Line of succession to the former Russian throne
7. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Line of succession to the former Saxon thrones

All of them ended up being deleted. This proposal would make those nominations eligible for speedy keep closures instead. To me, that demonstrates pretty clearly that the proposal is flawed. TompaDompa (talk) 20:58, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• mass nominations consisting solely of "not notable" don't fall under any speedy keep criterium, despite being widely seen as disruptive is a good refinement on the topic. What if we limited it to "Nominations asserting lack of notability without any BEFORE research documented in the nomination statement" That way "not notable, nothing but VALNET" passes, but "not notable" does not. Jclemens (talk) 21:56, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Sounds like a fairly narrow target to aim for, no? Even so, I don't think five nominations in a day each consisting solely of "not notable" is self-evidently disruptive. It depends entirely on the articles being nominated. In cases where the nominations are disruptive they should be procedurally closed on the grounds that they are disruptive, and in cases where they aren't they should be decided on the merits and closed like any other nomination. I appreciate the intention behind trying to find criteria that would reliably identify disruptive nominations of this kind while avoiding false positives as much as possible, but ultimately I don't think this is something that is suited to that kind of approach—I don't think a good balance between false positives and false negatives is possible to strike in a manner that is practicable to implement like this. TompaDompa (talk) 16:24, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Maybe it just needs to read multiple disruptive nominations. SportingFlyer T·C 13:54, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose, WP/BEFORE searches are often not necessary. When I look at some of my succesful AfDs from e.g. January, I didn't provide evidence of a "before" search in e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Those Darn Etruscans, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/World-2023 ESN Publications and London Organisation of Skills Development Ltd, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of 1980s people, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rev. Roger Lynn, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tajimul Islam. If these had been done on one day, they would all be eligible for speedy keep closes? That seems counterprductive WP:CREEP. Fram (talk) 09:23, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose This seems a broad and somewhat vague criterion. If the idea is that the sort of nomination mentioned is bad, then why formalise that one can make four a day? If it's bad enough to be a persistent issue, that sounds like something that should be handled on an individual editor basis. This is also an era where a superficially fully formed article can be spun up in literal seconds, so I'm very wary of making cleaning that up even harder than it already is. CMD (talk) 10:15, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Removing junk flyers should be just as easy as putting them up. In fact, putting them up should be made harder. The way it is now, the creation of hole in the wall local tavern faces much less scrutiny than deletion leading to Wikipedia being littered with ultra hyper local insignificant bars, taverns, restaurants, non-profits, voice actors, and the list goes on. Graywalls (talk) 07:36, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Removing junk flyers should be just as easy as putting them up.
    It is physically impossible. Nothing is as easy as typing "Fails GNG" or "Non-notable person" and pushing a button.
    Okay, let's do it this way then: "A deletion rationale should be no shorter than the article itself". --Moscow Connection (talk) 08:22, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • Deletion does not happen simply because something is nominated at WP:AfD. It requires input from additional people, and there is a delay before the discussion is closed. TompaDompa (talk) 08:27, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
      • This "input from additional people" is usually very limited. And I think you are approaching this discussion with a different kind of articles in mind. I'm talking about "salveagable articles" who just take a lot of effort to save. A random person on AfD won't be passionate enough to invest their time in research. They won't be passionate about some skater from decades ago who was "the eternal second". When such articles were mass-nominated after a change to WP:NSKATE, they were deleted without much discussion. Those were articles that had existed for 5, 7, 10 years or more without any problem. --Moscow Connection (talk) 01:43, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
        • I daresay we all have different articles in mind—that's why there is so much disagreement here. Anyway, my point was that your description of what it takes to delete an article via WP:AfD undersells it quite a bit. Except in rare circumstances (WP:Speedy delete and WP:SOFTDELETE, respectively) it requires seven days to pass and input from additional people. And of course, if those people disagree it takes even more for the result to end up being deletion than in cases where it is apparently uncontroversial. I take it that your suggestion that the rationale should need to exceed the article in length was facetious. TompaDompa (talk) 02:21, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Moscow Connection: - "A deletion rationale should be no shorter than the article itself" - I 100% endorse the sentiment here, but LUGSTUBS break it every time: the article is one or two sentences long, and the argument over whether we need to look at some Romanian archive of Braille newspapers before we can truly state that there are no sources goes on for paragraphs. FOARP (talk) 14:47, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Please don't be facetious, it hinders the consensus-making process. Thryduulf (talk) 15:52, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Other perspectives on who it is that's hindering the consensus-making process are available.—S Marshall T/C 19:23, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Whether anybody else is or is not hindering the consensus-making process is indeed a matter of opinion. This does not make my previous comment any less true or relevant. Thryduulf (talk) 15:41, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

the argument over whether we need to look at some Romanian archive of Braille newspapers before we can truly state that there are no sources... – I've researched more 'Lugstubs' than probably 99% of editors, and do you know what's truly amazing? The U.S., Canada, Iceland, and Switzerland have excellent newspaper archives. Regarding ones I've searched for: I've found SIGCOV for 95% of U.S. Olympians; for Canadians, about 80-90%; for Icelandic Olympians, about 80-90%; for Swiss Olympians, about 80-90%. Yet in places like Zambia or Saudi Arabia or Iraq or Niger, we delete a large number of the ones taken to AFD. Is it, that, for some reason, only the Americans, Canadians, Icelandics, and Swiss cover their Olympians in-depth? NO! Its that the vast majority of Olympians receive significant coverage, its just for most of them we don't have anyone looking where the coverage is! BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:54, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Exited for xx years is irrelevant. There are plenty of articles that have slipped through the crack and the article remained around on Wikipedia for many years with 10-20 views a month and essentially staying out of attention like candy wrapper and trash that have lived in crevices in a car for years. Graywalls (talk) 23:17, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

" like candy wrapper and trash that have lived in crevices in a car for years" - That is a great, and highly accurate description of some of these articles. FOARP (talk) 10:31, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That is a wonderful analogy... But if I could extend the point I think BeanieFan11s is making to the analogy there is also money deep in the forgotten crevices of the car and we wouldn't want to vacuum away a bunch of money while cleaning out the candy wrapper and trash. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:06, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support Are we here to create or are we here to destroy? The fact that it is easier to create an article than it is to delete one is a feature, not a bug. Any complaints about how this would create an imbalance between creating articles and deleting articles should be disregarded; that imbalance is intentional. It affects no one if an article on a non-notable subject stays on the website, but it affects our readers if an article about a notable subject is deleted. AfD nominators should be required to put at least a modicum of effort into their nominations and their nominations should be discarded if they do not do so. And this proposal actually gives an enormous amount of leeway, you basically get four no-effort nominations every day before this even kicks in. If you're worried that this will prevent you from making shitty AfD nominations en masse, then consider making your nominations less shitty. Honestly, reading some of the oppose rationales in this discussion is making my blood boil. I guess some people consider the effort of doing a google search to be simply too onerous? Compared to, y'know, the effort required to write a damn article. Mlb96 (talk) 02:00, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Why do you think that a nomination that doesn't articulat[e] any pre-nomination research consistent with WP:BEFORE is necessarily a shitty nomination? jlwoodwa (talk) 02:16, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Wikipedia's goal is to spread knowledge. While we have limits regarding what is and isn't allowed, the idea that more knowledge is better than less knowledge is baked into every aspect of the site. That is why anyone can create an article with no oversight, but deleting an article requires jumping through a few hoops. Attempting to circumvent the intentional burdens associated with the deletion process flies in the face of Wikipedia's philosophy. Mlb96 (talk) 03:00, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  We have quite a well-developed system of oversight for new articles. CMD (talk) 03:17, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  We have a well-developed system of oversight that applies after an article is created. Users are welcome to create new articles at their leisure. Like it or not, Wikipedia is built around the idea that more is better than less, and this proposal would reinforce that philosophy while barely affecting any actual good faith AfD nominations. Mlb96 (talk) 05:29, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't think it's accurate that Wikipedia is built around the idea that more is better than less. For instance, WP:ONUS says that The responsibility for achieving consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content. If the general stance were that more is better than less, one would expect that to be the other way around. TompaDompa (talk) 06:38, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Indeed, and we can't exactly thought police people before article creation. Unregistered users are unable to create articles directly, and aside from 4,876 accounts, everyone else's new articles are put into a 3-month purgatory until checked by through oversight system. CMD (talk) 08:35, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  We could easily require all new articles to go through the draft process, but we don't. I could create an article right now consisting of the words "pee pee poo poo" despite being an ordinary user with no special permissions, but only the small subset of users with admin permissions can delete that article. Mlb96 (talk) 17:53, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  And that article could be speedily deleted without any "hoops". What's your point? jlwoodwa (talk) 18:10, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  This proposal pertains to articles, not the content in articles. I don't believe that ONUS is relevant here. Mlb96 (talk) 17:42, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  WP:ONUS isn't relevant to the proposal itself, no. But it is relevant as a counterpoint to your assertion that the idea that more knowledge is better than less knowledge is baked into every aspect of the site. I might equally well have brought up e.g. WP:NOTEVERYTHING, which says Information should not be included solely because it is true or useful. TompaDompa (talk) 18:09, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose for the same reasons enumerated by Vanamonde93, as well as their statement that "This would be rule creep of the worst kind, allowing procedural stonewalling of valid nominations without materially impacting our ability to handle invalid nominations". I also agree with the points made by Vanamonde93 and Asilvering's replies to OwenX in Asilvering's oppose (here).-- Ponyo^{bons mots} 17:30, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • So, let me push back on the valid nominations bit. You think it's OK for someone to start an arbitrarily large number of individual (not grouped) deletion discussions with no more rationale than "fails GNG" or "unreferenced, has been for years" that don't indicate any effort to see whether the underlying topic is, in fact, notable? If not, what would you propose in lieu of this proposal to rate-limit or eliminate nominations that a good faith editor can't tell whether or not they're valid or not without researching everything, when, in fact, we have a behavioral expectation in BEFORE already on the books. Jclemens (talk) 03:07, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    "You think it's OK for someone to start an arbitrarily large number of individual (not grouped) deletion discussions with no more rationale than "fails GNG" or "unreferenced, has been for years"" - if these things are true? Yes. Articles should meet WP:GNG where this applies. Articles should be referenced where this is required. Simply adding more words to these statements to say that you confirmed it demonstrates nothing further.

    WP:BEFORE is not and never has been mandatory, with the good reason that there are circumstances where a WP:BEFORE check is not warranted, and there is in fact no end to the sources you can look at. FOARP (talk) 20:17, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    • "researching everything" seems to be well beyond even the strongest behavioral expectation in BEFORE, that could take days, weeks, or even years of work and likely a good deal of money to ensure that "everything" had been looked at. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:10, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

      See especially the repeated demands at AFD that offline archives of newspapers be searched. No: If you want to spend hundreds/thousands of dollars/pounds/euros/whatever of your own money to go to such an archive, you go ahead and do so, and I will be happy to !vote keep if you find something. Until then we are not keeping non-notable content. FOARP (talk) 08:48, 20 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

      First of all, the Wikipedia Library has many newspaper archives, so cost is not a consideration.

      But I don’t think anyone is suggesting AfD nominators normally dig that deeply. Just hit the basics: Google News, Google Books, Google Scholar and relevant other language Wikipedias. Skim the article history to see if a chunk of links were deleted. Skim the talk page.

      The nominator may have to be a little resourceful in their searches for some topics. For instance, if Robert Smith is nominated, so many spurious results will be returned they’ll want to narrow the search to ”Robert Smith” bowling champion Winnipeg .

      I do this and so can others. 5 to 20 minutes. A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 19:15, 21 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

      That may be what you do but it is above and beyond we actually expect of editors. The nominator is not expected to be resourceful, that burden is on those who want to keep the article which is exactly where it belongs. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:24, 21 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. Good idea, but as mentioned above, it seems too hard to implement. WP:BEFORE is generally not a good reason for a single speedy keep, let alone for a lot of them. In my opinion, the key factor is that someone can say "WP:BEFORE" without any vetting, and if the same comment is made for a large group of nominations (e.g. a few score), who's going to go through all of them and confirm that BEFORE applies? This is fundamentally a matter that needs to be treated differently for every article, so whilst it might be good for a single nomination, it's problematic for a big group. Nyttend (talk) 06:38, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. I would like to show a brand new low-effort nomination this proposed rule would have prevented. Here:
  • Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/1993 Skate America.
  There's just "Non-notable figure skating competition" and no evidence of any WP:BEFORE searches.
  P. S. I'm leaving it up to you to draw your own conclusions. But the fact is that I have shown on Administrators' board how you can easily find sources for every Skate America event. Just name a year, and you can find a Skating magazine that discusses that year's Skate America in detail. (Doesn't it seem that the absence of WP:BEFORE is even intentional? Cause a WP:BEFORE search if done properly would come up with something?) --Moscow Connection (talk) 00:17, 13 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The rule would not have prevented this. No nominator can be assumed to know Skating magazine is around or to search within it, nor would one source necessarily be sufficient. CMD (talk) 00:37, 13 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Additionally Skating Magazine is "THE OFFICAL PUBLICATION TO U.S. FIGURE SKATING" (see here), so how exactly is this an independent source?

  This is exactly the kind of attitude that people are talking about when they say that making WP:BEFORE mandatory in the proposed fashion would simply result in every AFD being attacked as not having done WP:BEFORE because people will require the checking of inaccessible, irrelevant, or non-independent archives. FOARP (talk) 13:47, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Okay, one source is not enough. But BeanieFan11 has already found 6,000 sources, are 6,000 enough?
  There was clearly no attempt at WP:BEFORE. --Moscow Connection (talk) 15:21, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Moreover, the nominator has already backed down and now acts as if he knew all along that the 1993 Skate America was notable but still wanted to delete the article cause he found it "embarrassing". That is not what he wrote in his deletion rationale. --Moscow Connection (talk) 15:27, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I think that is a misrepresentation of the comment in question; Bgsu98 did not "admit that it was notable" or similar. jlwoodwa (talk) 16:15, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It is not just a misrepresentation; it's an outright fabrication, and just another example of MC's constant gaslighting. Bgsu98 (Talk) 16:24, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support for AfDs (except multi-article AfDs). Major time waster for everybody. Misguided mass-creation of PRODs should also be grounds for declaring them all "controversial" and removing the tags. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 02:09, 17 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Which group of AFD discussions that you have seen lately saw a large percentage of AFDs ending in keep? If the articles weren’t kept, then the nomination was likely on-point. FOARP (talk) 05:25, 17 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  FOARP, most recently, the problem was with PRODs:

  • Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive370#IP improperly PROD'ing 50-100 software articles per week

  Before that, a one-day wave of many inappropriate speedy deletion nominations (this was relatively painless - just pull the tags).

  Before that, a bunch of bogus AfDs but I don't remember the specifics (it was this Spring).

  When we get a wave of unhelpful nominations, I still try to find refs for each article and it can be overwhelming. I'm sure it's a pain for administrators, too.

  --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 22:25, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I asked: ”which group of AFD discussions..”. PRODs can be applied for any reason, and removed without any reason. FOARP (talk)| FOARP (talk) 06:06, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose for whatever reason we have not made BEFORE mandatory on article creators. Unless and until we have a rule that '"articulating any pre-[creation] research consistent with WP:BEFORE" is required before or when the article gets published to main space', we should not make it mandatory on others. So, this proposal is rather 'cart before horse' and encouraging article creators in burdening other editors: 'you must go do my research, the research that should have been done before I published this article'. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:54, 17 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, although I agree this could use some further wordsmithing to limit it to those noms for which BEFORE applies. Mass noms can be incredibly destructive. The assumptions behind many of the opposes above -- which I would summarize as (1) that article destruction should be handled equivalently to article creation, rather than requiring a higher standard, and (2) that the mere fact that a nomination ended in deletion means that the nomination was proper and justified -- are deeply troubling and irreconcilable with our encyclopedic mission. Without writing a whole dissertation here, I would just point out that nominating an article for deletion (even in good faith) involves vastly less effort than creating an article in good faith, and has much greater destructive potential, and therefore it is perfectly reasonable to hold nominators to a standard that creators may not always be held to. -- Visviva (talk) 18:28, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Without getting into the rest of it, asserting that nomination for deletion has much greater destructive potential than article creation is at odds with Wikipedia's general WP:Editing policy, which states that a lack of content is better than misleading or false content. TompaDompa (talk) 21:12, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • ” I would just point out that nominating an article for deletion (even in good faith) involves vastly less effort than creating an article in good faith

  This is flat out wrong. Articles can be (and have been) created at a rate of 10 or more a minute (this days-long stream of mass-creation peaked at 20+ articles in a minute), without the involvement of any other editors so long as the editor is autopatrolled. In contrast an AFD takes at least 7 days and typically requires the !votes of 3 other editors to actually be closed as a proper delete. Even a PROD requires an admin to delete the article after it has been nominated.

BTW - I've been working on the articles in the link above - a single day's work for their creator - since November of last year. It is far far easier to create articles than it is to remove them. FOARP (talk) 06:12, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Agree with your interlocutors, not only is your argument contrary to our actual encyclopedic mission, it is wrong on multiple levels, regarding what article creation actually requires. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:32, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Speedy close for recent events of unclear notability

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

WP:RFCBEFORE discussion complete, RFC started below. -- Beland (talk) 20:56, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

---

A concern was raised at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#AfDs on current event articles that when an article gets created in response to a current event, it is often nominated for deletion in a messy way. The early comments in the AFD may complain about lack of evidence of notability, but after a week, long-term notability may become clearer or coverage can be seen to be more enduring than a one-day flash. The threat of deletion for an article associated with a high-profile event can also bring severe negative publicity, as it did with Erika Kirk, and that's unnecessary if the article is going to be kept anyway.

One of the proposals in that discussion was to create a "speedy keep" criterion for recent events. For example, it might allow closing an AFD discussion if the event is less than 7 days old and the only objection to the article is lack of notability. If there are other objections like BLP violations or copyright or bad title or sourcing problems or whatnot, the discussion could continue. There would be no prejudice against re-nominating after the 7-day period.

If there is support for this idea, how should that be worded, for WP:RFCBEFORE purposes? -- Beland (talk) 18:11, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As the person who started the idea lab thread, I like this proposal. It'll make the high profile AfDs less chaotic without the disadvantages outlined by GreenLipstickLesbian regarding my original solution. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:26, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(summoned by ping) I mean, some articles on recent events do lack notability and always will. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hickory Hill shooting, after the cleanup, didn't have sourcing or blatant BLP issues, but it was obvious to everybody but the author that the event wasn't notable. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2025 Chittagong University Central Students' Union elections is an in-progress event that looks like it's coming to a decision to delete, purely on notability. There's also a strange phenomenom where people created articles on airplane "incidents" which consist of rough landings; these are prima facie nn.(ex. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cham Wings Airlines Flight 781; Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/PAL Airlines Flight 2259; Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pakistan International Airlines Flight 606). Option that can be selected in high-profile cases where the community is genuinely split (or most to all of the !votes are medium), yes. "Only objection to the article is lack of notability", no. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 18:41, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What would be your preferred phrasing? -- Beland (talk) 19:51, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I like this idea. It will be important to get the phrasing right of course, but that's the point of this discussion. My thinking is that the crux of the matter is that articles should not be nominated for deletion based only on speculation about lack of long-term impact or significance before there is enough information available to make accurate predictions. How long that takes is tricky to define, and may vary by the type of event. For starters this only really applies to events that were not (publicly) known about in advance - the notability or otherwise of something like an election is going to be known, at least in part, in advance of polls opening so we have something to go off other than uninformed speculation. Unplanned incidents can happen at planned events though, e.g. the shooting of Charlie Kirk was an unplanned (for our purposes at least) incident even though the speaking event at which it happened was publicly scheduled. Any speedy keep under this guideline should be explicitly without prejudice to a later nomination, probably at least 48 hours later and preferably at least a week later. There are some things that are probably basic enough to be useful regardless:

• If the basic facts are still unknown or disputed, the article probably shouldn't be created yet but if it is, don't nominate it for deletion until there is at the very least some clarity about what actually happened. Nominations before that point should be speedily kept without prejudice.
• If there have been previous events of a similar nature, and none of them have a stand-alone article, then it's unlikely to be notable so there isn't really a need to wait for very long after the basic facts are clear.
• If it's unclear if there have been previous similar events it's too soon to nominate for deletion.
• If multiple independent general audience news outlets that are not local to the event regard it as important enough to merit breaking news coverage, it's worth waiting at least a few days before nominating for deletion.
  • More extensive coverage, coverage in more outlets, and coverage from organisations based in more and further locations all increase the likelihood of significance and so strengthen the case for waiting.
• Don't nominate for deletion until the earlier of the final death toll being known and about a week after the event.
• It's more harmful to nominate an article about a notable event for deletion than it is for an article about a non-notable event to exist for a few days without being nominated.

Thryduulf (talk) 21:16, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Here is my preferred phrasing: New section: Speedy close: An administrator may close a deletion discussion as "speedy close" when the primary subject of the article is breaking news and the article was created less than 48 hours prior to its nomination for deletion, is sourced primarily to primary sources, and is not a biography of a living person. Discussions closed as "speedy close" may be renominated for deletion after 14 days. --Enos733 (talk) 21:18, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That works for me. I suggest omitting the "is sourced primarily to primary sources" part as largely being redundant with "the primary subject of the article is breaking news".

  I think I would prefer 72 hours to 48. If the event happens on the weekend or a holiday, the 48-hour deadline might pass on Monday morning, just when we're finally seeing better sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:39, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It'd be interesting to look at the data to find out how quickly an event is nominated for deletion. I do suspect that most of the nominations happen very quickly after the article is created, so I am not wedded to 48 or 72 hours, but I do suspect that there is a point where editors can get a sense of whether coverage is sustaining. As for the "sourced" language, I also thought it could largely be redundant, but major stories can have recap and analysis articles created pretty quickly (as some of the earlier discussion eluded to). - Enos733 (talk) 00:12, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  As soon as those recap and analysis articles are created, the primary subject of the article is no longer breaking news. Actual breaking news is when the television station breaks into a scheduled program to say something like "We interrupt this program to bring you this important message: In the early morning hours, the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, has been attacked by Japanese war planes. We do not yet know the extent of the damages but they are expected to be heavy and many American sailors are reportedly killed. We will bring you more information as soon as we receive it. Now back to the program". We extend that a bit, to say anything in the last day or so, when the information is rapidly changing, but once we've got secondary sources (recap and analysis articles), then it's not "breaking news". It's "current events". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:01, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree. Would this work: New section: Speedy close: An administrator may close a deletion discussion as "speedy close" when the primary subject of the article is breaking news and the article was created less than 72 hours prior to its nomination for deletion, and is not a biography of a living person. Discussions closed as "speedy close" may be renominated for deletion after 14 days. - Enos733 (talk) 20:02, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Enos733, the only change that I'd suggest is that you consider changing "An administrator may" to something like "Any administrator is allowed to". The word may is on my list of words that seem to confused editors, because it can mean "Hey, this might happen, so don't be surprised" vs "This is an officially sanctioned, permitted behavior". WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:30, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I'll point out that the Erika Kirk article that generated this question is in fact a biography of a living person. They are not being accused of a crime; they are part of the victim's family. -- Beland (talk) 22:34, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Also, I'm not sure why it matters if it's a biography or not. An article that is about an event can still mention living people and have problems with the BLP policy. -- Beland (talk) 22:45, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Yes, but that can be solved through normal editing. If a stand alone article is created about a BLP in the event, the only way to remove any material about the living person is to delete the entire article. If we wait a week (or two) to have that discussion, we are leaving contentious material that violates policy in mainspace for that whole period (and then for the entire time the deletion discussion occurs).

  Again, Erika Kirk is not the best example of a problematic BLP, and probably it would have been better if the article was not nominated for deletion. However, there are many more marginal BLPs that are created following an event that should not exist in mainspace and since we rely on discussions to determine whether a stand-alone page is desired or meets our policies, we should err towards quicker removal of problematic BLPs. - Enos733 (talk) 18:57, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  You seem to be saying that it is impossible to write an article about some people that excludes contentious matter. I have some doubts about this in theory, though I can understand how difficult it would be in practice. But: if editors thought that an article wasn't appropriate for a particular BLP, then it could be Wikipedia:Blanked and redirected to the main article. AFD isn't the only way to get rid of articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:20, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  While "Blank and Redirect" is a possible action, it has not been a preferred option for editors, as any contentious blank and redirects are supposed to be referred back to AFD. Now, if there was more support by the community for that action, I would not have as strong of an opinion - Enos733 (talk) 23:03, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Yes, and it could be referred back to AFD in a couple of days. NB there's no policy saying that it has to stay un-redirected during those couple of days. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:54, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  As far as public outcry is concerned, blanking and redirecting is not substantially different from deletion if the fear is erasure or minimization of certain points of view. -- Beland (talk) 03:36, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That depends on the redirect target. If there is no or almost no relevant content at the target article then it is an unsuitable redirect - the consensus for disputed blanking and redirecting is that the content should be restored and discussed at AfD or a merge proposed. If there is extensive, directly relevant content that the redirect leads straight to (e.g. "Murder of X" redirecting to X#Death" which explicitly discusses claims that X was murdered) then any public outcry will be limited to the extremes. On the other hand if Joe Bloggs is widely claimed in multiple very reliable sources around the world to be the prime suspect in the killing of Mary Smith, redirecting Joe Bloggs to the top of Mary Smith where the only relevant content is a single sentence buried in the middle of a "personal life and death" section, and that only obliquely mentions Bloggs, that redirection is not solving anything. Thryduulf (talk) 04:04, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I can accept that suggestion WhatamIdoing. - Enos733 (talk) 21:34, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  If the purpose is to give a 'good' 48h window, a better deadline would be 96h. Cdr. Erwin Smith (talk) 07:42, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Some basic thoughts - I'd like this to be applied to cases where the deletion is controversial. If everyone except the author or everyone except the nominator is on the same page, then we should look to snowball clause it instead of speedy it under the new criterion. I do think this needs to be applicable to BLPs at least in some cases. The Erika Kirk AfD is a prototypical example of where this speedy close is useful. Maybe compromise on "this should not be used if a BLP is nominated for BLP issues, but may be used if a BLP is nominated for notability" or some better wording thereof? I think all the numbers thrown around so far for how recent the discussion is to the event and how close the renom can happen after the speedy close are sane and workable. Tazerdadog (talk) 23:51, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Two questions or thoughts. First, how much discussion do we want on these types of articles? The faster an editor can pause/close a discussion, the less likely the discussion is to get heated. Waiting for controversy to appear may just lead back to the original problem. As for BLPs, I think we should always be much more careful about BLPs and the privacy interests of BLPs. As for Erika Kirk, the first edit included sources from 2012, 2024, and February 2025, so I don't think it is a good example. Editors advocating to delete the article largely rested on WP:NOTINHERITED and to a lesser degree WP:TOOSOON and it became quickly clear that those were very minority positions. A better example of a BLP stemming from a recent event is Andy Byron, where the participants in the discussion pointed out that the subject failed WP:BLP1E and the article should not be retained. In this case, waiting several weeks for a full discussion would be problematic. - Enos733 (talk) 00:36, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  On amount of discussion I'm gonna retract after I thought about it some more. My concern was a XfD heading to a snow or clear delete that wouldn't have been particularly controversial would get speedy kept over an overwhelming consensus (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2025 Vienna Township Cessna 441 crash was cited at idea lab). Ultimately, when I thought about it more I do think an early interruption of the AFD beats a late one though, with hopefully common sense applied where there's an article that doesn't have a chance even with a lot of post-event publicity compared to what we expect. On BLPs, I think I'm fine with someone like Byron who fails BLP1E having their biography retained if we're very close to that 1E, and there's still uncertainty about how the post-event situation and coverage will shake out. I am, however, 100% fine with and would encourage tighter enforcement of BLP within any article that we don't want to run a AFD on right now. Tazerdadog (talk) 01:42, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Perhaps a speedy-kept or snow-closed AFD would encourage tighter enforcement of BLP rules. If I can't get that irritating article deleted outright, then maybe I will turn my energy towards enforcing the strictest interpretation of the BLP policy on it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:15, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Taking a crack at a wording: Wait and see: Any administrator is allowed to speedily close a deletion discussion as Wait and see if the article was created in the wake of a major event it is closely related to, and that event is less than 1 week old. Editors are free to renominate the article once a week has passed from the event, and are encouraged to apply our policies on biographies of living people strictly in the interim.

I'm not married to any of the specifics here. Procedural keep probably works instead of wait and see, I just wanted to emphasize that this is temporary. I chose to trade off awkwardness around the 1 week mark to avoid awkwardness where an article nominated at 4 days 23 hours gets 14 days of protection, while a nom at 5 days 1 hour can run immediately. There should be a category for pages kept this way so they actually get re-reviewed after we have some distance from the event. Ideally we can make this happen automagically with a bot or a XFD tool, but if we can't we need to mention that somewhere. I chose to allow BLPs, but encourage tight enforcement. If this is a really controversial point then we need a broader conversation before a RFC goes live to see if we need a subquestion or something. There's squidginess on "in the wake of", "major event" and "closely related" that I don't see an easy way to avoid. Hopefully people have common sense on the article on Hurricane Doe posted 12 hours before it makes landfall. 1 week is probably on the longer side, I will note that people at idea lab were saying the first 4 days of some XfD discussions had to be basically disregarded as outdated, and I wanted to give room for how you count timing (which landfall on the hurricane, whether it's the crime or the apprehension/identification of a suspect for an article on the suspect) to matter less, but I'm not opposed to moving the bar to 72, 96, or 120 hours. I also want there to be enough time to break out of the initial news cycle the event happened in. Tazerdadog (talk) 01:31, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This seems sensible; BLP policies also apply to mentions of living people in event articles. -- Beland (talk) 02:18, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Two thoughts, I prefer to link to breaking news as that is already defined by the community (compared to trying to figure out what is a "major event") and I think that for most major events there will be some sort of recap article within a couple of days and in most cases the community can better discern whether there is sufficient sourcing (to counter WP:SUSTAINED and WP:CRYSTAL within a short period of time. I also do strongly think that AFDs on BLPs need to run immediately as WP:BLP1E is policy that we cannot ignore. Enos733 (talk) 21:33, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it's always possible to "immediately" determine whether BLP1E is relevant.

@Tazerdadog, I think the second AFD nom should be a week after the first AFD started, not a week after the event. Compare:

• Monday: Event
• Tuesday: Article created
• Thursday: AFD started
• Saturday: AFD closed as a wait-and-see speedy keep
• Monday: AFD re-started (a mere two days after the admin said to wait and see)

vs

• Monday: Event
• Tuesday: Article created
• Thursday: AFD started
• Saturday: AFD closed as a wait-and-see speedy keep
• next Saturday: AFD re-started

The latter approach gives us more opportunity to reach a reliable conclusion at the second AFD. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:44, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think it is more likely that an article is created the day of the event and nominated for deletion within the first 24 hours of the article's creation. My preference is that if an administrator decides to close the discussion, it would be done so within the first few hours of the opening of a deletion discussion. - Enos733 (talk) 18:48, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think that a short sequence is common, and in that common case, "a week after the event" and "a week after AFD" are nearly the same thing. However, in the less common case, treating them as essentially the same produces a silly result. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:25, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I was trying to avoid creating a perverse incentive to start the AFD ASAP so the timer starts rolling sooner if your first bite at the apple doesn't work, which would do the exact opposite of what we're trying to do here. Timing based on the event is unlikely to be gamed. It's slightly more complicated, but would 7 days after the event and 72 hours after the last AfD work? Alternatively, if you want a reliable conclusion from the second AfD to be a priority, we can extend the timer out longer from the event. Tazerdadog (talk) 21:37, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'd specify "72 hours after the end of the last AFD", and I'd write it as with both/and language (to prevent either/or interpretations), but, yes, that would work for me. I think 72 hours post-AFD closing is enough. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:56, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting link; WP:RAPID basically already advises not nominating articles for deletion too soon after an event, but doesn't have a specific time limit or mechanism for what to do if someone does. -- Beland (talk) 22:59, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• I like it. I'd say 72 hours threshold, "primary sources" isn't necessary if we're saying "breaking news", and I like a two week cooling off period, but one week would usually suffice. Heck, I'd actually support closing any TOOSOON event made within six months of an event. Jclemens (talk) 00:47, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Trying again for a consensus wording this time: Wait and see: An administrator is allowed to speedily close a deletion discussion as Wait and see if the article was created in the wake of closely related breaking news that is less than a week old. Editors are free to renominate the article after both 1 week has passed from the event and 72 hours has passed from the closure of the last deletion discussion, and are encouraged to enforce our policies on biographies of living people strictly in the interim. I think this wording addresses all the concerns except Enos's concerns about BLPs. I'd like to hear more new voices on that specific point so we can figure out if someone is in a small minority, or if we need to address this in an upcoming RFC. Please let me know if I missed a concern somewhere along the way, or if you'd like to see numbers/wording tweaked. Tazerdadog (talk) 01:47, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As a potential solution we may all agree on, could this language work for the last phrase "editors ... are encouraged to enforce our policies on biographies of living people strictly in the interim, including blanking and redirecting or incubating problematic articles as appropriate (see also WP:BLPDELETE)." - Enos733 (talk) 02:46, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm concerned about what would happen if that wording were adopted in the following situation: An article about a living person is created. Some editors firmly believe it is BLP-violation for the article to exist (either at all or just in mainspace), while an approximately equal number of editors equally firmly believe that the article existing in mainspace is not a BLP violation in and of itself and that there is no justification for deletion or draftification. An AfD was attempted and quickly closed as "wait and see", those who want it deleted swiftly move it to draftspace, effectively bypassing the result of the AfD. Thryduulf (talk) 03:09, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

My initial preference is that a stand-alone BLP deletion discussion should continue (even if it is within a one week period of the inciting event) so that scenario would not occur (at least without a discussion). But, if that is not the direction we want to go, and if we push to follow WP:BLP strictly, we see that blank and redirect and incubating are existing policies and guidelines. - Enos733 (talk) 03:54, 29 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging a couple people to ask for feedback about the specific details/wording and the question of how BLP articles should be handled: @Clovermoss:, @GreenLipstickLesbian:. I think the 4 of us have gotten most of the consensus we can squeeze out, and we need a couple fresh voices. Tazerdadog (talk) 01:40, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, I don't really like the possibility of this overriding a community discussion; there's few things on Wikipedia more important than them. Personally, I think that the admin should only be allowed to close the discussion as "wait and see" if one or more editors, not including the page creator, has !voted for that outcome, ideally after maybe 12 to 24 hours of discussion or so. And if the discussion has been open for more than 72 hours, then, well, better let it play out, even if it ends in a way I disagree with. But yeah, I don't really want this to end up with a "Somebody creates an article on one of the thousands of earthquakes/storms/killings/car crashes that happen in the North America every year, somebody else nominates it for deletion on day 4, and the page creator gets a slightly out of touch admin to speedy keep it on day 6", pointing to the policy page". (mostly because if the criterion gets used like that, then it gets repealed and then there is no improvement to the AfD process.) GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 02:10, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I personally don't think the timing has to be anything set in stone (I see a lot of different timeframes have been suggested above). I suggested the 7 day thing out of simplicity because that's how long AfDs usually run (unless they get relisted). I don't have much experience with RfCs, but it'd probably be good to suggest a few options and see what people like best. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 04:36, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Suggesting multiple options risks ending up with a split vote. In practice, editors usually want something "normal" or "familiar", so I'd propose that and see if they like it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:39, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We could fix that by asking people to rank the choices instead of only picking one, and doing an instant-runoff voting tally. -- Beland (talk) 16:51, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if that's a rationale to have all of SK only apply during the first 72 hours of the AFD discussion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:40, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In general, that seems like a good idea unless new information has come to light (e.g. someone identified as a previously banned sock) that would instantly invalidate the nom AND subsequent discussion. Jclemens (talk) 16:11, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that's useful - new information about the nominator (per Jclemens), new real-world information and new information that is somewhere between the two (e.g. discovery that there are multiple transliterations and the article just happens to be using a less common one and there are actually lots of sources) could all occur after the first 72 hours and would just result in IAR speedy keep closures if it was otherwise disallowed. Per WP:IARUNCOMMON we shouldn't be building in IAR for predictable scenarios that are easily envisageable. Thryduulf (talk) 17:04, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sp if I create an article on a local football game or small concert on the market square of some village from yesterday, sourced to a local newspaper, then it is safe from AfD for 72 hours (well, some above even advise 6 months)? Cool! Can't see any problems with this. I know this is an RfCbefore, but beware of the echo chamber effect and don't be surprised if it gets shot down at an actual RfC. Fram (talk) 19:20, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is already a step down from the previous discussion where the idea was not being able to start an AfD for the first seven days. It was pretty easy to convince me how that might not be the best idea in practice. Having a speedy keep voting rationale doesn't seem like it'd do much harm to me (and the above situation sounds like an A7 anyways). But it's important to consider if trying to fix one problem (current event chaos) won't create another. I don't think there's harm in brainstorming and trying to future proof ideas. Good ideas stand up to scrutiny, bad ones don't. If something doesn't work, then we can just not do it. I think it's still worth trying to improve things if we can. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:28, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

AN improvement would be default draftification for recent events unless there was a clear consensus that a certain event was alomts certain to be notable (Super Bowl is notable, a local car crash with nothing exceptional is normally not notable even if it doesn't match A7). We aren't a news website, and the default should be "this is not for Wikipedia" unless it is really to be expected that it will have sustained coverage (e.g. national elections). This proposal is a step backwards. Fram (talk) 19:37, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe the proposed change isn't clear enough. There's nothing about safe from AfD for 72 hours.

The current process is:

• An event happens.
• Alice quickly creates an article.
• Bob promptly decides to AFD it.
• Sometimes people are mad at Bob, because it's obvious to them that the event is almost certain to be notable, even though that probably wasn't apparent to Bob.
• But the AFD hangs out for a full 7 days anyway, which means more opportunities for people to complain about how Bob screwed up.

The proposed process is:

• An event happens.
• Alice quickly creates an article.
• Bob promptly decides to AFD it.
• The people who think Bob screwed up have the option to vote "speedy keep" – or not, because it's an option and not a mandatory requirement.
• A passing admin has the option to close the AFD early as "speedy keep" – or not, because it's merely an option and not a mandatory requirement.

In the case of your local football game or small concert on the market square of some village examples, I would expect nobody (or almost nobody) to !vote to speedy keep in the first place, and I would expect no admins to close the AFD. But if someone AFD'd an article on, e.g., a national election from a country they considered too unimportant, then editors would consider SK votes, and an admin would consider an SK close. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:08, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

But why would we in those borderline cases give an extra weapon, an extra option, to one side of the debate? If it's clear enough, you already have WP:SNOW. But if the result is debated, then there is no good reason to strengthen those wanting to keep by offering some speedy keep rationale which is optional in theory but will be treated as some policy anyway; or will there be a parallel "speedy delete" optional vote as well, for the people who think that not "Bob" but the article creator has screwed up? Fram (talk) 20:13, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like there is enough support to at least start an RFC. If one is going to be held, is there any particular language you feel would represent the least-bad option? -- Beland (talk) 20:33, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No, I will oppose any attempt to have a SK for good faith AfDs for recent event articles. This is just not what SKs are for and will just be used to give one side in a content dispute more strength by misusing a system intended to deal with vandalism and completely wrong nominations. Fram (talk) 20:50, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

OK, then I guess that's a good argument to make in the RFC. -- Beland (talk) 00:17, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Fram, SNOW isn't for when it's "clear enough"; SNOW is our essay for our "lots of editors already spent time agreeing with each other". Sometimes, when it's actually "clear enough", you want to close the discussion before the "lots of editors already spent time" part happens. Speedy keep is our guideline for when it's "clear enough". WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:35, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also, we already have a Wikipedia:Speedy deletion option. However, the preferred mechanism in that case is to tag the article directly, rather than !voting that in the AFD. Just like the Wikipedia:Speedy keep guideline, Wikipedia:Speedy deletion only applies in specified circumstances. "Speedy delete" is an authorized option for organized events but not for, e.g., natural disasters. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:38, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

All the other speedy keeps are for clear reasons, not for good-faith discussions where some want to delete and some want to keep. In such discussions, we nerer give one side a "speedy keep". This proposal is completely out of line with what speedy keep is for. And snow closures are part of the Wikipedia:Deletion process guideline, they are more than an essay, even if we have an explanatory essay about them. Fram (talk) 20:48, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In my mind, the close would either be called "speedy close" or closed as "wait and see" (or something) rather than "speedy keep" to suggest the close is a deferral of a discussion rather than a "keep" outcome. Also the problem that I think needs addressing is the fact that editors commenting on early AFDs on events do not (or rarely do not) have any sense of whether there is sustaining coverage. - Enos733 (talk) 21:34, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think there's really a "side" to begin with. The whole point of this idea is to make things less chaotic because no one can tell the future (This will have sustained coverage! No it won't!) but no one has a crystal ball. It's a win for everyone if we can save editor time, isn't it? It's always about what's best for the project, not a war between the inclusionists and deletionists. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 21:35, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In re It's...not a war between the inclusionists and deletionists: That probably feels true to people who take more moderate positions. But if you take a less common stance, then it's possible that everything is about this disagreement. As this particular proposal delays deletion and prevents incorrect deletions, we should expect opposition primarily from the deletionist side. If it were the other way, we would predict opposition from the inclusionist side. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:02, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I'd really like it if people could vote "wait and see" on recent events rather than "speedy keep"; my ulterior motive in supporting this is really just that I want to be able to more easily vacate AfDs decided very soon after an event, without people going 'keep per first afd'[2]. (Ideally, event articles that should be kept wouldn't get renominated once whatever waiting period expired, expired) I... haven't yet figured how to make a dictatorship where we delete obviously nn event articles on site, so I'm forced to explore other options. I probably would still prefer than a "wait and see" close didn't function as a speedy keep, because I don't think there's anything wrong with a bit of excess discussion, but this seems to be the direction other people are going in and, again, the Wikipedia dictatorship thing hasn't been panning out. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 02:04, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think making "wait and see" a formal close option for AfDs, that can (but not must) be made sooner than 7 days after the nomination is probably best. There should be guidelines (that are explicitly not firm rules) about when it can be used, when it is encouraged to be used and when it is discouraged to be used. !votes like "keep for now", "keep unless..." and "delete unless..." should be interpreted the same as an explicit "wait (and see)" !vote.

There should be a short absolute minimum time before renomination (probably a low single digit number of days after the event and/or close) - renominations made before that time are not allowed and are automatically speedily closed without prejudice to a a renomination after the minimum time and without changing that minimum time.

There should also be a longer period (perhaps as long as 2-3 weeks) during which time renominations are generally discouraged but they are allowed if the nomination explicitly addresses why there isn't a need to wait any longer. Renominations made during this second period that don't explicitly address that may (but not must) be speedily closed without prejudice and without extending the minimum time. The purpose behind this is to make a second "wait and see" closure for the same article very unlikely - if you can explain (ideally with reference to sources, or evidence of trying and failing to find sources) why waiting longer is not required then it is very likely that enough information exists to determine if the event is notable or not. If you can't explain that then it's more likely than not that waiting longer is still required.

Obviously there will be edge cases - one possibility that comes to mind is an earthquake happens, an article is quickly created and quickly nominated for deletion but the deletion discussion is closed as wait and see. The article is renominated for deletion after say 10-ish days, but during the discussion another earthquake happens in the same/similar area that might be an aftershock or might be a separate quake (or the first might be a foreshock). In that circumstance a second wait and see closure would be perfectly justified, and this would restart the clocks. Thryduulf (talk) 02:43, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Let's not mince words: Wikipedia needs a fair and fast way to shut down AfDs that are making us collectively look like fools. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Erika Kirk is only the latest failure in this space, lasting for 5.5 days; Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Grooming gangs scandal was less than three months prior, but lasted longer before coming to the obvious conclusion. Both were on politically contentious topics, started by editors in good standing, and with hindsight both look ridiculous and make us look incompetent to the non-Wiki world. We've been doing this, in my memory, for the past decade and a half and failing to learn from our process failures. Jclemens (talk) 03:11, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• I'm with @Fram: on this.The Erica Kirk debacle is an extreme outlier in this, and while I didn't follow it (because I generally avoid bio AfDs) I would venture to guess that the article was started before it was apparent that she would move on from grieving wife to figure in the movement, if indeed it is clear that she will become a permanent fixture there, because of course we cannot tell that yet. So the problem from my viewpoint is that people are starting articles too soon. And in any case, by far the largest number of event articles that show up are aircraft accidents of little larger import and ordinary murders where the number of victims happens to be large enough. And most of these do get deleted, although there is always a lot of grousing from people who don't get that the AP wire allows a lot of otherwise very local stories make a brief appearance to a larger audience. I don't think we need to be giving these a week of immunity; we need something that discourages their appearance in article space.

And the actual, larger problem is the race to get material into WP, even when it doesn't really matter and when the event is baldly notable. The election of the current pope is an object example: it didn't matter one whit whether we waited until the MSM had reported on him and gotten a decent, solid, thought-out picture of him. But of course there was a mad race, and in the process the article was made something of a hash (including multiple "breaking event" banners for a time). Mangoe (talk) 01:34, 12 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No, you can't keep people from creating things "too early"; that's the point. What we can do is shut down wrongheaded nominations based on TOOSOON when things are dynamically evolving. In other words, given a new article on an in-the-news topic, on what basis should we keep it open, and risk looking like we're trying to censor things? 06:41, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

After thinking about this and reading more people's opinions, I don't think a speedy keep formulation has a chance of gaining consensus, so I'm going to try a reformulation as a !vote instead of a speedy keep criterion and an outcome of "Pause" instead of an outcome of "procedural keep NPASR".

Wait and See is a !vote that asserts the following 4 facts:

• The article is connected to recent breaking news and sources are evolving rapidly.
• The article is neither obviously suitable or obviously unsuitable for inclusion in Wikipedia.
• The article is not eligible under any speedy deletion criterion.
• The article has not has a previous Wait and See pause.

If an AfD is paused as "Wait and See", the AfD is put on hold (2 weeks by default) with a hatnote at the top, and the AfD template on the article is removed. At the end of the pause, the AfD is automatically resumed. This is a !vote, not a speedy keep criterion, so it must gain some level of article specific support. However, because the goal is to interrupt a discussion and not to determine the final outcome, admins should pause Wait and Sees earlier, and with thinner consensuses than usual.

I know this is somewhat of a departure from what we were building here amongst us, but I think it better reflects where the community as a whole is at. To the people who are saying that the solution is to be more cautious about creating the breaking news articles, I both think that's unrealistic - unless you want a speedy deletion criterion for breaking news articles they are going to happen, and I don't think it's a good idea either. Wikipedia has a niche where you can look at the article 30 minutes after an event happens and get the most comprehensive understanding of what just happened. That's a service to our readers. Tazerdadog (talk) 05:13, 12 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Any objection to starting an RFC with this wording? -- Beland (talk) 06:21, 12 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't own the idea, so feel free to start the RFC. That said, I think it would be wise to let this marinate here for about 24 hours since this is a pretty big deviation from the earlier ideas. The RFC should also have a good intro that lays out the problem and the types of AFDs we're looking to interrupt this way. There are also a couple of vague points in my wording that we definitely want clear answers to in the RFC - how early is "earlier", how thin is "thinner consensuses", and how does the end of the 14 day period look mechanically. We should also wordsmith it a bit, I'm going to make some changes that shouldn't affect the meaning in the next edit. Tazerdadog (talk) 07:08, 12 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Mechanically they could be reopened and relisted by a bot, especially if "wait and see" is implemented by a different template to a closed AfD. Perhaps we should say that the default pause is 14 days, but allow implementing admins discretion to pick a different duration (probably minimum 5 days as anything else is pointless, and maximum say 30 days as anything longer is a "keep without prejudice to renomination after a month or so" not a pause).

I'd also like to use language that avoids describing "wait and see" as a "close" rather than a "pause" to emphasise it isn't a result.

I don't like the phrase "The article does not have any complex BLP issues". That's probably best just removed - either there are BLP issues that can be resolved via normal editing (in which case just do that) or there are BLP issues that require deletion to resolve (in which case the article should be deleted rather than the AfD paused).

Other than that I like the proposal. Thryduulf (talk) 09:23, 12 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would probably just leave "earlier" and "thinner consensuses" up to people's judgement? It depends on what proportion of people are advocating that, participation volume, etc. Those parameters could be refined later if it turns out they are problematic. -- Beland (talk) 15:47, 12 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Thryduulf about "The article does not have any complex BLP issues". All BLP issues are complex if I want it deleted; no BLP issues are truly complex if I want it kept. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:56, 12 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've gone ahead and merged some of this into the green text above. A wait and see closure in now uniformly described as a pause, not a close, and the BLP clause was removed. The idea of the BLP clause was to differentiate articles like Andy Byron (Astrologer CEO who had the coldplay kisscam scandal), whose article would be a BLP minefield from articles like Erika Kirk, which should be no more difficult than any other political figure of similar prominence to manage. However, I get that it gives a subjective hook to latch on to. I think we can start drafting a RFC at this point, we've had a ton of feedback on the general concept, and a short but real feedback session on the final text of the !vote. The only outstanding issue is admins having discretion of the length of the pause. Could I just say something like "2 weeks by default" and get away with it without bloating the explanation with a standard range, a minimum acceptable length without needing IAR and a maximum acceptable without IAR? Tazerdadog (talk) 06:21, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think that "2 weeks by default" will probably work. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:27, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done. If anyone else wants to tweak wordings to make it flow/read better, please do. Tazerdadog (talk) 06:46, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think pause and restart after ~2 weeks is better than a pause and resume: nothing from the original AfD will have any merit after two weeks of breaking news. Better to just end the first one, with a tickler (bot process, whatever) to start a new one in two weeks. Jclemens (talk) 06:41, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I am generally fine with the objective (the goal is to interrupt a discussion and not to determine the final outcome). I would like to see some language that suggests that a "wait and see" !vote is only acceptable within the first 48 (72) hours of an eligible AfD and that an administrator may pause the discussion at any time within the first three (four) days if there is sufficient support and expectation that new sources may emerge. Otherwise we should not encourage "wait and see" !votes or pauses close to the normal 7-day discussion period. - Enos733 (talk) 15:11, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

So, for which of these would we have had a "wait and see" (or in the worse first proposal a "speedy keep"), and why would that be better than a "draftify, wait and see" or a "have the discussion now and delete it"

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Private Messages between Mark Rutte and Donald Trump
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hetero Awesome Fest
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2025 Wave Cave incident

I've only included some closed AfDs, not wanting to influence open ones. Fram (talk) 15:31, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A wait-and-see !vote, like any other !vote, should be used at whichever AFDs the participants in that discussion thought it was the best option for. Maybe someone would choose this option for one of those, and maybe nobody would. If anyone did, maybe an admin would agree that this was a sensible option, and maybe the admin wouldn't. This isn't some magic word that gives you veto power over everyone else. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:59, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Let me rephrase it then; do you (plural) have many examples where this would have been the better option? Something like Erika Kirk, which ended in Snow Keep, would not be a good fit. I don't think the ones above would be a good fit either. So my question is: what AfDs would be a good fit for this, and how often do these happen? Fram (talk) 16:05, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This seems like a question to which the answer has bearing on whether or not the proposal should be adopted, rather than how it should be worded. It may be a good one to ask in the RFC discussion below. -- Beland (talk) 18:16, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I've started the RFC with the revised phrasing, plus some grammatical tweaks. -- Beland (talk) 18:15, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

RFC: Wait and See

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Should a "Wait and See" option be added to the Articles for Deletion guidelines, to be used as needed for breaking news? -- Beland (talk) 18:15, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Rationale: Currently, votes in AfD discussions about breaking news can change radically over the period of a week or so as the long-term notability of an event becomes clearer with more information and enduring (or not) news coverage. This creates a messy question about whether the early participants would have voted differently in light of more evidence. The text to be added describing the option is:

Wait and See is a !vote that asserts the following facts:

• The article is connected to recent breaking news and sources are evolving rapidly.
• The article is neither obviously suitable nor obviously unsuitable for inclusion in Wikipedia.
• The article is not eligible under any speedy deletion criterion.
• The article has not had a previous Wait and See pause.

If an AfD is paused as "Wait and See", the AfD is put on hold (2 weeks by default) with a hatnote at the top, and the AfD template on the article is removed. At the end of the pause, the AfD is automatically resumed. This is a !vote, not a speedy keep criterion, so it must gain some level of article-specific support. Because the goal is to interrupt a discussion and not to determine the final outcome, admins should pause discussions based on Wait and Sees earlier, and with thinner consensuses than usual.

-- Beland (talk) 18:15, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wait and See survey

• Neutral - I'm just facilitating. -- Beland (talk) 18:54, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. - our standard process of a week-long discussion doesn't hold up well when an article is evolving rapidly. Early comments in the discussion become essentially irrelevant because the topic has moved passed them, and Wikipedia often looks out of touch to outsiders when they see these discussions creating a reputational risk. I don't think this !vote will be common, but I do think that it will be impactful when it is used. Tazerdadog (talk) 11:12, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per Tazerdog and the preceding discussion. Articles should not be nominated for deletion when it is unknowable whether the subject is notable or not as all !votes (regardless of flavour) are essentially meaningless noise and a waste of everybody's time. Thryduulf (talk) 13:01, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support it would be a good option to have when in such a situation the article is changing rapidly and it is not known if the subject is notable or not. Stops peoples time being wasted when we dont know notability and allows for a clearer picture later. GothicGolem29 (talk) 13:06, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, a good solution when WP:SUSTAINED cannot be ascertained in breaking news events. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 13:57, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, articles where this applies should be draftified, an article should only be created/kept when notability is clear. Why we would apply and even strengthen different rules for "breaking news" articles is not clear, we are not a news site and don't rely on primary sources, we are an encyclopedia and rely on secondary sources. Waiting two weeks to have an article for recent events of unclear notability is not a problem, and would perhaps reduce the rush people feel to be the first to cover some minor event, often with major BLP issues. Fram (talk) 14:11, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Part of the problem I see with draftifying is that multiple editors often try creating the article rather than working in draftspace. This is particularly true for breaking news, where a bunch of people unfamiliar with editing will try to create the page or bombard the AfD (oftentimes calling Wikipedia's bias credibility into question if we're trying to delete Important Information). Significa liberdade (she/her) (talk) 01:29, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support Avoids waste of time per others above. ~/Bunnypranav:<ping> 15:00, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak oppose. Anything in this category should really be draftified as Fram suggests. Wikipedia is not meant to be breaking news. Stifle (talk) 16:03, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• oppose This is just endorsing current bad behavior by protecting NN events from review. Draftification is a better route; there is no deadline. Mangoe (talk) 16:21, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  This is not protecting anything from review - if a topic is clearly non-notable the AfD will arrive at a consensus to delete or draftify. Wait and see is only an option where it is both unknown and unknowable whether a topic is or isn't notable. The protection is against wasting time with AfDs that cannot come to a meaningful conclusion and against draftifying articles about notable topics (both far more harmful). Thryduulf (talk) 16:28, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Draftifying articles about topics where it is not yet clear if they are notable is not harmful (never mind "far more harmful"). The rush to have articles on news events, often with BLP issues, is a lot more harmful (and yes, BLP applies to draft as well, but it is a lesser problem to have such issues there than in the mainspace). Discouraging the creation of such articles would do much more against "wasting time" than delaying an AfD for two weeks based on nsome nebulous "thinner consensus". Fram (talk) 16:47, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support with edits 1) "Wait and see" !votes should only occur within first 48 hours of an eligible deletion discussion. 2) An administrator may only pause an deletion discussion as "wait and see" within the first 48 hours of a deletion discussion. (Times are my preference, but a discussion should not be paused near the end of the normal 7 day discussion period). The premise behind the proposal is good, as there are many deletion discussions of breaking news events where WP:SUSTAINED cannot be ascertained. --Enos733 (talk) 16:49, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Private Messages between Mark Rutte and Donald Trump is an AFD that ended up getting relisted because editors had different views. In the second week, it was much clearer to editors that this was non-notable and should be deleted. Maybe "wait and see" should be thought of as a "pause and relist". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:25, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  No one in that AfD wanted to keep it. No one. The reason for the relist was to see if it should be draftified, redirected or deleted. Waiting two weeks before restarting that non-acrimonious, totally unproblematic AfD would have as only result that the article would have existed for one week more. Using such an AfD as an example makes me only more convinced that this whole proposal is a bad idea in search of a problem, instead of a good solution for a common problem. Fram (talk) 18:56, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Any outcome, including draftifying or merging, that doesn't involve the delete button is a type of "keep". WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:11, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Feel free to tell that to everyone who calls draftification "backdoor deletion"... Fram (talk) 20:32, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That is not at all how I see things. AfDs serve primarily to determine whether a topic is notable, and any consensus that the topic is not notable (including nearly all redirects, most merges, and many TOOSOON user-/draftifications) should not be read as equivalent to a "keep" outcome. Toadspike [Talk] 16:08, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, a solid option to deal with recency bias. The Kip ^(contribs) 18:46, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose I agree with Fram that there aren't actually that many cases where this would or should apply. I think people should add information about events to relevant existing articles or drafts and wait and see before creating a new page, rather than the other way around. This would seem to encourage creating potentially unnecessary or duplicative pages. Reywas92^Talk 19:37, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose – Per Mr Fram. Wikipedia is WP:NOTNEWS. Articles with unclear notability should be removed from the mainspace. Merely because some event is receiving breaking news coverage does not mean that it is notable or fit for inclusion. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia: there is no urgent need to provide articles on such content. Pausing a deletion discussion, which would effectively allow potentially non-notable content to remain visible in the mainspace for longer than it does now, makes very little sense; if there is to be a 'holding pen' for these sorts of articles, it should be in the draftspace, outside of the public view. There is no benefit to granting such articles a two-week reprieve. Yours, &c. RGloucester — ☎ 00:42, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose – Wikipedia is WP:NOTNEWS, and there is no rush to create articles. If there are questions about lasting notability, the article shouldn't be created in the first place. Let'srun (talk) 01:37, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support but we need a bit more on the process to ensure that a passing admin can unilaterally implement this when called for. It's ideally like a speedy keep or speedy delete... but in this case a speedy pause. Jclemens (talk) 03:08, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: I guess I ought to support my own suggestions, although I don't know if an iVote eo ipso is the way to do this. Usually, the problem with breaking-news AfDs is that they have too damn many votes: it is hard for me to imagine a situation where the waits actually outnumber keeps and deletes. Only a select few end up being a problem (either by creating gigantic unproductive arguments, making a gigantic chore for the closers, and/or making us look dumb in the news); these tend to be the ones with some partisan political aspect. So the participants are experiencing an episode of malding-induced brain dysfunction, their entire brain is devoted to coming up with whatever action would most own the (libs/cons/etc), which imo precludes them doing something like making a "wait" ivote. So I don't think this will be used very much, but I do support it for the sake of at least having some change, and maybe this could evolve into something useful later. jp×g🗯️ 06:42, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose In August, I created clanker, prompting an AfD that fiercely debated WP:NSUSTAINED in the context of a word whose popularity was rising in the current news cycle across a week of debate, deletion review, relisted week, and requested move to userify the essay most frequently cited by the Keep voters. While there is dispute over how to apply our notability guideline in the context of breaking news, I would rather the approach taken there to keep with the option for relist within a few months than keeping all borderline cases for a two-week incubation. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 14:34, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Draftifying the article would severely constrain the number of editors who can edit the article. Experienced editors knew where the draft was, but the inexperienced would just assume that there was no article at all or that it had been deleted permanently. It is true that Wikipedia is not the breaking news, but Wikipedia should also be fast enough to cover a notable breaking news. The option to "wait for more sources" should always be on the table. By keeping the option on the table, it also helped with recency bias. Some editors might vote "Delete" because it hadn't hit the news cycle yet, despite if they waited for a few hours, it can be a snow keep. This option will help keep everyone to have cooler heads. ✠ SunDawn ✠ Contact me! 15:21, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, if notability is not yet clear, the article should be in draft. Once notability becomes clear, the draft can either be abandoned if the answer is "no", or moved to mainspace if it is "yes". Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 16:22, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose If notability isn't clear we shouldn't have a mainspace article on it. (t · c) buidhe 19:36, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose as instruction creep - comments on an AfD discussion are !votes and we shouldn't seek to codify what "bolded !vote descriptions" (e.g. [speedy/weak/strong] delete, keep, etc.) can be used - leave it to the individual commentator to make their own call. Nothing prevents a commentator from !voting with a "wait and watch" rationale at present. Further, breaking news/current event topics manifestly involve WP:BLP (among other) concerns, and where notability is legitimately in doubt (whether due to SUSTAINED or on any other grounds) it is best to play safer and avoid having a mainspace article. Though, I guess, it would be far better if editors remembered WP:NOTNEWS, WP:DEADLINE etc. and didn't directly create new mainspace articles on breaking news topics until a couple of days have passed and we have some actual sense of how RSs have reported on the topic. JavaHurricane 03:21, 16 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support We should give people time to develop the articles in mainspace so no duplicative articles/draft articles exist and editors can find the topic easily. Everything in these article should be sourced to multiple independent reliable sources and Wp:BLP should be followed strictly. When those debates (mostly American politics and high profile crimes reach AFD they get closed as keep or no consensus anyway after lots of protracted debate.) --Rolluik (talk) 09:27, 16 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose edge cases are always going to be edge cases; I can only see this proposal making the edge wider, ie less likely to achieve consensus. Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 09:31, 16 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. If an article is not yet notable, it should be removed from mainspace (by deletion, draftification, etc.) until it is. People can make any appropriate comment they wish, but should not be encouraged to make comments contrary to the guidelines. Eluchil404 (talk) 09:29, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Adding such a type of vote directly violates WP:NOTNEWS and WP:SUSTAINED, which establishes that an article must have sustained coverage *before* being created. Therefore, the real question here is whether those two policies should be overturned, as their enforcement seems to be nigh-nonexistent for articles about breaking news events. If those policies are still active, something like this is not tenable. One could characterize current Wikipedia as "yes, Wikipedia is for making articles about breaking news literally immediately even if you have no idea whether it will have any lasting impact. Don't even bother trying to delete it, it will always be kept due to the 'it might be notable' WP:CRYSTALBALL argument." ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 11:35, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Then the article should be draft namespace not mainspace, since by definition its not encloypeadic. Wikipedia is not a news service. scope_creep^Talk 13:28, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Just to be clear, this is the wrong venue to change AFD and won’t stick if someone trys to enact it. Get a consensus here then open at WT:AFD Spartaz ^Humbug! 07:18, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose if notability is unknown the subject should not be a mainspace article. Traumnovelle (talk) 08:19, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support if and only if the article is unpublished/draftified or held in an unindexed space that AIs won't read and summarize during the time while we're waiting and seeing. There are just too many cases where having a Wikipedia article for a week -- if it's the right week -- is really useful for advancing a point of view.—S Marshall T/C 10:58, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Wait and see - but more seriously, there's no need to have this as a distinct option because people are free to !vote anyway they like and AFD !votes have never ever been restricted to a set number of options.

In the case of this specific one, AFD's can run for up to three weeks, and draftification is already an well-known option for handling situations where more work needs to be done that will go beyond three weeks. What purpose does this serve? FOARP (talk) 11:09, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

People can cast a vote however I am not sure how a closer would weigh that sort of vote given it's not usually an option used. GothicGolem29 (talk) 13:44, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

They have to weigh any !votes cast. Particularly, if the consensus is "wait and see", they'll do a "wait and see" close. FOARP (talk) 11:55, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

So if the consensus is wait and see they would follow that not say no because that is not an option? Thanks GothicGolem29 (talk) 14:39, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. Bearian (talk) 13:55, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. Anyone who wants to !vote "wait and see" should just !vote "keep" and cite WP:RAPID. It's better that editors come to a consensus (or no consensus) that taking assessment of the facts and state of the sources than to create a complicated process that by its expedited nature is more susceptible to being gamed. If things change in the course of an AFD that should be assessed by the closer and relisted as appropriate. Furthermore, the current proposal requires that an AFD must automatically be rerun, even if the situation has obviously shifted in a way that cements notability. Yes, WP:IAR exists, but this is bad to formalize in the first place. -- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 09:19, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Anyone who comes to Wikipedia for breaking news is a fool, and we are by design a "lagging" information source. Breaking information is inappropriate for Wikipedia almost by definition, unless it's an event unambiguously and obviously big enough that WP:CRYSTAL is irrelevant (and for that to happen it has to be something like ten million people killed in seconds due to a comet impact). As to those in the discussion below who say this fuels angry haters calling us a left-wing censorship mob or whatever, who cares? We aren't here to please the Elon Musks of the world. Let them AfD the articles on the next forty No Kings marches we'll have in the coming year. WeirdNAnnoyed (talk) 11:11, 24 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I would not call someone a fool just for coming here for information. Several afds have closed with keep for breaking news events which have not killed 10 million people or even thousands(one was the killing of one person.) GothicGolem29 (talk) 16:59, 24 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose per Fram, Mangoe, Buidhe, and especially WeirdNAnnoyed. I've gone into more detail in the discussion below. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 19:10, 24 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Suppport this sounds like a good idea Oreocooke (talk) 20:39, 24 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong oppose: Agree with other "opposes" above. While Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, we report breaking news, but there still needs to be some lag ("lagging" information source above). There are hundreds of sites that report breaking news, but none of those claim to be an encyclopedia. Considering this, we have criteria that are more involved concerning BLPs. Most know this, but for several reasons, I will add it. WP:Notability (lead): On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article. Information on Wikipedia must be verifiable; if no reliable, independent sources can be found on a topic, then it should not have a separate article. Wikipedia's concept of notability applies this basic standard to avoid indiscriminate inclusion of topics. Article and list topics must be notable, or "worthy of notice". Determining notability does not necessarily depend on things such as fame, importance, or popularity—although those may enhance the acceptability of a topic that meets the guidelines explained below. A topic is presumed to merit an article if: It meets either the general notability guideline (GNG) below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific notability guideline (SNG); and It is not excluded under the What Wikipedia is not policy. "If" notability is in question, the subject should likely be in a draft and possibly presented for publication. I believe we still consider this an WP:ATD. An article where notability is questionable, maybe looking barely notable, lacking the required significant coverage, can be deleted as too soon. It doesn't make sense to use WP:AFD as a holding pen. Again, a holding pen would be "draftify". There are really only two options: 1) keep, 2) not keep. All the others, merge, redirect, incubate, rename/move to another title, userfied to a user subpage, mean the article does not deserve a page so are alternatives to deletion. If more closers used this consideration, split !votes like merge, redirect, and incubate would not be counted separately but would collectively indicate a !vote of "no page". -- Otr500 (talk) 05:45, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong oppose. Breaking news can only be a primary source — breaking news dates from the time of the event, so by definition it's primary. We can expect certain classes of events to be acceptable because they always get secondary coverage — e.g. it would be preposterous to AFD the article about a major country's election a day after the event, and in many countries, commercial air crashes always get studied in detail by relevant government agencies — and occasional incidents will be so big that they're certain to be covered long after the fact (imagine deleting the article about the 11 September 2001 attacks a day afterward), but the former is fine because we know how sources are written and the latter is the occasional case of IAR. Some average person's murder may never get studied by reliable secondary sources (who can predict which crimes retain the interest of scholars years later), so we need to delete them, and requiring wait-and-see for these articles helps to reinforce the common disdain for the actual scholarly definition of "primary source" and the common reliance on FUTON sources. Nyttend (talk) 02:50, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  commercial air crashes always get studied in detail by relevant government agencies – Noting that even in this case, these studies will often lean primary (though it will vary from study to study and claim to claim). Relatively few events get coverage where, for example, a book or review article about the crash will look back at these studies to analyze or explain the findings. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 19:51, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, although really what I'd prefer is something like a flat ban on NOTNEWS AFDs majorly in the papers with admins empowered to speedy close such nominations regardless of if any Wait-and-see !votes have been cast. These nominations are a tremendously bad idea even when they're "correct" and do a lot to feed stupid narratives about Wikipedia in the press. Just wait a week, then nominate if it isn't ridiculous to do so. SnowFire (talk) 03:52, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose as unnecessary. If something goes to AfD, it always has a week (at least) before closure, so we don't need a mechanism to protect hot news from deletion (assuming Wikipedia should be operating as a hot-news outlet anyway). If notability is unclear after a week, draftification is correct. Then it automatically gets 6 months of wait-and-see time. From the point of view of a closing-admin, a wait-and-see !vote is no help: how can they tell whether the !voter would have gone for delete or keep after a week or two? If a !voter wants to specify the conditions required for an article to become keepable/deletable, they can use a comment to do so. Elemimele (talk) 17:06, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose if notability isn't clear after a week then should be a draft, and per the other opposing comments. Editor can always added conditional comments without the need for additional rules. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 02:31, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per WP:NOTNEWS. We are discussing events as they unfold and discussion happens on them all the time. However, claiming an event is notable to have an article within the first 24 hours is folly and waiting two weeks just upends the AfD process. It's essentially the same as WP:NOTYET right? Especailly since AfDs can last for a few weeks, it's very unnecessary. Conyo14 (talk) 18:46, 31 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support with an identical perspective as that expressed by SnowFire. ~ Pbritti (talk) 16:01, 1 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per WP:NOTNEWS. We can always use a sandbox or draft page to hold the article while things develop. --Lenticel ^(talk) 12:20, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Unnecessary per FOARP. I was writing out a comment in support of this proposal, but I realized that this proposal is just adding an option for !voters at AfDs. However, this isn't necessary as AfD !voters can already make comments to this extent. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of whether WP:NOTNEWS or draftification or whatnot should apply here, just that there is nothing in the current rules that disallows "wait and see" !votes. (I should also note that I'm not specifically opposed to this, either; it's just that there's no need to allow something that's not already disallowed.) – Epicgenius (talk) 19:42, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support as a good alternative to what I started above in the #Speedy close for recent events of unclear notability section. I agree with SnowFire. I still support the thinking behind my original rationale. No one can really predict the immediate future on whether something is of lasting importance in its immediate aftermath. Waiting a week does not break the Internet and it should lessen the intensity of drama whenever an article like Erika Kirk is created and then nominated for deletion. Having a formalized option is useful for circumstances that warrant it. If it doesn't work out, we can always change our minds. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:14, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: I've seen far too many AfDs be bombarded with people unfamiliar with Wikipedia's processes who call into question Wikipedia's bias and credibility because we have brought a news subject to AfD. This makes it incredibly difficult to actually discuss whether the subject meets notability guidelines. My first thought (as with Clover, it appears) was Erika Kirk (and Lauren Chen, where I was accused of being 'Kremlin backed'). I prefer 'wait and see' over draftification because of a) the unnecessary vitriol and b) it would stop editors from repeatedly trying to create the same article. Significa liberdade (she/her) (talk) 01:34, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. If anything, "wait and see" should be regarding creation of news articles. Geschichte (talk) 12:19, 8 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Abaciscus (talk) 15:08, 9 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. I don't think this is necessary. We are not a news organization, there's no rush. Draftifying is a better option for such articles, and they already have one week to show some lasting notability. Agree with Fram. win8x (talk) 05:43, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose: Articles that require waiting to see if they meet WP:N in the future are articles that don't meet WP:N now, articles that don't meet WP:N now should not be articles. Draftspace is the proper place to "wait and see" if a new topic becomes notable. Disruptive repeated recreations of draftified articles can be addressed with salt. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 06:51, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wait and See discussion

Do you have many examples where this would have been the better option? Which recently closed AfDs would have been a good fit for this, and how often do these happen? Without this, it is a solution in search of a problem. Fram (talk) 18:51, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see this as a commonly used tool. AfDs where I would have liked to have this option include Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Erika Kirk, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Grooming gangs scandal, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Killing of Austin Metcalf, and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Killing of Iryna Zarutska. 2 additional places where this might be useful is on articles about natural disasters, and articles about accidents. Is that plane crash or that hurricane going to be notable and have a lasting impact? I have no clue 24 hours after it has happened, but I have a solid hunch 14 days after it happened. Tazerdadog (talk) 11:24, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Erika Kirk was a snow keep, this new option would not have changed this
• Grooming gangs scandal was not about breaking news or NOTNEWS issues, "Wait and see" would have made no sense there
• Killing of Austin Metcalf AfD was four months after the fact, what would "wait and see" (automatic restarting of the AfD 2 weeks later) have achieved here?
• Iryna Zarutska had massive, massive participation at the AfD. Better to wait 6 months or a year with this one, than just two weeks.

Not convincing. Fram (talk) 11:35, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The airplane accidents are a persistent problem. People put in small plane incidents and relatively minor mishaps with commercial carriers all the time even though the consensus on these hasn't changed in a very long time; usually it's apparent from the start what's going to be important and what isn't, with rare exceptions, e.g. small plane crash kills important person, but often enough the right solution is a redirect to the section on the person's death. Mangoe (talk) 16:27, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This entire discussion is completely irrelevant to cases where it is apparent from the start whether something is important or not. It is literally only for those rare exceptions when it is not clear. Thryduulf (talk) 16:30, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If it is only for rare exceptions, then why is it added to WP:CENT as a "big change"? People are supporting this because "Wikipedia often looks out of touch to outsiders when they see these discussions creating a reputational risk. ", but it hardly seems as if these "is-it-notable-or-not" dubious events really can have such an impact. The effort put into this, and the arguments used for it, don't seem to match the actual impact it is supposed to have. Fram (talk) 16:43, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For transparency, I added it as I believe that it will have an impact on high-profile AfDs. While the absolute numbers might or might not be high, current events articles do tend to attract more readership (and, naturally, more heated discussions at AfD). Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Killing of Iryna Zarutska and some of the Kirk spinoff articles are examples of what I had in mind. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:51, 14 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

All the above Oppose votes are ignoring the problem, which is that when a million people come visit an Erika Kirk article in the wake of news and see that we're working to delete it [sic], it simply cements Wikipedia's image as a leftist news source. Now, you and I know that's not really what's happening, but that's absolutely the perception and it's getting big names like Elon Musk routinely trashing Wikipedia's news coverage as biased. Likewise, the suggestions for draftification or redirection to Wikinews ignore the expectation the public has developed that something will be here on Wikipedia for anything big enough to be in all the MSM news, so having "nothing" is likely worse than having "something with an AfD tag". The question is how we duck the limelight and hate while giving a suitable time for the news cycles to cycle and us to return to a more deliberative approach to coverage (merge, redirect, rename, etc.) unbothered by the crush of the news cycle. This will never satisfy everyone, as there are plenty of editors who believe something must have had six months of enduring coverage before an article is created on it (reverse-CRYSTAL). So if this gets voted down as not having consensus and nothing replaces the current system, we're going to look like idiots yet again when the next big news story breaks and someone AfD's it for whatever reason. Jclemens (talk) 03:06, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia should not be fighting an information war, or waging a public relations campaign to ingratiate itself with its audience. Wikipedia is, in the first place, not a news source at all, 'leftist' or otherwise. If the purpose of this proposal is to satisfy a public that expects something from Wikipedia that it can never truly provide, then I would be happy to change my !vote from 'oppose' to 'strong oppose'. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, and it should behave like one. Content of unclear notability or significance does not belong in the mainspace. Yours, &c. RGloucester — ☎ 04:10, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, what would be the difference in changing your !vote? You're willing to ignore what the public wants--expects--in order to stay true to your vision of what the project should be, and that sort of dedication is admirable even if I judge it misplaced. For right or wrong, however, such visions of Wikipedia's True Purpose are quite varied. Jclemens (talk) 05:16, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I know of many other things that certain sections of the public may want, but that we don't provide, including but not limited to medical and legal advice, promotional content, and validation of one's own viewpoint. I understand that Wikinews is on its way out, but if what you are saying is that Wikipedia should change its fundamental premise and abandon its principles to satisfy the unquantifiable demands of an amorphous audience, then you might consider forming a consensus to do that first. Yours, &c. RGloucester — ☎ 05:28, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

And it's not what "the public" wants: there hasn't been a "The Public" for at least a decade and really going back even further. One subtribe wants everything to bend to their views, and objectivity be damned. We need to continue to tell them to squiggle off and stick to our principles, which is what most of The Public wants even if they only appreciate it in the abstract and butt heads with our practice when their ox is slightly scratched (much less gored).

And I'll say it again: the Erica Kirk situation was a huge anomaly, a hard case which is trying very hard here to make bad law. Look: people got bent out of shape for a while, the article is still there, and in the long run we will still be attacked at every opportunity by people who don't like that the true doesn't cut their way. We can afford to put something into draft for a few days if it's questionable whether its subject is going to have lasting impact, and for most things, nobody is going to start screaming about it's some sort of vendetta against their cause. We need to react to these people on our terms, not theirs. Mangoe (talk) 15:23, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree the Erica Kirk situation is not the best reason to consider a change to allow AFD participants suggest an outcome other than keep or delete. Since there are editors who do want to create stand-alone articles about current events and people in the news, and there are other editors who are quick to nominate some of those pages for deletion, while sending the page to draft space is a valid option, and while redirect may be a possibility, frequently the real question is whether there is WP:SUSTAINED coverage or whether it is a WP:BLP1E. And since time is the only way to understand if there is sustained coverage, pausing a deletion discussion in the first couple of days allows time for the article to breathe (as long as there are no other violations of policy). And while sending an article to draft space may be preferable in the mean time, the article will still exist in mainspace for seven days before the close of the discussion. - Enos733 (talk) 15:44, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a bit surprised at the strength of the desire to hide potentially non-notable articles. Draftifying something that would later need to be returned to the mainspace prevents people from reading about a recent event, which may be the time when reader interest is the highest in the lifetime of the article. Not draftifying something that will soon be deleted just means there's a non-notable article laying around, which few people are interested in reading, being a page of clutter on a website of millions of pages. -- Beland (talk) 18:36, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Draftying an article does not prevent anyone from reading about a recent event; one can go to a newsagent and purchase one's newspaper of choice. Our goal is not to cater to 'reader interest', or to provide what the reader wants, but to provide what we, as an encyclopaedia, are capable of providing. Wikipedia is never going to be a good source for news. We cannot do original research, we have no system of fact checkers, and no correspondents in Ruritania, Lower Slobbovia or Upper Volta. Leaving an article of questionable notability or encyclopaedic interest in the mainspace is injurious to our mission; if anything, it turns our pages into a lightning rod for discord, and further skews public perception about what Wikipedia is. We should focus on doing what we do well: providing articles on topics of encyclopaedic significance, written with appropriate historical distance from the subject. This does not mean that we cannot have articles on current events. We simply need to be discriminate in what we decide to cover. This is why we have policies on notability, and why they must be strictly enforced. Yours, &c. RGloucester — ☎ 23:36, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Expecting anyone who is getting information from the Internet to leave the building and go find a newspaper stand...somewhere? That's a bit crazy in the modern era. If people want to get information from a newspaper, they're much more likely to look for an online copy.

I have online subscriptions to three different newspapers because their journalism is important to me and the public interest. Usually when I end up at Wikipedia to read about a current event, it's because I've read about something happening in one of those three newspapers or heard about it on NPR, and I want to find more comprehensive coverage. I find that Wikipedia actually does a great job covering current events, because there are a lot of editors motivated to put in updates, and article end up gathering information across all the newspapers and other media outlets, not just one; tells me the cumulative story and not just the latest development; has space to go much more in-depth than most media outlets; and has the ability to link to articles on related topics so if I want to do a deep dive on a person or organization or geography, it's easy.

For example, 2025 United States federal government shutdown and 2025 Malagasy coup d'état are far more in-depth and cross-referenced than what I heard on All Things Considered today and what I can read in the New York Times right now. I would be very upset if someone took that away from me because there was a dispute about notability because the events were too recent. -- Beland (talk) 00:01, 16 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The bit about the 'newsagent' was what is called a rhetorical device; has modern man lost his capability to understand even this, the simplest of metaphors? In any case, the two articles you cite are not very good examples, because both have very clear long-term encyclopaedic significance. However, there is a fundamental problem with your lauding of the 'news aggregator' approach to current events articles. Namely, aggregating selected news sources into a historical narrative is fraught with difficultly, and requires editorial judgement that may be tantamount to WP:OR. There are many cases where editors stitch up a day-to-day narrative based on various news reports; they do the best they can, they are bricoleurs after all.

When one comes back years later, however, it often becomes clear that this patchwork narrative either deviates from the academic understanding of the relevant events, or gives UNDUE weight to certain details that have lost significance over time. As editors tend to be more interested in contributing when events are actually happening, rather than after the fact, these articles are rarely tidied up with reliable, secondary, academic sources. Consider that, in this way, Wikipedia may potentially participate in the propagation of deviant information. There is a very great danger in this activity, and it threatens the integrity of the encyclopaedia. Yours, &c. RGloucester — ☎ 01:31, 16 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I understand your metaphor, it just wasn't clear that you were not speaking literally. A "metaphorically" or something would have helped. I'm sure modern woman and non-binary people would have something to contribute as well.

It sounds like the "danger" you're talking about is having choppy articles cited to reliable news sources? That seems like a less-bad outcome than not being able to distribute any information about an event when it's most needed. Insignificant facts are annoying to read through, but are easy to trim out once someone notices they no longer belong or have been overtaken by events. I do that all the time.

It's also unclear that deleting or drafting an article would prevent this problem from happening, and doing so might make it worse. If an article doesn't have secondary or academic sources ten years after an event, then I think that's a problem with lack of editor involvement, especially in years 2 through 9, not a problem of excess editor involving in weeks 1 and 2. Preventing enthusiastic editors from being able to contribute in week 1 or 2 probably means there will be fewer people watching the article in years 2 through 9. Allowing an article to be created in week 3 could still result in something choppy a few years later, possibly one with fewer notable facts and more original research because it has had fewer eyeballs on it. Historians who come by years later might have a narrative arc that analyzes the events we describe a certain way; generally Wikipedians should not be putting that into articles out of their own thinking. Sometimes they do, but that can happen at any time and not just after a recent event; it just depends on having multiple eyeballs on contributions. An article written from news sources would simply be missing that narrative arc perspective, and would mostly just be a collection of documented facts. That doesn't seem "deviant", which is a weird and problematic way to describe claims that don't align with an academic orthodoxy. -- Beland (talk) 02:10, 16 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sure the public would also want us to add recipes, video game strategy guides, and private blogs if they were asked. But that's not what Wikipedia is, just as it's not a place where we pick out random events we saw in the news and have standalone articles about them. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 14:48, 24 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If the problem is members of the general public not getting the whats and whys of deletion discussions then the solution is not another voting option in discussions. Instead, we should be showing the deletion notice discussions to just the logged in editors who might understand the criteria for keeping or deleting articles. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 20:34, 17 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There are many logged in editors who don't understand the criteria and many logged-out readers and editors who do. We should fix the problem (overly hasty AfD nominations) rather than attempt to hide it. Thryduulf (talk) 20:41, 17 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like hiding deletion discussions would generate even more criticism, rightly so, and also start to give truth to the criticism of being a cabal of secretive elites who make decisions without listening to readers. If there's going to be a discussion happening, I think it's far better to have the proceedings be open to help dispel misinformation about the process. A lot of the people amplifying these types of complaints misrepresent the process to make people angrier and get more monetizable attention. Some people then arrive at the discussion and make poorly-informed comments, but many arrive and see that it's actually reasonable and start to learn not to listen to demagogues. -- Beland (talk) 02:43, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The process would be suspended, not hidden yet continuing, per this proposal. Jclemens (talk) 06:11, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Another solution would be to have a reader-facing rationale on the deletion template that summarizes the issue in one sentence without wiki-jargon, optionally with a piped link to the P&G. Things like "The subject of this article is only known for a single event." and "The subject of this article is only known for [its/his/her] connection to another subject." Also keep in mind that most non-notable current events articles are things like crimes and transportation accidents. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 19:08, 24 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps we need to tweak the breaking-news template to explain more clearly that Wikipedia is merely a summary of sources, a smoothed average of human viewpoints over the time between the event and now; breaking news articles are naturally volatile, potentially unreliable, and subject of hot debate, because there has been no time for the average to smooth, or the long-term significance of the event to become clear - they are provisional articles, in a sense? I don't know how this can be expressed concisely? I personally dislike instant-news articles, but accept that many people rely on Wikipedia as their unbiased news-source, so we're obliged to have them. I definitely think we should avoid taking action merely to fight back against labels attached to us. We're here to encyclopedify, not to fight, even for our own reputation. Quietly getting on with doing the right thing is the best way we can signal our stance. Elemimele (talk) 17:17, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I like the idea of a provisional article in a reader-facing context, even if on the editor end we understand that Wikipedia is always changing. My first preference is that "Collapse of Example Bridge" be covered in "Example Bridge#Collapse" and that "2025 So-And-So shooting" be covered in "List of shootings in 2025" and/or "List of shootings in So-And-So". But for larger events where it's impossible on a practical level to merge it somewhere more centralized, I'd be interested in exploring something like this in addition to reader-facing descriptors on the deletion template. Honestly, it might be about time to revisit our ambox templates more broadly to make them more understandable to readers. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 19:41, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Having a "This is a breaking news story. Wikipedia will consider whether this merits a separate article or whether the information will be added to another page after the enduring impact of this event has been made clear." In lieu of an AfD banner seems still a bazillion times better than our status quo. Jclemens (talk) 07:05, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely agree with this. Thryduulf (talk) 09:47, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I can agree with this idea. - Enos733 (talk) 16:15, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is the idea to create a new template to be used instead of Template:Article for deletion for breaking news, that links to WP:SUSTAINED? It seems like the wording Jclemens proposed is for a merge request rather than a deletion request, where we'd normally see Template:Merge to, which is not alarming. Template:Current is used more broadly for breaking news, even if it's affecting an existing article that has not be nominated for deletion or merging. -- Beland (talk) 22:42, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think the idea is for a template to be placed on a subset of articles where {{Current}} is used that says it is a provisional article, and that while it is a stand alone article currently it might be nominated for deletion or merging when the significance (or lack of) is clear, but it will remain as-is until that point. Thryduulf (talk) 23:05, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If no one has actually nominated for deletion or merging, it seems like it would make things worse to say that this is something that might happen, when right now we would just have the "article may change rapidly" warning. -- Beland (talk) 01:11, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

My original idea was to expand {{Current}} as Thryduulf noted, but at Template Talk:Current it's gotten a bit of pushback, when I posted there to try and draw more interested participants here. Jclemens (talk) 02:10, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Reading the discussion there, it seems if this is going to happen, other editors would simply prefer a new template be created so that Template:Current can continue to be used for current events which are clearly notable, to avoid creating unnecessary alarm.

If we get a new template, it makes sense to me for it to be used in situations where someone has nominated for deletion but someone else has objected on "Wait and See" grounds, so there will in fact be an automatic AfD discussion in a few days. It's also fine if the nominator for deletion "Wait and See"s their own nomination because that has become standard procedure for deleting articles about current events; the important point for me is that there actually will be a discussion because someone is challenging notability, not that there might be a discussion because some as-yet-unidentified editor might theoretically challenge notability. -- Beland (talk) 07:07, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Do y'all think it would fly now, if we just created a new template that says something like the following, and created AfD discussions that stated up front they're not supposed to start until DATE X?

This article is about a current event; known facts may change rapidly, and this article may require updating and improved citations. Standalone Wikipedia articles are only created for notable events; less notable events might be mentioned in other articles. A discussion at [LINK TO AFD DISCUSSION] about this event's notability will start on [DATE X], to allow time for demonstrated sustained coverage in reliable sources.

-- Beland (talk) 07:17, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'd support this as an improvement over the status quo, but it's still my second choice to automatic draftification and/or merging for any article if it's based solely on breaking news. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 04:02, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

... then someone else comes along and re-creates it. It's the inevitability of a contributor-driven site. Jclemens (talk) 04:34, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment This is essentially the inverse of Not Yet (with some semantic subtleties). All the best: Rich Farmbrough 09:54, 17 October 2025 (UTC).[reply]
  
• Kneejerk oppose, because I don't find WP:RAPID to be inherently more persuasive than WP:DELAY (two sides of the same coin). We might as well have another option called "Delay and see" which works the same way except it's deleted for two weeks instead of kept. Can't help but wonder if there are infrastructural changes that would help with breaking news, though. I'm reluctant to use draftspace, since it's functionally just a bad content trap for newbies/project-wide trash bin. But something that makes it clear it's provisional, might not be up to the project's long-term standards, etc. but lets people continue work on it. Maybe some stylistic differences from other articles beyond banners (maybe a tall order given multiple skins)... — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:15, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Articles based solely on breaking news should not have been created in the first place and shouldn't be given any special leeway for their unwarranted existence. We could merge them to a list (like List of traffic collisions (2000–present), List of fires in China, etc), merge them to the history section of the location they occurred, draftify them for insufficient secondary sourcing, or simply delete articles where there isn't sourcing demonstrating notability. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 14:43, 24 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Comments: Wikipedia has gone from "build an encyclopedia", where policies and guidelines were sort of placed on a back burner, to "build a great encyclopedia". Allowing little or no sourced articles because the information may be out there, somewhere in the universe, is replaced with present the proof, or provide sourcing when contested. AFDs, in some cases, lag far (sometimes years) behind article creation. Two weeks may sound good, but in practice, how will that work out? Involved editors would have to "stay tuned" and follow the article, and many will likely languish. Even maintenance is years behind in some cases, and it is nearly impossible to make improvements. I have been performing maintenance in the external links section. I was moving gross over links, up to 15 to 25 links, to the talk page with an abundance of policies and guidelines to support the moves, and an Admin told me I was disrupting Wikipedia. I paused the work, not dropped, as I have never been blocked or banned, until I get a resolution to continue culling the section, moving them to the talk page (or deleting them), and removing 15 to 20-year-old career maintenance tags. The point is that there is push-back enough in attempting to build a great encyclopedia, and we don't need yet another layer of protection for suspect or bad articles. Don't forget that an editor can request undeletion, so there is another protection level. An Admin created hundreds of place-name California stub articles, using one source that presented populated places that could not be corroborated. They were mass-produced, and individual AFDs would take forever, so I bailed out. We should not make it easier to create articles lacking notability. Answer to above: "I have no clue 24 hours after it has happened, but I have a solid hunch 14 days after it happened." Wait the 14 days.-- Otr500 (talk) 06:34, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wait and See next steps

My impression is that the RfC is not going to be found to have consensus in its current form. Would anyone object to closing the RfC as failed and begin workshopping some of the ideas brought up in the discussion (e.g., modifying or making a variation on {{Current}})? Jclemens (talk) 02:15, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Workshopping a new version of {{current}} would be helpful. I think it would solve the "messy AFD" problem if combined with pointing to an AFD discussion that doesn't actually start right away. This RFC was not intended to solve the public relations problem of people misunderstanding the Wikipedia deletion process, but some discussion participants have declared that is a/the problem they want to solve. Having a new version of {{current}} that is used instead of {{article for deletion}} without delaying the start of the AFD would not solve the "messy AFD" problem, but would mitigate the public relations problem. (Which if you ask me, sounds like an improvement.) But are there other alternative solutions to discuss as well, and if not, where does that leave the AFD process?

Looking through the "oppose" votes, many editors said that if an article's notability is unclear, it should be deleted or draftified or not created in the first place. But if there's a dispute, "delete" or "draftify" are outcomes of one of these week-long "messy" AfDs, not a way to avoid one. ("Don't create it in the first place" is not actionable, as obviously people do that despite us having guidelines against it, and notability is often disputed.)

If we actually want to solve the "messy AFD" problem and the "this article shouldn't exist until notabilty is clear" problem these editors have in these situations, then the natural solution would be a "speedy draftify" option. Is that something that should be workshopped?

There were also objections on instruction creep grounds; this implies that editors can simply go ahead and vote "Speedy pause for 1 week" or "Speedy draftify/redirect/merge" or "Speedy delete WP:A7", regardless of the outcome of this RFC, and see if other editors agree.

-- Beland (talk) 08:46, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy Draftify means that people will 1) Complain that the current event article was deleted, and 2) someone else will start it again, and 3) it will also be reverted via WP:DRAFTOBJECT. No, there's no place for draftification, at all, in solving disputed notability of current events. Might be nice if it did work, but it's a very heavy lift to fix that, and it will raise plenty of secondary issues that also need to be addressed. Jclemens (talk) 07:06, 1 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Jclemens that the fate of this RFC is pretty clear at this point. As far as what to do about it - breaking news event happens. I don't think you can stop article creation without a huge shift that I think is somewhere between unrealistic and impossible - you certainly can't salt the potential titles, there's too many. So the article gets made. From there we have to figure out the disposition of the article. Speedy deletion is supposed to be uncontroversial, which in general these are not. Draftification has a lot of issues (recreation in mainspace, backdoor deletion, hiding from public view during max interest). AfDs are the status quo, but can lead to a powder keg where we look out of touch to the point where it's a reputational risk because the subject changed too much in the last 5 days. I guess maybe an alt "current event AFD" tag on the article is the best we can do at this point? Something that explains in a reader-facing way what's going on? Tazerdadog (talk) 20:44, 2 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

OK, how about creating {{current event AFD}} with this text:

This article about a current event has been nominated for deletion. The article may continue to experience rapid updates and corrections, and may need improved citations. Standalone Wikipedia articles are only created for notable events that generate sustained coverage in reliable sources; less notable events might be mentioned in other articles. (See deletion discussion.)

? -- Beland (talk) 04:04, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I can get behind both that and a modified {{current}} that also notes that it may be moved or merged as things evolve. No reason to restrict ourselves to one updated/clarified template. Jclemens (talk) 05:32, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would oppose modifying the existing template to add warnings about things that are unlikely to happen to some of the tagged articles; there was also opposition to changing the existing template at Template talk:Current#Potential Idea. -- Beland (talk) 08:07, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I was too terse. The idea wouldn't be to replace current {{current}}, but rather give it a separate display mode and/or create a new template for when this is in use on potentially contentious new events. Jclemens (talk) 22:44, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's a lot of AFD machinery in Template:Article for deletion that might need to be ported over later, so I decided to draft a separate template {{Current event AFD}}. I guess feel free to start using it and see what happens? Or tweak or discuss further. -- Beland (talk) 09:40, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oh look, we did it again!

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/UPS Airlines Flight 2976 For a blessedly short 33 minutes and <800 AfD pageviews, TOOSOON was invoked, making us collectively look like insensitive jackasses to those who came to see about a tragic accident that devastated an industrial area and killed more than a dozen people. This was handled reasonably well in comparison to some of the other examples, but THIS is precisely why a TOOSOON clarification and a speedy closure reason would help us NOT look like ghouls the next time this comes up. There will absolutely be time for trimming and merging later, but if we want to continue to be relevant we must accede to the public's interest in getting the latest news aggregated here on Wikipedia. Jclemens (talk) 07:29, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'd prefer if we told off the people creating these and teach them about how sourcing works, as opposed to permitting a new article every time something goes bang and treat it like a historical event of encyclopedic significance. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 19:16, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No matter how many different people you "tell off" its not going to change the fact that people will create these articles and so the telling off isn't actually going to benefit the encyclopaedia in any way (unless you count driving away good faith editors as a benefit). There is no harm in having an article of borderline notability live for a week, there is harm in nominating an article about a potentially notable topic for deletion while it's actively front of the public's attention. This isn't a new phenomenon either, my earliest clear memory of reading Wikipedia was of the Ufton Nervet rail crash article a few hours after the incident - that was 21 years ago yesterday. Thryduulf (talk) 19:34, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Oh, look, we did it again, again Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Samantha Fulnecky essay controversy

I'm just going to keep posting these as I see them unless someone wants to propose a sub-page to catalogue the week-of deletion nominations. Jclemens (talk) 07:10, 5 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No reason not to delete these things until they pan out and prove to be more than the outrage of the week. Mangoe (talk) 12:52, 5 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]