Contents
- 1 Should a 4th CSD for unused templates be added?
- 2 Extend R2 to portals
- 3 Provide for CSD criterion X3: Mass-created portals
- 4 Proposal: Expand G13 to outline drafts
- 5 New F Crtiera - Unused/unusable explicit image.
- 6 G14
- 7 X3
- 8 Clarification on G8
- 9 Proposal: Expand G5 to include undisclosed paid editing
- 10 Update P2 proposed
- 11 Mentioning the requirements for new criteria in an edit notice?
- 12 Expand A3 to all namespaces except draftspace (A3 -> G15)
- 13 Twinkle now logs user-inputted options and should better handle noms in module space
- 14 Speedy deletion of modules
- 15 G6 for post-merge delete?
Should a 4th CSD for unused templates be added?
Should a new CSD criteria (T4T5) be added for unused templates that meet the following criteria:
- Template is not used anywhere, I.E. has zero transclusions excluding templates own documentation of course.
- Template is NOT a substitute only template. Should go without saying but templates that are substitute only by definition should never have transclusions, doesn't mean the template can been speedily deleted.
- Template is older than 6 months. No speedily deleting a new template that hasn't been used just yet.
- Template is NOT a sometimes unused/temporary template. An example of this would be {{help me}} which may have 0 transclusions at any given moment.
Please discuss. --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 18:41, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
- Support Practice shows that such templates are routinely deleted at TfD without much discussion, CSDing them would save effort. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 18:46, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
- For the same reason it was unanimously rejected barely a month ago. Please read the "Please read this before proposing new criteria" box at the top of this page and do the due diligence of at least a minimal search before squandering the community's time with a formal rfc. —Cryptic 19:41, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
- @Cryptic: that was not a formal RFC, this is. Additionally, I added some clarifying criteria in this proposal, such as the note about substitute only templates being exempt. Would be nice to have the proposal discussed on its merits rather than based on a cursory previous discussion. --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 19:55, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
- Support The reason this gets suggested repeatedly is because it's a good idea. So much time is wasted taking unused templates to TfD when there is virtually no opposition to their deletion. Number 57 20:39, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
- Support - just look at the logs for the past few months, most (or even all?) of the unused templates were deleted without any objection. Regular nomination just clogs the list with pointless discussions full of "per nom" as there is virtually nothing to say. As these templates weren't in use, there is nothing to lose by deleting them. If someone later on wants the template back, they can ask an admin to WP:UNDELETE it and move it to their sandbox. --Gonnym (talk) 21:04, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
- Support – templates aren't articles, so the CSD criteria for removing unused ones should be low. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 21:38, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
- Support – it's too difficult, because too bureaucratic, to have unused templates deleted, so many editors, including me, have given up. Category:Unnecessary taxonomy templates, for example, is full of unused templates, almost all blanked. The suggested criterion would help to get them deleted instead of leaving them just sitting there. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:50, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
- Support much like we delete unused pages with just the article wizard text. Clear the clutter and focus management on the useful. Legacypac (talk) 22:03, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
- Comment should this CSD apply to unused Lua modules too? {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 22:29, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose
It cannot be T4, because T4 has been used before and we do not re-use old codes.unless it can be demonstrated that each template to be deleted under the proposed criterion has never been used, either directly or as a substitution. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:31, 21 February 2019 (UTC)- @Redrose64: so you are opposing the entire proposal because it cannot be T4? That is a pretty simple correction... If it was T5 would you then support it? --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 01:34, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Support Assuming this accounts for transclusions that have been removed as part of vandalism before the template is deleted, is not just used to bypass TfD in some way, and say around 7 days has passed after being nominated before deletion. Breawycker (talk to me!) 00:15, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- @Breawycker: great point. You can't just remove the transclusions and then CSD the template to game the system. If a template has a number of transclusions and you think it should be removed, that is a case for XfD. --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 01:35, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. The fact that a template is unused is never by itself a reason to delete it, it's only relevant as a criterion by which to select a potentially unneeded template for further inspection at TfD (see also this brief essay). An evaluation of use, or the potential for use, of a template requires knowledge of its context, the function that it serves and the existence of related or similar templates. All this calls for judgement that is above and beyond what goes into dealing with the obvious, clear-cut scenarios that the CSD criteria are there for. A template can be "unused" for a wide variety of reasons. Maybe it's a useful template that nobody happens to know about, in which case it needs not to be deleted, but popularised and integrated into the project documentation. Maybe it's a template that is meant to be used only temporarily, for example until certain issues on a given page have been addressed (niche maintenance templates). It may be a currently unused element of a wider system that somebody might soon need (happens sometimes within the lang-xx family of templates). It may be unused because it was removed in error from the one page where it's meant to be used and nobody has noticed yet. It may be unused because the editor who tagged it for deletion has just removed all of its transclusions. It may be unused at the moment, but its existence may be assumed or required by some other piece of machinery (like a module) in a way that doesn't show up in its list of transclusions. A template may be unused, but it could hold the history of a fragment of article text that has at some point been merged into the article, and hence the template is there to preserve attribution. A template may appear as unused because it's meant to be substed; yes, such a template should be exempt from the proposed CSD, but how do you determine if a template's meant to be substed? (It doesn't always say so in the documentation; I remember there have been TfD discussions where several editors had voted to delete such an "unused" template until someone noticed it was a user warning template and so is always substed.)
I don't think any one editor is attuned to all these possibilities, and that's why such things are better decided by discussion involving several participants. However, TfD does indeed occasionally feel like it's getting flooded with similar nominations, so something probably ought to be done about that. If new speedy deletion criteria are going to be part of the solution, then they should be about easy, clearly-defined subsets of templates; there could, for example, be a CSD criterion for unused navboxes that fail WP:NAVBOX. – Uanfala (talk) 03:08, 22 February 2019 (UTC) - Support. This helps make editing an easier experience by simplifying the set of available templates. The amount of verbiage and time wasted on discussing (but rarely if ever actually using) potential uses of these templates is vast. A template exists to serve the encyclopedia in some way (helping editing or reading) and if it's not used, in the caveats above, it should be deleted.--Tom (LT) (talk) 07:26, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose, unused templates can hold interesting history that needs preserving. Also, deleting templates that have been widely used destroys old revisions of articles. And per Uanfala. —Kusma (t·c) 07:45, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- "this destroys old revisions" is not an argument that TfD seems to be accepting: Template:Persondata was deleted. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 18:13, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per Uanfala and Kusma. I'm generally not opposed to cleanup but the above-mentioned risks are clearly higher than the potential benefits. Regards SoWhy 08:15, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose I've supported and even proposed the ability to PROD unused templates, since it takes a step out of the deletion process but allows users seven days to oppose and potentially discuss its deletion and use. Speedy deletion offers none of that. Nihlus 09:06, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose Some unused templates, such as {{Roads legend}} and {{Trillium Line route diagram detailed}}, are nevertheless permanently stored in template space, and they may be linked to Wikidata items which are structurally useful. I would support if there were a provision for certain templates – such as templates explicitly marked as historical, templates with incoming links from articles, template sandboxes, templates for which T5 has previously been declined, and templates which have been otherwise marked as ineligible for T5 – to be ineligible for T5 deletion. Jc86035 (talk) 10:07, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. While I think the basic idea is good, there are too many nuances and exceptions to the point where I believe a CSD to be untenable. I think the proper solution is to expand PROD to templates so the distinction becomes potentially controversial vs. uncontroversial, and I would support such a proposal. -- Tavix (talk) 15:00, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- I was thinking I'd like to see template prod as well, but that's a discussion for a different page. --Izno (talk) 15:22, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per the above opposers and the many previous discussions where a CSD criterion for unused templates has been rejected. Not all templates need to be used at all times (e.g. {{help me}} may be unused at any given moment), not all subst-only templates are marked as such, some templates should be kept so as not to break old revisions, etc, etc. Thryduulf (talk) 15:27, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- C1 exists despite the fact that Category:Wikipedians looking for help may be empty at any given moment. Why can't T5 be implemented in the same way? {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 18:20, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per those above who have already highlighted many situations in which a template with zero transclusions should be kept anyway, i.e. there are good reasons why zero transclusion templates should not be deleted without prior discussion. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 16:25, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Comment @Thryduulf: and a few others have made a very valid point that there are some templates that at any given moment may have no transclusions ({{help me}} for example). Pppery raised a good counter argument about C1 accounting for sometimes empty categories. This is why we have {{Empty category}}. With that in mind, I 100% agree that something would be needed to document that some templates may have zero transclusions at any given moment. I'm curious those who have objected based on this point alone, if we were able to account for this case would you be more supportive of this? I have added a new criteria to the top of this RFC to account for that case. It would seem to me that it would be pretty easy to add some documentation to the new CSD criteria that exempts templates that may at any given moment have no transclusions.
- Additionally, I'm curious if there are additional conditions that would cause some of you to be more supportive of the idea? For example, if we said that the template must be at least 1 year old instead of just 6 months? Thryduulf thank you for raising that point, it wasn't something I had considered and definitely needs to be accounted for. A reminder, the goal of this CSD criteria is to expedite the process of deleting old unused templates that have been sitting around for a long time and are unused. It is not my intention to facilitate a method for gaming the system and quickly nuking templates someone just doesn't like. --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 20:08, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- @Redrose64, SoWhy, Jc86035, Thryduulf, and Ivanvector: please see above comment. --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 20:08, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- My opposition to this criteria is based on far more than just on that one point, and still stands. For example the older a template is the higher the chance of breaking old revisions. If a template has been around for a year without causing problems then I'm not seeing any reason why deletion of it needs expediting. Thryduulf (talk) 20:18, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Regarding your question about an {{Empty category}} equivalent for templates, {{Subst only}} will account for most of the templates that have no transclusions, with the caveat that some templates use {{Substitution}}, which allows a custom message, and thus requires examination to determine whether the jist is that it's a template that must be substituted. --Bsherr (talk) 20:28, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Still a no for me, the temporarily-unused template (like {{help me}}) is just one of the issues raised. I'm actually more concerned about borked page histories that rely on templates that are later deprecated. I'm not against deleting unused templates, I'm only opposed to doing it without having a discussion to consider all the angles first. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 20:36, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. Again? We just discussed this in December. See Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion/Archive 72#Proposal to add T4: Unused. I'll just quote my comment from then:
Alas, this has been proposed, many, many, many, many times. The iterations sometimes vary, such as just for user namespace templates, or just for those "not encyclopedic", with varying waiting periods or age requirements. Just some of these discussions are: /Archive 72#Proposed tweak to T3, /Archive 10#Orphaned templates, /Archive 67#New criterion - T4, aka Template PROD, /Archive 44#New CSD - T4 Unused userbox that is more than 30 days old, /Archive 42#T4: Unused template, /Archive_52#Deprecated_templates, /Archive 22#Speedy deletion of unused templates?, /Archive 59#Gauging opinion on a possible new criterion for templates. There have also been several proposals at WT:PROD for this (reportedly four in 2007 alone). There seem to be three reasons this has never been adopted. Firstly, as pointed out by Tazerdadog, templates that are intended to be substituted have no transclusions by design, and a summary process like CSD is not efficient to distinguish those not transcluded by design from those by circumstance. Secondly, CSD is generally for urgent deletions and, although TfD is busy, it is not backlogged enough (with deserved thanks to Galobtter (above), Primefac and others) to warrant the use of a summary process like this, particularly since an unused template is not an urgent cause for deletion. Thirdly, that a template is unused is not, in any guideline, a dispositive reason to delete it; rather, it is just a relevant consideration; therefore, it would be egregious to make it a dispositive reason to speedily delete it before there is consensus on whether this should be decisive for a deletion discussion.
- I want to echo what Tavix said, because he hit it on the head. CSD should be quick and straightforward — the least amount of judgment or gray area required, the better. This proposal would require users to:
- Ensure the template isn't substituted
- Ensure it's older than 180 days
- Check that it has no transclusions
- Check if any redirects have transclusions or history that might have been merged there
- Somehow know whether this template may have been used occasionally but not right now even though it's not substituted(???)
- Know whether any of its redirects may have also been used occasionally but not right now
- That's nowhere near tenable for a SD criterion. A TPROD process might work, but this is too complicated for speedy deletion. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 21:39, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
- As usual, I'm with Amory. Too many criteria for a CSD, any questionable template should be sent to Tfd. Liz Read! Talk! 04:22, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
- Comment/Question: How many templates fit the proposed criteria today? Are we talking about 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, or more? An order of magnitude (backed up by a reasonable method of arriving at that number) would be helpful in this discussion. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:23, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
- As a first approximation, there's 90684 non-redirect pages in the template namespace that currently aren't transcluded from any other page that were created before 2018-06-27 (quarry:query/33701). So something less than that - the count includes subst-only templates, and template sandboxes, and template documentation pages, and so on. —Cryptic 23:16, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
- Excluding pages with names ending in "/sandbox", "/testcases", or "/doc" brings the total down to 83752. Further excluding templates that themselves transclude {{require subst}} and/or {{subst only}} brings it down to 82204. Even supposing that many subst-only templates aren't documented as subst-only, there's only 518284 total non-redirect pages in the Template namespace. —Cryptic 19:15, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
- Interesting. I wonder why Wikipedia:Database reports/Unused templates shows only about 13,446 templates before it starts to list redirects (and why would it list redirects, which are cheap?). It seems that a better set of queries is needed, perhaps one or two that implement some of the criteria listed at the top of this section. That might allow people who want to take templates to TFD (or label them as subst-only) to have an easier time of it, allowing all of us (or most of us, at least) to achieve our goals. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:59, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
- I find the deletion of templates very annoying when reviewing old page revisions where they were used. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:27, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
- I'm pretty sure the criteria under discussion would prevent that from happening. CSD would apply only to templates that are unused. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:47, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
- Nope. This is for templates that are currently unused, not for ones that were never used. —Cryptic 23:09, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
- I'm pretty sure the criteria under discussion would prevent that from happening. CSD would apply only to templates that are unused. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:47, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose I'll give a current real example to illustrate why I disagree with this proposal. At Template talk:URL #Infobox input may vary, same output preferred, there was a request for code that "
accepts all input forms, then reformats it as needed into good {{URL}}
". Eventually we've arrived at updated functionality in Module:URL and a new template called Template:URL2 that's much more user-friendly in infoboxes than Template:URL. Take a look at the comparison between the outputs and judge for yourselves whether {{URL2}} has potential, especially as it doesn't throw an error in an infobox that uses Wikidata (which may provide blank input to the template). But {{URL2}} is not used in article space at present, so unless somebody uses it in the next x days, it would be deleted under this criterion. What value does that add to the encyclopedia? What happened to WP:TIND? Why would I spend time creating potentially useful code if I knew there was a deadline imposed for somebody to use it? If potentially useful code keeps being deleted, what will you do when editors asks for new functionality but all the coders are too fed up with having their work deleted to bother with it? --RexxS (talk) 23:50, 24 February 2019 (UTC) Oppose - no matter how many ways these proposals are dressed, I will stubbornly oppose; unused will never be a synonym for unusable (a criterion I would support) and it will never mean its condition is final, and so absolute that every potential for use in the future is also precluded (only its deletion can accomplish that). And, so too is it fact that a template's deletion, after discussion at TfD, does not remotely suggest that discussion itself is not beneficial, or even necessary.
In closing, I'd like to say: I find the proximal nearness of this discussion to its most recent counterpart more than a little disturbing. I hope when it closes, its proponents will accept the consensus achieved (or lack thereof) respect the mandate in its remit, and stifle the inclination to be heard again. These matters are settled, their questions have been thoroughly answered, and enough has been vested already. Moving on is the only course to follow from here, please follow that course!--John Cline (talk) 04:08, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. Mere disuse is a bad reason to delete a template, if for no other reason than per SmokeyJoe and Cryptic. If they're not problematic, keep them, since otherwise you're damaging old revisions for no good reason. Also, per Cryptic's stats, this would involve a very large number of pages, even after you skip the ones that are always supposed to be substituted, the new creations, and the temporary ones. We shouldn't declare such a large number of pages currently speedy-deletable, except after a big community discussion on whether such deletions are appropriate. Look at the way G13 was originally handled; it was much bigger than merely a conversation here. Unless they come out of a big discussion, the only way we should create new speedy criteria is if they cover a class of pages that is rare at the moment because the pages are constantly getting deleted at XFD already. Nyttend (talk) 04:27, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
- Comment (additional to oppose above). Zackmann08 has recently TFD'd hundreds of unused templates. The results seem to indicate to me that, while many are deleted unopposed, clearly not all are deleted, and the deletions are clearly not uncontroversial. So CSD for them is clearly wrong. —Kusma (t·c) 17:33, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose for similar reasons as in this recent MfD of unused templates: Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Unused userbox template. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 22:16, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose: There are enough corner cases that this could be dangerous. What about templates that are uses as preloads only (which aren't subst only, yet have zero transclusions)? What about templates that aren't technically subst only, but which don't have any hidden comment for tracking and have so far only been substed? How would criteria 4 be objectively judged, as any template could be defined as "sometimes unused"? As we've seen at TfD recently, figuring out whether or not a template is actually used is often not srtaightforward enough to be considered as a CSD. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 14:05, 14 March 2019 (UTC) - Oppose: The old discussion already showed problems, it shouldn't have been simply reproposed after that short a time without addressing the issues raised before. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 14:38, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose especially per Kusma and others. Deleting templates makes older revisions extremely difficult to read. Guettarda (talk) 15:02, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- 'Comment note that Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Unused userbox template (and MfD for 250 unusued userbox templates) was closed as "keep", Template:Pollachi–Dindigul branch line, Template:Railway stations in the Borough of Scarborough and Template:Railway stations in Nottinghamshire were both brought to TfD as unused but rather than being deleted the templates were used. Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2019 March 2#Template:Trillium Line route diagram detailed is still open but is likely heading for a keep or no consensus close after being relisted - debate is about whether a template that is linked from article space is "unused". These show that "unused templates" fail the "uncontestable" and "objective" requirements for new criteria. Thryduulf (talk) 10:50, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. Uanfala covered what I was going to. I also agree this is basically forum-shopping since we just went over this in December. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:53, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Please do not archive this until it has been formally closed (I've requested this at WP:ANRFC) so that there is a clear record of consensus about this going forward. Thryduulf (talk) 19:20, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
Extend R2 to portals
- 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.
Two days ago WP:R2 was boldly extended to apply to redirects from the portal namespace. There appears to be some disagreement at least on what exceptions there should be. Could we decide on all that here first? Pinging involved editors: Legacypac, Thryduulf, Tavix. – Uanfala (talk) 19:01, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Mainspace and Portal space are both reader facing content spaces. Draft space is for stuff that is not intended for readers. Links between Mainspace and Portal space and vice versa are fine but if a portal is draftified it is exactly like draftifying an article so the redirect should be immediately deleted. When there were 1700 mostly dead portals this was not frequent problem but now we have 4500 new automated portals that are being examined and I expect a bunch will be placed in some Draft holding pen out of view while consideration of their future is done. Legacypac (talk) 19:09, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Legacypac, it is not clear that this is a very common occurrence that would require it to be covered by CSD. Also, draft portals can just be left in portal space. If they are not linked to from any articles or other portals, there is no fundamental problem with keeping unfinished portals around in portal space. The mass-produced automatic portals should be deleted, not draftified. Classic portals with many subpages simply can't be moved around in any meaningful way, so instead of being draftified, they should just be tagged with some template that tells any accidental readers that it is unfinished and that they should go read something else. —Kusma (t·c) 19:18, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Wait until Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Thousands of Portals is resolved. I don't see the point in draftifying portals if they are going to be deleted anyway. -- Tavix (talk) 19:13, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) Main → Portal and Portal → Main redirects should not be speedily deleted under R2 as they are both reader-facing namespaces with encyclopaedic content. Such redirects will not always be optimal but that is a matter that should be discussed at RfD as deletion is not going to be the best action for all of them. This means that, if R2 applies to portals at all (which I have no strong opinions about) then the main namespace needs to be listed as an exception. Thryduulf (talk) 19:14, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- agreed 100% with Thryduulf's refinement. I disagree with waiting because the nuclear option is not going to delete all portals, only many portals. There are a bunch of legacy portals that may well be draftified and dealt with seperately. I actually tagged a portal=>Draft redirect R2 but it did not display properly, then I tagged it housekeeping with a not it was R2 and that was accepted. I don't see this change as an expansion, more a refinement of wording based on the principle of the CSD. Legacypac (talk) 19:19, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Then how about a separate bullet point for R2 that includes any other namespace to draft, so we don't get a bunch of potentially-confusing exceptions and includes anything that has been draftified (eg: templates, books). -- Tavix (talk) 19:24, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Good idea. Add the words "Also any redirect to Draft namespace, except from user namespace." This way anything draftified from any random spot (like I saw someone post a draft as a category recently) can be moved and the redirect nuked. Legacypac (talk) 19:32, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Tavix, the question is why we would want to move pages from non-mainspace to draft anyway. I am unconvinced that this is a good idea, as many namespaces have their own special features. Draft books should be in Book space, just as draft TimedTexts should be in TimedText namespace. —Kusma (t·c) 19:33, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Then how about a separate bullet point for R2 that includes any other namespace to draft, so we don't get a bunch of potentially-confusing exceptions and includes anything that has been draftified (eg: templates, books). -- Tavix (talk) 19:24, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- agreed 100% with Thryduulf's refinement. I disagree with waiting because the nuclear option is not going to delete all portals, only many portals. There are a bunch of legacy portals that may well be draftified and dealt with seperately. I actually tagged a portal=>Draft redirect R2 but it did not display properly, then I tagged it housekeeping with a not it was R2 and that was accepted. I don't see this change as an expansion, more a refinement of wording based on the principle of the CSD. Legacypac (talk) 19:19, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
The "special features" argument just convinced me no Portal should be in Draftspace. It breaks them anyway. Can you make that point at AN against the idea of sending Portals to Draftfor more work? Legacypac (talk) 19:58, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Legacypac, done. One problem with the current portals discussion is that it is so fragmented... but the AN discussion should fix the main issue soon. —Kusma (t·c) 20:20, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Point of order - I'm not following the discussion this was forked from so I don't really get what's happening, but the redirect criteria apply to redirects in any namespace, including portal redirects. If the proposal is to apply the R criteria to portals themselves, then oppose, R criteria are for redirects. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 16:31, 21 March 2019 (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.
Provide for CSD criterion X3: Mass-created portals
- 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.
Administrator note: This proposal is being advertised at WP:VPP and WP:CD, and it has been requested that it stay open for at least 30 days. ~Swarm~ {talk} 05:14, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
I am entering and numbering this proposal in order to get it into the record, but am requesting that action on it be deferred until the current round of MFDs are decided.
As per User:UnitedStatesian, Create Criteria for Speedy Deletion criterion X3, for portals created by User:The Transhumanist between April 2018 and March 2019. Tagging the portals for speedy deletion will provide the notice to users of the portals, if there are any users of the portals. I recommend that instructions to administrators include a request to wait 24 hours before deleting a portal. This is a compromise between the usual 1 to 4 hours for speedy deletion and 7 days for XFD. The availability of Twinkle for one-click tagging will make it easy to tag the pages, while notifying the users (if there are any). Robert McClenon (talk) 04:21, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- This proposal should be posted in a wider venue, such as WP:VPR or WP:MFD. Many of those portals have been in place for months, making WP:AN too narrow a venue for them. CSD notices wouldn't be placed until after the discussion is over, and therefore would not serve to notify the users of those portals of the discussion. A notice to the discussion of this proposal, since it is a deletion discussion, should be placed on each of the portals, to allow their readers to participate in the discussion. The current round of MfDs are not a random sampling of the portals that were created, and therefore are not necessarily representative of the set. The portals themselves vary in many ways, including scope, the amount of time they've been accessed by readers, quality, number of features, picture support, volume of content, amount of work that went into them, number of editors who worked on them, length, readership, etc. — The Transhumanist 07:09, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- How would you suggest to get a representative sample? Legacypac (talk) 07:20, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thank you for asking. That would be difficult now, since there are already a bunch of portals nominated for MfD. If those were included, then the sample would already be skewed. I expect a truly random sample would reveal that some portals are worth keeping and others are not. A more important question would be "How would we find the portals worth keeping? Which is very similar to the question "what should the creation criteria for portals be?", the very thing they are discussing at the portal guidelines page right now. Many of these portals may qualify under the guideline that is finally arrived upon there. For example, they are discussing scope. There are portals of subjects that fall within Vital articles Level 2, 3, 4, and 5, and there are many portals of subjects of similar scope to the subjects at those levels. And many of the portals had extra work put into them, and who knows how many had contributions by other editors besides me. Another factor is, that the quality of the navigation templates the portals are powered by differs, and some of the portals are powered by other source types, such as lists. Some have hand-crafted lists, as there are multiple slideshow templates available, one of which accepts specific article names as parameters. Another way to do that is provide a manual list in the subtopics section and power the slideshow from that. Some of the portals are of a different design than the standard base template. Some are very well focused, contextually, while others are not. For example, some of the portals have multiple excerpt slideshows to provide additional context. — The Transhumanist 07:46, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- How would you suggest to get a representative sample? Legacypac (talk) 07:20, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support in principle. Looking at the existing MFD discussions, TTH seems determined to drag and wikilawyer as much as possible to try to derail the discussions, even for blatantly and indefensibly inappropriate microportals like those discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods; it's not a good use of anyone's time to go through the same timesink 5000+ times. (The cynic in me says that a speedy criterion wouldn't work as while the creators wouldn't be able to decline the templates themselves, TTH and Dreamy Jazz would probably just follow the tagger around removing the speedy templates from each other's creations.) In practice, it would probably be more efficient to do what we did with Neelix and have a streamlined MFD nomination process, in which "created by TTH" is considered sufficient grounds for deletion at MFD and they default to delete unless someone can make a strong argument for keep. MFD is less gameable and also gives a space for people to defend them in those rare cases where they're actually worth keeping. (Every time I look, I find that the flood of inane and pointless TTH portals has spread further than I thought; shipping containers portal, anyone?) ‑ Iridescent 08:26, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Comment – Another option would be to move these to draft space. The templates and lua modules could be modified so that the portals render right in that namespace (I wish I would have thought of this before). Being in draft space would give time to fix their various problems (keeping in mind that micro-scope is not fixable), and identify the ones worth keeping. I would agree not to move any of them personally, and would propose/request such moves after the new creation criteria guidelines for portals are settled upon. I would also be willing to tag those that did not meet those guidelines with CSD (as creator), saving Legacypac the trouble of nominating them at MfD (he mentioned somewhere that he thought I should help clean up this "mess"). Another benefit of this strategy is that if any of them sit in draft space too long without further development, they automatically become subject to deletion per the draft space guidelines, and those that reach that age without any edits can be deleted en masse without time-consuming effort-wasting MfD discussions. This course of action would of course need the participation of some lua programmers to add the necessary functionality to the modules, which would be a good upgrade for those, to allow for portal drafts to be created in the future. — The Transhumanist 09:15, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- P.S. @Iridescent and Legacypac: (pinging) — The Transhumanist 09:28, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Absolutely not. The problem is that hundreds of portals on obscure topics makes an unmaintainable mess. Passing it to another namespace does not solve the problem which is that the portals are not helpful and are not maintainable. Automated creation of outlines/portals/anything must stop. Johnuniq (talk) 09:36, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- No. I tried moving one broken portal to Draft as a test and it broke even more stuff. Not worth the effort to modify everything for draft space and then let the same little group of editors release them willy nilly back into portal space. Since this group ignored their own Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines "portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers." why should anyone trust them to follow stricter guidelines? Legacypac (talk) 09:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Definitely not. What possible benefit would there be to cluttering up another namespace with ≈5000 pages that will never serve any useful purpose? If you want to goof around with wikicode, nobody's stopping you installing your own copy of Mediawiki; we're not your personal test site. ‑ Iridescent 15:38, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- As a general rule, Portal pages should not be draftified. In fact, we should not usually move anything not designed to be an article to draft space. Draft portals should be in portal space, just like draft books should be in book space and draft templates in template space (pages with subpages are a pain to move, and many namespaces have special features that suggest keeping drafts in the same space if possible). If a portal is not ready for viewing by the general public, tag it with a relevant maintenance template and make sure it is not linked to from mainspace or from other portal pages.
- In the case at hand, TT's mass created portals do not seem like they will all be soon made ready for wider consumption, so deleting them seems the better option. —Kusma (t·c) 20:15, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support nuking from orbit: It's the only way to be sure. ——SerialNumber54129 09:32, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- How is this the "only way" to be "sure"? What about actually viewing the portals themselves, as opposed to mass deleting them all sight unseen? North America1000 03:08, 26 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support enough with the wikilawyering and obstruction. This proposal is a little too narrow though - TTH created 3500+ automated portals but others in his little team created around 1000 more. I just grouped some by User:Dreamy Jazz into Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion#US_County_Portals Legacypac (talk) 09:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support These useless broken portals have to go. CoolSkittle (talk) 14:54, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Could you provide any evidence that all of the portals are "broken"? Many of them that I have viewed and used are fully functional, and not broken at all. North America1000 03:09, 26 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support, too many, too quickly, not enough thought went into their creation. Nuke these, revert other portals that were better before TTH "restarted" them. Automation should help with portal maintenance, not replace portal maintenance or move the maintenance burden to navboxes or other places. —Kusma (t·c) 14:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support, sensible and fair way to deal with these. Johnbod (talk) 16:53, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support: MFD could never handle the overwhelming amount of unnecessary and unsustainable portals, considering the magnitude of TTH's portal creation entering the thousands. –eggofreasontalk 20:12, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support nuking. Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:30, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Transcluded to Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 20:31, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support mass creation of portals on these topics isn't appropriate without wider discussion, and the automated/semi-automated method used to create them doesn't produce high quality output. Portal:Sierra County, California, for example, is about a county with a population of 3,240, and consists of the lead of the main article, a few random contextless images grabbed from that article (mostly maps or logos) and portal boilerplate. Cleaning these up will require a temporary speedy deletion criterion, I don't think MfD could handle the load. Hut 8.5 22:25, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support as proposer. I had already suggested deferring, but am satisfied that it is going ahead to mass-delete. I will add that, after a consensus is reached on whether and how to use portals, any that were deleted and are needed are available at Requests for Undeletion. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:01, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- This mass page creation went against WP:MEATBOT and at least the spirit of WP:MASSCREATION if not the letter. An appropriate remedy for automated script and semi-automated creation is speedy deletion. Did you know they were driving for 10,000 portals at a rapid pace? It's here [1] Legacypac (talk) 04:44, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose any and all notions of creating new CSD criteria at any drama board. Discussions here are too rushed, too emotive, too reactionary. Use WT:CSD. Consider using a WT:CSD subpage RfC. Do not attempt to mandate the detail of policy from a drama board. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:52, 4 March 2019 (UTC) Transclusion is not good enough. The discussion needs to be searchable from WT:CSD, and the specifics of any and all new criteria need to address the Criteria for a new CSD criterion. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:55, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- Many editors at the Village Pump discussion, the Tban discussion above, and at MfDs also supported this. We do not need to fragment this discussion further. Legacypac (talk) 05:12, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- Proposal 1 will make this Proposal 4 moot. This Proposal 4 is not a proper CSD implementation. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:41, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- @SmokeyJoe: Proposal 1 is about stopping TTH from creating new portals. Proposal 4 is about deleting those he created in the last couple of months. How is P1 going to make P4 moot? —Kusma (t·c) 10:19, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- List them all in an MfD, if they must all be deleted. A CSD that enables self appointed decision makes for which should go and which might be ok, is inferior to MfD. MfD can handle a list of pages. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:24, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- If you want them all at MfD stop objecting to the listing of specific Portals at MfD. Legacypac (talk) 01:34, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- No. Some of the Portals I would support for deletion, and others definitely no. This makes the proposal for a CSD invalid. It fails the CSD new criterion criteria. The proposal is neither Objective or Uncontestable. It would pick up a lot of portals that should not be deleted. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:44, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- If you want them all at MfD stop objecting to the listing of specific Portals at MfD. Legacypac (talk) 01:34, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- List them all in an MfD, if they must all be deleted. A CSD that enables self appointed decision makes for which should go and which might be ok, is inferior to MfD. MfD can handle a list of pages. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:24, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- @SmokeyJoe: Proposal 1 is about stopping TTH from creating new portals. Proposal 4 is about deleting those he created in the last couple of months. How is P1 going to make P4 moot? —Kusma (t·c) 10:19, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- Proposal 1 will make this Proposal 4 moot. This Proposal 4 is not a proper CSD implementation. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:41, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- Many editors at the Village Pump discussion, the Tban discussion above, and at MfDs also supported this. We do not need to fragment this discussion further. Legacypac (talk) 05:12, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support. No care at all went into these portals, they are mindless creations with loads of errors and little actual benefit for our readers. I would also support the restoration of all pre-existing portals to the pre-transhumanist version, the new "single page" version may require less maintenance, but is way too often clearly inferior (see e.g. this, which is more like vandalism than actual improvement, and has been reversed since). Fram (talk) 10:31, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- Comment. Anyone restoring old multi-subpage portals should bear in mind that they will require maintenance. If there is no-one willing to maintain them, they, too are likely to be MfDed. No old-style portal with a willing and active maintainer has been converted as far as I know, so I suggest that anyone restoring them should be willing to maintain them. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 16:47, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- No. Converting an unmaintained but well-designed portal into an unmaintained semi-automated worse portal is not the way forward. Any claims that the new portals are maintained or don't need maintaining is false, as the many problematic new portals demonstrate. Fram (talk) 17:00, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- Portal:Germany was converted (more than once) although it has maintainers. To make sure your portal isn't "improved", you need to put a specific template on the page, which isn't very obvious. There are old-style multi page portals that require only minimal maintenance, and where the conversion removed specific features. All those should be reverted, also to protect the subpages from overzealous deleters (the worst is deleting the /box-footer subpages; this breaks all old revisions by removing a necessary closing div). —Kusma (t·c) 17:21, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose A mass-deletion of the new generation portals. Listing them at MfD will be sufficient for any that do not meet the criteria laid out in the portal guidelines (which are still under discussion). It makes little sense to remove the whole batch because some of them are problematic. They would need to be properly triaged to ensure the good ones are not caught in the process. I would of course, help with said triage. We're not trying to create more work for the community, just preserve good content. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 23:47, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
- Comment - You created more work for the community by creating thousands of portals, some of which do not work, and with no intention to maintain them. I see no evidence that this effort created good content that needs to be preserved. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:17, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
- There is no new content in the automated portals, it's all poorly repackaged bits of existing content. Legacypac (talk) 04:40, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
- Strong oppose per wumbolo below: criterion P2 already covers a number of these, the rest should be discussed. I still stand by my original comment which follows this addition. Wugapodes [thɑk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɹɪbz] 22:37, 13 March 2019 (UTC) Original comment: Weak oppose on principle. CSD is a necessary evil, and I don't think we should be hasty to add another criterion that skips our usual consensus process. I'm fine with nuking these portals and not opposed to deleting them, any diamonds in the rough will prove their worth by being created again, but I would prefer one big MfD with the rationale "created by The Transhumanist" which allows proper determination of consensus and gives those who want to spend their time triaging a chance to do so. Wugapodes [thɑk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɹɪbz] 08:03, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
- Building multipage MfDs like Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods is time consuming and tedious. A temporary CSD is rhe way to go. Consensus against this mess of new portals has already been established at VP, AN and in the test MfDs. Legacypac (talk) 17:20, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support due to the massive amount of time it would take to put the ~4500 portals through MfD. MfD has been swamped with portal deletion requests from some time ago, and I can't see all this stuff removed via MfD in the foreseeable future (as someone said earlier, there is still a lot of Outlines left over from one of TTH's previous projects, so who knows how long it would take for MfD to delete all of this). This CSD X3 would streamline the process, and it would probably only take a few days to a week. It would help, as also mentioned earlier, to extend the criterion to the other users involved in the mass creation of these portals. Rlin8 (☎·✎·📧) 03:31, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- MfD has never had an issue to nominations of list of pages. 4500 separate MfD nominations would be absurd, but a list would be OK. If each is new, and has a single author, notifications of the author will be trivial. A CSD proposal shortcuts a discussion of the merits of the new portals, and pre-supposes deletion to be necessary, contrary to deletion policy. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:01, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- TTH demands we place notification on every portal. We can skip notifying him, but building even 20 page MfD's is very time consuming. How do you propose to discuss 4500 or even 100 assorted portals at a time? These took 3 min to make - but far more than 3 min to list, tag, discuss and vote, then delete - when you add up all the time required from various editors and Admins. The test MfDs are sufficent and the very strong opposition to this automated portal project justifies this temporary CSD. Legacypac (talk) 04:16, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- "TTH demands we place notification on every portal"? Legacypac, I have missed that post by him. If he did that, it needs to be repudiated. If these are new pages, and he is the only author, it is sufficient to notify him once. If all 4500 are essentially variations on the same thing, as long as the full set is defined, and browsable, we can discuss them all together at MfD. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:34, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- User:SmokeyJoe during the Portland Oregon neighborhood MFD I specifically said I was not tagging all the related portals but he insisted I tag here [2] I could not get support in the section above to relax the MfD tagging because others wanted this CSD. During the Delete Portals RFC TTH went all out insisting every portal including the community portal be tagged for deletion - then he did it himself. That brought in all kinds of casual infrequent editors who were mostly against deleting the community portal. (Even though that was Pretty much pulled out of consideration for deletion before the tagging project). That massive tagging derailed the deletion RFC. By making cleanup as hard as possible TTH is making a lot of people want to nuke everything. Legacypac (talk) 06:11, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Legacypac's analysis is erroneous and misleading. The WP:ENDPORTALS RFC was a deletion discussion, and posting a notice on each page up for deletion is required by deletion policy. Note that the Community Portal was only mentioned twice. A portal that was the basis for about 50 oppose votes was the Current Events portal. Neither the Community Portal nor the Current Events portal were exempted in the proposal at any time. If you didn't count those, that left the count at about 150 in support of eliminating portals to about 250 against. — The Transhumanist 07:25, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- @SmokeyJoe: (edit conflict) See the top of this section for the referred to statement, which is not exactly as he quoted. A notice posted at the top of the portals slated by this proposal would be appropriate. Legacypac has been posting notice for his multi-page nominations using the {{mfd}} template, which auto-generates a link to an mfd page of the same title as the page the template is posted on. Rather than following the template's instructions for multiple pages, he's been creating an MfD page for each, and redirecting them to the combined mfd. Then a bot automatically notifies the creator of each page (me), swamping my user talk page with redundant notifications. Thus, Legacypac believes he'll have to create thousands of mfd redirect pages, and that I somehow want 3500+ notifications on my talk page. — The Transhumanist 07:10, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- You want us to manually tag pages for deletion that you used an automated script to create? You flooded Wikipedia with useless pages in violation of WP:MEATBOT but you are worried about having to clean up your talkpage notices? Just create an archiving system for your talkpage like we did for User:Neelix's talkpage. If you don't want notices you could start tagging pages that fail your own guidelines with "delete by author request" instead of commenting on how we will do the cleanup. Legacypac (talk) 08:37, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- TTH, if you don't want so many deletion notices on your talk page, then remember in future not to create thousands of spam pages. Please help with the cleanup, rather than complaining about it.
- @Legacypac: good work MFDing the spam, but it does seem that you are using a somewhat inefficient approach to tagging. Have you tried asking at WP:BOTREQ for help? In the right hands, tools such as AWB make fast work of XfD tagging. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:21, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- You want us to manually tag pages for deletion that you used an automated script to create? You flooded Wikipedia with useless pages in violation of WP:MEATBOT but you are worried about having to clean up your talkpage notices? Just create an archiving system for your talkpage like we did for User:Neelix's talkpage. If you don't want notices you could start tagging pages that fail your own guidelines with "delete by author request" instead of commenting on how we will do the cleanup. Legacypac (talk) 08:37, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- User:SmokeyJoe during the Portland Oregon neighborhood MFD I specifically said I was not tagging all the related portals but he insisted I tag here [2] I could not get support in the section above to relax the MfD tagging because others wanted this CSD. During the Delete Portals RFC TTH went all out insisting every portal including the community portal be tagged for deletion - then he did it himself. That brought in all kinds of casual infrequent editors who were mostly against deleting the community portal. (Even though that was Pretty much pulled out of consideration for deletion before the tagging project). That massive tagging derailed the deletion RFC. By making cleanup as hard as possible TTH is making a lot of people want to nuke everything. Legacypac (talk) 06:11, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- "TTH demands we place notification on every portal"? Legacypac, I have missed that post by him. If he did that, it needs to be repudiated. If these are new pages, and he is the only author, it is sufficient to notify him once. If all 4500 are essentially variations on the same thing, as long as the full set is defined, and browsable, we can discuss them all together at MfD. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:34, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- TTH demands we place notification on every portal. We can skip notifying him, but building even 20 page MfD's is very time consuming. How do you propose to discuss 4500 or even 100 assorted portals at a time? These took 3 min to make - but far more than 3 min to list, tag, discuss and vote, then delete - when you add up all the time required from various editors and Admins. The test MfDs are sufficent and the very strong opposition to this automated portal project justifies this temporary CSD. Legacypac (talk) 04:16, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support whatever course of action that will result in every portal created in this manner being deleted with the minimal of time and effort required. TTH has set up his automated tool, created a massive mess, and left it unattended for others to sort out. It should take less time to clean up this mess than it did to make it, not more. Nuke the lot and if there is anything of value lost then TTH can manually request pages to be restored one at a time at DRV. Fish+Karate 11:19, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support per Fish and karate. RGloucester — ☎ 14:20, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Strong oppose as written. I could support something that explicitly excluded portals which are in use and/or are being developed, but the current proposal to indiscriminately delete everything, including active portals, unless the admin chooses to notify any editors and the ones notified happen to be online in a narrow time frame is significantly overly broad. Thryduulf (talk) 01:54, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support Not that portals are that bad, but I don't think we need portals on smaller subjects. (Portal:Spaghetti when we already have Portal:Pasta? Portal:Nick Jr., anyone?) Some might be worth keeping, but a lot are unneeded and unmaintainable. At least it's not a Neelix case. SemiHypercube 16:57, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
- @SemiHypercube: "Some might be worth keeping" is actually an argument against this proposal. Thryduulf (talk) 12:08, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Thryduulf: Kind of, but that might be a reason not to just mass delete all at once. In the Neelix case there were some redirects that were actually useful, so a separate CSD criterion was used to keep some redirects at the admins' discretion, so this might be a similar case (before you say that contradicts my "it's not a Neelix case" statement, I meant that in terms of what the redirects were about) SemiHypercube 12:23, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- It violates points 1 and 2 of the requirements for CSD criteria: objectivity and unconestability. Unless all the portals covered should be speedily deleted then none of them should be. If you only want to delete some of them then you should be opposing this criterion (just like you should have opposed the subjective Neelix criterion). Thryduulf (talk) 12:34, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- @SemiHypercube: "Some might be worth keeping" is actually an argument against this proposal. Thryduulf (talk) 12:08, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
*Support Only realistic way to deal with these. Johnbod (talk) 01:57, 11 March 2019 (UTC) Duplicate !vote struck. GoldenRing (talk) 10:16, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
- Request the posting of a notice at the top of each of the pages being nominated here for mass deletion, as required by the Deletion Policy. This proposal is currently a gross violation of the deletion policy because it is a discussion to delete 3500+ pages, that have been created over the span of a year, that are presently being viewed hundreds of thousands of times per month (projected to millions of times over the coming year) by readers of Wikipedia. The proposal for mass deletion has been made without the required notice being posted at the top of the pages to be deleted. This is being decided by a handful of editors unbeknownst to the wider community, namely, the readership of the portals to be deleted. It may be that those reading such notices would decide that the portals should be deleted, but the point here is that you are denying them the opportunity to participate in the deletion discussion as required by the deletion policy. — The Transhumanist 21:12, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- Request you stop wasting people's fucking time. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:41, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- He switched back to Outlines Special:Contributions/The_Transhumanist which are another unpopular plague for Wikipedia. The assertion that hundreds of thousands of readers a month are looking at his 3500 portals is fanciful at best and not supported by readership stats. Legacypac (talk) 21:58, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Legacypac, technically he's probably telling the truth. Even obvious drivel like Portal:Coconuts averages around five views per day, thanks to webcrawlers and people who have the articles watchlisted and are wondering "what's this mystery link that's just been spammed onto the article I wrote?"; multiply that by 3500 and you have 500,000 pageviews per month right there. ‑ Iridescent 22:52, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- Comment Neelix created about 50,000 redirects, which were reviewed by the community. The number of portals is an order of magnitude smaller. If X3 is to be introduced, it should involve a similar review process. We should certainly delete portals which have too narrow a scope or are of poor quality and cannot be improved. However, systematic deletion of all portals which qualify for consideration, purely on an ad hominem argument, would be as wrong as semi-automatic creation. Certes (talk) 10:51, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- Absolutely not. Look at the rate these were created [3] sometimes several dozen an hour, and sometimes an average of 12 seconds each. If so little thought went into creation, why make deletion so difficult? The Neelix cleanup took far too long (I was a big part of it) and we deleted the vast majority of those redirects anyway the extra hard way. As far as I could see the editors who insisted we review everything did none of the reviewing. Also, these were created in violation of WP:MEATBOT which is a blockable or at least sanctionable offense Legacypac (talk) 11:04, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- Two wrongs do not make a right - it is much more important that we get the cleanup right than it happens quickly. Whether or not TTH is blocked or otherwise sanctioned is completely irrelevant. While many (maybe even most) of the created portals should be deleted not all of them should be, and this needs human review: see requirement 2 for new CSD criteria at the top of WT:CSD. Thryduulf (talk) 12:07, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Thryduulf, Certes, SmokeyJoe, and Legacypac: Concerning the rate, Legacypac's observation is not accurate. What the edits he is citing do not show, is the method by which the pages were created: they were created in batches, in tabs. Before saving, all the pages/tabs were inspected. For the pages that did not pass muster, such as those that displayed errors (this did not catch all errors, because lua errors can be intermittent or turn up later due to an edit in source material being transcluded), the tabs for those were closed. In a batch of 50, 20 or 30 might survive the cull (though batch sizes varied). Some tabs got additional edits in addition to inspection, to fix errors or remove the sections the errors were in, or further development. After all the tabs in a batch were inspected and the bad ones culled, the remaining ones were saved. That's why the edits' time stamps are so close together. If you look more closely, you'll see the time gap is between the batches rather than the individual page saves. Therefore, WP:MEATBOT was not violated. — The Transhumanist 18:55, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- He claims [4] he created 500 portals in 500 to 1000 minutes. and is using a script Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion#User:The_Transhumanist/QuickPortal.js If this is not MEATBOT we should refind MEATBOT as meaningless. Legacypac (talk) 19:07, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- A minute or two per portal of the new design sounds about right. Note that the script doesn't save pages. It puts them into preview mode, so that the editor can review them and work on them further before clicking on save. — The Transhumanist 19:39, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Legacypac and The Transhumanist: As I said above, the method of creation is irrelevant to this proposal, as is what (if any) sanction is appropriate. Likewise discussions of WP:MEATBOT don't affect this at all. What matters is only that these pages exist but some of them should not, this proposal needs to be rejected or modified such that it deletes only those that need deleting without also deleting those that do not. Thryduulf (talk) 20:42, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- He claims [4] he created 500 portals in 500 to 1000 minutes. and is using a script Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion#User:The_Transhumanist/QuickPortal.js If this is not MEATBOT we should refind MEATBOT as meaningless. Legacypac (talk) 19:07, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- Absolutely not. Look at the rate these were created [3] sometimes several dozen an hour, and sometimes an average of 12 seconds each. If so little thought went into creation, why make deletion so difficult? The Neelix cleanup took far too long (I was a big part of it) and we deleted the vast majority of those redirects anyway the extra hard way. As far as I could see the editors who insisted we review everything did none of the reviewing. Also, these were created in violation of WP:MEATBOT which is a blockable or at least sanctionable offense Legacypac (talk) 11:04, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- Procedural note I have advertised this discussion at WP:VPP and would encourage others to add links where they think interested editors might see. I think this should remain open for 30 days, as it is quite a significant policy change. GoldenRing (talk) 09:24, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support now that the MfDs (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) are closing with strong consensus around delete, it is clear this is the fastest path to improving the encyclopedia (which is what we are here for, remember?) Any argument that 3,500 more portals have to go through MfD is strictly throwing sand in the gears. It is going to be enough manual labor pulling the links to the deleted portals from all the templates and pages they have been added to. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:15, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- That shows that a speedy deletion criterion is possibly warranted for some, but several comments on those discussions - including your own at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Spaghetti - indicate that this proposed criterion is too broad. Thryduulf (talk) 15:33, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- You misunderstand my comment at that MfD: I strongly support that portal's deletion and all the others that would be covered by this proposed criterion. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:37, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- You supported the deletion of Portal:Spaghetti because the topic was covered by Portal:Pasta, even though Portal:Pasta would be deleted under this criterion? That's rather disingenuous at best and very significantly and unnecessary disruptive at worst. Portal:Pasta is an example of a portal that should not be deleted without discussion. Thryduulf (talk) 16:00, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- Again, you misunderstand my reasoning: I was specifically pointing out to another editor that the existence of Portal:Pasta could NOT be a reason to delete Portal:Spaghetti, since in my opinion Portal:Pasta would likely also be deleted. Instead, I think the current Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines provide ample OTHER reasons for deleting both portals (and many, many others, of course). Hope that clarifies. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:55, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- You supported the deletion of Portal:Spaghetti because the topic was covered by Portal:Pasta, even though Portal:Pasta would be deleted under this criterion? That's rather disingenuous at best and very significantly and unnecessary disruptive at worst. Portal:Pasta is an example of a portal that should not be deleted without discussion. Thryduulf (talk) 16:00, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- You misunderstand my comment at that MfD: I strongly support that portal's deletion and all the others that would be covered by this proposed criterion. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:37, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- That shows that a speedy deletion criterion is possibly warranted for some, but several comments on those discussions - including your own at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Spaghetti - indicate that this proposed criterion is too broad. Thryduulf (talk) 15:33, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- Strong oppose and keep all. WP:P2 covers unnecessary portals, and there is no rationale presented other than WP:IDLI to delete a large proportion of all of them, which were all kept after a RfC in 2018. The next time content policies are created at AN by the cabal of admins, I am retiring from Wikipedia. wumbolo ^^^ 16:40, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Wumbolo: Well, if it came to that, take it to WP:RFARB first. Given the past history of WP:FAITACCOMPLI and WP:LOCALCONSENSUS extremism (i.e., WP:FALSECONSENSUS) cases, I have little doubt that ArbCom would agree to take a case about a gaggle of anti-portal people WP:GAMING the consensus-formation process by inventing sweeping policy changes out of their butts in a venue few content editors pay attention to and which is clearly out-of-scope for such a decision, even if it somehow had sufficiently broad input (e.g., via WP:CENT). I'm skeptical any alleged consensus is going to come out of this discussion, anyway. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:33, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support This is a repeat of the Neelix situation. ―Susmuffin Talk 00:01, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Susmuffin: The situation has similarities, but the proposed criterion is not comparable. Criterion X1 applied only to redirects created by Neelix that the reviewing administrator reasonably believed would be snow deleted if discussed at RfD (i.e. they had to evaluate each redirect), this criterion would apply to every portal created by TTH in the timeframe without any other conditions and without the need for anyone to even look at anything other than the date of creation. Thryduulf (talk) 00:13, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Unlike Neelix who created some reasonable redirects along the way, these autogenerated portals are of uniformly low quality. The community has looked at representive samples across a variety of subject areas at MFD and the community has already deleted 143 of the 143 portals nominated at closed MfDs. The yet to be closed MfDs are headed to increasing that number. No one has suggested any alternative deletion criteria for X3. Legacypac (talk) 00:45, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- That nobody has suggested an alternative is irrelevant - it's not up to those who oppose this proposal to fix it, and those who support it are by-and-large ignoring the objections. The MfDs have been selected as a representative sample of those that, after review, are not worth keeping and have been reviewed by MfD participants. This does not demonstrate that deletion without review is appropriate - indeed quite the opposite. Remember there is no deadline, it is significantly more important that we get it right than we do things quickly. Thryduulf (talk) 09:59, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Not particularly similar to the redirect situation that occurred; portals are vastly different in nature and composition from simple redirects. North America1000 03:16, 26 March 2019 (UTC)
- That nobody has suggested an alternative is irrelevant - it's not up to those who oppose this proposal to fix it, and those who support it are by-and-large ignoring the objections. The MfDs have been selected as a representative sample of those that, after review, are not worth keeping and have been reviewed by MfD participants. This does not demonstrate that deletion without review is appropriate - indeed quite the opposite. Remember there is no deadline, it is significantly more important that we get it right than we do things quickly. Thryduulf (talk) 09:59, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Unlike Neelix who created some reasonable redirects along the way, these autogenerated portals are of uniformly low quality. The community has looked at representive samples across a variety of subject areas at MFD and the community has already deleted 143 of the 143 portals nominated at closed MfDs. The yet to be closed MfDs are headed to increasing that number. No one has suggested any alternative deletion criteria for X3. Legacypac (talk) 00:45, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose as unwarranted and dangerous (and circular reasoning). First, we do not modify CSD without a strong community (not admins' star chamber) consensus that an entire class of material is not just categorically unwanted but so unwanted that it should be deleted on sight without any further consideration. It's our most dangerous policy, and a change like this to it should be an RfC matter at WP:VPPOL. In theory, it could be at WT:CSD, except there is not yet any establishment of a consensus against these portals, and VPPOL is where that would get hashed out, since it's a project-wide question of content presentation and navigation (and maintenance, and whether tools can permissibly substitute for some manual maintenance, and ...). The cart is ahead of the horse here; we can't have a speedy deletion criterion without already having a deletion criterion to begin with. I strongly agree with SmokeyJoe:
"Oppose any and all notions of creating new CSD criteria at any drama board. Discussions here are too rushed, too emotive, too reactionary."
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:05, 14 March 2019 (UTC) - Oppose – WP:P2 covers problematic portals just fine. A concerning issue here is that some users herein appear to simply not like portals in general, and so there are several arguments above for mass deletion as per this "I don't like it" rationale. Mass deletion should be a last step, not a first step, and portals should be considered on a case-by-case basis. North America1000 22:22, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- You created some with the same tools. One or two of your creations are now at MfD which is why you are now engaging against this solution. We will consider each of your creations at MfD. Legacypac (talk) 02:34, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- My !vote here is based upon my view of the matter at hand, and as such, it stands. Period. Regarding my portal creations, so what? You come across as having a penchant for scolding content creators on Wikipedia if you don't like the medium that is used. Please consider refraining from doing so, as it is unnecessary, and patronizing. North America1000 01:12, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- You created some with the same tools. One or two of your creations are now at MfD which is why you are now engaging against this solution. We will consider each of your creations at MfD. Legacypac (talk) 02:34, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Northamerica1000: I agree - for example, I actually welcome the creation of Portal:Economics because I think econ should be established as distinct from business as in Portal:Business and economics. Qzekrom 💬 theythem 02:20, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose - this CSD seems have to no more objective criteria than "shoot unless someone defends it". For this to be justified, they'd have to explain how no-one reacting within 24 hours was sufficient reasoning. As far as the initial proposal included, it didn't contain any acceptable objective criteria for something warranting deletion on quality grounds. Far worse, it didn't contain suitable justification (whether popularity/quality) for these portals to impose such a major hindrance to Wikipedia as to warrant a process with as few eyes (per consideration) as CSD. The nominator might have had more luck with a PortalPROD mechanism. Nosebagbear (talk) 23:09, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- This CSD exactly meets each criteria for CSD's at the WP:CSD page. It is clear. It is easy to decide if the page meets the CSD. We ran 145 of these portals through MfD already and none survived. Numerous editors suggested this CSD in the Village Pump discussion. These mass created portals universally have the same flaws. Therefore this oppose rational is flawed. Legacypac (talk) 02:34, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support: will allow to quickly manage the auto-created portals of zero utility. --K.e.coffman (talk) 02:23, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support enthusiastically. Taking all these portals through MFD would be a massive drain on community resources. TTH created these portals at sustained speeds of up to 40 per hour, so even the time taken to apply a CSD tag and assess it 24 hours later will require more editorial time than TTH took to create them. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:23, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Strong oppose - There are good quality portals that will be excluded, few maybe, but deserve to remain. For example Portal: Cities,
Portal: ArchitecturePortal:Sculpture.Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:40, 15 March 2019 (UTC)- @Guilherme Burn, maybe those are worth keeping. Or maybe not. But even if they are good, they are not worth the price of the community committing huge amounts of time to individually debating every one of the thousands of useless portals which members of the portal project have spewed out over the last year (often as drive by creations, and which project members have then piled into MFDs to keep.
- If the Portals Project had exercised discretion so far, then we would be in a very different place. But it's utterly outraegous to ask the community to devote more time to assessing this spam than the Portal Project put into creating them. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:10, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Could these portals be marked to be spared?Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:03, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Guilherme Burn: not according to the proposal as written. The only chance of saving is if an admin chooses to notify and wait 24 hours and somebody objects within those 24 hours and someone spots that CSD has been declined previously if it gets renominated. Thryduulf (talk) 14:01, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Guilherme Burn: Portal:Cities is totally moribund and unread, and has never had a single participant. Portal:Architecture dates from 2005 and wasn't created by TTH or this tag-team, so wouldn't be deleted regardless (although I imagine the enormous wall of pointless links which TTH's bot dumped onto the page a couple of months ago would be reverted). ‑ Iridescent 14:08, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Iridescent and BrownHairedGirl:One portal that does not meet Mfd criteria is enough for me to keep my opinion. Portal:Cities Although poor visualized is an important and good quality portal and the Portal:Sculpture (erroneously I quoted another portal) as well.Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:20, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Guilherme Burn: please can you clarify that statement that
One portal that does not meet Mfd criteria is enough for me to keep
.- Are you saying that you are willing to personally scrutinise a few thousand drive-by Portals at MfD in order to find the one which should be kept? Or do you want others to do that work?
- TTH as made it very clear that these portals took on average between one and two minutes each to create ([5]
Have you tried creating 500 portals? It is rather repetitious/tedious/time-consuming (from 500 to 1000 minutes)
). So many multiples of that-one-to-two minutes per portal do you think it is fair to ask the community to spend scrutinisng them? And how much of that time are you prepared to give? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:12, 20 March 2019 (UTC)So many multiples of that-one-to-two minutes per portal do you think it is fair to ask the community to spend scrutinisng them?
Yes. The community also failed to set criteria for creating portals. What is the difference of Portal: Lady Gaga to Portal: ABBA? For me both should be excluded. If the community not had problems to create a portal for a unique singer, why now have problems with someone who has decided to create portals for lot of singers? And to be honest I do not think so much work like that, Mfd can be executed in blocks excluding several portals at the same time.Guilherme Burn (talk) 17:11, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Guilherme Burn: please can you clarify that statement that
- @Iridescent and BrownHairedGirl:One portal that does not meet Mfd criteria is enough for me to keep my opinion. Portal:Cities Although poor visualized is an important and good quality portal and the Portal:Sculpture (erroneously I quoted another portal) as well.Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:20, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Could these portals be marked to be spared?Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:03, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- If the Portals Project had exercised discretion so far, then we would be in a very different place. But it's utterly outraegous to ask the community to devote more time to assessing this spam than the Portal Project put into creating them. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:10, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per SmokeyJoe et al. Completely unnecessary to override already existing procedure. Paine Ellsworth, ed. put'r there 17:12, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Paine Ellsworth: the administrative work of trawling through several thousand drive-by-created micro-portals is huge. Cleaning up this flood of portalspam through MFD requires a huge amount of editorial time, vastly more than was involved in creating the spam.
- If you think that existing procedure is fine, why aren't you devoting large hunks of your time to doing the cleanup by the laborious procedure you defend? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:33, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Because...? I don't know, I guess I think this whole thing is rather more of a knee-jerk reaction than a brainy, measured response. Sure I've done my share of big, teejus jobs for the project and plan to continue (on my terms). I have a lot of respect for editors like yourself and TTH who've been lifting this project out of the primal soup of its beginnings even longer than I have (I went over ten in January, or was it Feb? whatever) and I'm tired of seeing good, solid editors get reamed for their work and retire, just leave or get banned. Don't think it can't happen to you, because as good as you are, neither you nor the rest of us are immune to the gang-up-on-em mentality that turns justice into vengeance 'round here. Think you should also know if you don't already that I'm about 95 farts Wikignome and 5 parts other, and it takes a lot less for us to think we're being badgered and handled. I voted correctly for me and my perceptions, and I don't expect either of us will change this unwise world one iota if you vote you and yours! WTF ever happened to forgiveness? REspectfully, Paine Ellsworth, ed. put'r there 13:28, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Paine Ellsworth: Thank you for adding the words that I dared not write in case I was next against the wall. Certes (talk) 16:31, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Paine Ellsworth and Certes: I genuinely don't in any way doubt the good faith of either of you.
- But it seems to me that the unintended effect of what you are both saying is something like "I am not making any effort to assist the cleanup of this mass portalspam, but I will take the effort to oppose measures which reduce the huge burden on those who are actually doing that necessary cleanup work".
- As I say, I do not believe that is what either of you intend. But all I see from either of you is opposition to any restraint on the portalspammer, and opposition to anything which would assist the cleanup. I respect the fine principles from which you two start, but I urge you to consider the effects on the community both of not easing the cleanup burden and of continuing to describe the likes of TTH in positive terms. Look for example at my post in a thread above about the #Lack_of_good_faith_from_User:The_Transhumanist, and at Iridiscent's observation above that of TTH's previous history of spamming useless pages.
- As to
lifting this project out of the primal soup of its beginnings
... that's an extraordinary way to describe TTH's spamming of hundreds, if not thousands, of useless, unfinished micro-portals. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:53, 16 March 2019 (UTC)- I am not making any effort to assist with mass deletions, beyond !voting to delete the clearer cases. We already have enough enthusiasts working in that department. Until recently, I had been adjusting individual portals and enhancing the modules behind them to improve quality, but I slowed down when it became obvious that my contributions in that area will be deleted. Certes (talk) 00:19, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- So that's as I feared, @Certes: members of that WikiProject are leaving it to others to clean up the mess created by the WikiProject and its members.
- That only reinforces my impression of a collectively irresponsible project, which doesn't restrain or even actively discourage portalspam, doesn't try to identify it, and doesn't assist in its cleanup.
- That's a marked contrast with well-run projects. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:06, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- To BHG: not a surprising perspective, possibly a hasty generalization, however that's not your worst move. Your worst move is to consider "mass deletions" of what you deem "portalspam" as better than the "mass creations" of portals. Who's really to say? As an editor mentions below, "...these portals are doing no harm so great that they can be deleted without due process." So maybe you're wrong about those mass deletions that portray some portals as WMDs instead of the harmless windows into Wikipedia that they were meant to be? No matter, at present you are part of the strong throng. If you're right, you're right. But what if you and the strong throng are wrong? May things continue to go well with you! Paine Ellsworth, ed. put'r there 07:01, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- I am not making any effort to assist with mass deletions, beyond !voting to delete the clearer cases. We already have enough enthusiasts working in that department. Until recently, I had been adjusting individual portals and enhancing the modules behind them to improve quality, but I slowed down when it became obvious that my contributions in that area will be deleted. Certes (talk) 00:19, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- If you think that existing procedure is fine, why aren't you devoting large hunks of your time to doing the cleanup by the laborious procedure you defend? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:33, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support and also apply it to those created by Northamerica1000, who has made such useless portals as Portal:Strawberries and Portal:Waffles. Reywas92Talk 08:26, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Reywas92: Northamerica1000 has created only 70 pages in the portal namespace (excluding redirects) in the relevant timeperiod. In no conceivable scenario does that justify a speedy deletion criterion. Thryduulf (talk) 11:58, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support per F&K (whatever course of action that will result in every portal created in this manner being deleted with the minimal of time and effort required) and SN (nuke from orbit). I'll be honest I don't know enough to know whether it should be a X3 or a P2 or a single MfD list with 4,500 entries... but it should not need to involve manually tagging pages that were created by a bot or otherwise spending any real time figuring out which should be kept and which should not be kept. Delete them all. If editors feel like this portal or that portal should be kept, let them make the case for undeletion afterwards which can be examined on a case-by-case basis. (If that process is followed, it goes without saying that the portal creator should be banned from making any such undeletion requests.) Leviv ich 17:25, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- How are we supposed to work out what is worth undeleting, short of downloading all portals in advance lest they be deleted? Certes (talk)
- If an editor is not aware of a portal existing, then that editor shouldn't be asking for it to be kept. If there are particular portals that editors know they want saved, then they should have an opportunity to request that it be saved. But there should be no one-by-one examination of thousands and thousands of portals created by one user using semi-automatic methods. Leviv ich 19:39, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Kill them all and let God sort them out is very much not the way Wikipedia works and is very much not the way it should work. Why should the review be restricted to administrators (as your proposal would require)? Why is it preferable to significantly harm the encyclopaedia by deleting good portals than to do the job properly and delete only those that actually need deleting (which are doing significantly less harm by existing than deleting good ones would cause)? Thryduulf (talk) 18:06, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- So let me create several thousand pages semi-automatically, and then I'll put it to you to go through them one by one and tell me which should be deleted and why? I don't think that's how it should work. It should work in reverse. The default should be delete them all, with some process for allowing people to request that particular portals not be deleted. BTW, when I say "all portals" I mean all portals covered by this proposal, not all portals that exist on Wikipedia. Leviv ich 19:39, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- If an editor created several thousand pages semi-automatically, the correct sequence of events is to analyse a representative sample to determine whether consensus is that they are (a) all good, (b) mostly good, (c) all bad, (d) mostly bad, or (e) a mixture. If (a) then no action is necessary, if (b) then individual deletion nominations are the correct response. If (c) then a CSD criterion to remove all of them is appropriate, if (d) or (e) then a CSD affectingly only the bad ones should be explored. In this the situation is somewhere between (d) and (e) depending on your point of view, but this proposal is treating them as (c). As I've said several times, I'm not opposed to a criterion proposed (in the right place) that caught only the bad ones and allowed for objections - that is not this proposal. This situation is frequently compared to Neelix, but the proposal is very different - this one: All pages created between Time A and Time B, unless anyone objects to the optional tagging within 24 hours. Neelix: All pages created between Time A and Time B that would be snow deleted if nominated at RfD, retargetting would not lead to a useful redirect and no other editor has materially edited the redirect. Do you now understand the fundamental difference? Also remember that pages can be tagged by bot. Thryduulf (talk) 20:56, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Yes. We also need to clarify one important detail of the proposal: would an editor be required to look at the portal before applying CSD, or is there an assumption that everything created by this editor in that time period is automatically rubbish and does not deserve assessment? Certes (talk) 22:29, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- If a human being didn't spend a lot of time making a page, then human beings should not spend much time deciding whether to keep it. I put it to you again: suppose tomorrow I create 5,000 new pages and ask you to go through them and decide which to keep and which to delete. That would be insane; this is a website of volunteers; my doing such a thing would be disruptive. It would make work for others. Nobody reading this thinks it would be a good idea for me to do such a thing. Yet this is what is essentially being asked of us. Insofar as I have a !vote, I !vote no. Delete them all. They are all bad. Any that are good can be recreated as easily as they were created in the first place. Letting people flag keepers in one way or another is a perfectly reasonable way to prevent the baby from being thrown out with the bathwater. But yes, my starting point is that all of them should be deleted because none of them should have been made in the first place, and they do not have content value. Some portals are the product of careful creation and extensive work, but not 5,000 or however-many automatically created by one editor. The quantum portal idea is a much better idea, anyway. Leviv ich 02:38, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- I've alreadyanswered this immediately above, but as you apparently don't like the answer I'll respond again. If you create 5000 new pages in good faith (which TTH did), then the correct response is for others to go through and look at a representative sample, then gain a consensus about whether they are all bad, mostly bad, a mixture, mostly good or all good. This has been done with TTH's portals and while you may think they are all bad that is not the consensus view, especially as others have taken over some and either have improved them or are working on improving them. This means that it is important that only the bad ones are deleted meaning any proposal (such as this one) to delete all of them is overbroad and needs to be opposed. Thryduulf (talk) 10:03, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- This statement by Thryduulf is incorrect on many levels. Who has taken over and improved any of his creations? Where is the concensus view that they are not all bad when so far zero of his creations have been kept at MfDs. Where is the proof any of this was in good faith when he admits several sections down that no one (including him) has followed WP:POG Legacypac (talk) 10:38, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Are you even reading the comments made by those who disagree with you because I'm not seeing evidence of it, especially when it comes to the MfDs (to reiterate, a reviewed selection of the worst pages being deleted by consensus but not unanimously in all cases does not provide evidence of the need for deletion of all of them without possibility of review). Thryduulf (talk) 16:36, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- This statement by Thryduulf is incorrect on many levels. Who has taken over and improved any of his creations? Where is the concensus view that they are not all bad when so far zero of his creations have been kept at MfDs. Where is the proof any of this was in good faith when he admits several sections down that no one (including him) has followed WP:POG Legacypac (talk) 10:38, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thryduulf, so I spend less than 1 minute per page creating 5,000 pages; you and others spend–what, an hour, cumulatively, at least?–per page to analyze it, discuss it, vote it, close it, and delete it. I spend 5,000 minutes; the community spends 5,000 hours. With all due respect I am flabbergasted to hear such a high-ranked Wikipedian express the view that this is OK or preferred. Even with your representative sample approach, say it's 100 portals that are looked at, that's still 100 hours of labor forced upon volunteers. In my opinion, no one should be allowed to make 5,000 pages without going through something like a BAG process to seek community approval. There was once a time, years ago, when it made sense to, for example, automatically create a stub for every known city and town in the world. I believe that time has long since passed; there are not 5,000 pages that can be created automatically that we need to have that we do not already have (IMO). And as for consensus, if they're not being kept at MfD, the consensus is clear. Those portals that people maintain manually are the same ones that can be flagged as exceptions to a mass-deletion. So I feel like we're on the same page about consensus, but I'm saying the consensus to keep a particular portal can be effectuated by allowing people to flag them as exceptions to mass deletion, whereas you seem to be suggesting: let's get together and spend an hour per portal to decide if it should be kept, even though nobody spent anywhere near that time creating it in the first place. If that's where we are, we'll have to agree to disagree, because I fundamentally don't believe these portals are worth a one-by-one analysis, and I believe the representative sample approach you advocate has been done and has led to the conclusion that these are worth mass deleting with exceptions. I guess that's for a closer to make the ultimate decision about, but for my part, from uninvolved editors, I'm seeing a lot more support than oppose for mass deletion. Leviv ich 14:42, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Levivich: If you're just going to ignore all the explanations I give in response to you (twice) and all the explanations elsewhere from me and others about why a reviewed selection of the worst being deleted (and not unanimously in all cases) is not evidence of the need for all of them to be deleted without possibility of review by others then it is clear we will never agree. Fortunately, per WP:VOLUNTEER, nobody is being forced to do anything they don't want to do - including you - and it's really disappointing that someone as experienced as you feels the need to prevent that work being done by others just because you don't want to. Perhaps between now and the time this is closed those in support of this overbroad proposal will actually choose to address the points in opposition but unless they do the only possible outcomes are no consensus or consensus against. Thryduulf (talk) 16:36, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thryduulf, I heard you say: pick a representative sample and decide if they're all bad, some bad, etc. As I understand it, a representative sample has been sent to MfD with consensus to delete almost all of them, if not all of them (I'm not sure if lists I've seen are complete). Then you say that just because the sample is all-delete doesn't mean the whole category is all-delete. I infer you think the sample is not well-chosen? By TTH's admission there are like 4,500–5,000 portals, and a tiny tiny percentage of those are being manually maintained–like less than 5%. Are we on the same page about the facts so far? If so, where do you see consensus other than "delete 95% of these things"? Why can't we tag the 100 that are manually maintained and delete the remaining 4,500? I am reading what you're writing, but I am not understanding it. Leviv ich 16:44, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Levivich: If you're just going to ignore all the explanations I give in response to you (twice) and all the explanations elsewhere from me and others about why a reviewed selection of the worst being deleted (and not unanimously in all cases) is not evidence of the need for all of them to be deleted without possibility of review by others then it is clear we will never agree. Fortunately, per WP:VOLUNTEER, nobody is being forced to do anything they don't want to do - including you - and it's really disappointing that someone as experienced as you feels the need to prevent that work being done by others just because you don't want to. Perhaps between now and the time this is closed those in support of this overbroad proposal will actually choose to address the points in opposition but unless they do the only possible outcomes are no consensus or consensus against. Thryduulf (talk) 16:36, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- I've alreadyanswered this immediately above, but as you apparently don't like the answer I'll respond again. If you create 5000 new pages in good faith (which TTH did), then the correct response is for others to go through and look at a representative sample, then gain a consensus about whether they are all bad, mostly bad, a mixture, mostly good or all good. This has been done with TTH's portals and while you may think they are all bad that is not the consensus view, especially as others have taken over some and either have improved them or are working on improving them. This means that it is important that only the bad ones are deleted meaning any proposal (such as this one) to delete all of them is overbroad and needs to be opposed. Thryduulf (talk) 10:03, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- If a human being didn't spend a lot of time making a page, then human beings should not spend much time deciding whether to keep it. I put it to you again: suppose tomorrow I create 5,000 new pages and ask you to go through them and decide which to keep and which to delete. That would be insane; this is a website of volunteers; my doing such a thing would be disruptive. It would make work for others. Nobody reading this thinks it would be a good idea for me to do such a thing. Yet this is what is essentially being asked of us. Insofar as I have a !vote, I !vote no. Delete them all. They are all bad. Any that are good can be recreated as easily as they were created in the first place. Letting people flag keepers in one way or another is a perfectly reasonable way to prevent the baby from being thrown out with the bathwater. But yes, my starting point is that all of them should be deleted because none of them should have been made in the first place, and they do not have content value. Some portals are the product of careful creation and extensive work, but not 5,000 or however-many automatically created by one editor. The quantum portal idea is a much better idea, anyway. Leviv ich 02:38, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Yes. We also need to clarify one important detail of the proposal: would an editor be required to look at the portal before applying CSD, or is there an assumption that everything created by this editor in that time period is automatically rubbish and does not deserve assessment? Certes (talk) 22:29, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- If an editor created several thousand pages semi-automatically, the correct sequence of events is to analyse a representative sample to determine whether consensus is that they are (a) all good, (b) mostly good, (c) all bad, (d) mostly bad, or (e) a mixture. If (a) then no action is necessary, if (b) then individual deletion nominations are the correct response. If (c) then a CSD criterion to remove all of them is appropriate, if (d) or (e) then a CSD affectingly only the bad ones should be explored. In this the situation is somewhere between (d) and (e) depending on your point of view, but this proposal is treating them as (c). As I've said several times, I'm not opposed to a criterion proposed (in the right place) that caught only the bad ones and allowed for objections - that is not this proposal. This situation is frequently compared to Neelix, but the proposal is very different - this one: All pages created between Time A and Time B, unless anyone objects to the optional tagging within 24 hours. Neelix: All pages created between Time A and Time B that would be snow deleted if nominated at RfD, retargetting would not lead to a useful redirect and no other editor has materially edited the redirect. Do you now understand the fundamental difference? Also remember that pages can be tagged by bot. Thryduulf (talk) 20:56, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- So let me create several thousand pages semi-automatically, and then I'll put it to you to go through them one by one and tell me which should be deleted and why? I don't think that's how it should work. It should work in reverse. The default should be delete them all, with some process for allowing people to request that particular portals not be deleted. BTW, when I say "all portals" I mean all portals covered by this proposal, not all portals that exist on Wikipedia. Leviv ich 19:39, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- How are we supposed to work out what is worth undeleting, short of downloading all portals in advance lest they be deleted? Certes (talk)
- Support: these portals are easy to create semi-automatedly and contain no information not found in articles so we're not losing any information from Wikipedia, which sets this apart from most other CSD criteria. An alternative proposal I would support is to expand the remit of P2 to apply to any portals with fewer than one-hundred pages under their scope (or alternatively, fewer than one-hundred notable topics if there is evidence that the portal creators and users are planning to create such topics as articles). If a topic doesn't have 100 pages on it at the bare minimum, there's absolutely no reason to focus a portal around it. Even for portals covering tens of thousands of articles, reader interest is very, very low and the current semi-automated busywork is not serving the readers. — Bilorv (he/him) (talk) 19:05, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Biorv: a proposal for expansion of speedy deletion criterion P2 is being discussed currently at [[Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion}} (which is where proposals related to speedy deletion criteria should be held, not AN), so I will refrain from explaining here why I oppose your suggestion to avoid splitting the discussion. Thryduulf (talk)
- Support with exceptions. I support the speedy deletion of all portals auto-created in recent months as it seems excessive and unnecessary. However, those few portals which are manually maintained in good faith should be kept. Down the line we need to take another look at a notability threshold to keep a lid on portalmania. Bermicourt (talk) 22:37, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- If you believe there should be exceptions for portals maintained in good faith (and I agree there should be), then you should be opposing this proposal in favour of an alternative one that allows for that. Thryduulf (talk) 22:59, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- X3 only covers the mass created automated portals started by TTH so already excludes the type of portal User:Bermicourt wants to exclude. Thryduulf is muddying the facts. Legacypac (talk) 23:08, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose because a) on procedural grounds this shouldn't be discussed at the AN "closed shop" and b) because these portals are doing no harm so great that they can be deleted without due process. It is not TTH's fault that the guidelines for portal creation are permissive. Triptothecottage (talk) 02:56, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Comment:
I have already voted here butI just wanted to provide an example of how much thought was going into the creation of these portals. Portal:Aquatic ecosystem was created by TTH on Aug 15 2018 and in classified as "Complete" despite having 4 selected images. An identical portal was created at Portal:Aquatic ecosystems by TTH on Nov 24 and is classified as "Substantial" (the portalspace equivalent of B-class). One wonders, which portal is of better quality, how was this determined, and how was this oversight not caught? — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 13:33, 17 March 2019 (UTC) - Oppose: Criteria are supposed to be uncontestable - almost all pages could be deleted under this criterion, according to consensus. Looking at the most recent 50 portals created by TTH, I see a lot of frivolous ones, but I also see Portal:Pumpkins, Portal:Woodpeckers, Portal:International trade, and Portal:World economy, all of which represent subjects with well-populated categories. And I could add at least as many that are debatable. If TTH, now under a topic ban, were to create more portals, they could be speedy deleted under WP:G4. But the pages considered here were created before the ban, so they should stand or fall on their own merits. RockMagnetist(talk) 06:05, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- @RockMagnetist: I think you mean WP:CSD#G5 (Creations by banned or blocked users) rather than WP:CSD#G4 (Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion). Thryduulf (talk) 14:49, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- WP:CSD#G5 cannot be used here. The locus of G5 revolves around obliterating the edits of LTA's and sockpupeters and for ban-evasion in a generalized scope. << FR (mobileUndo) 15:12, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- G5 can be used to delete pages created in violation of a topic ban, if deletion is the best course of action. I would never use G5 on a page that was a borderline violation, but that's not relevant here (I can't think of any page creation that would be anything other than clear-cut one way or the other). It's all theoretical though as TTH hasn't created any pages in violation of his ban and I think it unlikely they will. Thryduulf (talk) 15:37, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- @FR30799386 and Thryduulf: My point in mentioning G4 (oops - G5!) was that it is a more appropriate standard for deleting pages based on who created them. The current proposal is too broad. RockMagnetist(talk) 16:09, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- WP:CSD#G5 cannot be used here. The locus of G5 revolves around obliterating the edits of LTA's and sockpupeters and for ban-evasion in a generalized scope. << FR (mobileUndo) 15:12, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- @RockMagnetist: I think you mean WP:CSD#G5 (Creations by banned or blocked users) rather than WP:CSD#G4 (Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion). Thryduulf (talk) 14:49, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
Oppose I have gone over many of the portals. It seems that there are a mix of topics which are mainstream and some which should not have been created. This isn't a white or a black issue, the wheat must be carefully separated from the chaff. << FR (mobileUndo) 12:04, 18 March 2019 (UTC)!vote from sockpuppet struck. GoldenRing (talk) 10:17, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
- FR, is there some issue with deleting them without prejudice to re-creating existing ones? These were basically made by a bot in what amounts to a single spasm, so deleting them all could be seen as a BRD reversion. The next step would be to let uninvolved editors recreate any worth keeping. Yes, that might take a while. There is no deadline and if some potentially useful portals have gone uncreated up til now, it's fine if they stay absent a little longer. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 04:07, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose - the proposal assumes that none of the portals should have been created, and that is an incorrect assumption. Certainly the are some that perhaps should not exist, but equally there are some that definitely should, and some that need a bit of discussion to determine consensus. Speedy deletion is not the way to resolve this. WaggersTALK 16:45, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- No, the proposal assumes (correctly) that 95% should never have been created, and that the tiny amount of time spent on those few that might be worth keeping doesn't justify the hours needed to discuss them all at MfD. The ones that get speedy deleted and would be an acceptable portal anyway can easily be recreated if someone really wants them. No effort has gone into creating these portals (usually not even the effort of checking if the result was errorfree, never mind informative or not a duplicate of existing portals), so demanding a week-long discussion for all of them because sometimes the mindless effort created an acceptable result is putting the cart before the horse. Fram (talk) 08:28, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
- Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not a sensible solution. Also, given WP:PAPER, could you explain why the existence of these portals is such a problem? This is nothing more than a massive exercise in punishing a user for the crime of trying to improve the encyclopaedia and getting a bit overenthusiastic. It's horrible to see and I honestly thought the Wikipedia community was better than this. WaggersTALK 11:42, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
- The existence of these portals is a problem because they add extra clutter to already link-intensive articles (the lower part of our articles has become more and more overcrowded over the years, with authority links, navboxes, links to sister projects, ...) and removing links with no or very little value makes the articles better and avoids sending readers to utterly useless pages created in a completely mindless manner without oversight or care. Deleting pages which are useless is not "punishing a user", that is a WP:OWN approach you show there which should not be taken into consideration when debating whether to keep or delete pages. Punishing the user would be blocking or banning them. Fram (talk) 12:10, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
- And that is happening (or has happened) too, so my point very much stands. Describing an editor's good faith hard work as "useless" isn't exactly conducive to a civil discussion either. Certainly some of the portals created are worthy of deletion, others are worthy of being kept. I could support a new PROD criterion, but CSD is not the right tool for this job. WaggersTALK 12:51, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
- The existence of these portals is a problem because they add extra clutter to already link-intensive articles (the lower part of our articles has become more and more overcrowded over the years, with authority links, navboxes, links to sister projects, ...) and removing links with no or very little value makes the articles better and avoids sending readers to utterly useless pages created in a completely mindless manner without oversight or care. Deleting pages which are useless is not "punishing a user", that is a WP:OWN approach you show there which should not be taken into consideration when debating whether to keep or delete pages. Punishing the user would be blocking or banning them. Fram (talk) 12:10, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
- Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not a sensible solution. Also, given WP:PAPER, could you explain why the existence of these portals is such a problem? This is nothing more than a massive exercise in punishing a user for the crime of trying to improve the encyclopaedia and getting a bit overenthusiastic. It's horrible to see and I honestly thought the Wikipedia community was better than this. WaggersTALK 11:42, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose—CSD is for stuff where there's zero grey area. At best, this should be a specialized PROD. Gaelan 💬✏️ 14:42, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Arbitrary break (CSD criterion X3)
- Oppose Although the vast majority may not be needed: that does not mean they should just be deleted (without oversight or consensus). The arguments for this critera seem to be centered around: 'so little work was put into them, therefore we shouldn't need to put in any work to fix it'. Why not just let them sit there then? Is there a deadline? Seeing as portals themselves are an auxiliary aide to our main focus (of writing articles) this seems unnecessary. I'm surprised that this is (at least) the second time that a Private Bill has been proposed for the cSd, I guess times have changed a bit. It seems uncollegial to respond to opposers by saying: "then you better help out with all the MfD's'. I agree with the points made by SMcCandlish and RockMagnetist among others. Crazynas t 23:54, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- "Why not just let them sit there then"? Have you actually looked at the pure drivel many of these portals are? Most of these portals are not an "auxiliary aid", they are random shit, bot generated without bot permission but without actual human oversight. Sending any reader to such total shit is a disgrace. The below image is how one of these portals looks right now, after it has existed for 7 months and after this discussion highlighting many problems has run for a month. Time spent discussing these (time spent looking at these) is time wasted. Any portal which people think is necessary after all can be recreated (in a much better fashion) afterwards, the speedy deletion of these doesn't restrict this. But keeping the shit an editor mass produced because their may be some less shitty pages included is doing a disservice to the people who actually wander to these portals and can only stare in dsbelief at what we show them. "'Calamba, officially the ', (Tagalog: Lungsod ng Calamba), or known simply as Calamba City is a class of the Philippines in the province of , . According to the ?, it has a population of people. " Fram (talk) 09:16, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thank you for identifying a problem with a small number of Philippines portals where the lead contains {{PH wikidata}}, a technique designed for use in infoboxes. I'll pass your helpful comments on to the relevant WikiProject. Certes (talk) 11:02, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- No, please pass my comment on to all people supporting these portals, but not bothering to actually look at what they propose or defend. Creating and supporting pages with such blatant problems is basically the same as vandalism. There are e.g. also quite a few portals which confront their readers with the below "selected article" (as the default selected article, not even when scrolling deeper). Or with the same image two or three times. Or... The list of problems with these portals is near endless (selected categories only consisting of one redlink? Sure...). The fact that adding a category can cause a page to look completely different and generate different errors (like in the example above) should be a major indicator that this system, used on thousands of pages, is not as foolproof and low in maintenance as is being claimed. Fram (talk) 11:36, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thank you for identifying a problem with a small number of Philippines portals where the lead contains {{PH wikidata}}, a technique designed for use in infoboxes. I'll pass your helpful comments on to the relevant WikiProject. Certes (talk) 11:02, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thank you for your continued help in identifying portal issues. I have found and fixed three pages which had repeated "Read more" links. If you could be kind enough to reveal which portal you have depicted as "PortalShit2.png", we may also be able to fix that case and any similar ones. Certes (talk) 12:20, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- There are two very simple solutions: either support X3, and all these portals are instantly fixed. Or actually take a look at all these low maintenance, automatic portals of the future, find the many issues, and fix them. Which still won't solve the problem that many of them are utterly pointless, mindless creations of course. I've noted more than enough problems with these portals to wholeheartedly support speedy deletion, since spending any time "corecting" a portal like the Calamba one is a waste of time (as it should be deleted anyway, speedy or not). Fram (talk) 12:42, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Fram: You are clearly not understanding the opposition to this proposal. It is not about supporting the inclusion of poor content, it is about opposing a speedy deletion criterion that fails the criteria for new and expanded criteria and would delete content that should not be deleted in addition to content that should. Thryduulf (talk) 13:41, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- No, I often have trouyble understanding burocratic opposition which creates tons of extra work for very little actual benefit. Furthermore, I'm not convinced that this actually fails the four criteria: it is objective and nonredundant (I guess we all agree on these two?), it is frequent (in the sense that having 3K portals at MfD is quite a heavy load, it's not just one or two pages), so we are left with "Uncontestable", which doesn't mean that as soon ass someone opposes it, it becomes contested, but that "almost all pages that could be deleted using the rule, should be deleted, according to consensus.". Looking at this discussion and the MfDs, I believe this to be true. Opposing this new CSD rule "because it is contested" is circular reasoning, as you are then basically saying "it is contested because it is contested", which is obviously not a valid argument. Having a significant number of portals which fall under the X3 but should not be deleted (which doesn't equal "should never exist", only "should not exist in the current form or any older form in the page history") would be a good argument, but I haven't seen any indication of such. Fram (talk) 13:57, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) Frequent is not an issue (it wouldn't be as a permanent criteria, but as a temporary one it's fine), non-redundant is not an issue for most (although a few might be caught by P2 that's not a significant proportion so not a probelm). This proposal (unlike the ones being discussed at WT:CSD) is objective as written (created by a single user within a defined time period). Uncontestable however very much is, the requirement is "It must be the case that almost all pages that could be deleted using the rule, should be deleted, according to consensus. CSD criteria should cover only situations where there is a strong precedent for deletion. Remember that a rule may be used in a way you don't expect, unless you word it carefully." It is very clear from this discussion and others around these portals that not all of them should be deleted - several have received strong objections to deletion at MfD, some are argued to be kept and others merged. "it is contested because it is contested" is exactly the point of this requirement - nobody argues in good faith against deleting copyright violations, patent nonsense, recreations, or specific types of articles that don't assert importance. There is consensus that were these to be discussed they would be unanimously deleted every time. There is no such consensus about these portals. Some, perhaps most, should be deleted but not all of them. Thryduulf (talk) 15:47, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- No, I often have trouyble understanding burocratic opposition which creates tons of extra work for very little actual benefit. Furthermore, I'm not convinced that this actually fails the four criteria: it is objective and nonredundant (I guess we all agree on these two?), it is frequent (in the sense that having 3K portals at MfD is quite a heavy load, it's not just one or two pages), so we are left with "Uncontestable", which doesn't mean that as soon ass someone opposes it, it becomes contested, but that "almost all pages that could be deleted using the rule, should be deleted, according to consensus.". Looking at this discussion and the MfDs, I believe this to be true. Opposing this new CSD rule "because it is contested" is circular reasoning, as you are then basically saying "it is contested because it is contested", which is obviously not a valid argument. Having a significant number of portals which fall under the X3 but should not be deleted (which doesn't equal "should never exist", only "should not exist in the current form or any older form in the page history") would be a good argument, but I haven't seen any indication of such. Fram (talk) 13:57, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Fram: You are clearly not understanding the opposition to this proposal. It is not about supporting the inclusion of poor content, it is about opposing a speedy deletion criterion that fails the criteria for new and expanded criteria and would delete content that should not be deleted in addition to content that should. Thryduulf (talk) 13:41, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- There are two very simple solutions: either support X3, and all these portals are instantly fixed. Or actually take a look at all these low maintenance, automatic portals of the future, find the many issues, and fix them. Which still won't solve the problem that many of them are utterly pointless, mindless creations of course. I've noted more than enough problems with these portals to wholeheartedly support speedy deletion, since spending any time "corecting" a portal like the Calamba one is a waste of time (as it should be deleted anyway, speedy or not). Fram (talk) 12:42, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- I am pleased to report that a recent module change should eliminate the problem where articles too short to be worth featuring occasionally appear as "Read more... Read more...". This should fix the mystery portal depicted above next time it is purged. Certes (talk) 11:26, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thank you for your continued help in identifying portal issues. I have found and fixed three pages which had repeated "Read more" links. If you could be kind enough to reveal which portal you have depicted as "PortalShit2.png", we may also be able to fix that case and any similar ones. Certes (talk) 12:20, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- User:Thryduulf your opposition to X3 is baffling. You oppose it basically because some topics where Portals were mass created using automated tools against policy may warrant portals. But none of these pages have any original content to preserve. They are mindless spam poorly repackaging existing content. Kind of a poor Wikipedia mirror effort. MFDing these has proven they are unwelcome - yet you want to force us to spend a week debating pages that the creator spent seconds to create without even checking for compliance against their own criteria or for major errors? If these deletions were actually controversial (the only one of the 4 CSD criteria you say is not followed) we would expect a significant number of the MfDs to close Keep. We might expect the creator to defend and explain, but instead the creator freely admits he ignored WP:POG. Seriously makes me doubt your competence and judgement. Admins should show better judgement then this. Legacypac (talk) 17:12, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Second Legacypac. Additionally, part of what I meant by "some might be worth keeping" is that they can be deleted, but if any were actually worthy they could be recreated, perhaps with more care and effort than this. SemiHypercube 17:19, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- It seems like a lot of what is objected to can be covered by a judicious use of P2, G1, and A3 (via P1) but there's probably something I'm missing. @Fram:, I'm not here to support bad content, but bad policy (and precedent) can be far more harmful to the project than 'repackaged nonsense' existing for a bit longer than some people want it to. This would have the side effect of saving the portals worth saving. Crazynas t 22:07, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose let's discuss deletion based on content and merit of individual portals. No need to throw the baby out with the bath water, this is not how we do things here. You're proposing deletion of many very good portals here. ɱ (talk) 15:41, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Please identify 35 out of the 3500 (1%) that are "very good portals" so we can run them through MFD to test your statement. Also there is no baby - there is no original content at all. No work done by humans is lost with X3 deletions because they were created using an automated script that was used without BAG approval to repackage existing content. Therefore WP:PRESERVE is not an issue. If someone started creating thousands of articles called "Foo lite" that just copied Foo mindlessly we would CSD them without debate. These are just in another mainspace but they are really Foo lite. Legacypac (talk) 17:12, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Except that's not comparable at all. The point of portals (which the community has repeatedly endorsed) is to duplicate article content and provide links to related content - which is exactly what these portals are doing. They might be doing it poorly in many cases, but that's qualitatively different to one article duplicating another. Thryduulf (talk) 18:10, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Wouldn't it be faster to delete them all and then recreate the ones that need recreating, rather than go through them one by one to see which to keep? Because the number of "keeps" is like 5% or 10% and not 50%? (It would have to be 50% to be equal time between the two approaches.) If you're not convinced that it's 5-10% keep and not 50% keep, what sort of representative sampling process can we engage in to test the theory? Leviv ich 19:13, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Yes it would be faster, but there is no deadline so it is very significantly more important to get it right than it is to do it quickly. Deleting something that doesn't need deleting is one of the most harmful things that an administrator can do - and speedily deleting it is an order of magnitude more so. As only administrators can see pages once they have been deleted, and doing so is much harder, deleting it first makes the job of finding the good portals very significantly harder. Thryduulf (talk) 21:30, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Wouldn't it be faster to delete them all and then recreate the ones that need recreating, rather than go through them one by one to see which to keep? Because the number of "keeps" is like 5% or 10% and not 50%? (It would have to be 50% to be equal time between the two approaches.) If you're not convinced that it's 5-10% keep and not 50% keep, what sort of representative sampling process can we engage in to test the theory? Leviv ich 19:13, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Except that's not comparable at all. The point of portals (which the community has repeatedly endorsed) is to duplicate article content and provide links to related content - which is exactly what these portals are doing. They might be doing it poorly in many cases, but that's qualitatively different to one article duplicating another. Thryduulf (talk) 18:10, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Please identify 35 out of the 3500 (1%) that are "very good portals" so we can run them through MFD to test your statement. Also there is no baby - there is no original content at all. No work done by humans is lost with X3 deletions because they were created using an automated script that was used without BAG approval to repackage existing content. Therefore WP:PRESERVE is not an issue. If someone started creating thousands of articles called "Foo lite" that just copied Foo mindlessly we would CSD them without debate. These are just in another mainspace but they are really Foo lite. Legacypac (talk) 17:12, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- CommentI listed The Transhumanist's portal creations, latest first, and examined the top entry on each page, i.e. every 100th portal.
Assessment of a sample of TTH's recent creations
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- It appears that most of the portals have a narrow scope and should go but a significant minority are either already of a good enough standard to keep or show sufficient potential to merit further attention. This impression is based not on cherry-picking but on a random sample. Certes (talk) 21:42, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thank you for this, this is a very good illustration of why this proposal is too broad - it will delete portals that clearly should not be deleted, and others that may or may not need to be deleted (e.g. I've !voted to merge several of the portals about universities). Thryduulf (talk) 21:58, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Query Why don't we have a CSD for pages created by unauthorized scripts or bots? WP:BAG exists for a reason right? (And this seems to be a good example of it). Crazynas t 21:50, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Thryduulf: You're missing my point. Just like we have a policy that banned users are to be reverted in all cases not because they might not make good edits (to game the system or not) but because they are a disruption to the community; so we should have a policy that pages created (or edited I suppose) by unauthorized bots are inherently not welcome, because of the potential for disruption regardless of their merit (by disruption I'm talking about this AN thread as much as the pages themselves). This is the whole reason we have a group dedicated to overseeing and helping with bots right? Crazynas t 22:12, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- No bots were involved. The pages were created using a template. One of your last page creations was a user talk page, where you welcomed a new editor using Twinkle. You did a very professional job, by applying a template which introduces the new editor with the sort of carefully considered and neatly arranged prose that we don't have time to write every time a new contributor appears. Using a template is not a valid rationale for mass deletions. Certes (talk) 22:22, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Curious, what template did you use? I guess the difference I see is the twinkle is highly curated and subject to extensive review (as are the templates it calls). If all these pages were manually created, then what happened in the example of (what to me looks pretty much like G1) that Fram posted above? Why didn't the human that pressed the button take responsibility for that (so to speak) pile of rubbish? To clarify, Bot here covers scripts, AWB (which is 'manual'), java implementations etc. In short: "Bot policy covers the operation of all bots and automated scripts used to provide automation of Wikipedia edits, whether completely automated, higher speed, or simply assisting human editors in their own work." The policy explicitly references mass page creation as being under the purview of BAG here. Crazynas t 22:39, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- I haven't used any of these templates myself but recent portals have been created by variants on {{Basic portal start page}}. The numbered versions such as {{bpsp6}} cater for portal-specific conditions such as there being no DYKs to feature. Certes (talk) 23:07, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Curious, what template did you use? I guess the difference I see is the twinkle is highly curated and subject to extensive review (as are the templates it calls). If all these pages were manually created, then what happened in the example of (what to me looks pretty much like G1) that Fram posted above? Why didn't the human that pressed the button take responsibility for that (so to speak) pile of rubbish? To clarify, Bot here covers scripts, AWB (which is 'manual'), java implementations etc. In short: "Bot policy covers the operation of all bots and automated scripts used to provide automation of Wikipedia edits, whether completely automated, higher speed, or simply assisting human editors in their own work." The policy explicitly references mass page creation as being under the purview of BAG here. Crazynas t 22:39, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Crazynas: I was simply answering your question about why we do not speedy delete every page created by an unauthorised bot, etc - simply because not every page created by such means should be deleted. You are also mistaken about banned users - they may be reverted but they are not required to be. Certes analysis shows that some of the portals created by the script have been improved since, sometimes significantly. Thryduulf (talk) 22:46, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Thryduulf: Sure, and this is tangential to the proposal here (which I'm still opposing, if you noticed). In any case the thought I'm having wouldn't be applied ex post facto but it would make it explicitly clear that mass creation of pages by automated or semi-automated means without prior approval is disruptive. Crazynas t 23:02, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- No bots were involved. The pages were created using a template. One of your last page creations was a user talk page, where you welcomed a new editor using Twinkle. You did a very professional job, by applying a template which introduces the new editor with the sort of carefully considered and neatly arranged prose that we don't have time to write every time a new contributor appears. Using a template is not a valid rationale for mass deletions. Certes (talk) 22:22, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Thryduulf: You're missing my point. Just like we have a policy that banned users are to be reverted in all cases not because they might not make good edits (to game the system or not) but because they are a disruption to the community; so we should have a policy that pages created (or edited I suppose) by unauthorized bots are inherently not welcome, because of the potential for disruption regardless of their merit (by disruption I'm talking about this AN thread as much as the pages themselves). This is the whole reason we have a group dedicated to overseeing and helping with bots right? Crazynas t 22:12, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Comment. The problem with many of these recently created template-based portals is that it is difficult or impossible to improve them. I've edited portals for over a decade but cannot work out how to change the portal code to include or exclude a particular article or image. (For articles I believe one has to change the template or mark the article as stub to exclude it; for images I believe it just harvests those from the main topic article.) Thus they are not drafts that could be further improved, they are static uneditable entities for which the only solution is to start from scratch. There is no thought to be preserved that is not equally present in the list of articles in the template/images in the root article. Espresso Addict (talk) 02:12, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
- The key issue is that traditionally, portals are viewed as entry points to broad topic areas. However a page generated by the helper templates that draw content from an underlying navigation box is more akin to a second screen experience: it provides an X-ray view into the navigation box. It's not clear this is the experience the community wants to provide for readers visiting something labelled a portal. isaacl (talk) 20:47, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- the automated scripts are so easy to fool. Even if everything looks perfect when the portal is set up, as soon as someone adds an new link to a nav box (that may make sense in the nav box but not for the portal), adds an image to a page, or creates a DYK completely unrelated to the topic which includes the five letters "horse" within someone's name behind a pipe, you get random inappropriate stuff in an automated portal. The editor adjusting the nav box, adding a picture without a caption per WP:CAPTIONOBVIOUS or creating the DYK has no idea the portal is being busted. There is no edit to the portal to review so watch listing the portal does not help. You have to manually review the portal display regularly. That is before looking at lua errors. Autogenerated content is a bad idea. Forcing other editors to review your auto generated crap is wrong. Ignoring the guidelines because they are "outdated" and leaving 4500 pages that need to be checked and discussed against the guidelines by other editors is wrong. The only reasonable solution is to nuke these from orbit. Then if someone willing to follow the guidelines and use intellgently designed and applied tools want to recreate some titles, that is fine. Legacypac (talk) 21:23, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- Everything you say before "The only reasonable solution..." may be true but is irrelevant to this proposal as written. "Nuking them from orbit" is not the only reasonable solution, as fixing the issues so that the portals don't break is also reasonable. As is not deleting the ones that have been fixed so that the errors you talk about don't occur. Thryduulf (talk) 00:46, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
Someone spent less than 50 seconds creating the page; requiring editors to spend more time than that to delete it has an extortionate effect, even though there's a good faith intent. If we don't nuke from orbit, then those who want these automatically-created portals deleted will be forced to spend far, far more than 50 seconds per portal discussing them one by one (or ten by ten, or one hundred by one hundred, it'll still be a lot of time). 50 seconds "taken up by manual activities" is how we end up with a Portal:Sexual fetishism that includes Pedophilia as one of the selected articles–probably not the best selection–but that's been there for five months now. Leviv ich 03:04, 25 March 2019 (UTC)Portal creation ... is down to about a minute per portal. The creation part, which is automated, takes about 10 seconds. The other 50 seconds is taken up by manual activities, such as finding candidate subjects, inspecting generated portals, and selecting the portal creation template to be used according to the resources available. Tools are under development to automate these activities as much as possible, to pare portal creation time down even more. Ten seconds each is the goal.
— Portal Update #29, 13 Feb 2019
- Two wrongs do not make a right and there is no deadline. The only reason for deleting them all you seem to have is that you don't like that these portals were created so quickly, and that some of them are bad. That's fine, you are entitled to your opinion and some of them are bad. However that does not equate to a reason to delete all of them without checking whether they are good or bad. If you have problems with specific portals then they should be fixed and/or nominated for deletion, as I see you have done in this case, but just because X is bad doesn't mean that the entire set of pages of which is a part should be speedily deleted. Thryduulf (talk) 09:35, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
- "There is no deadline" is a complete non-argument. There is no deadline to have these portals either. Knowingly advocating for keeping problematic portals around until someone not only notices it but also decides to MfD it is exposing readers to shitty, thoughtless reproductions of content for no actual benefit (the benefits" of these portals are addressed dequately by the navigation templates they are based on) and with the risk of showing them all kinds of errors which gives a very poor impression. Luckily very few people get actually exposed to these pages, but this also means that the very hypothetical damage deleting some of these pages would do is extremely minimal. Fram (talk) 10:09, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
- There was indeed no deadline for their creation, now they have been created that is irrelevant. If we follow your logic though we should delete every article and then just recreate the ones that admins vet as meeting an undefined standard. Yes, deleting more slowly does increase the risk that some readers will see errors, but thtat's exactly what happens in every other namespace without a problem. Thryduulf (talk) 16:35, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
- No, that's not my logic. Your use of "no deadline" when it suits you, and the dismissal when it doesn't, is quite clear though. Deleting articles is losing content, deleting these auto-portals is losing nothing. Furthermore, we have in the past speedy deleted large groups of articles by one or two creators once it became clear that too many contained errors. This has been done with thousands of articles by Dr. Blofeld, with thousands by Jaguar, and with thousands by Sander v. Ginkel (the last ones moved to draft and then deleted afterwards). Once we know that with one group of creations by one editor, there are many problems, we had no qualms in the past to speedy delete them. That didn't mean that they can't be recreated, or that admins will first vet them, no idea where you get those ideas. Please don't make a caricature of what I support here, and please don't make absolute statements which don't match reality. Fram (talk) 17:41, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
- Everything you say before "The only reasonable solution..." may be true but is irrelevant to this proposal as written. "Nuking them from orbit" is not the only reasonable solution, as fixing the issues so that the portals don't break is also reasonable. As is not deleting the ones that have been fixed so that the errors you talk about don't occur. Thryduulf (talk) 00:46, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose 1) Let's not create precedents where we hand single admins editorial control, admins may well be great editors (some better than others), but let's keep editorial control as much as possible only with all editors. 2) The formulation of this supposed CSD criteria seems to be a WP:PUNISH against a single user. (As an aside, different perspective: there are perhaps millions of pages in article space that are "poor", so portal space is bound to have them, too - just work through it -- and if we come-up with new forward looking policies and guidelines for all portals (or mass creations) consistent as possible with the 5 P, all the better). Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:42, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support - per Fish & Karate. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:08, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. I feel there are much better ways of handling the situation, including but not limited to: expanding P2, Portal PROD, and even MFD. This is too broad of a sword that doesn't even cut in the right places since it's only limited to one user in a given time frame. -- Tavix (talk) 16:15, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thought I had voted here but I guess I hadn’t. Regardless, my thinking on this has changed because of Certes’ in-depth analysis of TTH’s portal creations. Anyway: Oppose. The mass creation of portals is something that should be dealt with preferably quickly, but this proposal as written is not the right way to do it. Sure, there are a lot of crappy portals that could be deleted fairly uncontroversially, but there are also a lot of good portals as well as edge cases that deserve more community discussion on whether they should be deleted, or at least a longer waiting period so users may object. — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 12:40, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
Oppose for now. I still hope that the proposal might become limited to portals looked at and determined to be poor by some objective criteria, which I could support, but that hasn't yet happened. Speedy ad hominem deletion regardless of subsequent tuning, current quality or even potential for future improvement is likely to throw too many babies out with the bathwater. Certes (talk) 12:46, 29 March 2019 (UTC)Duplicate !vote stricken. GoldenRing (talk) 10:14, 4 April 2019 (UTC)- Regretfully support: as an editor I dislike the idea of creations made by certain users being deleted en masse but, quite frankly, MfD cannot cope with the influx at the moment. Hell, I've got a decent laptop and MfD is getting so big scrolling down causes a bit of lag. SITH (talk) 20:57, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
- Strong support of something to this effect, per WP:MASSCREATION and WP:TNT (i.e., the babies thrown out with the bathwater can be recovered later). However, opponents raise good points of localizing control to a few members, and while I do argue that portals are not content, they are a navigational tool, so community control of them can be a bit "stricter" than mainspace articles, perhaps something like PROD would be better. Regardless of how this pans out, for future portals going forward I proposed Portals for Creation at RfC, and created a mockup here if anyone wants a look. — Preceding unsigned comment added by John M Wolfson (talk • contribs)
- Why is requiring administrators to comb through deleted portals to find those that should not have been deleted in order to restore them, having inconvenienced those people who use the portals in the mean time, in any way better for the project than deleting only those that need to be deleted? Thryduulf (talk) 07:34, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
- Support. Worthless pages which take 12 seconds to create shouldn't take more than 50000 times that for multiple users to delete. If a subject WikiProject or person interested in the portal's subject is willing to "adopt" that portal, or even assert that the portal is not useless, a more nuanced consideration may apply. And, I should point out, some of the individual deletions are incomplete, as user-facing pages (mostly categories and navigation templates, but some actual article pages) still point to the deleted portals. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 10:25, 4 April 2019 (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.
Proposal: Expand G13 to outline 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.
Should CSD G13 be expanded to include subpages of WP:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts? — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 17:17, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support as proposer. These draft outlines have by and large not been updated in a few years. The only thing keeping them alive is that they were not created in the proper namespace. Were they in draftspace, they would have pretty much all been deleted. Wikipedia is not a web host. — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 17:17, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support there are around 700 according to some info I found. Most are mindless mass fill in the blank mass creations while others are a sea of redlinks. Every one of these Drafts duplicates an existing title in mainspace. No change to Twinkle is required, all the Gx CSDs work in Wikipedia space. Legacypac (talk) 17:24, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose expanding G13 just for this narrow one-off issue. The solution is to move these pages to the Draftspace and then apply g13 as usual (IMHO a pagemove does not "reset the clock" on the 6-mo waiting period). Would not oppose expansion of G13 to cover all drafts housed in any WikiProject, however. UnitedStatesian (talk) 18:07, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- and the list of pages is here: it's 183 non-redirected pages; achievable in a single nom. by a dedicated MfD-er. UnitedStatesian (talk) 20:51, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- I also agree that a WikiProject's drafts shouldn't be treated like userspace. They should be moved to draftspace and / or deleted if they dead. Support both this and UnitedStatesian's extended proposal. --Gonnym (talk) 18:11, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support expanding G13 to include all drafts in Wikipedia space. I also agree that fixing the namespace does not reset the clock on G13. Draft space and G13 were created to get drafts out of the AFC Wikiproject space so this is just tweaking the wording to match the original intent. Legacypac (talk) 18:17, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. We should not be expanding any CSD criteria for such a small reason (note the frequency requirement for new criteria applies equally to modifications). IF they are actually causing problems then they can be dealt with at MfD. Thryduulf (talk) 20:35, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose - seems to be covered in the X3 proposal above. If that passes then this is unnecessary, and if not then there is also no consensus for this back-door. Also, perennial oppose to expanding G13. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 20:51, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- To clarify, X3 as drafted would only cover pages in the Portal: namespace, not these, which are in the Wikipedia: namespace. UnitedStatesian (talk) 20:55, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. There isn't even a good reason to delete them. They are an appropriate as the WikiProject subpages. What is the issue? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:17, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
- Says the guy who opposed the existance of these same pages several years ago because they would become mainspace pages. Legacypac (talk) 02:55, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
- I don’t remember exactly what you are talking about. I oppose portals in mainspace, but they never were. I oppose creative content forking, but I encouraged auto-creation of Portals that would auto-update with editing of articles, eg Portals transcending ledes from articles depending on their position in category trees. I haven’t been following the activity, but it sounds like TTH has gone too big too fast. This reaction however is an over reaction. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:25, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
- Too different stupid projects SmokeyJoe. This is about hos Outlines of Everything project. Today I found a discussion where you did not want these outlines in mainspace ever. It was an interesting read. You argued they duplicated portals and that they were content forks. I agree with you. He later abandoned Outlines and moved to Portals, with the same rational and agendas. The two projects are like siblings. Legacypac (talk) 03:37, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
- I have a fair memory of this. Yes, outlines in mainspace were content forking. Yes, outlines and portals were and are two manifestations of the same thing, attempts at readable summaries of broad areas mainly for navigation purposes. I advised TTH to merge the two concepts, to abandon mainspace outlines, and to look to real time auto-generation of portal contents to avoid the problem of content forking. New portals, continuing portals, all portals except for the very few actually active portals, should contain no creative editing. They should be created by coding. TTH has followed my advice, so I should be pleased, and can hardly be quick to support deletion. However, he has failed WP:MEATBOT. He should have demonstrated working prototypes, maybe ten working auto-portals that update themselves based on changing article content. He should not have created thousands of new portals. The rancour generated is understandable, and completely to have been expected. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:12, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
- Too different stupid projects SmokeyJoe. This is about hos Outlines of Everything project. Today I found a discussion where you did not want these outlines in mainspace ever. It was an interesting read. You argued they duplicated portals and that they were content forks. I agree with you. He later abandoned Outlines and moved to Portals, with the same rational and agendas. The two projects are like siblings. Legacypac (talk) 03:37, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
- I don’t remember exactly what you are talking about. I oppose portals in mainspace, but they never were. I oppose creative content forking, but I encouraged auto-creation of Portals that would auto-update with editing of articles, eg Portals transcending ledes from articles depending on their position in category trees. I haven’t been following the activity, but it sounds like TTH has gone too big too fast. This reaction however is an over reaction. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:25, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
- Says the guy who opposed the existance of these same pages several years ago because they would become mainspace pages. Legacypac (talk) 02:55, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose if they are causing harm, propose a mass deletion at MfD; no policy changes required. If they are not causing harm, WP:NOTCLEANUP. VQuakr (talk) 02:31, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose - Too much of a niche; miscellany for deletion is well equipped to handle such pages if necessary. — Godsy (TALKCONT) 04:50, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
Modified Proposal: Add Wikipedia Namespace Drafts to G13
Per the previous discussion we should add point "4. Article drafts in Wikipedia namespace" to cover misplaced drafts or drafts hosted under wikiprojects. Draft namespace was designed to host Wikiproject drafts for collabertive editing and was initially populated with drafts from a wikiproject. The same reasons for G13 apply to other versions of draftspace under a wikiproject now. Legacypac (talk) 20:47, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose - if an article draft is misplaced in the Wikipedia namespace, or other namespaces, the accepted treatment is to move it to Draft: space. Then G13 applies as normal. This extra proposal is unnecessary. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 20:51, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Misplaced drafts can easily be moved to Main or Draft space for further use as appropriate. Multiple pages such as the one mentioned above can be handled by a one-time consensus at MFD. I don't see a real need to expand the scope of G13. Regards SoWhy 20:53, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose for lack of need per SoWhy and Ivanvector. This also does not address most of the reasons for opposition to the original proposal and actually might make some worse. Thryduulf (talk) 01:48, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per New Criteria criterion #3, no frequent need. Also, I can very easily imagine this broad scope criterion being misused to delete things that should not be deleted. Legacypac is wrong to state "Draft namespace was designed to host Wikiproject drafts for collabertive editing and was initially populated with drafts from a wikiproject". That was true ONLY for one specific WikiProject, being WP:AfC, which was inviting hoards of newcomers to create WikiProject subpages. These newcomers were not WikiProject members. This is a big distinction. Pages properly organised in WikiProjects, by their WikiProject members, should not be subject to unwanted cleanup by deletion by non-members. WP:PERFORMANCE issues excepted. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:22, 7 March 2019 (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.
New F Crtiera - Unused/unusable explicit image.
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a porn host. Therefore I am asking if there should be a CSD that allows users and admins to 'speedy' delete explicit image that are unused, or which cannot be used within the context of encyclopaedia. This would in effect make the NOPENIS policy used on Commons a grounds for speedy deletion of the same kind of media on English Wikipedia.
The amount of existing media that would be affected is hoped to be tiny. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 16:51, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
- It'll need some refinement on what is considered unusable and for why, but it's a sensible proposal. Nick (talk) 16:58, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
- Unusable explicit images (or those uploaded and then used for shock value) are covered by WP:CSD#G3 vandalism already. How common are cases not covered by G3? —Kusma (t·c) 17:06, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
The amount of existing media that would be affected is hoped to be tiny.
See item #3 in the banner above about proposing new criteria. --Izno (talk) 17:08, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
- "Unusable" is subjective so can be dropped if that would make the proposal more acceptable....
To me unusable images would be (non-exclusive criteria) :
- Images that lack full sourcing, authorship or attribution as to where the media was obtained from, and who the creators were.
- Those that are of low technical quality, (out of focus, JPEG artifacts, badly lit) such that whats displayed isn't clear in relation to any provided context.
- Images that cannot legally be displayed or shared with respect to US law (with consideration being given to the equivalent laws in other jurisdictions, such as those of the uploader)
The following would not be "unusable" grounds within the context of the proposed CSD, but would be grounds for requesting FFD or PROD on an image:-
- Images where model or participant consent is not explicitly stated.
- Images lacking a detailed contextual explanation of what the media contains, the articles in which it is intended to be used, and what points or content in those articles it is intended to support (essentially amounting to an "explicit image use rationale").
ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 17:19, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
- Wikipedia is also WP:NOTCENSORED, so "explicit" is not a workable definition for a new criterion. Lack of authorship, attribution and source leads, in most cases, to lack of licensing information and is thus covered by F4 or F11. Files that are so corrupt that the subject is not identifiable should probably be covered by F2 already. "Illegal" is not something an admin can really determine and is thus not objective enough for speedy deletion. Regards SoWhy 18:18, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
- You can always just PROD the files ... {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 20:37, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
- How often do images like this come up at FFD? Do they always close as "delete"? Are we being swamped by them to the point that the FFD regulars are not finding enough time to handle the non-explicit images that are sent there? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:12, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- As an FFD volunteer, we get hardly any. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 09:28, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose: As mentioned, I see where you're going, but most of your edge cases can be covered by perhaps amending G3 with an "images uploaded solely for shock value with no possible encyclopedic use". ViperSnake151 Talk 17:10, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- G3 already covers that, see Wikipedia:Vandalism#Types of vandalism: Uploading shock images [...] Regards SoWhy 20:06, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose: Out of the roughly 2000 deletions I have performed, I don't remember any that would fit this criterion. The speedy deletion policy is designed to reduce the volume at xFD. In the absence of a significant volume of problematic material, I can't see why we would adopt such a subjective policy with so many clear possibilities for disagreement. UninvitedCompany 18:15, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose: Out of the roughly 13,000 deletions I have performed, I don't remember any that would fit this criterion. Since what constitutes "explicit" is always going to be subjective—what's porn to you might be a noteworthy artwork or a useful medical illustration to me—such things are never going to be appropriate for speedy deletion unless they already fall into one of the existing criteria, in which case we don't need another. ‑ Iridescent 20:50, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose as the criterion is too complex and subjective. In my deleting I have not come across such images either, so they must be rare. Removal from articles can be done, and the pic left for FFD. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 01:48, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- Query: Which current criteria would cover images that if assesed by a competent legal professional as potentially "obscene" (with respect to US Federal law, and those of the State of Virginia) would have to be removed for legal reasons? (Also such images should presumably be reported to a contact off wiki.) ? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 08:38, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- @ShakespeareFan00: That would likely be WP:G9, since its up to User:WMF Legal to decide that content
would have to be removed for legal reasons
--DannyS712 (talk) 08:43, 12 March 2019 (UTC) - (edit conflict)WP:G9 - the WMF has a legal team, and it is ultimately their job to assess if something is illegal and so to remove it. Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:44, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- @ShakespeareFan00: That would likely be WP:G9, since its up to User:WMF Legal to decide that content
- If an image is unused & unusable, does it matter if it's explicit or not? "I oppose" is explicit, and I don't think anybody would have a problem with that. On the other hand, "I fucking oppose", is veering into obscenity. Cabayi (talk) 08:55, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
G14
As far as I was aware DAB pages that have a primary topic and there is only 1 other (WP:2DABS) can be deleted as unnecessary DAB pages. This was quite clear in the past but it looks like since G6 was split, the inclusion of situation where there are only 2 topics and there is a primary topic has been lost for some reason. See User talk:Patar knight#Ross Greer (disambiguation) and User talk:Sir Sputnik#Magnus Lindberg (disambiguation). I would note though that DAB entries that are red links and part title matches do still count as "entries" for this purpose. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:16, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
- Looking at the plain wording of G14 as it is now, if there is a primary topic and a non-primary topic on a 2DAB, then it is still disambiguating two extant articles and ineligible for G14. My experience has been that they are then typically PRODed, so they show up at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Disambiguation#Article_alerts for a week and gives room for editors who work with DABs to review them. This interpretation fits with the framework of CSD as getting rid of unambiguous cases and letting other deletion processes deal with less clear cases.
- For DABs, those "disambiguating" one or zero DAB entries absolutely fail as DAB pages and are arguably actively unhelpful in navigation, while those with two entries do not. Those with two entries are more easily converted into valid DABs with the addition of only one additional entry or might be converted into a 2DAB page with no primary topic if the article at the base name doesn't have a solid claim to be the primary topic. Having a 2DAB page is at worst neutral, and an additional week to potentially save it isn't a big deal.
- Looking through the history of G14/G6 I don't think that it ever explicitly allowed deletion of 2DABs with a primary topic:
- August 2009: Added to G6 as "deleting unnecessary disambiguation pages
- January 2013: G6 is broken out into bullet points
- January 2013: "unnecessary is clarified as "those listing only one or zero links to existing Wikipedia articles."
- March 2017: "links" to zero/one extant article is changed to "disambiguates" zero/one extant articles.
- December 2018: G14 is split off from G6 with minimal changes.
- My interpretation of Tavix's change in March 2017 is that linking the previous wording technically allowed DAB pages with zero valid dab entries but some links to existing articles, either in invalid DAB entries or a "See also" section, to escape speedy deletion. The new wording shows that the linked articles must be part of a valid dab entry, not just any link whatsoever. ---- Patar knight - chat/contributions 01:21, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- I would support a speedy deletion option for disambiguation topics where there is one clear primary topic, only one other topic, and for which the primary topic page already contains a hatnote to the other topic, with no link to the disambiguation page. In that case, any reader looking up the term is already going to be taken to a page with an existing hatnote leading to the other topic, so there is no point in the disambiguation page existing. bd2412 T 17:46, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- I fully agree with Patar knight. Dab pages with a primary topic and only one other link are pretty useless most of the time, but the emphasis here is on "most of the time". Such pages are normally dealt with using PROD, and often enough it would happen that somebody might come along and expand the page with additional entries. Or it might turn out that the page is a result of a bad move. Or it could disambiguate between two articles only because of a previous overzealous attempt at cleanup that had removed valid links. Etc, etc. There are too many possible scenarios and too many nuances for CSD to be appropriate, and there are too few pages of this kind getting deleted for there to be a need for an extension of the existing criteria. – Uanfala (talk) 00:07, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- I agree with Uanfala that extending CSD to cover primary+1 disambiguation pages is not appropriate. In addition to the scenarios they list, in some cases there will be people navigating directly to the disambiguation page where they know or suspect the topic they are looking for is not primary but do not know what its title is. Whether this is likely will depend on factors that cannot be judged by a single admin reviewing CSD nominations. Thryduulf (talk) 09:22, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
X3
Can someone add Permalinks to the AN discussion, the recently closed MfDs where various users expressed a need for X3, and the VPP where various users requested some version of X3? The discussion is so fagmented but the conclusion in favor of X3 is very clear. Also we are going to call it X3 not P3 even though it is for Portals. Legacypac (talk) 21:20, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
Confirmed the X3 Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as mass created Portals now exists and pages get added when Template:Db-x3 is added. Legacypac (talk) 23:15, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
List of pages [6] there may be a better way to list them. Legacypac (talk) 01:46, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- Indeed there is - that doesn't list pages created before June 27 or pages created outside of Portal: and then moved there, and includes redirects and already-deleted pages. quarry:query/34239 (all pages) or quarry:query/34240 (omits subpages). —Cryptic 03:15, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- Useful Query for quantifying the issue, not so useful for tagging as the page names are not clickable and don't turn red as they are deleted. Legacypac (talk) 09:17, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- Is this query what you're looking for? (Note that if someone else created the page at a different title and TTH moved it to the portal namespace, this query will show TTH as the creator, so double-check the history before tagging unless it has an obvious edit summary like "created new portal".) ‑ Iridescent 09:21, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- Legacypac Quarry queries can be downloaded as a wikitable - see User:Galobtter/Portals by TTH. Galobtter (pingó mió) 09:48, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- Useful Query for quantifying the issue, not so useful for tagging as the page names are not clickable and don't turn red as they are deleted. Legacypac (talk) 09:17, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
- Iridescent's and Galobtter's queries are perfect. Look at the creation rate - I spotted 5 a minute in some cases.
- I'm not aware of any Portals created elsewhere and they don't work elsewhere (like draft) so page moves from outside spaces are not likely to be a big problem. He did rename a few Portal though so watch for that.
- X3 does not address the equally problematic "rebooted" portals[7] or the approx 1000 built by other editors in exactly the same way using his instructions. I started building a list here User:Legacypac/not x3 portals but it is painstaking to check each one. Better to wait till X3 pages are deleted first as so many Portals one checks will go X3. Legacypac (talk) 09:59, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
Clarification on G8
There are a whole host of unused documentation templates (1,111 to be exact). The vast majority are the result of the base page being redirected. For example, you have Template:Bible/doc. Well Template:Bible now redirects to Template:Bibleverse. Since the base page has been redirected, there is really no reason to keep the documentation. Technically you COULD redirect the old doc as well, but why? Again I want to emphasize this is ONLY regarding documentation subtemplates (I.E. Template:<sometemplate>/doc) that are UNUSED. It seems to me this is a clear WP:G8. Anyone have any strong feelings? --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 20:13, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- This is not a G8, as the parent page does exist. What is wrong with redirecting the doc of the old template to the doc of the new template? {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 20:21, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- To clarify, does G8 then apply to documentation pages for deleted or otherwise nonexistent templates? I would assume so, as documentation pages are technically subpages, though it is not entirely clear. ComplexRational (talk) 02:35, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Yes, I would say so. If Template;X doesn't exist and wasn't speedy deleted out of process, then Template:X/doc is a proper G8 deletion. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 02:49, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- To clarify, does G8 then apply to documentation pages for deleted or otherwise nonexistent templates? I would assume so, as documentation pages are technically subpages, though it is not entirely clear. ComplexRational (talk) 02:35, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- If you really want to pursue the claim that doc pages of redirects should be deleted, then take it to the proper venue (RfD) rather than misusing speedy deletion criteria that do not apply. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 20:23, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- For goodness sake Pppery AGF. I'm discussing it at templates for deletion because they are TEMPLATES. You are of the opinion that G8 is not valid, but so far that is just your opinion. --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 20:29, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Transcluded to Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 20:32, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- Simply redirecting them or deleting them per WP:CSD#G8 are both perfectly fine and functionally equivalent options. -- Ed (Edgar181)
- Support only for non-subst templates. like CSD C1. It should await 7 days after tagging CSD before actually deletion. For any subst templates, should always be posted to TfD Hhkohh (talk) 23:01, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- Zack, some of these could be the result of cut-and-paste moves, if the template at the base page was moved. Some could also be the result of a merge, for which the page should be preserved for attribution, and might not be properly labeled as such. I'd worry that expanding a speedy deletion criterion to this therefore could be problematic. --Bsherr (talk) 01:16, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Template:Black metal is a redirect. There is absolutely no justification for keeping any sub-pages: Template:Black metal/doc was, quite rightly, deleted. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 19:02, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- ok. Based on feedback from two admins (Edgar181 & RHaworth) I am going to continue to CSD these templates. If anyone else has any strong feelings, feel free to
{{ping|zackmann08}}
me. --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 20:30, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- ok. Based on feedback from two admins (Edgar181 & RHaworth) I am going to continue to CSD these templates. If anyone else has any strong feelings, feel free to
- Template:Black metal is a redirect. There is absolutely no justification for keeping any sub-pages: Template:Black metal/doc was, quite rightly, deleted. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 19:02, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- In my opinion these /doc pages leftovers should be deleted. A redirect has a function (or purpose if you will), in that it serves to lead users reaching it to the correct end-point. How exactly would a user reach an unused and unlinked sub-page of a page that itself was redirected? The only way is by manually searching for that exact title, and that should not be a valid result for a page that serves no purpose. --Gonnym (talk) 21:22, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) In reply to Gonnym, who I edit-conflicted with: I'm not necessarily saying we need to keep these unused or otherwise "orphaned" /doc subpages. I'm just saying that CSD is completely inappropriate to use in this case. I don't think you need to go about putting in a TFD for every one (hell, I don't really think we need to worry about these pages), but at the very least there needs to be a discussion to determine their fate. Primefac (talk) 21:24, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- As seems to be case with all the latest discussions making the system more efficient, more bureaucratic proceedings which serve absolutely no editors. The result of this will be that they will just get put up on TfD slowly, make the discussion list longer for no reason, and end up with the same exact arguments - "unused and should be deleted" and "redirect to new /doc page" - as there can't be any other argument (for valid unused /doc pages of redirect). --Gonnym (talk) 21:33, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Or Zach could go through and BOLDly redirect all of the /doc subpages and call it good. It's a heck of a lot easier to undo the creation of a redirect than it is to deal with an undeletion, should it prove necessary. Primefac (talk) 21:38, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Exactly, if we're striving for efficiency and we absolutely must do something about these doc subpages, then redirecting them is the one action that's the least time for everyone. And yes, a proposal for extending some CSD criterion to cover them is unlikely to pass: they don't do any harm that I can think of and there all sorts of problems that can arise if they get deleted: attribution could get broken (as pointed out by Primefac), or it might be difficult to fix errors resulting from template merges if you don't have access to the merged template's documentation. – Uanfala (talk) 02:29, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Or Zach could go through and BOLDly redirect all of the /doc subpages and call it good. It's a heck of a lot easier to undo the creation of a redirect than it is to deal with an undeletion, should it prove necessary. Primefac (talk) 21:38, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- As seems to be case with all the latest discussions making the system more efficient, more bureaucratic proceedings which serve absolutely no editors. The result of this will be that they will just get put up on TfD slowly, make the discussion list longer for no reason, and end up with the same exact arguments - "unused and should be deleted" and "redirect to new /doc page" - as there can't be any other argument (for valid unused /doc pages of redirect). --Gonnym (talk) 21:33, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) In reply to Gonnym, who I edit-conflicted with: I'm not necessarily saying we need to keep these unused or otherwise "orphaned" /doc subpages. I'm just saying that CSD is completely inappropriate to use in this case. I don't think you need to go about putting in a TFD for every one (hell, I don't really think we need to worry about these pages), but at the very least there needs to be a discussion to determine their fate. Primefac (talk) 21:24, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
No. The /doc subpages do not meet the criteria of G8, and WP:G6 is not a deletion criteria that means "well I don't really like it so it should be deleted". In the Black Metal example above, the /doc actually precedes the newer doc, and there could have been an attribution issue if the newer /doc had been copied from the old one. There is nothing in G8 or G6 that allows for deletion of these templates, barring IAR from admins who don't really care and just click "delete" when they see a CSD tag. Primefac (talk) 21:24, 14 March 2019 (UTC)Reasonable argument made below... still not overly thrilled but w/e. Primefac (talk) 00:12, 16 March 2019 (UTC)- Support CSD If the base template was made into a redirect, then G6 should apply: the doc template was "orphaned as the result of a consensus at WP:TfD". In other cases, I note that the list at G8 says "Examples include", not "these are the only possible cases" as some above seem to want to interpret it. An unused doc subpage would be "a page dependent on a nonexistent page": doc subpages exist only to document a template, and if there's no template to be documented then it's dependent on something that doesn't exist. If someone really did do a cut-and-paste move of the doc page (but not the template? why?), WP:REFUND exists. Anomie⚔ 23:51, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Eh... fair point. I suppose my main concern is that some admins don't care why a template/page has been nominated, just that it's not an "obviously wrong" tag. I know REFUND exists, but I would just strongly caution anyone wanting to deal with this "issue" to take care and not just batch-nominate 1k+ pages, because that's when mistakes get made. Primefac (talk) 00:12, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
Proposal: Expand G5 to include undisclosed paid editing
Main proposal
Currently G5 is actionable for articles created by editors violating a block or ban. This is a personal block or ban: "To qualify, the edit must be a violation of the user's specific block or ban."
Well, an undisclosed paid editor is "banned" from editing, not by Wikipedia policy but by the WMF's Terms of Use. This ban isn't directed at any specific editor, but editing without disclosing payment is blockable.
A discussion on the OTRS mailing list suggests that it would make sense, as an additional deterrent, to treat articles created by such editors as any other G5 article, but the wording of G5 would need to change.
We have the Terms of Use, and we have G5, and the purpose of G5 seems like a good fit for enforcing the Terms of Use ban on undisclosed paid editing.
I suggest adding after the bullet list in G5:
- "In addition, because undisclosed paid editing is prohibited by Wikimedia Foundation policy, articles created by undisclosed paid editors are candidates for speedy deletion under G5."
Or an alternative suggested by Cryptic below:
- "In addition, because undisclosed paid editing is prohibited by Wikimedia Foundation policy, articles created by editors who have been indef-blocked for undisclosed paid editing are candidates for speedy deletion under G5."
What say everyone? ~Anachronist (talk) 22:59, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Anachronist: I like the idea... My question becomes how do you determine that the user IS an undisclosed paid editor? I've personally accused someone of being a paid editor to later find out it was a high school kid who was just really excited about the product. Page certainly needed to be reworked, but didn't really qualify for CSD. I would argue this sort of article really needs to go through WP:AFD so that the paid editor status can be proven/flushed out... Now, if on the other hand, the editor in question is blocked as a result of paid editing, that is another story. Just some food for thought. I like the idea. --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 23:30, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Support.
- Can't support deletion because the criterion is not object, per User:Thryduulf. (we've been here before). However, something' has to be done. Counter proposal is to Quarantine suspected UPE product. --SmokeyJoe (talk)
- Support toughening the current rules to better than toothless. Consistent, or even prerequisite of this, is that at WP:COI most of the occurrences of the toothless "should" are changed to "must".
- COI editors MUST NOT edit articles directly; instead they may make requests and suggestions on the talk page.
- COI editors MUST NOT create articles; instead they may use WP:AfC.
- UPE editors are a worse-problem subset of COI editors, and the boundary is indistinct. Where a page is the sole product, ignoring minor edits, of a UPE editor or editors, an admin may delete it per WP:CSD#G5(UPE).
- Post deletion of UPE product, if the editor later sufficiently declares and complies, the deleted page should not be WP:REFUNDed, instead, the COI editor may start again, ensuring that all COI editing has links back to a declaration older than the edits. To comply conservatively with attribution requirements, if they request an emailed version, email only the references (there is no creative content in a reference list).
- I would like to go further, and require paid editors to use a special alternative account, named with the suffix "(paid)". Eg. User:Example (paid). This account must be a fully declared alternative account, linking to & from all other accounts controlled by the same person. The right to privacy is compromised by engaging in paid editing. Paid editing accounts must not be allowed to vanish leaving their product live in mainspace.
- --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:37, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
- I don't support excluding Wikipedians in Residence or WMF employees. If they are making edits for which they are paid to make, they should use similar declared alt. accounts and suffixed usernames: User:Example (WiR), and User:Example (WMF). Not because they are problem editors, but to set the example for best practice. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:47, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support. Just as I support banning any form of paid editing (except WIR) and deleting their contributions. Making money out of the work of the volunteers who create and maintain this encyclopedia is dishonorable and unethical. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:11, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support as a straightforward and long overdue extension of WP:DENY. The only snag I can foresee is that proving UPE is hard, and it wouldn't be in the spirit of speedy deletion to use it when there's merely a suspicion. I'd suggest restricting the new G5 subcriterion to articles created by users who have subsequently been indefinitely blocked/banned for UPE. – Joe (talk) 00:21, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Very strong oppose. In order for this to meet the requirements 1 and 2 for a new or expanded criterion (i.e. only applying to things that it should) it would need to be restricted to pages created by confirmed (not just suspected) undisclosed paid editors, for pay (i.e. not other articles they have created) who knew at the time of page creation that they needed to disclose and have not, after a reasonable opportunity to do so, disclosed in an appropriate location that they were/are paid to edit, and the creation was not otherwise permitted by the ToU. Given that it would be impossible for a single admin to verify even half of this it is not remotely suitable for CSD. Even if it were, almost all the actually problematic content would be suitable for speedy deletion under an existing criterion anyway (failing requirement 4 with the remainder probably failing requirement 3 also). Thryduulf (talk) 00:42, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Actually, Thryduulf makes an important point. It would be fine to G5 known UPE product, but nearly always, it is a mere suspicion, at best a DUCK test. That is why I proposed: Wikipedia:Quarantine promotional Undeclared Paid Editor product. Quarantine suspected UPE, blanked so that it looks not there, subpages so that "Quarantine" is in the title, but available for the author to defend themselves. Note that the proposal is rough with serious comments on altering the details, on its talk page. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:52, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Thryduulf: How about modifying the proposal to delete articles created by editors who have already been blocked for undisclosed paid editing? Often these are checkuser blocks. ~Anachronist (talk) 02:58, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- @SmokeyJoe: See SoWhy's point below - I would support this only if it applies only to pages that were created in violation of the ToU, which is not necessarily all of them. Thryduulf (talk) 09:52, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thryduulf, I appreciate that principle, you want to discriminate between UPE-TOU violators and other pedestrian COI editors, but how can you tell the difference if you don’t ask? And if you ask, how can you expect an answer with neither stick nor carrot? And why not chase the pedestrian COI editors to answer a few little questions? —SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:38, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- If you can't tell the difference between UPE and other COI editors then that is another reason why this cannot work - I oppose in the strongest possible terms penalising editors for breaching the ToU when they have done no such thing. If the article is non-neutral then fix it or delete it - you can do this already. If the article is neutral then there isn't a problem that requires deletion. Thryduulf (talk) 10:48, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thryduulf. How do you tell the difference between a UPE and another COI editor? Suppose both are newish accounts, all they have done is written a draft on WP:CORP-borderline company&products, a couple OK sources, a half dozen non-independent PR sources, and another half dozen mere-mention sources. This is typical. I don't think I can tell the difference without a little free form discussion. The problem is, most do not even answer. I suspect most are UPEs, but there is no proof. What would you do in this situation? Give the suspect UPEs the benefit of the doubt, and let them through?
Do you have a problem with OK articles in mainspace when they are the product of undisclosed paid editing? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:17, 14 March 2019 (UTC)- If there is no proof that an editor has broken the ToU then it is completely inappropriate for us to be treating them if they have. If there is a neutral, BLP-compliant article about a notable topic in the main namespace then the encyclopaedia would be harmed by deleting it (assuming it's not a copyvio) - why does it matter who wrote it? If the Foundation want editors to rigorously enforce the TOU prohibition on UPE then they need to (a) explicitly ask us and (b) give us the tools to do so reliably. Thryduulf (talk) 11:28, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- That is logical. I think, for an editor that does not self-declare, given the privacy policy, there can never be proof. Are people getting hyped up about UPE for no good reason? Is there evidence of a problem? Beyond NPP and AfC thinking they have to worry about it? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:48, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- I've never seen any evidence that content written by (suspected) paid editors presents any problems that content of the same standard written by other editors does. If an article is irredeemably spammy it should be deleted, if an article is good quality it should not - who wrote it ins't relevant. Thryduulf (talk) 11:54, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- I have never seen content written by an undisclosed paid editor that was any good. Often it looks superficially accurate but when you start looking at the refs they are typically poor and many often do not support the content they are placed behind. Paid editing is trying to mislead our readers and thus it harms our encyclopedia and our reputation. Those doing it are not interested in becoming editors who contribute high quality content but simple want to promote those who pay them and will try anything to continue to do so. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:23, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- "I have never seen content written by an undisclosed paid editor that was any good." in which case it can and should be fixed or deleted like any other bad content - that the author was (or might have been) paid is irrelevant. However, I actually suspect that there is good content produced by UPE that doesn't get noticed because it's good and doesn't actually cause any problems. Thryduulf (talk) 13:23, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- I have never seen content written by an undisclosed paid editor that was any good. Often it looks superficially accurate but when you start looking at the refs they are typically poor and many often do not support the content they are placed behind. Paid editing is trying to mislead our readers and thus it harms our encyclopedia and our reputation. Those doing it are not interested in becoming editors who contribute high quality content but simple want to promote those who pay them and will try anything to continue to do so. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:23, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- I've never seen any evidence that content written by (suspected) paid editors presents any problems that content of the same standard written by other editors does. If an article is irredeemably spammy it should be deleted, if an article is good quality it should not - who wrote it ins't relevant. Thryduulf (talk) 11:54, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- That is logical. I think, for an editor that does not self-declare, given the privacy policy, there can never be proof. Are people getting hyped up about UPE for no good reason? Is there evidence of a problem? Beyond NPP and AfC thinking they have to worry about it? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:48, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- If there is no proof that an editor has broken the ToU then it is completely inappropriate for us to be treating them if they have. If there is a neutral, BLP-compliant article about a notable topic in the main namespace then the encyclopaedia would be harmed by deleting it (assuming it's not a copyvio) - why does it matter who wrote it? If the Foundation want editors to rigorously enforce the TOU prohibition on UPE then they need to (a) explicitly ask us and (b) give us the tools to do so reliably. Thryduulf (talk) 11:28, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thryduulf. How do you tell the difference between a UPE and another COI editor? Suppose both are newish accounts, all they have done is written a draft on WP:CORP-borderline company&products, a couple OK sources, a half dozen non-independent PR sources, and another half dozen mere-mention sources. This is typical. I don't think I can tell the difference without a little free form discussion. The problem is, most do not even answer. I suspect most are UPEs, but there is no proof. What would you do in this situation? Give the suspect UPEs the benefit of the doubt, and let them through?
- If you can't tell the difference between UPE and other COI editors then that is another reason why this cannot work - I oppose in the strongest possible terms penalising editors for breaching the ToU when they have done no such thing. If the article is non-neutral then fix it or delete it - you can do this already. If the article is neutral then there isn't a problem that requires deletion. Thryduulf (talk) 10:48, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thryduulf, I appreciate that principle, you want to discriminate between UPE-TOU violators and other pedestrian COI editors, but how can you tell the difference if you don’t ask? And if you ask, how can you expect an answer with neither stick nor carrot? And why not chase the pedestrian COI editors to answer a few little questions? —SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:38, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- @SmokeyJoe: See SoWhy's point below - I would support this only if it applies only to pages that were created in violation of the ToU, which is not necessarily all of them. Thryduulf (talk) 09:52, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Thryduulf: How about modifying the proposal to delete articles created by editors who have already been blocked for undisclosed paid editing? Often these are checkuser blocks. ~Anachronist (talk) 02:58, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Actually, Thryduulf makes an important point. It would be fine to G5 known UPE product, but nearly always, it is a mere suspicion, at best a DUCK test. That is why I proposed: Wikipedia:Quarantine promotional Undeclared Paid Editor product. Quarantine suspected UPE, blanked so that it looks not there, subpages so that "Quarantine" is in the title, but available for the author to defend themselves. Note that the proposal is rough with serious comments on altering the details, on its talk page. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:52, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Support. Paid editing on Wikipedia is reaching crisis-level proportions and we need to deal with it as such. — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 01:45, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support option 2 as it is more objective. — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 13:03, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Please explain how your suggestion relates to the previous RFC. --Izno (talk) 02:10, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Over half of AfC submissions are likely UPE or COI edits. This could really cut down the AfC workload. Legacypac (talk) 02:12, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- The way to make this criterion objective is to foist the uncertainty off on another process. To wit: the content should only be speedyable if its creator has already been indefinitely blocked as a paid editor. —Cryptic 02:24, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support Option 2 as it is clear cut easy to see. I'm going to suggest we try to feed a notice about COI and UPE to every submitter of content at AfC that someone might pay for. Maybe a bot can do that. Even if it get posted to editors that are writing historic topics etc who cares because it will raise awareness without accusing them. Legacypac (talk) 03:51, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose particularly at AFC. It is difficult to determine whether the writer is paid or has made a disclosure. So this is not suitable for a speedy deletion. At AFC pages will be examined to see if they are promotional or not. It gives a UPE editor a chance to learn they need to disclose. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 05:31, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- I'm suggesting a notification system to encourage disclosure. We would only speedy drafts at AfC created by blocked UPE users. Often these drafts get worked on by sock after sock so flushing them from the system would be a good thing. Why waste my volunteer time to ensure the UPE gets his/her paycheck? Why make it easy for them to violate our rules? Legacypac (talk) 05:47, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose How do you tell that something was created for undisclosed payments? Idle speculation and "I think so" is not clear enough. Besides, G11 is a thing for spammy articles. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 06:30, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- G11 only catches the product of the most inept UPEs. Granted, there are lots of them, but they are noisy inept UPEs that will learn how to avoid G11, and G11 leaves no record for the non-admin reviewers to refer to when they try again, and again, and again. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:41, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Why does no one like my quarantine idea?
- * The suspected UPE page can't be deleted, because the reviewer rarely can know it is UPE objectively enough for any acceptable CSD.
- * It is not worth a community discussion for every suspected UPE creation, NPP and AfC reviewers have to be trusted on this to do something.
- * The page has to be blanked, so that the UPE is not recognized for the work in progress.
- * The page and every version of it has to have the ugly title, including "Quarantined", so that the UPE can't even send the sponsor a version link. (Achieved by the page move)
- * if the author can declare, or explain that the are not a UPE, then the reviewer can move the page back, no admin functions required.
- The quarantine proposal talk page has productive input on details. I think the concept is the only viable action I've seen. A CSD based on the unknowable author=UPE condition is not workable. A CSD requiring the author to be blocked will miss 99% of the problem. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:39, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Short answer on that proposal - too complex and too much work for reviewers. A blank in place for drafts might work with a message about UPE/COI much like we do with suspected copyvio. We could make it a CSD with a delayed deletion, it only shows up in the CSD pending list after X days. That can be programmed right into the CSD template. Give the user time to disclose and remove the CSD. Otherwise bye bye. Legacypac (talk) 07:04, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- It is not meant to be work for the reviewer. It is meant to be less work than giving a reviewing comment. If the concept is agreed to, everything is easily scripted.
- You can't have a CSD for suspected UPE. Anachronist's proposal is doomed for this reason, just like the previous one last time. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:20, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Short answer on that proposal - too complex and too much work for reviewers. A blank in place for drafts might work with a message about UPE/COI much like we do with suspected copyvio. We could make it a CSD with a delayed deletion, it only shows up in the CSD pending list after X days. That can be programmed right into the CSD template. Give the user time to disclose and remove the CSD. Otherwise bye bye. Legacypac (talk) 07:04, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Possibly support #2 delayed. I could entertain supporting some kind of UPE-PROD which gives these editors the chance to disclose per Legacypac above or dispute the UPE and a block based on that. After all, just because an admin has decided to block someone for UPE does not mean they are an UPE. However, I do see the problem that in most cases, such a deletion mechanism will fail due to the uncertainties surrounding UPE and how to prove it. Regards SoWhy 08:29, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support option 2 While I agree that suspicions of UPE are not sufficient for the deletion of a page (that's why we have the
{{undisclosed paid}}
template), if it is confirmed that a user has been editing in violation of Wikipedia's TOU, that's a good reason for deletion. As a comparative analogy, if a user is blocked for copyright violations, we delete pages they have created which are violating copyright, and we do so regardless of whether they were created before or after the block. In this scenario, we are blocking a user for violating the TOU, and the pages that they created prior to being blocked are part of that violation - they should, therefore, be deleted. Yunshui 雲水 08:37, 14 March 2019 (UTC)- I don't think that analogy is apt. If we block an editor for repeated copyright violations, we still have to check whether all their creations really fit G12 because just because they violated copyright in some cases does not mean they did so in all cases. Similarly, someone blocked for UPE does not mean all their articles were created because they were paid for it. Regards SoWhy 08:50, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Having dealt with some large cases of copyright issues, after finding copyright violations in 10 random edits from a single user, yes large scale rollback becomes a perfectly reasonable option and one I have carried out. At this point instances that do not look like copyright violations from this individual might just mean that the source they copied from is no longer easily avaliable online rather than the content being "okay". Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:17, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- I don't think that analogy is apt. If we block an editor for repeated copyright violations, we still have to check whether all their creations really fit G12 because just because they violated copyright in some cases does not mean they did so in all cases. Similarly, someone blocked for UPE does not mean all their articles were created because they were paid for it. Regards SoWhy 08:50, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support (option 2) - Articles written by confirmed UPEs should be speedily deleted for two reasons: 1) there is a high probability that the articles were also paid for, and 2) deleting all article created by the UPE would have the same disincentivising effect as it does for socks of blocked/banned users.- MrX 🖋 11:25, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Very strong support of both options plus suggestions by User:SmokeyJoe. When a family of 3 plus socks are blocked and all the articles created by these socks are 1) promotional 2) barely / not notable 3) each sock makes a dozen small edits, waits a week, and then creates a perfect article in a single edit. It does not take a rocket scientist (or AI specialist) to identify this as undisclosed paid editing (and by accounts of a prior blocked user). I currently delete these articles as they are created by previously blocked users (we do not need to bury our heads in the sand). In fact all articles that follow this pattern could really be simple deleted. User:SmokeyJoe suggestions are excellent and are definitely required if we are going to allowed paid "promotional" editing to continue at all. My issue with paid editing in the type were those doing the paying have a COI regarding the subject matter in question (ie someone paying for an article about themselves or their business). The NIH/CDC paying someone to help improve articles about hearing loss for example is not an issue as the NIH/CDC do not have a COI with respect to the topic in question. They of course should not and do not work on content about the NIH or CDC itself. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:16, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- If a family of socks are blocked then their contributions can already be deleted under G5 - why they were socking is irrelevant. The latter part of your comment just proves that paid editing (disclosed or otherwise), COI editing and promotional editing are three different issues - they are overlapping sets but all combinations of 0, 1, 2 and all 3 of them exist. If the content is bad it should be (and can be) fixed or deleted using existing processes so there is no need for this proposal; if the content is good then there is no need to delete it so there is no need for this proposal. Thryduulf (talk) 13:23, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support Proposal 2 - I also believe it is unjust and immensely unwise to block articles because they are believed to be from PAIDCOI editors. However I'm all for scrapping the work of confirmed paid editors. While we might actually do some collateral damage this way, it should make it much harder for the paid editor to keep doing his action as a number of his clients suddenly become grumpy. Nosebagbear (talk) 13:35, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support proposal 2 with a caveat that it is not very retrospective and only includes arrticles created from March 2018 because many upe articles that have been around for a few years have a lot of contributions from legitimate editors and the G5 criteria in practice is applied very unevenly so that some articles will be deleted no matter whether the other legitimate contributions are substantial and significant, regards Atlantic306 (talk) 15:53, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose Proposal 2, as it would include all pages they created, even those they were not paid to create. That, to me, is overreaching and suggests if an editor was paid to create one page and created 99 good pages without payment, all 100 pages are eligible for speedy deletion. That's not productive. Neutral for now on Proposal 1. Smartyllama (talk) 18:07, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Smartyllama: Both proposals would include all pages UPE created. The only difference is which users are covered, in proposal one it's everybody suspected to be an undisclosed paid editor (whether this is proven or not), in proposal 2 only those people who have been indefinitely blocked for undisclosed paid editing (whether proven or not). Thryduulf (talk) 18:32, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- In that case, Oppose Both but Support a potential third option which only includes pages the editor was actually paid to create, as those were the only edits in violation of WMF policy. Smartyllama (talk) 18:43, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Smartyllama: Both proposals would include all pages UPE created. The only difference is which users are covered, in proposal one it's everybody suspected to be an undisclosed paid editor (whether this is proven or not), in proposal 2 only those people who have been indefinitely blocked for undisclosed paid editing (whether proven or not). Thryduulf (talk) 18:32, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. UPEs have long been alleged to be socks at SPI. I don't know the stats, but certainly frequently they are not socks. I have no objection to some sort of proposal to add a G code for UPEs, but expanding G5 in this way would be very messy. As it is, many editors tag articles incorrectly, and there are admins that either don't understand the language of G5 or who IAR-go along with it. I suspect a new G code just for UPEs would also be messy, but let's at least keep our messes separate.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:38, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per Thryduulf and Bbb23. Additionally, the only valid reason for a UPE's contribs to be speedy deleted is already covered by WP:G11. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 19:24, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose unless it is limited to cases where the article "is the sole product, ignoring minor edits, of a [blocked] UPE editor or editors", per SmokeyJoe. I've seen plenty of blatently promotional articles rescued by uninvolved editors, and we wouldn't want to throw those babies out with the bathwater. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 19:44, 14 March 2019 (UTC) - Oppose I support the general idea but this version does not restrict itself to articles created for pay. If I accept a commission to write a paid article tomorrow and don't disclose it then any article I've ever written could be deleted under this. Hut 8.5 20:42, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- part of the point of this is to discourage people from doing just that. It wouldn't conceivably apply to you, because an editor with skill and experience and knowledge of WP, would know to declare. DGG ( talk ) 21:33, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Sure, I have no desire to take up paid editing but the same principle applies. If an editor gets banned then G5 isn't used to delete everything they have ever written, even though that would be a deterrent to doing something ban-worthy. Hut 8.5 21:56, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- part of the point of this is to discourage people from doing just that. It wouldn't conceivably apply to you, because an editor with skill and experience and knowledge of WP, would know to declare. DGG ( talk ) 21:33, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support option 2. with the same understanding as for other G5s, that if a good-faith editor has edited it substantially, it does not apply. I have in the past tried to rescue articles of importance and clear notability even for UPEs, and this will make it more difficult, but considering the threat that they pose, it is necessary. I do point out that by adopting it we eliminate the possibility of a UPE reforming and declaring their earlier work. But this is not that much of a change, because even now they would have to declare their earlier work, tho it would not get speedy deleted. -- several such editors have contacted me, and they are not willing to declare earlier work regardless, claiming confidentiality. I would suggest proceeding very slowly withe earlier ones. DGG ( talk ) 21:21, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- @DGG: What is the actual "threat" here that is not posed by unpaid COI edits? Why does this require speedy deletion of every article created someone we suspect of engaging in UPE - regardless of whether we are right, and regardless of whether that article was created for pay? Thryduulf (talk) 00:58, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Unpaid COI editors are normally friends or associates or fans of the subject. They can, at best, be educated about our standards and will try to meet them and sometimes even go on to editing properly; at worst, they will quickly leave. We need to be flexible and open to potential good faith contributors. (If they're the subject in person, then it's a different problem--their sense of self-importance is involved, and they will generally become so obnoxious about it that we can quickly remove them.) Paid COI editors, the ones who are undeclared especially, almost never can be educated about our standards; they can be stopped at a particular article, but many of them seem to return indefinitely. They have no interest in being good faith editors. . (I'm usingCOI in the sense of specific interest in having a particular article , not contributing with a COI to WP generally) DGG ( talk ) 01:45, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Another consideration is that COI editors are often in a better place to find sources to support an edit on the topic, given that they are connected to it. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 06:34, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Broken windows theory applies to promotional articles because newbies justify their existence with WP:OSE. There's also cases where articles - they don't have to be spam, mind you - were created for pitching to potential clients (who are not necessarily the subject of the article) or business development purposes. Even though these articles are not created explicitly for pay, they still need to be nuked - perhaps more urgently. MER-C 18:34, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Unpaid COI editors are normally friends or associates or fans of the subject. They can, at best, be educated about our standards and will try to meet them and sometimes even go on to editing properly; at worst, they will quickly leave. We need to be flexible and open to potential good faith contributors. (If they're the subject in person, then it's a different problem--their sense of self-importance is involved, and they will generally become so obnoxious about it that we can quickly remove them.) Paid COI editors, the ones who are undeclared especially, almost never can be educated about our standards; they can be stopped at a particular article, but many of them seem to return indefinitely. They have no interest in being good faith editors. . (I'm usingCOI in the sense of specific interest in having a particular article , not contributing with a COI to WP generally) DGG ( talk ) 01:45, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support option 2. The only way to rid ourselves of this menace is to deny the spammers their product. They are not here to improve Wikipedia and we shouldn't expend more than the bare minimum of time needed to dealing with them - they can just overwhelm us with cheap labor. AFD doesn't scale very well and many UPE articles are specifically created to frustrate the notability evaluation process (e.g. by WP:REFBOMBing). Whether they are explicitly sockpuppets or not is irrelevant - many UPE operations are sophisticated enough to evade CU and/or farm out the actual page creations to low wage/third world/freelance meatpuppets with instructions on evading detection. Quarantine should be used when UPE is merely suspected. The analogy with copyright violations is correct - it is policy that contributions of repeat infringers can be presumed to be copyvios and removed indiscriminately. MER-C 18:51, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose any version of this. I am as strongly opposed to undisclosed paid editing, and paid editing in general, as anyone. However, no version has been proposed that is Objective and Uncontestable. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:53, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support. — Jeff G. ツ 23:10, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per Jo-Jo Eumerus. How many of you supporters are familiar with the big box at the top of the page? Look under Read this before proposing new criteria if you're not. This proposal is neither objective nor uncontestable, especially as it's quite plausible that an article potentially deletable under this proposed criterion is beneficial to Wikipedia. We shouldn't go deleting good content merely because the creator got paid to create it: we should delete it if the content's demonstrably bad or if the situation's ambiguous, but this proposal would have us delete all paid-edit content, even when it's demonstrably good. Nyttend (talk) 02:50, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose - Unless an editor discloses that they are a paid editor, how can it objectively be known that they are? — Godsy (TALKCONT) 03:46, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. Content should be evaluated by its own merits, not those of its creator. Benjamin (talk) 06:27, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose Thryduulf and Nyttend raise good points. It's impossible to quickly verify whether the article meets the proposed criteria. And if it's not quick, it's not speedy deletion. feminist (talk) 10:10, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- A wonderful, impractical dream. A criterion that, if it could be objectively and speedily enforced, would make Wikipedia a better place. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 05:43, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose both. As drafted, both proposals are overly broad, capturing work that have substantial contributions by others, weren't written while blocked, weren't written for pay, and combinations thereof. It couldn't work as an extension of G5, which is specifically for pages created in violation of a user's specific block w/o substantial contributions by others. A more narrower and objective CSD criteria could work, or some PROD or quasi-PROD process might be better. ---- Patar knight - chat/contributions 20:53, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. Undeclared paid editing is not even agreed to be a deletion reason. The place for this discussion is Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy#Undeclared Paid Editor (UPE) product; only if UPE AfDs consistently result in SNOW deleted should this be considered as a CSD. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:32, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. Thryduulf and Nyttend are right again with this one. --Bsherr (talk) 15:13, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose as per WP:BITE. Some newcomers may not know about declaring paid editing. I know the best wiki (talk) 15:55, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per Thryduulf's valid point. It's literally impossible to tell whether the article was a COI creation, which would ruin the point of speedy deletion. --GN-z11 ☎ ★ 18:48, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose, mostly per Thryduulf, though I like SmokeyJoe's idea. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:05, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose If the article isn't bad enough to delete G11, there should be a discussion about it, not a speedy deletion based on the author. Monty845 05:03, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per WP:CREEP and WP:FOC. Andrew D. (talk) 12:03, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per above. Should be done on a case by case basis with community input, not summarily by admins. Wugapodes [thɑk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɹɪbz] 01:03, 26 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per Benjamin: "Content should be evaluated by its own merits, not those of its creator." As well, one editor with 99 good articles shouldn't have those all deleted over one undisclosed-paid one. ɱ (talk) 17:05, 26 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose For so many of the reasons listed above that it would take too long to list them all. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 06:33, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose - For all the reasons already stated. If it doesn't qualify under G11, then not only should it get a discussion, there should be even less confidence in the identity of the supposedly conflicted creator. MarginalCost (talk) 01:22, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose Outright deletion of content, except as already defined per CSD. UPE is unethical but there is absolutely no basis to say that the content produced as a product of UPE cannot be salvaged at all. Instead of going on a crusade against UPE, if we all improved Wikipedia (by improving UPE bs, for example) we'd be better off. --QEDK (後 ☕ 桜) 18:07, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
Alternative proposal (3)
To remedy some of the opposers’ concerns, I propose that the following be added to the G5 bullet list in lieu of any of the above:
- In addition, because undisclosed paid editing is prohibited by Wikimedia Foundation policy, articles created for pay by editors who have been indef-blocked for undisclosed paid editing, with no substantial edits by other users, are candidates for speedy deletion under G5.
(Changes from proposal 2 marked in red.) — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 21:47, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support as proposer. — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 21:47, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
- Strong oppose because these conditions are impossible for a single admin reviewing a CSD nomination to determine. Also, it fails to address other problems noted above - principally lack of need and not being restricted to proven cases. Thryduulf (talk) 00:58, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- It may be hard to tell if the article was created for pay, but if it is obvious, then this should be possible to enforce with a speedy deletion. However if other good standing editors have adopted the page or removed the speedy delete tag, then this should not be foreced, and AFD considered instead. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 02:54, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
Oppose as written, but would support if "with no substantial edits by other users" were added to keep it in line with the rest of G5. Smartyllama (talk) 11:24, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- This would already be a required step because it's part of the G5 requirements, but I have inserted it above for clarity. — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 12:02, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support current version as my concerns above have been addressed. Smartyllama (talk) 12:28, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support, although in practice, we won't know which articles have been written for pay. But I guess we'll assume the article about a company CEO was written for pay and the one about an obscure 18th century poet wasn't, and we'll get it right most of the time. —Kusma (t·c) 11:46, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support this too, though prefer proposal 2. MER-C 18:52, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose as above. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:53, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support, this one looks like has been ironed out enough. I think I would prefer a separate number for this per Bbb23's concern above, but I understand why it's bundled with G5. -- Tavix (talk) 21:32, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support. — Jeff G. ツ 23:11, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support' along with proposals 1 & 2 (with preference reflected in the proposal number). Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 00:01, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support as this is clear and can be decided by only examining a few pages (history and user log). Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:10, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- How? Yes it's easy to tell whether the editor is indef blocked, and not difficult to tell whether there have been significant contributions from others but how do you propose to reliably and objectively tell whether any given article was created for pay? Note that simply suspecting that it might have been is insufficient. Thryduulf (talk) 14:28, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per Thryduulf. feminist (talk) 10:14, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. Just leave G5 alone, it's fine as is for quickly cleaning up ban violations, which is what it's meant for. For suspected paid editors, make a proposal to modify G11, or propose a new criterion. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 14:38, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Ivanvector: The idea here is that undisclosed paid editors are already "banned" by default. Therefore, wouldn't it be appropriate to use G5 to clean up these ban violations also? Remember, the proposal in this section applies only to contributions of editors who have already been blocked for undisclosed paid editing, and often those blocks are by checkusers. ~Anachronist (talk) 15:23, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Yes, that's a common view (that undisclosed paid editors are violating an implied ban) and one I share, but it's not universal, and so it doesn't meet the "objective" requirement for new criteria. For socks of editors who are already banned by a community process, G5 already applies. As a side note, we were explicitly warned in orientation that suspicion of commercial editing is not a valid rationale on its own for the use of Checkuser - if a user is Checkuser-blocked, you can presume it's not because of undisclosed paid editing but because of some violation of policy related to multiple account abuse. They don't go hand-in-hand as often as people like to think. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 16:23, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Ivanvector: The idea here is that undisclosed paid editors are already "banned" by default. Therefore, wouldn't it be appropriate to use G5 to clean up these ban violations also? Remember, the proposal in this section applies only to contributions of editors who have already been blocked for undisclosed paid editing, and often those blocks are by checkusers. ~Anachronist (talk) 15:23, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. Better than the above but still too subjective per Thryduulf. If this does get consensus, it should be a new criterion not under G5, which is for very clear cut violations of the user's original block/ban. If this must be under G5, then it should be restricted to very clear cut cases where someone is blocked for socking (e.g. explicitly mentioned in the block, link to SPI, Checkuserblock) after their first account was blocked for UPE. ---- Patar knight - chat/contributions 21:08, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose as not objective. Instead, to move forwards on this, introduce a tracking category on UPE AfDs, to provide evidence on what normally happens. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:25, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- See Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy#Undeclared Paid Editor (UPE) product. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:30, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. Per Thryduulf. --Bsherr (talk) 15:19, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support as the person who originally started all this. I like this better than my option 2 in the section above. ~Anachronist (talk) 15:23, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per Thryduulf again. This is closer, but it's not there yet. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:05, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose - This would allow adaptive block rationales to make pages deletable, which is an abhorrent notion. — Godsy (TALKCONT) 19:29, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose Same as main proposal, if the article isn't bad enough to delete G11, it should go to a discussion, not be deleted due to the author. Monty845 05:05, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per WP:CREEP and WP:FOC. Andrew D. (talk) 12:03, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
- Weak support. I hate G5, but paid-for spam needs to be dealt with better than it is right now. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 06:01, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
- Support - If paid editors can easily continue to create new articles with new accounts, they will not stop. We need to do more to actually deter paid editing before it happens. We must make it clear that if you break our rules about paid editing you cannot get away with it. Meszzy2 (talk) 18:10, 5 April 2019 (UTC)
Another alternative (4) (or possibly, an addition)
Articles written by UPE can be brought to AfD, and if the consensus is that they were written by a blocked UPE, this will be a sufficient reason for deletion, regardless of considerations of possible notability and promotionalism
- This way no one person gets to decide, and there is a possibility of making exceptions. The disadvantage of this is having a large number of inconclusive AfD debates, so I'm not sure of this. I'm suggesting it only as a possible alternative to see what people think. (And, of course, it is't actually just one person in Speedy. Good practice is for one person to nominate, and then a second person who is an admin to decide.) DGG ( talk ) 01:52, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- This sounds reasonable, but AFD would always have been an option. I suppose that the deletion policy is what gets changed by thgis proposal. We shouuld make it clear that in this case it is the UPE that is the only substantial contributor, to avoid the case where pre-existing articles get edited by the paid editor. (in which case ubndoing edits would be appropriate). Graeme Bartlett (talk) 02:57, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
Additional possibility: remove the word blocked. If we are going by consensus the consensus can decide. (There will be an additional proposal to revise blocking policy. We now often presume any upe is likely to have socked, butit would bemuch more straightforward for UPE should be stated explicitly as a reason for blocking. DGG ( talk ) 04:52, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- AfD can delete any article for any reason per the consensus established in the AfD discussion. User:Thryduulf has provided a fundamental challenge. Who says ToU violation is a deletion reason? Did the WMF? Did editors decide? Links? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:28, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- We can decide. (though the discussion would have to take place at WP:Deletion Policy). We make our own policy. It would add to the list at WP:DEL-REASON. Though we can delete for any other reason also, reasons not on that list are in practice usually strongly challenged. Leaving it to individual AfDs would repeat this discussion each time, whether UPE is an acceptable reason. We need some uniformity of practice in dealing with COI contributors. DGG ( talk ) 14:17, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Wikipedians can decide, right. But not on this page. It is not even a WP:DEL-REASON, so it is not even conceivable that it should be a CSD. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:27, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- We can decide. (though the discussion would have to take place at WP:Deletion Policy). We make our own policy. It would add to the list at WP:DEL-REASON. Though we can delete for any other reason also, reasons not on that list are in practice usually strongly challenged. Leaving it to individual AfDs would repeat this discussion each time, whether UPE is an acceptable reason. We need some uniformity of practice in dealing with COI contributors. DGG ( talk ) 14:17, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Any article can be brought to AfD for any reason by any editor at any time. This proposal adds nothing to that. Thryduulf (talk) 10:37, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support Yes reasonable. Helps with causes of a bunch of paid for articles by a single account. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 11:41, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Wrong forum this is not a proposal for speedy deletion so the discussion should be happening at an appropriate venue - presumably Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy. However it is unnecessary as all you would be doing is adding a bullet point to Wikipedia:Deletion policy#Reasons for deletion which duplicates existing points 1, 4, 6, 7, 13 and/or 14. Thryduulf (talk) 14:07, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- of course it would need to be discussed at DelPolicy. And it I think ought to be viewed as a supplement to the discussion here which might use narrower criteria. For example, CSD would be blocked, AfD would be any UPE even if not yet blocked. The reasons given for deletion at DELPOLICY already overlap. It adds clarity to be specific. , whith something that can be quoted at the AfD. We do not want to add confusion to what many new users see as an already complicated and confusing process. DGG ( talk ) 14:30, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose as above. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:53, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose AfD can choose to delete an article under existing policy for promotionalism. This just muddies the waters. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 23:59, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- AfD can only delete under promotionalism if it reaches the level that would justify a WP:G11 deletion anyway. Paid Editing might cause the same problem, but it is not the same reasoning.
- actually, based on the last few years of decisions at AfD, Deletion for promotionalism it is interpreted more broadly. This is justified by WP:DEL4, " Advertising or other spam without any relevant or encyclopedic content )" The CSD criterion for G11, WP:G11 is "Unambiguous advertising or promotion: ... This applies to pages that are exclusively promotional and would need to be fundamentally rewritten to conform with Wikipedia:NOTFORPROMOTION " The difference, as for all speedy criteria, is that is has to be unambiguous. Situations that are debatable need to be debated at AfD, and promotionalism there can be and is interpreted however the consensus decides. Many is the promotional page where I have declined G11, nominated for AfD as promotional, and seen deleted by consensus. DGG ( talk ) 17:59, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support with Bartlett's amendment, - This is a different case to those above, and I think it is a reasonable one. It handles comments that it either isn't appropriate for a CSD standard time scale, or doesn't belong because it's too long for CSD (a somewhat tricky double argument!). Given the significant opposition primarily focused on being discussion in this forum, @DGG:, closing this here, moving to Del Policy while both leaving a forwarding and pinging each participant in this proposal would be reasonable/wise. Nosebagbear (talk) 17:40, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- AfD can only delete under promotionalism if it reaches the level that would justify a WP:G11 deletion anyway. Paid Editing might cause the same problem, but it is not the same reasoning.
- Wrong forum per above. UPE should obviously be a factor to consider at AFD that would militate towards deletion barring exceptionally good other factors (e.g. substantial, transformative contributions by others, very high quality material explicitly endorsed by other editors, etc.) but implementing changes to AFD is outside the scope of this page. ---- Patar knight - chat/contributions 21:14, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose in favor a restarting at WT:DEL, should UPE be a WP:DEL#REASON? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:26, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per Barkeep49, et al. This isn't a CSD proposal so is off-topic here, and it's not necessary since AfD can already delete such pages as hopelessly promotional. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:05, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose If the AFD discussion on the merits results in a keep consensus, the identity of the author should not override that. Monty845 05:10, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per WP:CREEP and WP:FOC. Andrew D. (talk) 12:03, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
Alternative wording (5)
Here's my concept for this new criterion:
"In addition, any articles confirmed to have been created by a confirmed undisclosed paid editor, are promotional, and have no substantial edits by others, are subject to this criterion due to violating Wikipedia terms of service."
Since other proposals were said to be too broad (not counting the wrong venue proposal), I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring with this potential wording of the new criterion for G5.
Hopefully this is short but concise enough to do. Kirbanzo (userpage - talk - contribs) 00:56, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support as proposer. Kirbanzo (userpage - talk - contribs) 00:56, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose If the article is problematically promotional, it can already be deleted G11. If it isn't bad enough for G11, its worth discussing at AFD. Monty845 05:12, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per Monty845. It also doesn't distinguish articles created for pay from articles created by someone who was paid to create other articles. Thryduulf (talk) 09:37, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per WP:CREEP and WP:FOC. Andrew D. (talk) 12:03, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
Alternative proposal 6
I think that this would be a good reason for speedy deletion, but I think that G5 is the wrong criterion. I think that we should, in stead, add this to G11 (spam), which is directly related to the issue of undisclosed payed editing. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 15:10, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Od Mishehu: Please could you be specific about the wording you are proposing as there are several different formulations above "this" could refer to (and the exact wording matters at speedy deletion). However, unless your proposal addresses the reasons for opposition that are unrelated to it being part of G5 (which I think is most of them) it is very unlikely to gain consensus. Thryduulf (talk) 19:11, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per WP:CREEP. There are too many half-baked proposals now and this is vexatious. No deal is better than a bad deal, eh? Andrew D. (talk) 12:03, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
Update P2 proposed
Currently P2 says "Any portal based on a topic for which there is only a stub header article or fewer than three non-stub articles detailing subject matter that would be appropriate to present under the title of that portal."
However even WikiProject Portals has 20 articles as the minimum to support a portal, something that many other editors think is too low. We are now finding many portals that lack 20 articles created by various users. To save a lot of wasted MfD time let's move the 3 to 20 in this criteria. Legacypac (talk) 02:01, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose, because speedy deletion is intended for content that blatantly violates CSD standards, and as presently worded, the criteria is sufficient. For example, a portal with nineteen selected articles could then be speedily deleted simply because it hasn't been updated to include new content. Makes it too easy to quickly throw away the work of other editors from simply counting articles, essentially qualifying deletion via bureaucratic bean counting. Per this "nineteen article" example, such and similar portal examples would be better discussed and assessed on a case-by-case basis at WP:MFD. North America1000 03:54, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support, but prefer a threshold of 10 non-stub articles pending a wider consensus. I have some sympathy with North's "nineteen article" example, and setting the limit at half that gives plenty of room for the occasional lapse, while still satisfying Legacypac's well-justified concern that too much effort is being wasted on portals with 3–10 articles.
- However, that "nineteen article" example is problematic. The minimum of 20 is a target set by the create-squillions-of-pointless-portals brigade at WP:WPPORT, and I believe that community consensus would set a radically higher threshold. Insofar as that threshold of 20 is upheld, it should be regarded as the absolute rock-bottom bare minimum for a portal to survive, so editors should be aware that creating a portal without a significantly higher number of articles is placing the portal at real risk of deletion if the numbers slip.
- So while, I'd refer ten, I'd support a threshold of 20 if other editors back it ... but either way, this proposal is just an intermediate step to ease the burden of cleaning up the flood of portalspam. It should all be revisited as part of a wider discussion on what size and number and type of portals the community will support. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:32, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per NorthAmerica. This would be a good reason to discuss the portal at MfD but the higher the number the greater the chance that there will be disagreement about whether an article does fall within a topic area or not so it needs discussion. Given that there is no draft space for portals and editors who dislike the idea of portals so much that they are desperately trying everything they can think of to get as many of them deleted as they humanly can, it is very important that we take extra care not to speedy delete something that would be better merged for example. Thryduulf (talk) 11:44, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- This isn't unreasonable. It is, however, premature. We should first find a wider consensus on how many articles are truly needed to support a portal - and I strongly suspect it will be multiple orders of magnitude higher than what the WPPORT echo chamber would like - and only then set a CSD threshold at some percentage of that. —Cryptic 12:15, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Not yet. The breadth threshold for portals is already being debated in several forums. I am disappointed that those discussions have not yet reached a conclusion, but producing yet another competing standard would not help. Certes (talk) 12:42, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- 20 is the number the Portal fans set a long time ago. Precious few topics on Wikipedia are notable enough to have a page yet are unreleated to less than four other pages. Therefore P2 is pretty much pointless as written. Legacypac (talk) 18:44, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Legacypac, CoolSkittle, BrownHairedGirl, Pythoncoder, and Cryptic: As Espresso Addict notes below, it is not going to be possible for a single admin to objectively determine whether a threshold above a small number (certainly less than 10) is met. This means it is inherently unsuitable for speedy deletion. It would be a good metric for a deletion discussion though, but per Certes it is important that if we have a threshold that we have only one, so it should be discussed at a single appropriate venue (which is not this discussion). Thryduulf (talk) 09:52, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Thryduulf, I think you misunderstand the issues here.
- This discussion is about criteria for speedy deletion. It is quite common (even routine) to have content guidelines which set thresholds higher than the speedy deletion criteria, so there is no reason why there should be only one criterion. All that matters is that the speedy criterion extends no higher than the lower limit of the general guideline. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:05, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) @BrownHairedGirl: I agree that two thresholds are common, but that's not my point. I was making two spearate points - First that many of the thresholds proposed here for speedy deletion (10, 20, etc) cannot be assessed objectively by a single admin and so cannot work as a speedy deletion criterion. Secondly I was pointing out that discussions of a non-CSD threshold (which some commenters seem to be unclear is different) should be discussed elsewhere. Thryduulf (talk) 10:12, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Paging through the list of portals-actually-deleted-as-P2 that I generated below, it's clear that even "3" has been entirely ignored in practice. —Cryptic 10:10, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Cryptic: Do you mean that portals with more than three non-stub articles are being deleted or that ones with fewer are not being? If the criterion is being routinely abused then that deserves a separate discussion about how to resolve that - e.g. is it only one admin or multiple admins? If it's not being used, then we need to look at why (again probably a separate discussion). Thryduulf (talk) 10:16, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- I meant the former, but the latter's probably true too. There hasn't been a year with more than 10 correct P2 speedies since 2007. Its original purpose - to prevent Portal:My meaningless little company and/or website - was obsolesced by the introduction of criterion G11. —Cryptic 10:38, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Cryptic: Do you mean that portals with more than three non-stub articles are being deleted or that ones with fewer are not being? If the criterion is being routinely abused then that deserves a separate discussion about how to resolve that - e.g. is it only one admin or multiple admins? If it's not being used, then we need to look at why (again probably a separate discussion). Thryduulf (talk) 10:16, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Legacypac, CoolSkittle, BrownHairedGirl, Pythoncoder, and Cryptic: As Espresso Addict notes below, it is not going to be possible for a single admin to objectively determine whether a threshold above a small number (certainly less than 10) is met. This means it is inherently unsuitable for speedy deletion. It would be a good metric for a deletion discussion though, but per Certes it is important that if we have a threshold that we have only one, so it should be discussed at a single appropriate venue (which is not this discussion). Thryduulf (talk) 09:52, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- 20 is the number the Portal fans set a long time ago. Precious few topics on Wikipedia are notable enough to have a page yet are unreleated to less than four other pages. Therefore P2 is pretty much pointless as written. Legacypac (talk) 18:44, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support with a threshold of 10 for now per BrownHairedGirl. CoolSkittle (talk) 14:52, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support 10 or 20 per BrownHairedGirl — if 20 is what the biggest portal fans (and thus people who want the lowest number of portals deleted) on this site want, it should definitely be the minimum standard for portals. This would help get rid of some of the useless nanoportals that aren't eligible for X3. — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 19:27, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
- Comment. I think this could be quite difficult for an admin to quickly assess in practice. Take, for example, the late unlamented Portal:Spaghetti. In addition to an adequate main article, there's Spaghetti alla chitarra, ~7 clear non-stubs under the subcat Dishes plus ~3 other borderline stub/start. I was surprised not to find that English school meal staple 'spag bog', but it's under Bolognese sauce, which apparently traditionally should be cooked with flat pasta, but does talk about the spaghetti dish. Also Tomato sauce, which has a classic spaghetti dish highlighted in the infobox. Also spaghetti sandwich, mysteriously not categorised. There could well be many other uncategorised articles that relate to spaghetti that might be findable by search, or just by meandering through the main article & the other found articles. Then you've got peripheral (but categorised) content such as Spaghetti-tree hoax, Flying Spaghetti Monster & 3 related articles, plus 16 pages of metaphors relating to spaghetti. There are ingredients (well, flour). There might well be books on spaghetti, well-known manufacturers, chefs, restaurants &c. Then you've got the notion that articles in Italian might be translated or mined to expand the stubs. Does the admin press delete or not? Unless >=9/10 admins would agree, it isn't going to be viable as a speedy category. Espresso Addict (talk) 07:15, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Can anyone tell how many deletions happen under P2 in the last X months or years? Legacypac (talk) 07:32, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Not all that many. There's only been 449 deletions, ever, in the portal namespace that mentioned "p2" or "P2" in the log comment (quarry:query/34444). Maybe a handful more if you account for admins who don't mention the code in their deletion comment, but those are rare these days. A bunch less if you filter out the false positives (Portal:San Francisco Bay Area/Cities and Counties Intro mentions P2 only to say that's being declined as a reason, for example) and the plainly, blatantly invalid ones (Portal:Laser, Portal:Disco, Portal:Bon Jovi, and about 60 subpages of Portal:Paleontology jumped out at me). —Cryptic 09:41, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- The current P2 is essentially useless and unused, and could be abolished with little harm. In more than ten years of CSD patrol, I have not used it once. I can, however, imagine a good portal that navigates through only 10 pages and a gazillion images. While I support a very low bar for deletion of autogenerated crap portals, that is a different issue than the number of articles covered by a portal. —Kusma (t·c) 10:20, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support. I like the effort to make P2 actually useable and would prefer an expansion of P2 over the X3 option that currently floating around. I'm also fine with 10—I could go either way. -- Tavix (talk) 21:27, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support 10, 20 or any number up to 100. I'd also support expanding P2 to apply to semi-automatically created portals with fewer than 100 pages, or portals with fewer than 100 notable topics under their scope, if either suggestion would garner more support. This threshold is still tiny and the vast majority of useless portals we have would not fail it. Given how incredibly low readership is for portals, and given that Wikipedia is written for readers, there's no point in us hosting portals on topics with so few pages under their scope. — Bilorv (he/him) (talk) 22:32, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
- @Bilory: How on earth do you propose to quickly, reliably and objectively (all required) determine whether there are 10 "notable topics" (definition please) within a portal's scope? For example would Trolley pole, Tunnelling shield and The Institution of Railway Signal Engineers be within the scope of a Portal:Railway infrastructure? Thryduulf (talk) 14:40, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- No one has been arguing it is impossible to quickly, reliably and objectively deturmine if 3 related articles exist. 10 or 20 is just a slightly higher number. If you believe the entire CSD is unworkable and has been that way for years make that point instead. This CSD should be used to clear the most crappy narrow portals. If there are not 20 bird species in a family for the Portal, Portal fails the test. If a writer has a head article article and articles on two books, writer fails the test. It's not that hard. Most of us can count to 10 or 20 and the Admin who feels incapable of making the assessment can leave it for an Admin who is more capable. Legacypac (talk) 15:33, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
Example: new Portal:Skunks which stinks. There are only 12 kinds of skunks so would fail P2=20. The 12 species are linked from the nav box and the portal and easy to count. The portal, complete with a contextless unlabeled chemical bond chart, adds nothing to skunks, it is just a detour from the useful article. Even more clear cut, a portal on Western spotted skunk would have zero other articles and fail P2 as written now. Legacypac (talk) 16:10, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Indeed, it is almost always going to be easy to find (or not find) three articles that objectively fall within a portal's scope, however this is not the case infinitely and so a cut-off has to be drawn somewhere at a point that it will be possible to determine objectively in all cases. Taking your skunks example, there are 12 types of skunk, but there are also list of fictional skunks, Enchantimals, Pepé Le Pew, Pogo (comic strip), Punky Skunk, Stinkor, Skunks as pets, Mephitis (genus) and Brachyprotoma obtusata, meaning there are 21 articles at least. Now you might argue that some of those shouldn't count - but that's the point, e.g. whether fictional skunks count as within the scope of a portal on Skunks is subjective (meaning the criteria fails the objectivity requirement). In this case though I would suggest that Portal:Skunks be merged into a Portal:Mephitidae or Portal:Musteloidea (meaning the criteria fails the incontestable requirement). Thryduulf (talk) 17:52, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- This, I think, is the crux of the thing. Once you get past a limit of a few (say, for example, three), it becomes time consuming and subjective, which makes for a bad CSD criterion. Once something becomes slow, subjective, or complicated enough that the typical sysop might not be guaranteed to do the same thing every time, it's better to use a more deliberative process like XfD where these cases can be discussed. The problem here is not with P2, but rather with the recent spate of portal creation. We can deal with that without complicating P2. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 19:39, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- The portal links to Category:Skunks and Category:Fictional skunks, which in total contain 31 articles. This is an objective criterion that could be used. And if a category doesn't exist for a topic then we certainly don't need a portal on it. — Bilorv (he/him) (talk) 20:21, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- And Portal:Skunks shows no evidence of including fictional skunks in the scope so that is a big stretch. The lede article does not mention fictional skunks. Legacypac (talk) 21:35, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- You're making my point for me: There is no consensus whether the portal does or should include fictional skunks, therefore it is not objectively and uncontestably determinable how many articles are within the scope and so it is unsuitable for speedy deletion. Thryduulf (talk) 11:16, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- And Portal:Skunks shows no evidence of including fictional skunks in the scope so that is a big stretch. The lede article does not mention fictional skunks. Legacypac (talk) 21:35, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Indeed, it is almost always going to be easy to find (or not find) three articles that objectively fall within a portal's scope, however this is not the case infinitely and so a cut-off has to be drawn somewhere at a point that it will be possible to determine objectively in all cases. Taking your skunks example, there are 12 types of skunk, but there are also list of fictional skunks, Enchantimals, Pepé Le Pew, Pogo (comic strip), Punky Skunk, Stinkor, Skunks as pets, Mephitis (genus) and Brachyprotoma obtusata, meaning there are 21 articles at least. Now you might argue that some of those shouldn't count - but that's the point, e.g. whether fictional skunks count as within the scope of a portal on Skunks is subjective (meaning the criteria fails the objectivity requirement). In this case though I would suggest that Portal:Skunks be merged into a Portal:Mephitidae or Portal:Musteloidea (meaning the criteria fails the incontestable requirement). Thryduulf (talk) 17:52, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support portals usually link to at least one category to establish the scope of the portal, so it should usually be fairly unambiguous how many articles are in scope. If there is no category then there aren't likely to be many articles in scope. The ambiguity argument doesn't seem to have prevented P2 from working up to now either. Three articles is far too small a scope for an effective portal and is below even the standard used by the relevant Wikiproject. Hut 8.5 21:50, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Sure, but the CSD criteria aren't designed to catch everything for deletion, only the most obvious/egregious/clear-cut cases. A3 or A7, for example, don't set a low a bar for an effective article because they don't define what makes a good article, just an obvious example of something that doesn't. Similarly, a portal relating to 4 or 11 or 21 articles may well be deleted just as so many articles that do no qualify for A3 or A7. Setting an overly strict standard to ensure the community has their say doesn't mean the criteria are ineffective, it's by design. At any rate, I'm open to the idea that three is too few to be make a valuable criterion, but I continue to think the real issue will be slowing down reviewers. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 23:58, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- Not only are categories useful for gauging the scope of portals, they are required portal items. If there is no category, then the portal shouldn't have been created in the first place because it can't contain all the items required for a portal. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 16:15, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
- Sure, but the CSD criteria aren't designed to catch everything for deletion, only the most obvious/egregious/clear-cut cases. A3 or A7, for example, don't set a low a bar for an effective article because they don't define what makes a good article, just an obvious example of something that doesn't. Similarly, a portal relating to 4 or 11 or 21 articles may well be deleted just as so many articles that do no qualify for A3 or A7. Setting an overly strict standard to ensure the community has their say doesn't mean the criteria are ineffective, it's by design. At any rate, I'm open to the idea that three is too few to be make a valuable criterion, but I continue to think the real issue will be slowing down reviewers. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 23:58, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
- User:Amorymeltzer what reviewers? Do you mean portal creators? I'm happy with a low bar but obviously 1:1 Portal:Article is too low. 1:3 is also effectively meaningless. Many of the past P2 tags look like blank pages or tests so could have been speedy deleted G2 or other ways. Legacypac (talk) 00:39, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. Per Northamerica1000 and Thryduulf. I concur that increasing the availability of speedy deletion will be at the expense of the alternatives to deletion that can be considered at MfD. --Bsherr (talk) 15:22, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose, but expand PROD to include portals so that these uncontroversial cases of deletion can be made via the PROD process. feminist (talk) 01:38, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per Northamerica1000, et al. Also, there is no evidence that MfD is failing to get the job done, including with mass nominations. Extant process is sufficient. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:08, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per the group. 3 is a reasonable objective threshold. There is a significant range of grey area above that level in which portals are unlikely to be kept after a discussion to evaluate their merits, but each one should be evaluated in a discussion, not deleted or not deleted under the selective evaluation of individual administrators. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 16:17, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose, three is reasonable. I also want to point out to all commenters here that Legacypac is also simultaneously trying to delete portals with well over 20 articles inside here: Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Alhambra, California. These two discussions are inherently related, and should have been disclosed together. ɱ (talk) 17:13, 26 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per User:Ɱ. Also, there is no need to speedy delete a portal with less than 20 articles. Making the threshold that high would lead to speedy deletion for portals currently under construction. 3 to 20 is a good range for grey area that should not result in simple speedy deletion. Speedy deletion is not means to address grey area portals. PointsofNoReturn (talk) 19:16, 26 March 2019 (UTC)
- No it would not. The number of articles within the scope exists before someone even starts a portal. If a portal has only 5 or 10 articles within the scope it should not be created or exist. See WP:POG. This is not a gray area. Legacypac (talk) 22:34, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
- While it is probable that such portals will be deleted it is not certain as it is not always clear exactly which articles are in scope and which are not - see for example the difference of opinion regarding whether fictional badgers are within scope of the badgers portal - and adjusting the scope is an alternative to deletion that will be appropriate in some cases - e.g. a portal about Brian May is unlikely to have enough articles in scope but a portal about Queen (band) is more likely to be, but then are articles related to May's scientific career within scope? These are questions that cannot be answered by a single administrator acting alone. Thryduulf (talk) 13:34, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
- No it would not. The number of articles within the scope exists before someone even starts a portal. If a portal has only 5 or 10 articles within the scope it should not be created or exist. See WP:POG. This is not a gray area. Legacypac (talk) 22:34, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose per Northamerica1000 and others above. Could lead to unwarranted deletions. There are valid alternatives. --Crystallizedcarbon (talk) 20:25, 26 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose An "underpopulated" portal is akin to a stub article. Everything has to start somewhere, and the requirement that everything has to be a fully complete, finished, product before it can be published is completely opposite to how Wikipedia works. WaggersTALK 11:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
- Comment the discussion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Andy Gibb, a portal with 19 articles at the time of nomination, has attracted good-faith recommendations to keep, further demonstrating that expanding P2 to cover portals with fewer than 20 articles fails the uncontestable requirement for speedy deletion criteria. Thryduulf (talk) 12:03, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
Mentioning the requirements for new criteria in an edit notice?
There are plenty of examples of people on this page proposing new criteria or commenting on proposals for new criteria who seem unfamiliar with the requirements (Objective, Uncontestable, Frequent, Non-redundant) detailed in the page header. To help reduce this (especially for those who arrive via a link to a section), how about adding a slimmed down version of the header in an edit notice, linking to the header for full details? Perhaps something like:
Although it might be possible to condense it still further - the point is to alert not overwhelm, and other improvements are almost certainly possible as well. Thryduulf (talk) 11:36, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Suggest Speedy closing proposals that clearly fail the new criterion criteria, and Speedy close CSD proposals that are not even accepted reasons for deletion. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:56, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
It's worth mentioning here that I've just created a new shortcut to the header listing the the requirements: WP:NEWCSD. Thryduulf (talk) 13:45, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Fails #4, redundant to the header.I don't think it's a matter of not noticing the new-criteria criteria. (And if it is, the first step is to remove the irrelevancies distracting from it - we absolutely don't need a "don't delete WP:CSD, we copied some text out of it four years ago" box; we don't need the "be polite and sign your posts" box; and the archive lists doesn't need to be full-width.) What we've been seeing lately is A) legitimate disagreement over whether criteria meet NEWCSD, and B) a suicidal headlong rush to vote on everything. B exacerbates A, because there isn't time to hammer out the obvious amendments that make a proposal meet NEWCSD before some dolt's plastered it all over CENT and started a formal RFC, and then we suddenly have four competing proposals for people to vote against without even fully reading. —Cryptic 14:28, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- I should hope I'm not a dolt because you're making that statement as a general comment. ;) --Izno (talk) 14:51, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- The purpose is very much to complement the header, for people who don't see it and/or read it, that's why it explicitly summarises it and links to it for full details. It's very much not redundant to it. The excessive number of proposals being made (sometimes on the wrong page - e.g. the X3 proposal at AN) without understanding the requirements is why we need to make it more in-your-face. And just like when evaluating a page against the criteria, if there is good faith disagreement about whether a proposal meets the requirements for a new criterion it doesn't. If people disagree whether something is objective it clearly isn't. If people disagree whether everything that covered by the criterion should be deleted then it is not uncontestable. The "we copied text" box is needed for proper attribution - see WP:CWW. The archives box though could be made less prominent, but I'm not sure it would make that much difference. Thryduulf (talk) 15:56, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Strongly support making such an editnotice. The vast majority of proposals at this page fail at least one of these obvious criteria, and it's a drain on editorial time. One of those "RtFM" things. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:11, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support - clearly an improvement. If rule #4 prevents us from implementing this obviously helpful advice, ignore the rule. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 16:19, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
Given the comments above I have added an edit notice (Template:Editnotices/Page/Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion). Please tweak it. Thryduulf (talk) 13:52, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
Expand A3 to all namespaces except draftspace (A3 -> G15)
I believe A3 can apply to things like a template that looks like this:
Obviously, this would be deleted per G1, but if it weren't nonsense, it couldn't be deleted, as A3 doesn't apply to templates at the moment. I also have a potential template here. InvalidOStalk 17:41, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
- Support An empty page is still an empty page but I don't expect it will be used much though since new users rarely create pages in other namespaces. I'm assuming you also exclude user space. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:44, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
- A3 should apply to all name spaces except Userspace. Mostly this would simplify how we deal with Drafts. We see a lot of pages in Draft, including many but not all pages found in Category:AfC submissions declined as a test, Category:AfC submissions declined as lacking context, and Category:AfC submissions declined as blank that meet A3. Usually a G2 test CSD is accepted by Admins for the blank pages but that is not a fully intuitive application of G2. A3 is clearer and this change would bring consistency. Legacypac (talk) 18:50, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. Patent nonsense is already G1, test pages are already G2 and G7 covers pages blanked by the author, which would seem to cover most of these cases (fails the "non-redundant requirement of WP:NEWCSD). Lack of context is not a reason to delete a draft - this can be added. There is no evidence presented that there is any reason why these drafts need to be deleted before they're eligible for G13 and there is no evidence presented that problematic pages in other namespaces are overwhelming normal deletion processes (fails the "frequent" requirement). Simply expanding A3 to other namespaces would catch a lot pages in user, template, Wikipedia and portal namespaces that have no content of the type the criterion mentions but are nevertheless useful pages - including most noticeboards, reference desks, the help desk TOC templates, navboxes, template testcases, etc, etc, (stupendous failure of the "uncontestable" requirement). Thryduulf (talk) 19:25, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
- I don't see how WP:A3 applies really to that template (if it were less nonsense it could be a valid navbox template); I'd think WP:G3 would cover it. (WP:G1 may not even really apply since there are portions of the template that are understandable) Galobtter (pingó mió) 20:01, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose - G1 wouldn't apply because that's clearly intended to be a template (exempted per "if you know what it is, G1 doesn't apply") but it is G3 obvious vandalism, and if not then it's G6 "this is obviously going to be deleted"/WP:IAR, and interestingly this might have been a use case for the long-deprecated T1. I would also strongly consider blocking the creator and then deleting this per G5, but that's specific to this particular example. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 20:07, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose. I don't really get it. WP:A3 is for lack of content. The example you give has content. So why would it be covered by a G-A3 criterion? Also, what Thryduulf said. Regards SoWhy 21:35, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose I'd have thought many perfectly legitimate article talk pages would fall into the scope of such an A3. Here is one I created: Talk:Dudley Wolfe. Now, I know most people nominate for CSD appropriately but some do not and a couple of administrators delete all CSD nominations they come across on the basis that they'll later restore any that are shown to be wrong. It's quicker like that. This would be disruptive and overwhelmingly unsuitable as a changed CSD criterion. Thincat (talk) 21:49, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose - something like this is already covered under existing CSD criteria (G2 or G3 usually, but depending on circumstance other criteria like G5 or G10 would apply) and a lack of content on the page is to be expected for userpages that have been blanked (courtesy or otherwise). —A little blue Bori v^_^v Bori! 22:10, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose, far too wide-reaching, and no obvious flood of pages that MfD/TfD can't delete quickly enough. I probably don't need User:Kusma/AJH anymore, but it was a useful page containing only external links that once helped me write an article. Why should pages like that (many of them exist in user space, as a WikiProject subpage, as a Portal subpage, probably in many other places) suddenly become speedy-deletable? If they are not in article space, they do not cause embarrassment and may actually be helpful for writing an encyclopaedia. —Kusma (t·c) 21:17, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
Twinkle now logs user-inputted options and should better handle noms in module space
This is about CSD tagging and not the criteria themselves, but just FYI if attempting a CSD of a Module, Twinkle should now place the tag on the documentation subpage, like is supposed to be done at WP:TfD. Also, the CSD log will now include the user-inputted options, like user for G5 or xfd for G6. Other recent changes here; please let me know if there are any issues! ~ Amory (u • t • c) 15:47, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Speedy deletion of modules
Hi. There have been a number of times when I've tried to tag modules for deletion. The tag goes on the doc page, and doc page gets deleted, but the actual module isn't. Can an admin please delete Module:User:Xinbenlv bot/msg/inconsistent birthday per WP:CSD#G7. Separately, is there a better way to communicate to admins that, despite the tag being on the documentation page, the module itself is the target of the deletion request? --DannyS712 (talk) 00:59, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
G6 for post-merge delete?
The Twinkle CSD menu includes G6 for An admin has closed a deletion discussion ... as "delete" but they didn't actually delete the page, but this isn't listed as a use case under WP:G6. I propose adding another bullet point:
- Deleting a page per an XfD close which specified deletion but didn't perform it.
Any objections? -- RoySmith (talk) 14:58, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
- PS, see this discussion for background. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:00, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
- That's already in there; fourth bullet point in the "templates" section of G6:
* {{Db-xfd|fullvotepage=link to closed deletion discussion}} - For pages where a consensus to delete has been previously reached via deletion discussion, but which were not deleted.
- Oppose. Lazy catchall. If the deletion is authorised by an XfD, use “deleted per [the XfD]”, not per G6. G6 should never be used for pages with a nontrivial history, and G6 post merge sounds like a terrible violation of that. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:00, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
- Fix twinkle. Twinkle documentation errors should be fixed, not policy altered to suit twinkle documentation. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:02, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
- Two things. First, the list under G6 isn't exclusive, i.e. those are not the only reasons that G6 may be used. Tagging a page under G6 where the XfD for that page was closed as delete is fairly obviously "uncontroversial maintenance", so there isn't a need to add a bullet point. Second, tagging a page as G6 for an AfD result of merge - even if the nominator recommends deletion post-merge, which should frankly never be done for attribution reasons - would no longer be uncontroversial by default, and therefore shouldn't be done. ansh666 22:24, 6 April 2019 (UTC)