Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion/Archive 65

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Expand G13 to cover ALL old drafts

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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Note Wikipedia talk:Miscellany for deletion#Blatant disregard for the RfC, encouragement of that disregard, and overwhelming of MfD by worthless harmless drafts, and for example Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Montenegro-United Kingdom relations. Legacypac is proving that there is near endless crap and mess abandoned in DraftSpace. Unowned (no user caring for it), content-forked attribution-compliance-menacing scrambled mess. There are few OK stubby things amongst them. The stuff should be deleted for some many reasons, and page-by-page MfDing them is unworkable and trying is disrupting MfD.

Things in draftspace that are not drafts should be removed to elsewhere. Users' notes should be moved to userspace. Article sandboxes deleted per the same rationale written at WP:UP#COPIES, there are good short term but long term they are attribution hazards. Generally useful stuff, but not article drafting, move to ProjectSpace, and the few long term good drafts, probably a WikiProject in the several instances where this applies.

There are other ideas for this old crap. DraftPROD. DraftPROD will be pseudo-speedy deletion. AfC-managed autodeletion. Yes, AfC reviewers need to be able to delete completely hopeless things and tendentiously resubmitted stuff, but they do not go backwards for years old abandoned crap.

Everything in DraftSpace untouched for 6 months should be speediable under G13. Everything that would be hit by that and shouldn't be deleted should not be in DraftSpace. Bot edits and minor edits, and tagging "worthless" should not necessarily delay G13, but it really doesn't matter. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:37, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

• Support per the spirit of WP:NOTWEBHOST. Admins handling deletions can and should salvage good content, but there's loads of crap drafts (and plenty of seriously problematic content among them). ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 04:59, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support but would increase time to two years, that would provide a more than reasonable safety period to help prevent any useful content from getting and still address the bulk of the problem. --Crystallizedcarbon (talk) 08:00, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support CHANGE TO: Conditional support SEE ADDENDUM - CSD G13 falls short in requiring drafts to use the {{AFC submission}} template to be eligible; all drafts should be equally eligible.--John Cline (talk) 09:04, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
  • Addendum - upon considering the merits of those opposing this measure, and those who reserve their support, I have come to agree that draft deletions are more than perfunctory clean-up measures. And that time-based criteria, alone, are needlessly blind and recklessly impartial. More is needed here than an hourglass provides and haste, in these deletions, is clearly contentious. Interim steps appear needed, such as "DraftPROD" and perhaps, time spent categorized as "usurpable". Seeing that the {{AFC submission}} clause was deliberately carved, it occurs to me that a proposal bearing on it ought also address the prevailing concerns that brought it about. This proposal is remiss in that regard.--John Cline (talk) 03:10, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support - provided fair warning is given to any interested parties. Anything deleted can be restored on request per WP:REFUND. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 09:14, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

  Or the deletion postponed per the current AFC G13 deletion postponement process, in my opinion. --Izno (talk) 12:25, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

  But that implies having someone watching it at the very precise moment where someone decides to speedely delete the draft. If no one is looking and it gets deleted, the chances that someone will later discover it and ask for a refund are close to zero; "out of sight, out of mind". The collaborative process needs that the content is left around in plain sight for someone to stumble upon it and decide to adopt it and make it better; getting rid of it prevents the whole process. And it is not reasonable requiring the editor that finds about a deleted draft to ask for a REFUND; since the talk page and history are also made inaccessible upon deletion, there's no way to assess whether it's worth to start the non-instantaneous and non-automatic bureaucratic process, bothering some fellow administrator, maybe only to discover whether or not there was something there that was worth the bother. Diego (talk) 20:01, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

• Support - 6 months is long enough to improve anything that is likely to be improved. Cabayi (talk) 09:25, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

  I have had Draft:FuturLab on my to-do list for some time—in fact, more than 6 months since I last touched it. The time period is mostly-irrelevant for long-term, in-good-faith, Wikipedia editors, since we can always extend the lifetime of a draft. --Izno (talk) 12:19, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

• Support 6 months matches the Stale Draft report generated weekly amd G13 should cover all drafts. . There are over 6,000 such drafts ranging from simply blank to hoaxes, attack pages, profiles of completely non-notable people and other nonsense. Anything actually useful will je G13 postponed or promoted (yes occasionally fully formed articles are found abandoned in Draft space, but without reviewing the abandoned stuff and deleting the garbage we will never find the useful pages. Legacypac (talk) 10:03, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Broadly support making G13 apply to all draft-space content. I don't think I agree that WikiProjects should assume "long term good drafts" and I explicitly disagree with Smokey's assertion that "shouldn't be deleted should not be in draft space"—some draft-space content is worth leaving for work-to-be-done. I do agree with Ritchie's caveat. --Izno (talk) 12:19, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

  Also, regarding notability (which apparently started this discussion to some degree at the 'blatant disregard' thread), I had this to say to the now-banned now-ex-administrator working on drafts. I am unsure if it is a point that has been made previously.... --Izno (talk) 12:23, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

• support since there is a notable amount of abandoned drafts. The lack of AFC template does not make them any better. However it wouldn't be bad to notify involved parties and/or corresponding wikiprojects before applying it. --Kostas20142 (talk) 15:12, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support. Draftspace needs tidying and that task should take up a minimal amount of volunteer time. – Joe (talk) 15:53, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• support - I see no particular reason why G13 should only apply to drafts with an AfC template on them. In fact it seems to me to have been simply an oversight that that was not part of the original RfC for G13. Bot and minor edits should not restart the clock. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:55, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support draft space isn't really my thing and I don't see too much harm with stuff staying there, but we are not a webhosting service, and it also makes next to no sense to delete things with an AfC tag, but not one without it. Per Kudpung, I'd also like someone to close the conversation on the top of this page as to how to deal with bot edits and G13. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:59, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support subject to all the same rules as already apply to the tagged drafts, incuding {{AfC postpone G13}} and WP:REFUND. An untagged draft is no better than a tagged one, there is no reason to delete the latter and not the former. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 18:24, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:38, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support per all the above. Good proposal to clean up some of the junk we've built up.--Mojo Hand (talk) 18:42, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support provided there is a mechanism for editors to exempt particular drafts from G13. (Note that about 1,900 articles are about to be put into draft space that were created by the Content translation tool, some of which may have been improved or overwritten since then). If this proposal is implemented there will be a need to reinstate automated daily processes first to warn the creator, then to list the articles due for deletion: Noyster (talk), 18:56, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
  • @Noyster: The mechanism is really just "make an edit". We have {{AfC postpone G13}} as a null template to allow editors to postpone G13 and keep track of how many postpones have been made. Anyone can use it. (As for the bot notifications, that's currently not required of G13 but may not be a bad idea. Worst case they go to REFUND.) ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 20:17, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support makes sense to me. Jytdog (talk) 19:41, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Strongest possible support with bells on. This will solve both the overflow of drafts at MfD and the massive piles of cruft dumped into draftspace and abandoned. Kudos to SmokeyJoe for having the balls to propose this. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 20:29, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support clearly as this is something that I had not only used IAR in that past, but I had also proposed here long ago but nothing surfaced from it. General G6 cleaning basically. SwisterTwister talk 20:43, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose No no this is a terrible idea. Age should not be used as a synonym for low-quality. What is needed is a better deletion mechanism not the expansion of the not-so-good mechanism. The result of this proposal would be that the good drafts will be moved to the user pages for the fear of the deletion. Perversely, the remaining drafts will be of lesser quality and would bolster the argument that the draft namespace attracts only wrong-kind of drafts (since good productive editors will not be attracted to the draft namespace.) -- Taku (talk) 23:00, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
  • Change to Support: SmokeyJoe makes a good argument: the status quo is not good, which I agree and making a change is better doing nothing. But, for the record, I still think this is not a good idea, if not terriblest (English word?) idea. -- Taku (talk) 20:49, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
• Strongly oppose An arbitrary time limit works no benefit to the project. But if this does pass, i will stop advising people to start by creating drafts in draft space, and instead advise that all drafts be created in user space. I will also stop draftifing marginal articles, moving them instead to user space. DES ^(talk)_{DESiegel Contribs} 23:03, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
  • Taku and DES, these drafts are already being mass pseudo-speedy deleted at MfD. Their deletions are frequent and apparently uncontestable (ubncontestable not counting procedural objections). If you disagree with their rapid barely-reviewed no-discussion deletions, you should speak up at Wikipedia_talk:Miscellany_for_deletion#Blatant_disregard_for_the_RfC.2C_encouragement_of_that_disregard.2C_and_overwhelming_of_MfD_by_worthless_harmless_drafts. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:41, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
• Comment If this is enacted to consensus, I propose that: All pages in draft space that are are at least 3 months old that do not have any form of AFC submission banner on them have the AFC banner placed on them so that they can be enrolled in the AFC tracking categories based on their creation date. WIth that I will reset the HasteurBot G13 reminder process and CSD nominations at 5 months reminder and 6 months CSD nomination. This is 100% unedited because I prefer to take the more conservative view that unedited really means unedited and I'd rather not have to sort through all the exceptions as to bots and real changes. I chose the conservative view so that I'm not exceeding the mandate of the community. Hasteur (talk) 00:06, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
  • @Hasteur: I'd actually recommend a very different route. Rather than trying to template and mass-delete these, I think it should just be a criterion editors can choose to nominate under. Each page should be considered on its merits for speedy deletion with editors/admins considering postponing or expanding. That is the point of draft space, after all. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 00:12, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
  • I recommend instead that we ask AfC reviewers to begin reviewing old untagged drafts, and decide on their own judgement whether to add the AfC tag, move out of draft space, or tag immediately with G13. There is no need for multiple handling of the vast majority of abandoned hopeless worthless stuff. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:38, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
    • @BU Rob13:@SmokeyJoe: We can slap on {{AFC submission/draft}} which helps get them in the Year/month/day tracking categories that I use to help drive the bot. Hasteur (talk) 02:10, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
      • Sure, but there should be no compulsion to tag obviously inappropriate drafts with that tag. If they are old, abandoned, worthless, no hope, let that tagger in their judgement tag them G13 immediately. Reviewing the old stuff once is enough. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:16, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
• Comment The cutout of CSD:G13 that excludes not AFC draftspace pages was intentional for the above noted reasons Personally I think think that we should nominate, but it takes some significant abuses of the good will to make the effort. Hasteur (talk) 00:08, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support. Junk is junk, regardless of whether it has an AFC tag on it. MER-C 02:41, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose Do you want to kill Wikipedia? 'Cause this is how you kill Wikipedia. The continued gentrification of mainspace--where ugly content isn't allowed and WP:DEADLINE is ignored--is bad enough, but now there appears to be a large number of editors who don't care to preserve any refuge for stuff that sucks, who don't care to allow people to write lousy articles in hopes that someday they will be worthy. Every edit you delete is an insult to the editor who volunteered his or her time to contribute it. Some of them need it because the edits are actively harmful, but those are all covered by G5, G10, G11, and/or G12. The entire idea of blanket or time-based deletion of content that is 1) not presented to the public, and 2) is available for people to work on and improve is wrongheaded and against the spirit of collaboration that draws editors in. Actions like this drive out hobbyist editors, and play to editors who thrive by picking apart and rejecting others' contributions, rather than encouraging them. WP:NOTWEBHOST is entirely about stuff that was never intended to be part of the encyclopedia, not legitimate contributions that simply suck. Jclemens (talk) 04:52, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
  • Jclemens, I largely agree, but not completely. This is not killing Wikipedia. AfC is killing Wikipedia. WP:ACTRIAL is underway, it may be a move to fixing, and at least it will tell us something. DraftSpace is killing Wikipedia, not because of gentrification, I think you mean to say Extememe Immediatism. Newcomers are sent to draftspace where they will not meet other editors, and they will be ignored. The notion that drafts can sit in draftspace forever is killing Wikipedia. Newcomers with not topics should introduce coverage of the new topics into existing mainspace page before writing a standalone (orphan) page. Anyway, they are the small minority, most of the drafts are not realistic drafts. Allowing G13 on all the old stuff at least gives Legacypac an incentive to continue reviewing the old drafts and bringing to light the few worth attention.
    Also, as I said to Taku and Des, these deletions are happening already. Collectively they are SNOW deleted, and this is a more efficient method, and one that lays more responsibility on the nominator. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:48, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
    • Worth noting also that these drafts aren't works-in-progress. By the six month mark, they're works-in-trash-bin. They've been abandoned. That's kind of the point. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 07:05, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

      I could enumerate several things that would kill Wikipedia (out of date user interface, steep learning curve, uncompetitive usability on mobile and tablet compared to Facebook / Twitter / Instagram etc, trigger-happy admins, a WMF software engineering department that seems to have difficulty shipping stuff people want and works and has been adequately tested, a leader who is as out of touch with the day-to-day runnings of Wikipedia as Jacob Rees-Mogg is to the job centre, etc etc etc) but the deletion of non-AfC drafts after 6 months is not one of them. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 09:28, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose with caveats. I previously supported such proposals for the reason that undeletion is always possible. However, Jclemens' argument holds considerable weight. I do agree there are a number of drafts that are hopelessly unsuited and fall under WP:NOTWEBHOST or similar policies but then a extension of U5 would be better than this proposal.
  Drafts are currently linked to from the main space if an article does not yet exist, allowing all editors to find potentially useful drafts to expand and send to mainspace. We should not get rid of this potential to increase both the project and our editor base.
  The question should be: Is there any need to remove stale drafts that do not violate any policy (including attribution!)? I don't see any real reason mentioned so far and if there is not, the mere chance that someone after more than six months finds the draft and improves them is sufficient reason to keep all of them. Again, I'm happy to support deletion of drafts that are clear violations of policy, including content-forks and drafts that are someone using Wikipedia as their webhost, but I oppose blanket deletion of all drafts because there is nothing we can gain from removing non-policy violating, potentially viable drafts.
  Also, currently some editors seem to use draftifying - without consent - as a way to circumvent the deletion policy (see previous discussions here and here for example) and this proposal would basically open the door to speedy deletion of any article. If someone wished to do so, they could just move thousands of rarely-edited articles to draft space and after six months, they'd be gone. So even if this proposal passes, it should not apply to drafts that are the result of a move (except if draftifying was the consensus at AfD or requested by the creator). Regards SoWhy 12:30, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
  • SoWhy, the Draft pages could be ignored, but many seem incapable of ignoring them. The need is to stop them coming all through MfD one by one. A U5 condition for the author to have made no mainspace edits? See WP:ACTRIAL for implementing that if the assumptions are right. Mass draftifications? Yes, it is a barn door loophole for backdoor deletion, and at WT:Drafts there have been strong statements against it at all, except for when it is a good idea. I think we have almost got good boundaries documented, see Wikipedia_talk:New_pages_patrol#Clarification_and_guidance_for_draftification. Most of your concerns are being addressed. The current abandoned junk though? Ignore, or MfD one by one, or speedy? They are currently being speedied via unparticipated MfDs. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:52, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
    • SmokeyJoe: ACTRIAL will not have an impact on the ability to create drafts or AfC. It will likely reduce the need for draftification of articles such as Draft:Mohammadpur Khanquah, by preventing creation by non-autoconfirmed users, but half of the project is getting good faith users acquainted with en.Wiki and that includes sending those who want to immediately create an article AfC. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:28, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
      • TonyBallioni, not directly and immediately, but I for one anticipate that it will. A major premise of ACTRIAL is that people should experience content improvement in existing articles before writing new articles. If this premise is borne out, it should inform revision of the Article Wizard instructions. Currently, the Article Wizard paves a clear road for a newcomer to make their first edits by writing a new draft on a new topic. Many of the drafts to be deleted are first edits of newcomers, and worse, are last edits of those newcomers. I believe it likely that if autoconfirmation is required before writing either a new article or a new draft, there will be far less woefully unsuitable drafts dumped by drive-by editors. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:28, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
• Comment anything with half an ounce of possibility as a potential page is being postponed or put through AfC anyway. Occasionally abandoned Drafts get sent to mainspace. The VAST majority of non-AfC Draft space is link SPAM, hopeless garbage, blatent lies, and absolutely never gonna be a valid topic junk. This will really help useful pages be surfaced and improved. It ensures that all Draft pages get some experienced editor eyes at some point after they are created so we can dispense with problematic pages. Legacypac (talk) 17:49, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose per my usual arguments against G13. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:54, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support per arguments by BU Rob13, Kudpung, and others. Our purpose is to build a published encyclopedia, not to stockpile content that no one cares enough about to actually work on. Six months on the internet is a long time.- MrX 18:38, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
• I continue to believe, for reasons similar to Jclemens, that any time-based deletion of drafts must be paired with analysis of their content - that is, they should also meet speedy deletion criteria of their target namespace, typically the A* series. An abandoned draft reading in full "[Name] (born [date], 1999) is a high school senior at a local Miami public school. She has been described overall as a stunning individual and has never failed to excel in everything she does." doesn't need an MFD; one starting "Captain Marvel is an upcoming American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character Carol Danvers." with 45 references and 2400 words of prose does, even if it goes unedited for six months and a day. And yes, there are users who would tag that, and admins who would delete it.
  That said, this proposal is still better than the status quo, where drafts like my first example are regularly speedied despite meeting no speedy deletion criterion, typically with a G2 or G6 or G13 deletion summary. I started to do an analysis of G2 deletions here; an unexpected drop in my free time has prevented me from following up on it. —Cryptic 19:09, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support equality for drafts irrespective of userspace {{AFC submission}} or draftspace. Widefox; talk 19:11, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support. The draft space is not a free repository where drafts can remain indefinitely, especially if they are about topics that are clearly non-notable, such as WP:MILL topics. If this were not true, then we risk the draft space becoming a place where anyone can write an article about a decidedly non-notable subject (i.e. something not meant to be included in the encyclopedia) and have it remain there forever – this is the fundamental violation of WP:NOTWEBHOST that we are trying to avoid. Previously such drafts were nominated to WP:MFD, but it's been pointed out that MFD is somewhat overwhelmed by these nominations. To avoid deletion, all it would take is one edit, one comment to say "hey, I'd still like to keep this". Or, if it has already been deleted, a note at WP:REFUND or to the deleting administrator. Mz7 (talk) 20:40, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose without additional requirements. Most importantly, I don't believe we should consider drafts "abandoned" if the user is still actively editing but has some draft he/she hasn't touched in 6 months. If other editors feel it should still be deleted, that's a good case for MfD. There's a lot of crap indeed, and G13 should be broader (after checking a sample of the recent MfDs, it looks like 80% of them should've been speediable, but not 100%). But there's no requirement here that it be an inappropriate topic; there's no requirement here that the article be of poor quality; there's no requirement here that the editor be inactive; there's no requirement here for a waiting period to ask an active editor about it; there's no requirement here to make userfication an option... Obviously I wouldn't want all of these requirements, but as it stands it seems like this will allow for deletion based solely on time, with no other considerations required. Am I missing something? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:45, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

• Just because the expansion would allow for deletion of more abandoned drafts doesn't mean that it insists upon deletion. Drafts that look half-decent - anyone can plop the postponement template on them to forestall deletion for another 6 months. Reviewers can use their judgement to ask still-active editors about their abandoned drafts, or even just drop the postponement template on them in the good-faith assumption that the author will be back. Setting a bright-line bar for inactivity is difficult, because how do you define it? A month? Three? Do you give additional leeway for editors with lots of edits but who haven't stopped in in awhile? Does a single edit in a year, not even to the draft in question, count as "activity" for this purpose?

  If you insist that a topic be "inappropriate", again you get the question of how to define that, which is something we've been struggling with at MfD. There are editors who will argue that anything with even a 5% chance of becoming notable is appropriate enough to keep forever in draftspace, and there are editors who will argue that anything without an 80% chance of being kept at AfD is inappropriate. It's going to be impossible to create a hard line that will satisfy everyone and still allow for things to be deleted.

  I believe userfication is always an option for drafts, and of course, WP:REFUNDS are cheap and easy. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:59, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

  doesn't mean that it insists upon deletion - If we say "after 6 months, drafts are speediable" it will become routine maintenance to delete drafts older than six months. And it will be interpreted by many different people who may or may not have the same perspective as you -- people who would be justified to delete regardless because we have no qualifiers in this text.

  Reviewers can use their judgement to ask still-active editors about their abandoned drafts, or even just drop the postponement template - Or they could not do that. If it's something that reviewers should be doing, that should be reflected in the proposed text.

  Setting a bright-line bar for inactivity is difficult, because how do you define it? - Arbitrary is fine by me. Why 6 months until deletion rather than 3 or 12 or 5.9? To me, the simplest way would be to say that a draft can be deleted if its major contributor(s) has/have been inactive for 6 months.

  If you insist that a topic be "inappropriate", again you get the question of how to define that - Fair. I suppose I mean no obvious problems with either GNG or NOT, but again, this is just one of many hypothetical qualifiers I threw out (not something I actually think should be imposed, necessarily). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 02:02, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose  The word "crap" is popular here, which shows thinking influenced by an excrement viewpoint.  Draft articles are work product, and reliably sourced statements are the building blocks of a reliable encyclopedia.  It is the deletion of reliably sourced statements which turns work product into waste product (excrement).  We are not here to create waste product.  Unscintillating (talk) 01:18, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

  If only there were more than the very occasional reliably sourced statement in the pages that this covers. Sadly you have to wade through heaps of undeleted crap for such a gem. G13 facilitates the sorting. Legacypac (talk) 01:59, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

  If it shouldn't apply to drafts with reliably sourced statements, that's relatively straightforward to include in the text of the criterion. Otherwise, presumably, it will also be used to delete those with very occasionally reliably sourced statements, no? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 02:04, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

  That is a different proposal you could make to apply to AfC drafts now subject to G13. Most rejected AfC drafts that should never see the light of day (SPAM and non-notable topics) include reliably sourced statements. Legacypac (talk) 02:40, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

• Support Keeping drafts for years encourages the idea that Wikipedia is a web hosting service, and that leads to the current situation where potential articles in the backlog of abandoned thoughts are likely to languish forever. An admin is required to apply thought before deleting a speedy candidate so it is unlikely that future featured articles will be tossed out. Johnuniq (talk) 03:49, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support per above. I'm also one of the few admins who actually process G13 requests. Per my experience, most of it *is* cruft. -FASTILY 06:02, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support per above. Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 09:42, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support. I occasionally go through the Stale Draft Report and many of them are, to put it lightly, garbage. Because we're unable to tag them with G13 to get rid of them faster, they sit there for an extra 7 days where they're inevitably deleted anyway. This doesn't apply to userspace, as far as I'm aware, so experienced users will be able to edit drafts for months in their own userspace if they desire. If something decent is deleted from draftspace it can always be refunded at a later date anyway. Anarchyte (work | talk) 11:38, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

  Good grief, I've just had a look at that. I would like one of the oppose !voters to explain how they can salvage Draft:Rim Malass is one of the famous singers worldwide. Born on September 14,2003 she published 9m songs her own and got help from other artists too. and turn it into something encyclopedic. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:45, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

  We're not talking about a rule for terrible drafts. We're talking about a time limit after which any draft can be deleted. If that terrible draft you just linked were 5 months old, it wouldn't even be covered here. If the problem is terrible drafts, the criteria should cover terrible drafts, not all drafts that happen to have been created before a particular date. I can't speak for other opposers, but I can't imagine anybody thinks every draft is salvageable and worth keeping. Also up for deletion would be very good articles that happen to be 6 months old and, most importantly, a whole lot of edge cases where sometimes they'll be deleted and sometimes they won't. With no other qualification other than time, the quality of the draft doesn't even come into play except as the reviewing admin subjectively decides to factor it in. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:04, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) (edit conflicted with Rhododendrites' comment & not meant to reflect on it) I think this is one of the fundamental problems about this whole draftspace debate. There's this romanticized view that there's all this incredible content in draftspace just waiting to be deleted by evil deletionists who don't want to give peace a chance, but really, the stunning majority of it is one-line drive-by dumps by IPs or SPAs that needs to be weeded out so people have a chance to find the good stuff. Nobody is out here cheering wildly as wonderfully-sourced FA-material gets ruthlessly G13'd. We're looking for that stuff among the rubble, but there's very little gold out here in these hills. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 12:07, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Since this is directly below my comment, I presume this is directed at me. If so, it is, I believe, the first time I've been [indirectly] placed on the side counter the apocryphal "evil deletionist" camp (a couple blocks away from the street from the evil admin cabal, I believe). It also misrepresents what I'm arguing.

As I said, most of the content that would be deleted should indeed be deleted, and this criterion should be broadened to include that stuff. But it doesn't just do that; it says any draft 6 months old can be speedy deleted. The problem is that some are not junk. Whether that non-junk makes up 50%, 20%, or 0.25% of all drafts, non-junk nonetheless exists. But this proposal does not distinguish. It would be easy to add some additional qualification -- I'm opposing because this RfC is already well underway such that it would be fruitless to propose alternate wording at this point. But I would support with other wording. Of course, it doesn't look like it needs my support... — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 00:53, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Rhododendrites, I apologize. That comment was meant as a reply to Ritchie and was not directed at you. It was a post borne of frustration with the kind of draftspace content that Ritchie highlighted in his post. It's below your comment because it was an edit conflict with yours (which I didn't read until after posting mine, and had no bearing on what I posted), which is why they're indented to the same level. I've put a note on there to make that clearer. I in no way meant to label you as part of, or contra to, any deletionist cabal, or to misrepresent your argument in any way. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 01:14, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying. I guess that means I can't save that diff to pull out next time I'm put back into the evil deletionist cabal. :) — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 01:32, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

• Support per Rim Malass and her nine million songs; uh, that's pretty convincing. — fortunavelut luna 11:50, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support...9m times...ehmm, actually, yes, time to get rid of all this, or at least move it to userspace. Lectonar (talk) 11:53, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support Yes, that list is very persuasive. jcc (tea and biscuits) 13:17, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support per Jclemens and PMC. Gentrification is improvement. There's nothing in draft space worth saving and refunds are free. Chris Troutman (talk) 23:34, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
  • No, undeletion is not free. It hides the content from all non-admins, who won't even know it's possible to ask for it back. I've seen several people use this as an argument for cleaning up draftspace, but I have yet to see anyone who's actually had an article undeleted to work on it suggest this as a good idea. It really comes across as a 'let them eat cake' kind of comment. We need a junkyard where harmless stuff can accumulate without this sort of time-based deletion. Jclemens (talk) 05:14, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
    • In the 6-7 months that I've been actively closing MfDs and draft deletions, I've had exactly one person come to my talk page and ask me for their drafts back. One person, two drafts, and they'd been G7'd, not G13'd anyway. One of those drafts is now at Dayan Lake, while the other, Draft:Jiangshe (姜畲镇), is still blank and has never been touched again by its author. (Who, upon examination of their userpage, is indef-blocked as a sock anyway). Hell, I've never even had a draft creator come to complain that I deleted their draft and ask why.

In contrast I do have plenty of people who come requesting refunds for content that's been deleted via AfD, CSD, or PROD, or even just asking why. The massive disparity there tells me that the authors of those deleted drafts aren't here and if they are, they don't give enough of a damn to ask for a REFUND. Which, in turn, tells me that drafts that go stale are drafts we don't need, since they're not being worked on or even noticed 99% of the time. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 06:57, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

IMHO that's proof that drafts in Draft: space provide the best value for people who did not create them, not their originators. The requirement that drafts be updated by the person who created them entirely misses the point of having a Draft space separate from User: space in the first place, which is to allow other editors to eventually find them and build upon them, per WP:WORKINPROGRESS, WP:IMPERFECT and WP:PRESERVE. Hiding drafts merely because they're old would completely kill the possibility of finding them years after the fact, and of benefiting from the initial work of compiling references and focusing on particular aspects of the subject, which is the basis of the iterative wiki process of building content.

It's not clear to me that the people supporting this indiscriminate removal of potentialy good quality content have considered the harm of destroying the repository of knowledge that would be deleted together with the "cleanup" of trivial pages. We already have mechanisms to remove the problematic crap, and if they're not enough we can build better ones, but always providing the failsafe mechanisms to avoid removing the good content (and no, REFUND is not a valid failsafe); let's not activate the nuke option that would get rid of everything. Diego (talk) 07:47, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

"repository of knowledge" "work of compiling references" "potential good quality content" - you say this as though any significant percentage of draftspace is useful encyclopedic knowledge that has reliable references. So much of what gets put into draftspace is never going to be encyclopedically significant, whether we wait 6 months or six years. Seriously. If you can look at the short end of the stale drafts report (in other words, the stuff we actually want to target with this expansion of G13) and find one topic that's suitably notable for mainspace (even if the article isn't) and has even one ref already included, I will print this comment and eat it. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 08:26, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

What you're asking for is the equivalent of sending DMCA takedown notices to everyone on the Internet to improve Google Search results. Well, not exactly, but what you're describing is a problem with searching through the piles of useless content to find the worthwhile stuff: if you delete it all, we've lost everything, which is why I favor deleting essentially none of it, and focusing on search tools to identify the better stuff, not deletion tools to winnow down the pile indiscriminately. Jclemens (talk) 19:11, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

• No, and one thousand times no. This exact proposal has been discussed for years at WT:Drafts and faced overwhelming opposition there, to the point of being rejected several times. It should not be approved by a stream of me-too "sounds good in principle" supporters in low-attendance summer time, at a different page, without input from the regulars there, and without a careful consideration of the reasons why G13 was deliberately worded to exclude drafts that have not been created by newbies through Articles for Creation, with arguments that have been discussed there to death. I can't write a detailed account of them here and now, but I'll be writing a summary of the highlights in all those years. Diego (talk) 07:25, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Diego, the draft namespace hasn't been in existence for 'years'. It was created to replace another repository for deadwood, remember? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:42, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

Kudpung, the RfC that approved the existence of the Draft space happened in 2013, why do you say it's not been years? Diego (talk) 19:21, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

Continued voting

• Oppose six months is much too short for such a time limit. The redlinks mentioned in the previous post prove that G13 extension is not required when other speedy delete criteria apply. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:02, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

redlinks prove some are already speedyable but hundreds deleted at MfD and NOT speedyable is what this change addresses. Legacypac (talk) 12:10, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Graeme Bartlett, why do you believe that six months is too short of a time limit? Is there evidence that many of these articles are improved in months 6 to 12, or beyond? - MrX 14:34, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Example of the draft I wrote as a test, which is now an article: Squeaky hinge. It would have been deleted through this process, unnecessarily. As it sat unimproved for over a year. Writers are not in the same hurry as some others are on Wikipedia! Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:27, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

• Support per Legacypac --Cameron₁₁₅₉₈ ^(Talk) 20:18, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support Having seen some of the stuff that can reside in untouched userspace, I support cleaning out Draftspace like this. We need to make it clear that Wikipedia is not for hosting your autobiography (assuming it doesn't meet the requirements). Someday, I would like Wikipedia to actually be a mostly reliable source (according to, for an extreme example, English teachers). Cleaning out Draftspace is one step in the right direction, and it's a step that will need to be done sooner or later. Better to do now than later, in my opinion. (Sorry for rambling a bit.) — Gestrid (talk) 08:46, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

Do you realize that this proposal would remove good content as well? G13 removes content based exclusively on how long it has been stale, irregardless of the quality or number of references in the draft. Therefore it does not work as a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. All the arguments posing that "this will leave us with a better Draftspace" fail to see that the outcome will be a Draftspace with only recent drafts, irregardless of how good or bad they are; since G13 completely misses any quality-based criteria, and it depends exclusively on an arbitrary criterion of time. Diego (talk) 19:32, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

• Pointer: I have proposed a template which can be used to stop the automatic deletion of old drafts with reviews; see Wikipedia talk:Drafts#Draft classifier template revisited. -- Taku (talk) 20:36, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

That may be a sensible idea, but it will not work if this RfC passes as proposed. Administrators would be allowed to delete any draft, even if it is marked as reviewed and/or notable, as long as it has remained unedited. G13 is unconditional, and completely unrelated to the quality of the draft.

What we need is to change G13 so that it includes criteria that prevents it to delete good content even if it has been stalled. The current version has it in some limited form: given that it can't be applied to content that wasn't created through the AfC process, the pages that are most likely to be good quality (like pages moved from main space through AfD discussions, or drafts abandoned by editors in good stand) can't currently be deleted for arbitrary reasons. Rather than drop the clause that prevents this good content from being deleted, I'd extend it to all good content (including good content that was created in AfC), to satisfy those who want the criterion to be homogeneous.

This way, all bad content could be speedely deleted for being bad, not for being old; and all good content would be WP:PRESERVEd even if it is old, regardless of its origin. Diego (talk) 19:43, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

@Diego Moya: I think what we really need is a degree of trust in our administrators. When I reviewed G13 drafts, I postponed quite a few which looked notable and had content which would actually be usable in a mainspace article some day. Admins are chosen because we supposedly have decent judgement. Let us use it so we can stop spamming MfD with nonsense that will always be deleted. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 20:59, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

I actually agree with that. But the proposal in this RfC is flawed, as it doesn't reflect that modus operandi you just described; it would merely instate a rule that "everything that has been stalled six months should be deleted"; and anyone could request the rule to be interpreted and enforced that way. If the goal of the rule is allowing admins to delete the bad and salvage the good, it should say so. I agree with SoWhy's !vote above that extending U5 would probably be more effective for this goal than making G13 universal. Diego (talk) 07:45, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Not true. Anyone can postpone deletion by making a null edit. There are over 400 drafts in the G13 Posponed category right now and hundreds more postponed but not categorized. Legacypac (talk) 07:59, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

• Support. I was under the impression that this was already the policy. Daß Wölf 01:22, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
• Support, with changes ... The principle of deleting useless material is correct and necessary. The problem is that this only should be applied to actually useless material, and the six month limit or any other is too drastic. At the least, there needs to be adequate notice to everybody who has ever been involved in the article, , and easy way of stopping the deletion, and an index of some sort to deleted titles. The current G13 process does none of these properly. When Hasteurbot it running, it provides notice, not always in advance, but only to the original creator--not even to people who may have formally reviewed it. The deletion can be stopped, but only if caught in time. There is no way of accessing the titles of the deleted material, even for administrators, unless the exact wording of the title is known. This will be even worse with userspace titles. And all of this functionality shouldn;t depend as it now does upon a single botowner. DGG ( talk ) 00:46, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
• Support. G13's meant to cover abandoned drafts. Userspace pages may or may not be drafts, so thus we need the AFC tagging as a bright-line rule, but anything in Draft:space is a draft by definition (aside from pages that got put into the wrong namespace by mistake), so we should always be able to treat such pages as abandoned or not-abandoned drafts. I understand the concerns regarding the six-month period, and I'm not sure what I think there, so take this as a support for the idea and an abstention on the time period. Nyttend (talk) 01:07, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

  The 6 month rule is part of the main policy of G13, and beond the scope of this discussion. Ifd some one were to make ap proposal to extend this period, I wouldn't oppose waiting on the newer drafts covered by this proposal provided that there is signoficant support to raise this time period for all drafts. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 04:48, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

• Support, it does not seem to be helpful to let these pages linger in draft space forever. We should encourage more pages to be moved to main space. Until someone invents a better carrot, maybe we use the stick? —Kusma (t·c) 10:19, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
• Support, lots of stale drafts left around and it's pointless keeping them. Stifle (talk) 13:38, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
• Opppose proposal as stated. Deleting simply on the basis of age is not good. The nominator should present a reason for deletion. I am also concerned that, as currently worded, the proposal will include drafts in user space. SpinningSpark 16:41, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

As currently worded the proposal only specifies the Draft namespace: Everything in DraftSpace untouched for 6 months should be speediable under G13. Drafts in userspace would not be covered. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 16:48, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

The title of this section is Expand G13 to cover ALL old drafts. Is that not the proposal? The passage you quote is from the fourth paragraph down. If that is the actual proposal then that should have been made a lot clearer. The same paragraph also says Everything that would be hit by that and shouldn't be deleted should not be in DraftSpace. If that is also part of the proposal, by what mechanism will it be ensured that pages that shouldn't be deleted won't be in draft space? That is really the central issue here to my mind. SpinningSpark 17:08, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Based on previous comments/opinions from SmokeyJoe at MfD, I took Everything that would be hit by that and shouldn't be deleted should not be in DraftSpace to mean things like pages of working notes (which you do occasionally find in Draftspace when they should really be in Userspace). I can't read his mind though so I've pinged him for a clarification just in case I'm wrong. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 19:13, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

We should not be guessing what the proposal is. And we shouldn't need to ping somebody to find out. It seems many people are voting on what they would like the proposal to be, not on what it actually is. SpinningSpark 20:33, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

• • User:Spinningspark, the proposal is to allow speedy deletion per G13 on anything in DraftSpace for the reason of being an abandoned draft. That is the standard now in practice at MfD, in huge numbers, too many for MfD to handle. One editor's decision to tag "abandoned", usually stating "non-notable" which is synonymous with "content not suitable". Mostly is it also "promotion" or "made up" or "random silly stuff". The promotion is usually well sourced, as can be other silly stuff. Deletion occurs on review by the deleting admin. That one editor should know to move things that should not be in mainspace, whether a user's notes that belong in userspace, or a fair topic with content that meets WP:STUB and belongs in mainspace. If any one editor chooses to do this, we should thank them, and trust them. Already, that editor is required to not personally move things to mainspace (apparently he is too inclusionist, he moved some unsourced BLPs to mainspace), see User:Legacypac/Promotions.

An editor reviewing abandoned drafts and the reviewing admin will catch some false negatives, there are some lost drafts that could now be in mainspace. Same is true with rejected submissions. Same is true with unsubmitted drafts. What difference? There will be some mistakes, a human has to look for quality in the ocean of cruft, and the sifting is mindnumbing.

If the rare abandoned good page is not visited and judged by the single editor, it has no chance of being promoted. Better to allow someone do to do this properly than to insist on doing nothing. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:13, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

@User:SmokeyJoe point of correction - I have never moved an unsourced BLP to mainspace - that was the main false accusation that resulted in a move ban. (Possibly future non-)Admin Arthur Rubin is on the way to a editing Block at ANi partly for participating in making false allegations against me. Pretty funny I'm labelled too inclusionist on one side and appearently want to delete the world indiscriminately on the other. Legacypac (talk) 15:50, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

• @SmokeyJoe: You argue that there are far too many abandoned pages to allow for review and tagging by individual editors. At the same time, you expect that drafts mass-nominated for G13 will be reviewed by admins. The corps of admins is much smaller than the general body of editors. The body of admins servicing speedy deletions is smaller still. If there are too many for review by general editors, then there are certainly too many for review by admins. And as I said elsewhere, content review is not an administrative job in any case. The reality is that the same thing will happen as when stale AFC drafts were mass-nominated – the vast majority of them will be deleted without review.

It is no good writing your interpretation of what the proposal is supposed to be as a reply to a post here. Someone else can still have a totally different interpretation and that can get implemented. That clarity should have been right at the top of the proposal. SpinningSpark 10:12, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

@Spinningspark:The section header needs to be short. Theexplicit proposal can be found immediately before the OP's sig: Everything in DraftSpace untouched for 6 months should be speediable under G13. Everything that would be hit by that and shouldn't be deleted should not be in DraftSpace. Bot edits and minor edits, and tagging "worthless" should not necessarily delay G13, but it really doesn't matter. This is too long to be a section header. Old, in this context, refers to the age of the most recent significant change, not the age of the page. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 19:35, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

• Support per the above. Mkdw ^talk 17:01, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
• Support no use in keeping around useless content, WP is not a web host. CSD is a "can-delete", not a "must-delete", so if anyone wants to save something de-tagging it gets you another 6 months. – Train2104 (t • c) 17:21, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

  CSD is a "can-delete", not a "must-delete" - Actually the whole point of Speedy deletion criteria is that, once the stated criteria are clearly met, the page can be deleted without further thinking; that's why it's allowed to bypass any further discussion. If this proposal is approved, the strong expectation is that all drafts will be deleted after being stalled for six months, no matter their status; unless we explicitly include some wording that says otherwise. This idea that "the criteria says one thing, but admins will really be doing another thing" is naive; the proposal as stated is to unconditionally delete drafts based exclusively on time. Diego (talk) 07:51, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose per DGG. I have spent a fair amount of time dealing with G13 deletions, and I agree that the vast amount of what gets deleted is useless cruft. But not all of it is, and we are losing good content in these deletions. The idea that administrators use restraint when evaluating G13 deletions is naive; I have observed many potentially worthy drafts deleted. I can't support this change without more effective safeguards. Calliopejen1 (talk) 21:54, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose I don't agree with the increasing trend to get rid of drafts. Sure, most of them aren't very good, but that doesn't mean we gain much by deleting them. Drafts have very low visibility and few people other than those who work on a draft will ever see it, so there is little risk involved. The ones which actually are dangerous can already be deleted under G11, G12 or BLP-specific rationales. On the other hand deleting them does do harm. Some drafts which might have made viable articles will be deleted, and some editors who worked on them will be annoyed at having their work deleted just because they didn't keep to an arbitrary deadline. The former will be exacerbated if the deletion process doesn't consider the contents of the draft or the potential of the topic. Hut 8.5 20:54, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
• Support mainly because of concerns about hidden problems with many drafts that aren't easily detected (undiscovered copyright violations and libel, mainly). Also, some of the points raised below indicate that editor retention would not be heavily affected. I've no opinion about hiding vs. deleting so as long as people who patrol the namespaces for whatever reason don't keep falling over the hopeless ones. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:17, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
• Support. Any good-faith attempt at improvement of a draft would restart the 6-month "clock", which combined with the ease of a WP:REFUND addresses concerns about deletion of good content for me. Editors convinced that reams of mainspace-ready content will be deleted as a result of this policy tweak must hold a very low opinion of the judgement of our admins. VQuakr (talk) 03:13, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Why do people keep saying that WP:REFUND is easy, when it's one of the most dull bureaucratic processes we have? REFUND is not easy, certainly not at the scale at which this proposal is being made - bothering a human to some grindy requests, and blindly requesting to see if something is worthy or not, only to then have to wait several hours or days until someone complies; and having to re-delete the hundreds of pages that were requested and were indeed worthless, just so you could rescue the one that could be used. Wouldn't it be better not to delete them in the first place? What benefit did it gain us to perform this delete-undelete-delete again dance? No one has answered that yet.

Also the whole point of this request is that it will not involve the judgement of admins - judgement of content is being replaced by an automatic objective criterion not based on anything regarding the quality of the thing deleted. Diego (talk) 05:09, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

No, speedy deletion is not "automatic". WP:REFUND is exceptionally straightforward, complete with a prefilled form and big blue button in the middle of the page. What support can you offer for your bizarre assertion that "hundreds" of pages are going to be refunded and re-deleted en masse? VQuakr (talk) 06:17, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Let's not kid ourselves. Speedy deletion is almost completely automatic in practice. See e.g. these articles where a user left a comment indicating that that the draft was potentially worthwhile and then it was deleted anyway. Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Gavin Selerie, poet and writer, Draft:Gender inequality in Honduras, Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/General Philip Willbeck, Draft:George Triggs, Draft:Gesell Developmental Schedules. And I'm sure I could provide additional examples. Calliopejen1 (talk) 01:09, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

• Support per Legacypac Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 22:27, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. This is a random, pointless sabotage. We don't need to have people grinding mass MfDs, and if that remains their pleasure, we don't need to make it automatic so they can go find some other useful content to spend their days destroying. Remember, the deleted drafts take up disk space even if us stinking peasants are not allowed to read them! I therefore have no problem with allowing random drafts, even if they are stubs of a few sentences in length, persist for hundreds of years. Wnt (talk) 12:14, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
• Comment: this is getting out of hands. This RfC is not even closed, and people are emboldened to make edits like this, a much stronger claim that is in direct contradiction to our WP:Imperfect written policy, quoting this change to the speedy criterion as justification. The creation of Draft space was supported by many of us with an eventualist position of using it as a placeholder of material that couldn't be fixed in main space, but still could be stored indefinitely in a place where it wouldn't be harmful to readers. Even if there were consensus for the proposed change, this shows that its consequences for the community have not been well thought out. Diego (talk) 20:46, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
• Support - it's time to clean out the closet. Moldy drafts are bad for the health of the project. Serious article creators create stubs worthy of mainspace, they don't abandon their baby on drafty doorstep for someone else to raise. ^{Atsme📞📧} 02:07, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
• Support -- unsuitable drafts are best deleted. K.e.coffman (talk) 05:14, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
• Support for any initiative aimed at removing the garbage, be it from the draftspace, mainspace, userspace or outer space. Rentier (talk) 08:51, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose I find that draft space is being used as a surrogate for deletion. For example, good faith stubs such as National Park Podunajsko and Siamese buffalo were moved into draft space without leaving a redirect in mainspace. This seems quite outrageous as it is our long-standing policy that such weak starts are welcome in mainspace. Pushing such contributions into draft space without any discussion is bad. If they were then to languish there and be deleted, that would be even worse. If the draft space continues to be used as a deletionist dumping ground then you can expect inclusionists to start pushing the articles back into mainspace and this will cause silly, time-wasting tugs-of-war. Settling such issues is what the AfD process is for and it should not be subverted by a process of rules creep. Andrew D. (talk) 11:37, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Good examples, Andrew. Both of them would have been eligible for the newly proposed G13 in six months and most likely be deleted, thus circumventing the speedy deletion policy. Regards SoWhy 12:22, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
• oppose 6 months is too short, stale draftspace articles aren't an issue that really needs a solution (put another way, deletion doesn't really help but might hurt), and per Andrew Davidson's arguments above. Hobit (talk) 15:42, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
• Support. Since the G13 criterion has existed for almost 4 years now, in theory, no drafts in the "Draft;" namespace should be able to have their G13 deletions delayed past the 6-month mark. In other words, the drafts that existed prior to G13 existing were subject to grandfathering, and now that window of time is long gone. Steel1943 (talk) 07:00, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

  I just understood the purpose of this proposal. The proposal is not to disallow G13 to be postponed, but rather to allow anything in the "Draft:" namespace to be deleted per G13 if it is eligible. I'm abstaining for now until I can figure out where I stand on this. Steel1943 (talk) 07:09, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

  ...And scratch that. I actually have no idea what is being proposed here, nor do I understand what is recommended to be changed. From how I read the proposal, all of what SmokeyJoe stated seems to be common sense stuff that reviewing administrators should be following anyways when pages tagged for G13 have not been edited for 6 months. But, that common sense seems to already be implied by the way that G13 is currently written. (I think I saw DGG comment somewhere higher in this thread; I know DGG performed a lot of G13 reviews when G13 was first established, so I suspect DGG could shine some light on this, I think. Honestly, after reading this proposal again, I'm more confused about what is being proposed for change than I ever was before.) Steel1943 (talk) 07:17, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

  @Steel1943: What is being asked here is: Should we extend Speedy Deletion Criterion G13 to include any page in the Draft namespace that is not tagged by {{AFC submission}} that has not been edited in the last 6 months? Take a look at User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report to see some of the low threshold to creating that have languished in draftspace for multiple years without any improvement. Tt takes a full MFD to delete these because there is no low effort procedure to delete hopeless and worthless content that took all of 10 seconds to create. Personally I would rather have the a "stale" deletion rule go in for those non-AFC drafts that have been reviewed by an editor as not worthwhile and have remained unedited past that "not worthwhile" for 6 months. Yes this means a investment of human time to get all the drafts reviewed, but we have plenty of time to give the page authors their opportunity to contest/fix the page, but Draftspace is supposed to extend everything short of universal AGF to people who create there. Hasteur (talk) 13:11, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

As I say in a further-down discussion on this page, administering WP, just lie writing WP, requires people using discretion, not arbitrary rules. When G13 was first proposed I suggested 12 month as giving enough time to let people find and think about draft as a better compromise between the factors. I would like the ability in reviewing to specify a longer time--some articles just need refs and the refs should be findable, and the person is clearly notable--there is no reason to ever remove them, just to index them so someone can find them. But many are abandoned as hopeless, and the sooner we realize that the better gotten rid of--they shouldn't even clutter up an index. IF ONLY we had enough really skilled reviewers who could actually fix articles in reviewing them, we wouldn;t have a problem here.

Similarly with non-submitted drafts--there are multiple factors--some should simply be submitted as good enough to pass AfC already; some could reasonably stay indefinitely, and be indexed and someone may find them; ; many should be gotten rid of. But I recently had a complaint from someone whose draft I submitted & it was accepted--that though he knew anything he wrote here could be used by anyone if credit was given--it did not yet meet his standards for his own writing and in courtesy he should have the right to determine this. I have great sympathy for this point of view, but we have a place designed for just this purpose, user sandboxes.

on balance I support using G13 here, but I very much wish we had a more flexible G13. DGG ( talk ) 09:59, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

• Support – volunteer labor may be free, but as a project it makes sense to apply it in the least wasteful manner we can figure out. The first step in dealing with a large, unorganized pile of work is to organize it into an ordered work queue to ensure that, eventually, everything will be looked at and, with any luck, consistent standards will be applied. There's an asymmetry involved here: the effort to create a piece of junk is pretty low, we need mechanisms that keep the effort to get rid of obvious junk low as well. Allowing G13 for non-AfC draftspace content is no more dangerous than allowing G13 for AfC draftspace content. If a bot is allowed to tag for G13 under the constraint of first giving a 30-date notice, we'd be giving up one human out of the two who currently have to agree that a deletion is called for. I like the idea of allowing an editor to mark a draft as promising; that would be another defense against premature deletion. But in the end, some person has to be willing to actually do work to advance a draft to mainspace. Once an article makes it past that threshold, we can apply WP:NODEADLINE, but leaving unfinished, unsalvageable junk in draftspace does not further the project. — jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 10:12, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose as a blatant violation of the WP:CHOICE policy (also see WP:VOLUNTEER), as it requires draft creators to not take a break of >6 months or else suffer negative consequences. Additionally, the only problems with drafts that should qualify them for deletion are already covered by G3 (pure, blatant vandalism), G10 (attack), G11 (pure promotion), and G12 (copyvio). Deleting drafts for any other reason defeats the purpose of draftspace. This has been well-established for the concern of lacking notability that has been repeatedly raised in this RfC - see WP:NMFD. Deletion does not even save disk space, as the revisions are retained. As userspace and draftspace are NOINDEXed, I don't think WP:FAKEARTICLE is a concern. If other users believe it is, however, the best solution is to blank the draft to {{Userpage blanked}} or an equivalent template for draftspace. This procedure ensures the page will remain blank unless being worked on and does not require admin intervention, leaving them free to work do backlog work that actually benefits the project. A2soup (talk) 17:28, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose At the very least the time period should be extended to two years. Drafts that are copyvios or violate BLP should go for those reasons. The rest can wait for a week or two if need be. See also the essay by Ivanvector. Matt's talk 23:23, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose This would just be an end run around AfD. What use is the dratftspace if you cannot put drafts there? Hawkeye7 (talk) 13:16, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
• Support. There's no reason why someone who "does it well" (uses AfC) should have more trouble (i.e. risk of deletion) than someone who, for whatever reason, doesn't. Most of the opposes seem to be opposes of G13 in general, rather than arguing that there's a reason why the currently-exempt drafts should remain exempt while others qualify for G13.

Another argument that I don't think has been made yet... It's possible that old drafts can be worse than nothing, if someone unrelated to the original author wants to write about something, finds an old draft, and decides that trying to fix someone else's attempt is too much trouble, or doesn't want to interfere with someone else's article or something. No idea how often that happens, but I feel it's worth considering. Yeryry (talk) 21:28, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Opposition to G13 in general is a very valid reason to oppose a large expansion of its scope. An oppose (or support) isn't worth less just because the !voter doesn't get everything they want from their favored outcome. A2soup (talk) 01:36, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

• Support--Rentier has summarised it beautifully! Godric on Leave (talk) (Alt account of Winged Blades of Godric) at 02:55, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

Example discussion

Here is the report of pages that would be first impacted User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report. Pulling a couple random examples Draft:PSNPrank is spam. Draft:KAKIRI TOWN COUNCIL FC is NEVER going to become notable. Almost all the red links were deleted since Saturday under various existing CSD criteria. I've been holding off MfDing more while this proposal runs. Legacypac (talk) 08:58, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Here are a few selected ones from that list: Draft:Mike Mitchell (actor), Draft:Ideal theory, Draft:Shinobu (band), Draft:Proof of Binomial Theorem, Draft:Faculty of Applied Sciences, Draft:Fahrenheit 451 (unreleased film), Draft:Clusters of Innovation, Draft:Fingazz, Divisor (algebraic geometry). What is the rationale for speedy deleting any of those after six months of inactivity, without a MfD discussion? Diego (talk) 08:04, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Draft:Mike Mitchell (actor), unilaterally draftified by User:NativeForeigner. I think it should have been PRODded. The content was written by the subject, just as he wrote http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2396944/resume?ref_=nm_ov_res and related pages. Doesn't meet NACTOR, all content is better hosted at IMDB. There is no anticipation of him becoming notable, is it to be hosted in DraftSpace=ShadowWikipedia indefinitely pending a dramatic advance in his acting career? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:17, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

That's a reason to delete it per WP:COI. It doesn't make sense to leave it lingering for six months and then merely deleting it because it's old. When content is problematic for some reason, we already have the tools to get rid of it. Diego (talk) 08:26, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: I'd tend to agree. There was a reason for me draftifying it, but I not recall what it was offhand. Given what I can see now, that would have been the ideal course of action. That being said I don't think it's problematic per se due to lack of searchability, although the interaction with G13 is indeed funky. NativeForeigner ^Talk 05:14, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Agreed, G13 itself is problematic. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 08:59, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Without G13 that COI it's not going to be found, and when it is we have to MfD it.

you've picked some math pages that are part of another discussion centered on NOTAWEBHOST. Divisor (algebraic geometry) was developed by experienced editors. I'm not sure why it's not in mainspace but no Admin would delete that G13. Draft:Ideal theory is an abandoned UP#COPIES type page that should be redirected when not being worked on. Draft:Faculty of Applied Sciences has zero refs except a link to the school. It's maybe copyvio, has way to vague a title (which university?) and generally we don't do pages on facilties within a University per WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES Legacypac (talk) 08:44, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

It shouldn't even be an option to speedy it just because it hasn't been edited lately. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 08:59, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Legacypac, I think your comment proves my point. For problematic drafts that shouldn't be there, you can point to specific problems with them, so they should be removed providing those problems as the reason for their removal. For good content developed by experienced editors, like Divisor (algebraic geometry), shit happens, and it doesn't make sense to remove them merely because they got abandoned for some unknown reason; so deleting them for becoming inactive shouldn't be an option. Diego (talk) 09:06, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

I did not prove your point. Many Drafts can be speedy deleted or redirected for many various reasons. Many should not be deleted but instead promoted or at least worked on further. This change deals with efficently deleting thousands of drafts at the intersection of Not otherwise CSD eligible + Worthless Abandoned Crap. We want to remove that set of Drafts from MfD because MfDing them to get SNOW or uncontested Delete closes is a waste of time. That is ALL this about and arguing how this or that Draft could be deleted another way or should be kept is off topic. Legacypac (talk) 09:18, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

It is not offtopic, since the proposal made in this RfC is that all those drafts may be deleted automatically after some time. If we want the guideline to be applied in a way that those that "should not be deleted" are treated in a better way, then the guideline should reflect it. The point is to avoid the likely situation in the future when someone proposes to make a bot that automatically deletes all stalled drafts, they can't point to this updated rule and say "oh yes, this is compatible with the policy".

If you can't see how the proposed change can be used that way, you're not even trying to understand the opposition. Your comment ammounts to "the proposed change has some good uses, therefore anyone pointing to outcomes of that change which are different to that good use are offtopic". We are not opposing creating a tool to get rid of "drafts that get snow-deleted at MfD", we are opposing the specific mechanism proposed to achieve that outcome. Diego (talk) 10:36, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Oh I understand the opposition, I just disagree with both the logic and the "facts" being used because both are falty. Diago wrote "the proposal ... is that all those drafts may be deleted automatically after some time." That is very incorrect. It's not "all" and it's not "automatically". It's only the stuff not worth saving after human review. The proposal simply extends the existing CSD process created to deal with one mounting pile of abandoned Draft crud to the rest of the same mounting pile of Draft crud. If you don't like G13 start an action to repeal it - but misrepresenting the proposal is not helping the discussion. Legacypac (talk) 14:35, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Discussion of some opposition

As a supporter of this proposal, I want to pull at the thread that Rhodo is, which is that there are good drafts, or possibly simply notable topics, that are left to languish in draftspace, and that the date shouldn't be the only factor protecting these from deletion. I personally use draft space as a place to a) identify a (video game) topic that someone else is interested in and b) clean it up to pull it into main space. I don't want to go around editing every existing draft in my domain of interest every 6 months (because I'm busy), much less keep a running red-linked list somewhere or another of video games drafts which might be worthy of article space (at some point in the indeterminate future and with some undetermined zero to non-zero amount of work). I personally will wield an extended G13 as a scalpel (to slice away drafts with no present hope of being article-spaced) rather than the butcher's knife at least a few of the supporters above would prefer to use it as. I am wondering if there is a way, or if it might be desirable, to back away from a "every draft can go under the knife" G13, while also allowing its expanded use, as a possible baby step toward an all-draft G13. A7 comes to mind. I like the current timeframe (6 months feels fine), so I wouldn't want to see that change. Lacking a single independent reliable source might be one way (a la BLPPROD). Are there others that are concrete? --Izno (talk) 03:31, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Date is NOT the only thing protecting pages from deletion. Remember an Admin checks every page before deletion, and so does the nominating editor (hopefully the bot will come back though). Pages that have merit are regularly postponed. The creator is notified of the deletion and WP:REFUND applies. G13 actually really helps content make it to mainspace - I regularly find entire ready to go unsubmitted notable articles in Draft that were last edited over 6 months back (even several years back, since the bot that identifies G13 eligible pages is a little blind and slow. New editors must assume someone else will look at and approve their draft without them specifically requesting it, but without G13 (or someone like me working the non-afc stale draft report) that never happens. This proposal facilitates deletion of uncontroversial junk so ediors like me can find and surface the useful pages and topics. I do seek deletion on thousands of Drafts to find those few promotable pages. Legacypac (talk) 04:04, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

I am rarely the creator, so I do not get a notification, nor do I know to refund a draft with potential because it will have been deleted. (I need to see if the article alerts mechanism picks up deleted drafts.) I am quite aware that an administrator checks every page before deletion, but that doesn't mean that a) all or even b) any administrator will do any more than process the page as a deletion (because all they have to do is check the timestamps). As for nominating editor, that is what I am most afraid of! I did not dispute that a deletion method such as draftspace or even simply AFC G13 helps to separate the wheat from the chaff, but as at least one other editor pointed out above, because there is no criterion other than draft age and the good faith of an editor and an administrator, the system can fall down quite quickly and reject good contributions (at some low probability, I think, but a probability > 0%). --Izno (talk) 04:25, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

@User: Rhododendrites maybe I'm missing something but do your concerns not equally apply to AfC drafts (perhaps unsubmitted). This change will remove the arbitary distinction between AfC vs not AfC. In my estimation having looked at many thousands of Drafts, non-AfC ones are worse because at least on many AfC Drafts the creator attempted to address reviewer comments. Legacypac (talk) 04:16, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

@Izno:, if there was a way to apply a template/category/tag to a draft which would permanently prevent G13 deletion, would you find this solution sufficient to address your concerns? Tazerdadog (talk) 05:53, 28 July 2017 (UTC) Fixing ping Tazerdadog (talk) 05:53, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Easy just post a message on the Draft talk or make an AfC Comment to that effect on the Draft page. If a Draft is labeled as "notable but needs xyz" it's not going G13. Legacypac (talk) 05:56, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

This is not true. Drafts with such comments are routinely deleted. See e.g. Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Gavin Selerie, poet and writer, Draft:Gender inequality in Honduras, Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/General Philip Willbeck, Draft:George Triggs, Draft:Gesell Developmental Schedules. Calliopejen1 (talk) 03:32, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Draft talk is not considered in HasteurBot's code. Any change that would cause a revision to be registered by wikipedia (i.e. not a NULLEDIT) resets the G13 clock for HasteurBot. I coded to choose the higher threshold for qualification of G13. Hasteur (talk) 06:01, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

So ..., tagging the Draft page with {{promising draft}} would be good, delaying G13, as well as being prominent. Tagging the talk page with {{No hope draft}} would also be good, indicating that an editor thinks it should be deleted, and not delaying G13? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:05, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: We could do a hybrid and any page that is taged with the No hope draft gets 6 months unedited before the bot nominates it for CSD. Still have an admin to the final checking on it. Hasteur (talk) 06:23, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

I think we already have a "no hope" tag - Template:CrapArticle Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 08:56, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Also Wikipedia talk:Drafts#Draft classifier template revisited is supposed to achieve the purposes of SmokeyJoe's proposed tags. -- Taku (talk) 03

18, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

@Tazerdadog: Pending thoughts! :). A {{no hope draft}} per Smokey would also be desirable, because we might be able to use that to categorize certain drafts as more likely to be draft-space G13 eligible, and at the end of 6 months, those might reasonably auto-convert to draft-space G13s (as well categorize the drafts differently). --Izno (talk) 12:21, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict)*5 Part of why AfC drafts usually have a very high percentage of sustained deletion on G13 is because every page that was submitted for review gets evaluated by an editor that looks for issues that would cause the page to be subjected to one of the "A" series CSDs or a AFD very shortly after creation in mainspace. Does this mean some drafts get rejected a few times, yes but that's ok because there's WP:NODEADLINE to get it to mainspace and if the page is being improved it's not becoming Stale. Having some form of evaluation go through on all non-AfC drafts to let the author know "you need to fix X, Y, Z, and R before you can put this in mainspace" goes a long way to sifting the at best 0.5% (1 page out of every 200) needle from the bulk haystack that gets submitted.

Also Legacypac HasteurBot lives Hasteur (talk) 05:57, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

@Legacypac: I would strongly dispute the 1 in 200 figure unless you can present some evidence of that. When G13 first came in, I spent a lot of time reviewing G13 nominations. I moved at least one in ten pages I reviewed into mainspace after declining the G13. On some days it was much higher. As far as I am aware, none of them have ever been deleted. I don't think any have even been nominated at AFD. Other users, such as DGG, doing this task got similar results. The number of pages involved was so high that only a small fraction of them got any kind of review from anybody. The sad truth about the introduction of G13 is that tens of thousands of salvagable pages have been deleted. SpinningSpark 17:19, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

I've processed thousands (no kidding) of Draft pages but the 1 in 200 number is not mine, I was just mentioned beside it. I feel AfC is too hard to pass, but that is another discussion and this proposal does not change how G13 for AfC works. The pages this expansion will actually delete are at the intersection of "Garbage without another CSD option" ie "take to MfD" and "Abandoned" for 6 months. In my experienced estimation 99% of abandoned non-AfC Drafts are either CSDable under existing crteria or would be deleted at MfD. Even if we G13'd them all blindly (we will not) I don't believe we would lose many useful pages and [[[WP:REFUND]] is easy. Legacypac (talk) 18:08, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion. Was it user:Hasteur who made the original comment? The bottom line is that we should not be deleting any pages that are salvagable, whatever that percentage is. Our central task is building the encyclopaedia, not getting rid of crap in draft space, and a usable abandoned draft is useful for building the encyclopaedia no matter how long we have to wait for someone to pick it up. I could support this proposal if G13 involved at least one human marking the page as deserving deletion, not just a bot. It should not be left to the deleting admin only to review the page. The admins job is to carry out the administration of deletion, not article review. SpinningSpark 20:42, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

I agree that a human really should be the one that arms the timed soft delete trigger (by determining that the page does not appear to have value) (i.e. no hope draft) and indicates what they see as problematic. Then if the page remains un-edited for 6 months, we pronounce the soft delete on it. Yes it means 2 sets of humans (arming and the admin for real deletion) but this extends a good faith olive banch to potentially fix the issue. Hasteur (talk) 21:15, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

• If we do this, i would like to make it a condition that only hasturbot, or some simialerly programed bot, nominates pages for G13, not any human editor. The bot gives creators a 1 month warning, and puts pages on the 1 month pending status into a categry which can be used to review them. Human editors who have been nominating for G13 have not been doing that. if a human editor is to nominate, s/he should follow the same rules as the bot -- a 1-month warning and a tracking cat. moreover the bot is throttled to avoid any huge lump of pages tagged for deletion, so review is feasible. Humans have recently nominated at much grater rates than the bot would. The original understanding of G13 was that the bot would do all or almost all of the nominations -- human noms would be unneeded. We should return to that, and ,make it part of the criterion, if we are to expand the scope -- and even if we are not. DES ^(talk)_{DESiegel Contribs} 02:15, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

respectfully, the bot G13 nominates blindly. Only the Admin considers suitability. When I nominate G13 eligible pages I look at suitability. I find good pages where the creator addressed the AfC comments but never submitted. Without G13 no one would think to review the page and promote it. Legacypac (talk) 18:08, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

• Comment First and foremost, too many decent drafts are deleted under G13 as it is, and that information is lost as it is "out of sight, [and] out of mind", especially when the writer of the page has left the project. Second, there is no harm in having drafts that are "junky", as someone will eventually delete if it has no potential to be an article. Third, the time period of six months is both too short and completely arbitrary. That said, I would support a draft PROD, to decrease the burden on reviewers. The point is, I would advocate getting rid of G13 altogether, and adding a draft PROD. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 08:12, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
  • Jjjjjjdddddd, G13 is DraftProd. If you made another DraftProd, who would review them? No one is reviewing the MfD Draft nominations when they are deleted on an unopposed nomination, unopposed because there are too many listed. Deletion of drafts by any method is pseudo-speedy already. If you don't like this, I ask you to go to WT:MfD (eg and oppose the current practice of pseudo-speedy deletion. I am very sympathetic to the view that none need deletion, they can be blanked for example, but the community is in contradiction of this and it should be sorted. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:25, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
    • But wouldn't a PROD for drafts and G13 be different, because a draft-prod would be for prodding any draft, saving the hassle of the MfD process for obvious junk, while G13 is a matter of time since last edit? Also, I do support a DfD process. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 08:35, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
      • Legacypac (for example) would in time DraftPROD every abandoned draft. What difference. DfD? I would support Wikipedia:Drafts for discussion (proposal), except that I find it disingenuous to support a process that I believe will never get rolling, it will not host serious active discussions. In weighing all the options, all with drawbacks, including "do nothing", I think this one wins. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:56, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Slight correction. I would DraftPROD every unsuitable useless page. I postpone G13, submit for comments, and recomment promotion on quite a few stale pages. Legacypac (talk) 18:08, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

• • • • • But a G13 covers any and all pages that haven't been edited in over six months, while a draftprod forces the nominator to have another reason to delete, and would also have more reviewing admin scrutiny. Also, a DfD would probably be like RfD, not having heavy traffic, but having enough to work, especially if it's Drafts for Discussion, as opposed to Deletion. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 09:29, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
          • G13 requires a nominator and an admin deleter. The vast majority of old drafts are mind-numbing cruft. Asking a DraftProdder to sift them all and write a meaningful reason for each I think is too much to ask, not realistic. The draftprod nominator I expected would soon being writing "abandoned non-notable" on every case, just as he does at MfD. Most of them would be convincing justified with "abandoned promotion, non-notable topic". In the end, same difference, I think CSD#G13 will be more honest about what we are doing. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:59, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
            • Asking a DraftProdder to sift them all and write a meaningful reason for each I think is too much to ask, not realistic. Oh come on, we have lots of semi-automated tools that make it trivial to choose the right reason from a list of common occurrences with just a click. In the rare situation when the draft doesn't fall under any of those pre-defined cases, that's precisely where the nominator should carefully reflect and provide a hand-crafted reason for wanting to remove the content. And if they can't think of any reason, why exactly should it be deleted? Those are precisely the kind of drafts we want to preserve, which are not obvious crap in any way and therefore may contain a seed of useful content - so better to keep them just in case. Diego (talk) 10:47, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
              • nominator should carefully reflect and provide a hand-crafted reason
                Great sentiment. Would you like to contribute at WT:MfD to enforce that, because at MfD it has become usual to see Drafts nominated with a brief generic statement, and deleted should there be no opposition, which is usual except for occasional procedural objections that decreasingly gain traction. (check the archives, because this proposal has directly caused a temporary lull.) I am talking about Legacypac's nominations of recent months, but to be fair, over many years, he is far from unique. Others over the years have also wanted to clean out old junk cruft, and brought it to MfD because there is no other deletion mechanism (and because of an inexplicable aversion to blanking being sufficient). I called it mind-numbing above, and I think it is quite right. It is not realistic to expect a customised unique rationale for the thousands to be processed when they belong a to very few classes having exactly the same failing. A great many can be labelled "abandoned promotion, non-notable topic" (companies, music bands), others "abandoned probably made-up fantasy, non-notable topic" (kids stories, reality TV imitation), and a most of the rest so brief and random it is hard to describe what it is beyond "obviously not useful". --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:40, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
• I'm uneasy about all of this. The problem I see is the difference between a "stale draft" (which really isn't a problem for us) and "cruft that shouldn't have been there in the first place". We ought to clean up the second, because the number of these things in an indistinguishable draft namespace makes any useful management of the space difficult. For the first though, we are being torn between pressure to keep them (an old stale draft just isn't a problem, and we don't know who might return or re-adopt it) and the exciting wikigame of finding stuff to delete. It is a problem throughout WP that stuff gets done because it can be done (Look at me Mom, I just deleted a whole article! I'm nearly an admin!) rather than because it ought to be done. A simple "Anything becomes zappable after n months" doesn't distinguish between a large, serious and unfinished draft on a real topic, or the regular test cruft that should really have gone long ago. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:14, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

User:Andy Dingley your patronizing comments are an inexcusable insult to every editor that spends volunteer time deleting problematic pages to make Wikipedia more useful. I've never noticed you at MfD or AfD or CSDing stuff so I submit you have zero clue how this works. Legacypac (talk) 21:15, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

I'm not talking about those who delete problematic pages, I'm talking about those who will delete anything, simply because they can. WP is a bureaucracy, and as such it attracts aspirational bureaucrats. We have long had a problem with such. Andy Dingley (talk) 21:48, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

• Absolute oppose deletion of drafts based solely on age. I might support a criterion that deleted pages in draft space that were greater than 12 months old and written solely by editors who have not edited in 12 months, and at least one of (a) clearly not intended as an encyclopaedia article, (b) of lower quality than an existing article on the same topic and contained no verifiable (note not verified) information not included in that article, (c) would unambiguously be subject to speedy deletion under an A criterion if posted in the main namespace. Anything less than that and I cannot support - we need to encourage the creation of good content and we need to encourage editor retention, the proposal as stands would discourage both of those. Thryduulf (talk) 08:06, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

  Thryduulf (or anyone else who has made similar arguments), can you point to any evidence at all that editor retention is somehow tied to draft articles being retained more than six months?- MrX 12:19, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

The theory is that when we delete semi/active editors draft articles, it is a negative customer experience. They may get disillusioned with the process and leave. Personally I think that argument is valid for someone who has been working on an article for a month say, even up to 3. Over 6 months? Na. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:26, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

I think there are two issues--1) specific instances of offended newbies. That's typically done just fine by NPP without any further help, and 2) the general attitude of "you can join us if you are already elite; we don't have time for you or your contributions otherwise" which is more subtle and obviously not targeted at any one specific individual. Allowing Draftspace as an alternative to outright deletion of sucky contributions did a LOT for both, but we're considering taking that away again, bit by bit, although impacting #2 far more than #1 with this particular move. Jclemens (talk) 20:16, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Nearly every impacted page was created and only edited by someone that already quit - often after one or two edits. Therefore your point is not on point. Do you realize we are targeting pages like Draft:JoJo Wolf Draft:GrumpMutt Draft:The Hunna Draft:Albion Football Club (Clapham) and Draft:First To Eleven that currently require MfD to delete. Which of these randomly selected pages have any use in Wikipedia? Go check out the current list of pages eligible for G13 when this change passes at User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report. Anything obviously useful will be kept. Legacypac (talk) 21:15, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

(sigh) Arguing by anecdote? Really? Allow me to quote this page's own FAQ: "It must be the case that almost all pages that could be deleted using the rule, should be deleted, according to consensus." No amount of lousy, useless drafts will prove the general applicability of time-based deletion. Oh, and you didn't really respond to my argument about hospitability, either. I get that you genuinely think you're crusading for quality; I happen to think that it's more like planning committees demolishing treehouses and sandcastles because they don't meet permitting requirements. Jclemens (talk) 21:32, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Those are crap pages. We need a mechanism to remove them because they're crap, not because they're old.

If you attach a process to the wrong criteria, don't be surprised when it doesn't work well. Even if they're easy criteria to identify. Andy Dingley (talk) 21:53, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

the pile of junk in Draft outside AfC is much worse on average then the junk inside AfC. If you want to repeal G13 make that a seperate proposal, but don't muddy the obvious logic to treating the whole pile by the same rules when the junk on the bottom is worse then the junk on the top. We have MfD to remove them now but it takes too much effort. Legacypac (talk) 23:17, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Evidence please that deleting 6+ month old drafts affects editor retention? I actually find Legacypac's examples to be considerably more informative than the usual cliches and generalizations.- MrX 00:34, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Sample of some worthwhile articles that have been deleted under G13

To rebut claims that administrator discretion are an effective way to keep worthy pages from being deleted, I offer up this page which lists drafts that were marked as postponed at some point in time (whenever I copied down the list): User:Calliopejen1/Postponed AFC. I encourage admins to examine what was deleted; there are a number of promising articles. Even though at least one user thought them worthy for salvaging at some point, the vast majority have now been deleted. The idea that postponement and admin discretion are sufficient to save good drafts is naive. Calliopejen1 (talk) 22:01, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Just one example picked at random: "María Vallet-Regí was born in Las Palmas, Spain. She studied Chemistry at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) and received her PhD at the same university in 1974. She is full professor of Inorganic Chemistry and head of the research group Smart Biomaterials in the Department of Inorganic and Bioinorganic Chemistry of the Faculty of Pharmacy at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Prof. Vallet-Regí has written more than 600 articles and several books. She was the most cited Spanish scientist (regardless of gender), according to ISI Web of Knowledge, in the field of Materials Science in these past decades. [and the article continues...]" Calliopejen1 (talk) 22:02, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

And that example was postponed twice by DGG before the bot tagged it G13. Good example of how even such postponements are not helping in preserving potentially useful drafts. I don't speak Spanish or have any idea about chemistry but 9,900+ GBooks hits seems a good indicator that this draft would have benefited from a deletion discussion at the very least. Regards SoWhy 17:38, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

they are actually very helpful. There were just too many of them for me to work on--the slowest part is the necessary manual search for copyvio google and the bots do not reach, (or alternatively, rewriting the whole thing so there won't possibly be any). If there were an actual list for people to see, organized by at least a rough subject, then other people would be able to help. The problem here, as in many other places of WP, is following them up. (Of course , I could simple accept and mark as "possible copypaste" and let other people worry about it. I am very reluctant to resort to that kind of shortcut.) DGG ( talk ) 02:19, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

Drafts that have been proposed to be deleted under G13, and whether they should be

Let's lay all cards on the table, and explore the full ramifications of both the proposal and its opposition. Legacypac has linked above a few examples of drafts s/he considers ought to be speedily deleted. Calliopejen1 and I have done the same with some other drafts that are much more likely to contain some data that could be preserved (in my case, even if each one doesn't ever necessarily becomes a full-blown article on itself).

Regarding the draft examples posted by Legacypac, after reviewing them I do not see the need to apply the WP:Deletion process to most of those. (Gasp! Yes, I've actually said that). Not necessarily because I find anything valuable or salvageable in those particular pages, but because the mentality to "delete everything and force interested people ask for a WP:REFUND" is completely backwards, and an enormous handicap to the project. Even if any of those particular examples do not provide any value to the project individually, removing them from view and making them inaccessible to non-admin editors does not provide any value either, and it results in overall negative value in the aggregate. And no, asking for a refund is not cheap, specially when you're talking about exploring hundreds or thousands of related pages (the most basic case, allowing anyone to perform the accountability of what those admins have been speedily deleting; but also for researching content contributed by many editors in some particular topic amenable to deletion).

Mind you, I don't mean to disparage the hard work of the people willing to sort through the new crap to find the few jewels hidden beneath; there was some time when I've been a regular at AfD, I'm aware that it can be a grinding process, and I recognize the value in the task of sorting everything out in that gray space between the clearly valuable and the clearly worthless.

What I'm criticizing is the process itself as it is being proposed, where the only possible outcome for those reviewed items is to bury them and make them inaccessible to the world at large. Much of the opposition to this proposal comes from realizing that such extreme practice is likely to lose most of the good content as well.

If some page is really dangerous (containing unambiguous advertising, attack pages, vandalism and hoaxes, patent nonsense), we already have the tools to remove them completely with other speedy criteria. Thus the current proposal is for drafts which are not problematic, and are not clear transgressions of any core content policy. For those cases, I really believe that removing them with full deletion is worse than leaving them alone, and that a better process should be used for their cleanup.

If such other process requires the people doing the cleanup to think a bit harder about whether to send a page to full and heavy-permission-locked deletion, or rather apply a milder remedy like tagging or blanking, I don't think that's a too harsh requirement to ask. Given the stakes at hand, which involves permanently deleting a corpus of user-contributed content published under a free license, I believe that people not willing to do that small assessment should not be in the process of reviewing drafts. People participating regularly in a process, and admins in particular, should be subjected to some kind of accountability; and that accountability is lost in the case of the Deletion process where all decisions are hidden from view. The least we can ask them is to clearly explain the reasons of their actions. If they can't explain the reason for a full deletion in some particular cases, well, maybe it is because those particular cases should not be fully deleted.

There has been this perennial proposal at WT:Drafts of blanking abandoned draft pages that don't infringe any content guideline, instead of deleting them; but there has never been interest in discussing it thoroughly. Maybe if the current RfC is closed without approval, and we definitely and formally show that "deleting everything stalled in draftspace" is not an option that will gain community consensus, then we can finally start talking about an altertative to cleanup that uses less severe and blunt methods.

(And for anyone willing to yell "but, but, perennial proposal!, please note that the official WMF's statement about deletion only limits universal access to content that has already been decided to deleted, yet it doesn't force us to delete everything sub-standard. The current status quo is entirely a community decision, and it's got consensus only for what to AfD in main space, never fully decided for Draft space. We have a lot of leeway here to get things right). Diego (talk) 10:54, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Responding to ping. Diego Moya Deletion of problematic pages is a hard job that has taken me years to master. There are so many CSD criteria with odd carve outs, so many notability guidelines, a lot of rule interpretation etc. I've tackled various backlogs but After weeks of emphasis there are still over 6,000 stale non-AfC Draft pages still standing. More go stale every week and without expansion of G13 there is no way to get to the bottom. See revision history here [

Let's be really blunt and say that opinions from editors with no experience or effort put in on these backlogs are pretty worthless - even grossly insulting to editors that work deletion processes. Such editors have no clue what the issues are or how much extra work their proposals to limit deletion processes creates. We are volunteers, forced to respond to a never ending stream of critics and comments by people that don't do anything to help. Not only are such criticisms and never ending proposals not helping solve the mess, dealing with them takes editors that do cleanup away from clean up.

Editors that work deletion process SNOW endorse applying G13 to all Drafts. Sorry to say but the opposers generally have no experience but lots of uninformed opinions based on dilusions that because some kid/corporate promotor/spammer typed some nonsense it nedds to be carefully preserved and made accessable for all time.

If content is not suitable for mainspace (or headed to mainspace very soon when it is ready) it has no place on Wikipedia in any Namespace. We have no mandate to build a permanent repository of random useless problematic garbage. If people want that there are WP:ALTERNATIVEOUTLETS to explore.

Editors that insist everything is useful and want to save three unreference sentences in Draft about some 12 year old youtuber forget that way more content is deleted bit by bit over in mainspace every day via regular editing. While I'm trashing three unreferenced useless sentences someone is deleting referenced paragraphs in mainspace.

Do you tell the public bathroom janitor - no you can't have a mop or use a hose, you need a toothbrush and a teacup because you might wash away a gold earing? Or say you better preserve the crap from the floor because we might want to see it again for research? Just let the people that do the cleanup have the tools they need and stop commenting on areas you have no commitment to or experience in. Legacypac (talk) 11:45, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Yes, we all know there is a load of crud out there. Please stop insulting people by telling them they don't understand that. You repeatedly put forward the argument for deleting all old drafts that we don't have the resources to review them all. This does not change the fact that many usable pages would get deleted as well. Our decisions should primarily be based on building the encyclopaedia, not on making the work the work of those processing backlogs easier. If it is impossible to keep under control, then perhaps the whole concept of draft space should be reexamined. SpinningSpark 14:40, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

• With all due respect to your dedication to cleaning up, Legacypac, you don't know how much time I dedicate to the project and how much I understand it, and you don't WP:OWN the Draft space no matter how much voluntary effort your pour into shaping it your preferred way. At a point where I consider that an initiative to "increase the efficiency" of deletion will hurt the project rather than improving it, I will speak up.

I'm as qualified -and entitled!- as you to participate in defining the nature of the cleanup that needs to be performed, and that which needn't. Note that I never denied that some form of 'cleanup' is needed nor said that it should not be done. I'm saying that a large part of it should not be made in the form of hard deletion. I could equally comment on your "delusion" that every "kid/corporate promotor/spammer nonsense" should be hard-removed and kept under lock and key even though it's been posted in the Draft space and doesn't contain problems of BLP, COPYVIO, vandalism or nonsense, and which could be made invisible by default to casual readers by blanking them anyway; and you'd be justly allowed to call me on it for using such colorful language.

I see no reason why it wouldn't take just the same effort to blank or tag non-infringing pages instead of deleting them. And I don't see it because no one has provided such reason in all the years I've been discussing this same topic, first at AfD and the Village Pump, latter at WT:Drafts when it was created.

All those editors that claim the imperative need of instant deletion of every bit of trivial content, as the only way to keep the encyclopedia in place, remain silent when pointed to the equally efficient alternatives that would allow for the accountability of their voluntary hard work. No insurmountable problem has been explained in all these years that would justify preferring on-place hard deletion over instant blanking or categorizing the reviewed content, in those cases where none of the valid content deletion criteria apply unambiguously.

And those reasons haven't been provided because they don't exist; it's a matter of preference. It's just the personal view of some editors with an acute sense of what is 'dirty' and should be 'cleaned up', which many of us disagree with and which we suffer whenever we arrive to a deleted article or draft. So maybe you will this time illustrate us on how you would solve the problem we have stated, that you'll be deleting reams of good content with the bad in a way that makes you unaccountable, or will you remain silent on the subject and keep addressing only the part of the conversation that benefits your point of view? And please don't say WP:REFUND one more time or I will scream, since as explained above it doesn't solve anything. Diego (talk) 17:52, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Good points, Diego. Even after re-reading the whole discussion I can still not find any good reason why it would be imperative to delete those pages. They are not indexed, they don't appear on any searches unless specifically searched for and there is nothing actually gained from deleting those pages if they don't fit any existing criteria. The example Legacypac gives above does not really fit. It's not like keeping waste on the floor, it's like going outside looking for fecal matter in the woods and then insisting it has to be buried when it didn't harm anyone just lying around. Wikipedia worked just fine for years before G13 was created and all the energy that goes into finding drafts, tagging them for deletion and reviewing those taggings could much better be spent improving content that is actually visible in the main space. There are 635 G13 eligible drafts (at this point)? That's nice. On the other hand, there are 2,700+ BLPs without sources at the moment, each of them potentially more problematic than any abandoned draft because they are visible to the world. In the end, I think expanding G13 will only incentivize people to spend their (limited) time focused on an area that is really the least of our problems. Regards SoWhy 17:53, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Fwiw, I just spotchecked a few "unreferenced" blp 9/10 had refs, tho they didn't have a ref section, or the tag wasnt removed when refs were added. Of the 646 G13s, about 1/3 have possibilities for making an article. DGG ( talk ) 05:25, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

I also see no reason to clear this "backlog", and no harm in not doing so. The fact that other editors aren't interested, I would say, would be a clue. If you want to get rid of the backlog, reprogram the bot that tags the pages to wait a year before doing so. If that isn't enough, make it two years. Eventually editors will be able to systematically scrutinize every abandoned draft... just as soon as they get around to it. In the meanwhile, of course, you're still free to program bots to systematically prowl after putative web cut and pastes or bullying pages to tag them for a faster look. But however problematic content is added, it still takes the same number of eyes before somebody complains, and the same amount of effort for editors to check it. Wnt (talk) 21:32, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

G13 is a bring forward system. Drafts are full of copyvio, attack, and other real problems. Drafts don't get NPP but at least G13 evenually gets someone to look at the page and that is even more important in non-AfC drafts. Legacypac (talk) 22:20, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

Are drafts actually improved after six months and are editors likely to be driven off if their stale drafts are deleted?

I looked at all of the 13 articles that I moved from article to draft space between 6 and 12 months ago. In every case, the draft articles have not been edited beyond the day that they were moved to draft. In two cases, the article creators went on to make a few edits to other articles,[1][2] then they stopped editing altogether.

Of the 25 articles that I have moved to draft space more than 12 months ago, two were recreated in article space; a few were redirected to existing content in article space; and about a third had trivial edits made to them (example 1, example 2). Of the editors who created those articles, most made no edits beyond creating the article; a few made some edits in the following couple of weeks; one continued to edit for a while and then stopped; and two are still editing [3][4].

It's difficult to see how deleting stale drafts would actually have a harmful effect on editor retention.- MrX 20:26, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

References

Request for implementation delay

It seems like this discussion is heading to the applicability of G13 to non-AFC drafts. If this is the result, I request that there be some delay before the change is implemented so that interested editors can identify and tag promising drafts before they become eligible for deletion. Calliopejen1 (talk) 00:09, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

I really think the current implementation of "Any page over 6 months is eligible" is a bad idea. I'd much rather prefer any page that's marked with a not-promising template that is 6 months unedited is eligible. It means many people will have to go through and tag both promising and un-promising. If the un-promising happens, I'll probably take the bot task on and code to that standard as we need to give every Non-AFC draft at least one review. Hasteur (talk) 04:15, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

No need for a delay. The stale draft report has been available amd updated weekly for a long time [5] so please work it. Many of the pages are CSDable now under various critera and I plan to continuing working my way through the backlog when this passes. I'll G13 pages that I would have sent to MfD until this proposal was made. I'll CSD G11 or G2 etc where applicable to get hard deletes like I do now. I'll note promising drafts with AFCH comments like I do now. The only thing that will change is pages that would have been deleted at MfD with zero or little comment will go G13. Legacypac (talk) 04:36, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, I have started looking through it. But even though it has been available in the past there was no threat of deletion in the past. It will take a little while to look through ~6k articles to see what is worthwhile lurking in there. Calliopejen1 (talk) 22:40, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Calliopejen1 makes an excellent point. Those who endeavor to identify and improve wanting material are spread thin, stuck Between Scylla and Charybdis of those who create sub-par material and those who strive to delete it without any effort to improve it on the other. If G13 is improved, the obvious implementation delay is six months: that is, staring the "six month" count would occur at the time the criterion is implemented, if indeed it is. Anything else would be imposing an immediate change on anything over six months old. Jclemens (talk) 07:24, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

While there might be numerical support for a change to G13, I still don't see consensus, with a good part of supporters merely being votes instead of arguments. But even if an uninvolved user judges there to be consensus to make such a change in principal, there should at least also be consensus of how to word the new G13. The opposers have brought up a lot of good points of the dangers of a blind expansion and request at least caveats to be made, so before making a change, we should consider how the new criterion will be worded? Regards SoWhy 07:12, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

@SoWhy: I agree, to the extent that the discussion is not so obviously clear that early RfC closure is warranted. The wording (assuming consensus is reached to change the policy) seems that it would be straightforward - the expansion of G13 to all Draft: space is unambiguous and seems pretty easy to concisely word in the policy. Tweaks can just be under BRD. If I ran the zoo, the relaxed rollout schedule would be handled qualitatively in the closure statement by suggesting that G13 nominations be introduced gradually rather than in the form of 6,000 CSD noms the day it passes - no formality needed. VQuakr (talk) 18:59, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

SoWhy's unusual statements about concensus borders on Admin WP:CIR failure. No one will be nominating 6000 pages on day one. It would take days or weeks to work through the backlog even if that is all someone did. Evaluating a page for possible G13 takes several minutes and logging it with AFCH tool or twinkle takes a few more seconds. Legacypac (talk) 03:34, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

No, SoWhy is right here. There is a lot of voting in the "Support" section and many points raised by "Oppose", and, speaking from experience, nominating articles for CSD with Twinkle is very easy. I could probably knock out hundreds of deletion nominations for the would-be G13 criterion in a short amount of time (not that I would). Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 03:58, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Just changing the wording to remove the AFC requirement opens the process to abuse as some people, including myself, have pointed out. For example, without a caveat to disqualify moves from mainspace to draftspace without consent or discussion opens the new criterion to abuse (just move the article to draftspace, find an admin to R2 the redirect (not really hard, most will not check the move was correct in my experience) and in six months tag them G13 → presto, speedy deletion of articles without reason). Since we have to expect people to use the criterion liberally, we cannot just "hope" that reviewers will be careful, we need to make sure that the wording prevents such deletions in the first place. The examples mentioned above by Calliopejen1 are proof that even currently G13 is applied to clearly worthy drafts. PS: WP:CIR has a banner on it saying "Be cautious when referencing this page, as it can be insulting to other editors." for good reasons. Just because you and I disagree, @Legacypac, does not make either of us incompetent. Regards SoWhy 09:33, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Any CSD that requires admins to be 'careful' in reviewing fails to be sufficiently lightweight. Roughly half of the speedy deletion criteria do not require the deleting admin to look beyond the page in question, and the other half typically require just a single examination or comparison (e.g., G4). Jclemens (talk) 16:09, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Reiterating that if this proposal does take effect, I intend to write a bot that looks for a "No Hope" like template that some editor has come through and tagged the draft with (indicating it's had at least one set of eyes/brain reviewing it) that has been 6 months unedited. In the shortest timeframe this would be 6 months after the page was No-Hoped. I reiterate that I don't see this being something that needs to be jumped on immediately to clear out, and that the action of reviewing all the drafts that are at least 6 months unedited already gives an effective 12 months minimum cycle (i.e. 6 months to show up on User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report, then 6 months with the No-Hope, then a procedural G13). Obviously with the oldest draft being from 2014-07-13, we have 2.5 years of unedited drafts to consider before we start getting to the minimums. Hasteur (talk) 12:23, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

• FWIW, if people want a delay, I'm fine with that I also don't see the need for a quick close here: let it play out for 30 days: draft space is even more not on a deadline than mainspace so there is no need for a quick closure.
  One thing I do object to that has been said above is the idea that people don't have policy based !votes or are just "per above" in a discussion on what policy should be is a bit of circular reasoning (as is common on either side of an RfC trying to change policy when the other side is in the majority). Sure there are several just votes, but they can be taken as "I've read all the oppose, they aren't convincing, lets move on because this makes sense." Ultimately every policy is based on ILIKEIT: it is what the community as a whole has decided to adopt as the standard way of doing things for the project because it is what we prefer as a whole.
  Making arguments that contributors here shouldn't have their opinion weighted as highly because they aren't as verbose or don't respond to the objections makes little sense when we are determining what the preference of the community as a whole is. Wikipedia is not a democracy, but numbers do matter as well, especially when we are not talking about local consensus or the application of policy, but of writing the policy itself. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:06, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Another potential compromise idea

What if this G13 for drafts were limited to certain problematic categories of articles that recur frequently? I'm not sure this would entirely solve the perceived problems with draftspace, but it would be less likely to cause collateral damage. In my experience, drafts of things that fall into the following categories (adapted from A7) tend to be garbage: living people, bands, musical recordings, clubs, societies, groups, companies, corporations, organizations, websites, individual animals. Also articles totally lacking in references are probably just has hard to reference as to write from scratch, so deletion generally is not terribly problematic. Perhaps everyone could get behind a proposal to allow G13 deletion for these sorts of articles, and use a prod-type mechanism for the rest (both unless tagged by another editor as promising). Or something like that. If automatic deletion were limited to these categories (and admins use some sort of discretion so obviously promising living-people articles aren't deleted, for example) I think I would support this proposal. Calliopejen1 (talk) 17:34, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

List of Drafts outside AfC

I have compiled a list of all drafts outside AfC (watch out, big page). There are a little over eleven thousand of these pages. Of those I randomly checked, about 1 in 3 is unsalvageable cruft; YMMV. -FASTILY 08:59, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

@Fastily: Urm... That looks similar to User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report. Hasteur (talk) 12:28, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

thank-you so much User:Fastily! User:Hasteur The FastilyBot report covers all Drafts outside AfC (11,000 pages apparently, though I don't see a counter in there) while the MusikBot report is about 5500 pages of non-AfC Drafts that have no edits within the last 6 months (any edit, including AWB, delinking edits and other inconsequential edits get the page off the report). If you look at the page history of Musikbot report you can see how the number has risen and fallen over time. Significant progress on cleanup has been made lately, including the removal of 2500 soldier bios and some thousands I've CSD'd and MfD'd for various reasons. I've long wondered how many non-AfC Draft pages were excluded from the Musikbot report - and this new report says the 6 month stale line currently divides the non-AfC Drafts in half. If the new report excluded pages not edited in 6 month (ie User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report included) the report would be much shorter and easier to work with. I'd like to look for and remove kid's personal info, hoaxes, and other permanently problematic pages before they go 6 months stale. Sort options and size data etc like MusikBot provides would be awesome too. Legacypac (talk) 13:05, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

I have no problem switching to FastilyBot's page once we dispose of the pages that are over 6 months stale. I think chasing the additional 6k pages when there are 5k alerady beyond the 6 month mark seems like hasty WikiImp-ery in the time scale of drafts. Hasteur (talk) 13:13, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

There will always be a need for the StaleDrafts list - it's the only reliable way I know of to identify what should soon be G13 eligible non-AfC pages. The other list, pared down, would be useful for scanning for issues. Sometimes the title alone tells you it's a joke or attack page. Legacypac (talk) 13:53, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

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.

G13: clarification on "old" = abandoned"

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.

---

Resolved

 – A page is considered abandoned and G13 eligible if is not edited by a human for 6 months.Draft activity levels matter.Editor activity levels doesn't.Winged Blades of Godric^{On leave} 06:04, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Is a page considered "abandoned" if it's old; i.e., if is not edited by a human for 6 months? This seems a bit of stretch. For example, if a user is still active, a 6-month-old page cannot be considered abandoned, correct? We need to add some clarification. -- Taku (talk) 15:37, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

• Is a page considered "abandoned" if it's old; i.e., if is not edited by a human for 6 months? Yes. That was the entire purpose of the G13 expansion discussion above. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 15:40, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
  • It is important to note that these pages are REFUND eligible. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:43, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
  • No, isn't the RfC simply about expanding G13 to non-AfC drafts? as opposed to introducing new standard that an old draft, no matter how an editor is active, is considered abandoned. Obviously, that's very strange word-choice. -- Taku (talk) 15:48, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
    • That's not a new standard. G13 used to say that a draft was abandoned if it was submitted to AfC and then not edited for 6 months. Now it says that a draft is abandoned if it is not edited for 6 months. The activity level of any contributors has never been part of the G13 criteria. The draft is abandoned, not the editor. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 15:52, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
      • Ok. I think you're correct; I misunderstood G13 (perhaps many others). -- Taku (talk) 16:03, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
• In draftspace, but only in draftspace. Taku should move his old drafts to his userspace, if he wants them, and is responsible for them. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 15:45, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
  • That could be very confusing. It's not clear that people who voted in the RfC had "old" = "abandoned" in mind. I think we need to have at least some another RfC to clarify this. -- Taku (talk) 15:51, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
    • No: the RfC above had a crystal clear consensus that it was intended to make any draft that had not been edited in 6 months eligible for deletion regardless of whether or not there was an AfC tag. There is a vocal minority that doesn't like this, but there is absolutely no need to have a new RfC on clarifying the core policy. I'm fine with discussing whether or not there should be a template for "valuable" drafts or something of the like, but the English Wikipedia policy on this is crystal clear. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:00, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
      • (@TonyBallioni: See above. I now see this was my misunderstanding.) -- Taku (talk) 16:05, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
• G13 is clear, has been clear, and was resolved as clear in the RFC. The misunderstanding exists with TakuyaMurata and not with any of the policy. Oppose Takuya's attempt to carve out an exception that lets them retain their walled garden in draft namespace. No objection (as I've enumerated many times in many places) for Taku to keep their drafts in their userspace subject to the general prohibitions imposed by the community at large. Hasteur (talk) 16:36, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

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.

Categorization for G13?

@Hasteur: Maybe we should try to get a draft-categorization structure going? We can organize them by month in order to facilitate warning people about impending deletion, and also so that backlog hunters looking to rescue drafts can go through the oldest ones first. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 06:23, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

User:Premeditated Chaos User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report is already sortable by date so that info is readily available. I've been mainly starting with the shortest each week on the idea they are the most useless and Hasteur has been mainly working from the oldest on the basis those are the most abandoned. Legacypac (talk) 06:29, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I know about the draft report, I just think a category structure would be better organized. Plus it would be automatically updated as opposed to once a week or so when the bot generates a new report. Maybe a bot could be made to slap a date category on each newly-created draft. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 06:41, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Ask the bot owner to run the bot once a day? --Gryllida (talk) 10:41, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Maybe... I've requested the bot update more frequently while we clear the backlog but MusikAnimal's page says he is away for a few days. Any idea how I can make links turn red on the report for deleted pages? There is a delay and I keep clicking on blue links that already deleted. Like a cache purge or something? Legacypac (talk) 06:46, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Well, that's a problem, I have faced too!Winged Blades of Godric^{On leave} 08:54, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

In your Preferences tab under Gadgets - Appearance, there's options for cache purge links that appear in your top bar. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 09:12, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Do you mean category by topic? If yes, tag drafts with wikiproject tags, or with Categories, or both?? If not by topic, if you mean by date, just let me know, I may have misunderstood. --Gryllida (talk) 10:20, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I said by month, as in, a hypothetical series of "Drafts created in MONTH YEAR" categories, similar to the existing maintenance backlog categories. I personally think tagging by WikiProject is pointless and clutters up talk pages, extra double so on draft pages, but if people want it I don't care enough to seriously oppose it. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 10:25, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Use User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report? Reuse its code and notify users or do whatever you wanted to do with this information? What advantage would a category give? 'Rotating' the categories (updating to 'last edited 2 months ago' then 'last edited 3 months ago' etc in the article) might be a unnecessary, if the existing bot algorithm works well. --Gryllida (talk) 10:40, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I've never said anything about categories by last edit or rotating any categories. I think you need to read my posts again please and pay attention to what I'm actually suggesting. We should be categorizing our drafts by the month that they were created in. So if you create a draft today, your draft will fall into "Category:Drafts created in August 2017".

This scheme would facilitate a number of different functions, such as making it possible for Hasteur's bot to pre-warn users that their drafts will become eligible for G13 soon. Users can pick through the drafts by category and either tag for G13 or make edits for postponement as the drafts become eligible. Users who like picking through backlogs can search through the categories for interesting-looking drafts to adopt and improve. The categories will be updated in real time, which is much more useful than an occasionally-updated bot page full of redlinks. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 10:59, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

The purge in Preferences worked great. Thanks! Would created in month cats really help the bot? The clock starts when they stop working on it, not start (granted that is usually the same day). A bot message like "the draft you started 5 months ago on hopeless topic may be subject to deletion soon if not being actively improved".

Start date cats could also help id drafts that someone is just tweeking to keep it from failing stale that may be NOTAWEBHOST or SPAM links problems. Legacypac (talk) 11:20, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I think Hasteur mentioned above that he can't do a 5-month warn with his bot since we lack dated categories, so I think they would help there at least. Plus it would give us a real-time idea of what draftspace looks like at any given time - you could see at a glance how many drafts there are left from any given month or year. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 12:03, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Tagging for WikiProjects has value. I can use Petscan presently to identify video games articles which are in the dated for deletion pile. I can do the same for all drafts now too. Also, WikiProjects would be a viable talk page to warn about impending deletion, as they will have the most editors able to help. (Of course, such a warning should be opt in.) Perhaps there should be an opt in where I personally can receive a list of pages from a particular WikiProject near the bottom of the backlog. --Izno (talk) 12:54, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, fair enough. I don't love the talk page tagging but I'm certainly not about to start a campaign against it, and I can see its value to other people. I can certainly also see the value of some kind of cross-referenced date/subject subpage for WikiProjects. "WikiProject:Video Games/expiring drafts" or something. I wonder if that kind of thing would increase the adoption rate on old drafts? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 13:12, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Those people would also have the best understanding of the potential of an article. Yes, a list updated somewhere between daily and weekly for topic areas would be very appreciated. Or perhaps we can get the article alerts system to pick up drafts now that the workflow is streamlined some. --Izno (talk) 14:48, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Reply to many: I can use the MusikBot report page to go through and apply a template that marks when the page was created, however this will be a registered edit. Per my personal view, I hold myself to a higher standard when notifying/nominating to mean 6 months un-edited by anything (in order to give the most conservative interpertation of the rule). For that reason it will kick all the pages currently on the MusikBot report back into the backlog for 5 months, then the bot will notify that in 1 month if the page remains unedited, it could be eligible for G13, and finally if it's still unedited then the bot will nominated. Again I reiterate the bot I am envisioning pushes for a more narrow standard on the nominating/notifying, but that is entirely up to the consensus here if they want that. Hasteur (talk) 16:24, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Heavens no. The junk to useful ratio is far to high. Legacypac (talk) 17:55, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Great idea, especially as the ratio of useful drafts being deleted is far to high. Agathoclea (talk) 19:45, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

In line with the above I have made {{Draft creations by date}}. See the description. If there is consensus, I can start working on building the bot later this week so that we can build the year/month/date category hierarchy similar to Category:AfC submissions by date. Hasteur (talk) 17:43, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Rather than trying to steer people to check abandoned drafts, let's focus on non-expired AfC Drafts. This fishing is MUCH better there. An even better pool is postponed G13 pages because someone actually took action thinking they had merit. Legacypac (talk) 17:55, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Article space essays/term papers

This has come up several times recentlyish, and I wanted to see what people's thoughts were on the possible creation of a new criteria for term papers/personal opinion essays. We get a fair amount of them created as new pages either by people trying to advocate for a specific POV or as part of a class assignment (see User:EJustice for the most prominent recent dispute in that area), or both. PROD is almost always ineffective here, as the author will almost always contest, and these type of creations are from what I can tell virtually universally deleted at AfD per WP:NOTESSAY. I've selected several from my AfD log as an example below:

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/African American Girls and School Discipline
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Black women and the United States prison system
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Prostitution and State Sanctioned Violence
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/British Sri Lankan Tamil: Humanitarian Issues
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Philosophical Evolution of Wing Chun
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Vision vs. Mission Statement
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Common English Language Mistakes Among Persians

I'm sure Jytdog could probably provide some similar examples from the EJustice situation. Robert McClenon recently raised a similar point about statements of religious faith at WT:NPR. Some argued that G11 would work for those, but I generally take a more conservative view on G11 than most. To be clear: this is not a proposal for anything, but getting peoples' views as to whether G11 could be read to cover these, and if not, whether there is a need for a new criteria, or a need for a more formal discussion. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:25, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I use G11 on the ones that really advocate for something. If created it should be a G?? to cover Draft and Userspace. Legacypac (talk) 22:30, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I agree something should be done, but before we move too far down the road: How often do these types of pages come up in Articlespace or other spaces where deletion is needed? What would the threshold between proviging information vs WP:OR/PoV advocacy? I'm concerned that some things that may have previously been accepted as internet static (such as certain OR screeds) would be swept up by this suggestion. Personally I don't think G11 really works for this as we don't have a particular "sell" on those and I'd hate to see G11 interperted that way to disasterous results. Hasteur (talk) 22:43, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I've not been keeping track but wild guess... 30 or 40 in 1000 abandoned Drafts. Userspace... no estimate. Legacypac (talk) 22:46, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I have also seen an annoying number of these personal opinion essays. Before we formulate any proposal, however, it appears that we are starting to conflate two separate questions, which are essays in article space, and essays in draft and user space. I respectfully disagree with User:Legacypac that if we formulate anything it should be a Gn to cover drafts and userspace. I don't think that we should worry much about essays in user space or draft space. The only question is whether we need a speedy An (A13?) criterion to cover opinion essays in article space that are inherently statements of opinion. That depends on how common they are. I think that we definitely do not need a speedy criterion to get them out of user space or draft space. I don't see the harm to them in draft space or user space; sometimes they can be reworked into neutral articles, and sometimes they can't, but we don't need to speedy them. Whether we need a speedy criterion for them in article space depends on how common they are; they satisfy the other criteria for a speedy deletion criterion, and they do need to be thrown out of article space. Let's not conflate article space and draft or user space. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:29, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I agree with Robert re G vs A: userspace has U5 if it's a massive NOTWEBHOST violation, and drafts can be improved or dealt with by G13 when they become stale. Re: Hasteur on frequency. If I had to guess it'd be about 1/2 of whatever is seen in draftspace. So around 1-2%. In terms of raw numbers, if we have ~7700 articles created every week, that's about 70-150 a week, which is about 1-2 days worth of deleted articles at AfD. It certainly wouldn't be the most used criteria, but I'd suspect it would be used more than A11. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:42, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I'd use against stuff that can't be fixed. WP:SOAPBOX applies everywhere. Legacypac (talk) 23:49, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Example Draft:MEDIA_FREEDOM Legacypac (talk) 00:33, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

I will comment that, while the rule against soapboxing applies everywhere, it, like most of the other rules on what Wikipedia is not, is not a speedy deletion criterion, and, because NOT includes so many things, it can't be a workable speedy deletion criterion. I would support an A12 or A13 for opinion essays that inherently cannot be reworked to be neutral point of view. Basically, it should apply to anything that, in user space, would be U5, and a few other things. I don't see the need for a speedy criterion for stupid essays in draft space. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:48, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

I would like to include things written in essay style that are unsalvageable OR as well (see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Common English Language Mistakes Among Persians.) Something along the lines of An article int he style of an essay, term paper, blog post, or other non-encyclopedic form of original thought that would need to be entirely rewritten to comply with either WP:OR or WP:NPOV. This criteria does not apply to pages that when the original research was removed would otherwise be an encyclopedia article. This would limit it so that encylopedia articles that contain OR are not subject to speedy deletion, but that lists of words that confuse Persians in English with reasoning why wouldn't need to go to AfD. I'd welcome thoughts. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:28, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

I agree with the proposal by User:Tony Ballioni. That seems well-defined and properly restrictive. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:41, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

I think we should prefer moving back to draft space or sending to AFD over any new CSD criterion. These often go without a hitch, but sometimes they're valuable potential articles--and it's more that their writers missed the boat on the style of writing than it is that they're deliberately OR or NPOV or anything in NOT (most are V). As Tony opens, these are a majority coming out of classes, where any crossing with the deletion crew of any sort will likely result in a lost potential editor (who has been exposed to editing through gradual change). WP:MERCILESS is a thing I guess, but maybe we shouldn't be merciless to people who want to learn. --Izno (talk) 03:36, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

On the one hand, I am not one to worry much about losing new editors. I do think that if we want to actively encourage new editors, we need a meeting and greeting function that isn't just a burden to dump on the New Page Patrol editors. On the other hand, I think that AFD is at least as off-putting to new editors as CSD. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:41, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

What I can't understand is that most people read Wikipedia, likely regularly, before they decide to submit their OR opinion piece or story about how they love some girl or how they started a band or whatever. Where, after reading Wikipedia, do they get the idea any of this is ok? Legacypac (talk) 19:56, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Because this is the encyclopedia anyone can edit. Next question.... Robert McClenon (talk) 03:42, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Because they don't read policy pages. Who would, anyway? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:01, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Seriously, there are three possible reasons why they submit the crud. First, as Jo-Jo says, they didn't read the policy pages. That is the first good-faith explanation. The second is that they did read the policy pages, and don't understand them. Third, they did read the policy, and figure that that means that if they can get their spam in, it will be viewed as neutral, to be believed. The third is the bad-faith explanation. I am inclined to believe the third for most [[WP:G11|G11], and something in between the first and the second for everything else (that is, they glanced at the policy pages and didn't pay attention). Robert McClenon (talk) 06:17, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Back to the original proposal, they should not automatically be speedy deleted. Even in the EJustice case some of the writings survived, I believe. Some had suitable material for merging, and one at the tome was completely OK as a standalone article. Term papers will often have some encyclopedic content. WikiEd is trying to get instructors to set suitable Wikipedia exercises. Also for opinon pieces, they will often duplicate a topic or be so promotional that they already get deleted. In some other cases if the topic is notable they can be cut to a two line stub. So we don't really need more speedy delete options for these. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:58, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Back to the original proposal, I will support a speedy deletion criterion for those that would need to be entirely written to comply with NPOV. It is true that some of these essays have some encyclopedic content, but most don't. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:42, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

By the way, I just PROD'd another essay in Hindi. Based on the machine translation, it is an essay that would have to be fundamentally rewritten to be neutral (and would then duplicate existing coverage anyway). As it is, at least it probably will be an expired PROD, while the typical page that is the subject here will not be an expired PROD because the author will remove the PROD. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:42, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

The way I (tried) to word the proposal above would have exempted the EJustice proposals that were worth merging or stubifying. My concern is that we do get a fair amount of OR/POV essays that don't clearly fall into any of the existing criteria where they have SNOW AfDs with people calling for speedy deletion but there being no actual criteria for it. I don't think its a good idea to wrap this up with G11, but this actually does distract more resources than are neccessary at AfD, IMO, for outcomes that are clearcut the second they are sent there.

My concern here is less with whether they get deleted or not: they obviously will, but it is for creating a way that is more respectful of the time of our people doing NPP and those who volunteer at AfD. Robert is one of our more experienced users who is active, and when he posed a similar question at WT:NPR, no one really knew what to tell him. Adding clarity to the issue of how to deal with these I think would be important, even if that clarity is "all essays must be SNOW deleted at AfD". TonyBallioni (talk) 05:22, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

• How's about tagging in a db-custom rationale?Would many admins decline?Winged Blades of Godric^{On leave} 10:11, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

• Yes. Most custom rationales need to be equivalent to G6 to be accepted, which is a good thing in my opinion. TonyBallioni (talk) 11:59, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Well, my experience differs.I have had a few successes logging the rationale as Orig. research..Winged Blades of Godric^{On leave} 13:29, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

These "essay" topics are always either "topic is well covered" and therefore duplicates an existing topic or "topic should not be covered". Legacypac (talk) 16:33, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

No, they aren't "always" one or the other. One or the more-recent batches of essays actually lead to Nitrate in the Mississippi River Basin--there are quite a few blue links at WT:WikiProject Chemistry/Archive 40#Essays for a class project. I think . --Izno (talk) 17:22, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

From my brief spot check most of those blue links were redirects. The ones that weren't would not fall under the language above because while they may be oddly specific, they are written as encyclopedia articles not essays. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:00, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

I should have been more specific. All such pages I've found are either one or the other, and I've found several hundred over time. I'm sure there is some exception out there somewhere but I trust the nominator or Admin would be smart enough to recognize the rare exception. Legacypac (talk) 18:13, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

• Strong oppose There is no sharp distinction between those essays that can obviously not be fixed, and essays which can. Quite a lot depends on how much effort is used to improve or normalize the new article, or to merge it into other articles in the encyclopedia. Criteria for speedy need to clearly distinguish, because otherwise it is a matter of contestable judgement, and anything involving such judgment needs to be decided by the community. The entire basis for speedy is that there are some sorts of frequently occurring instances where one admin plus an nominating editor can safely predict the inevitable result on behalf of the community. I don't think there will be that many such here that will give a true line of separation. For the ones that are simply naive, Prod takes care of them just fine, because those editors rarely follow up to contest them. A more difficult group are those submitted in class projects or as term papers, which ofter are exceedingly specific in the sense of making an acceptable term paper, where analysis of a particular case of a general problem is often expected, but the analysis is of the sort which is altogether inappropriate for an encyclopedia. Even bad class project articles of any sort unless truly outrageous should not be handled by speedy. The class ambassador will usually contest, and experience shows that quite a bit of ill will can be generate; there is usually need to carefully explain to them and the instructor. Speedy is not suitable for these. DGG ( talk ) 09:34, 31 August 2017 (UTC)