Wikinews talk:Criteria for speedy deletion

/Archive one

Article rename redirects from before later publication
I propose a new criterion under Redirects, to replace the current R3: Some thoughts on this: --Pi zero (talk) 16:04, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Were created by renaming an article prior to publication, and the article has since been published.
 * Qualification "and the article has since been published" is meant to avoid speedy-deletion crusades over unpublished articles. Any admin is already free to suppress redirects when renaming an unpublished article, justified technically under "author request", and this would have no effect on that.
 * Correcting a typo before publication can be handled well enough without a special rule for it, and correcting a typo after publication should leave a permanent redirect anyway.


 * I do not like it. I regularly redirect new duplicate articles to older ones, and likewise on occasion when articles are merged. Viewed retrospectively, pre-review, pre-FR, publish was easily-undoable; not such a big deal. Those redirects should stay. Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 18:43, 17 February 2011 (UTC)


 * If I'm following you rightly, that situation would be unaffected by my proposal. It seems to fail two different prerequisites for the proposed criterion:  it isn't the result of a move, so the criterion would not apply; and the redirect has significant history, so the criterion would not apply.  To be very clear, the proposed criterion would apply only when all of the following conditions are met.
 * The redirect has no useful history; this is a precondition for all of the redirect speedy deletion criteria, stated at the top of the section.
 * The redirect is the result of a move.
 * The move occurred before publication.
 * The article that was moved has since been published.
 * --Pi zero (talk) 19:10, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
 * To respond to your edit summary, the impression I get is you've correctly understood one scenario and not noticed the second scenario. To re-iterate differently, redirects from moves before the current regieme, which has made Publish into Srs Bsns™, should generally remain. Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 19:46, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Do you have a date we can plonk to that? "Redirects created after J u l y 1 7 8 9 t h a t w e r e " — μ 20:04, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
 * That's a little tricky; the new system evolved over a few months iirc through a series of transitions. Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 12:43, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Would it suffice to exempt anything created before 2009? That has the virtue of simplicity.  --Pi zero (talk) 13:32, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Works for me. Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 14:23, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Revised proposed criterion. --Pi zero (talk) 15:06, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Were created, not earlier than 2009, by renaming an article prior to publication, and the article has since been published.


 * We've just recently demonstrated the need to further clarify when it is not permissible to remove a redirect speedily; and after some lively and productive discussion here, there have been no further comments for over three weeks. I've deployed the change.  --Pi zero (talk) 17:10, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Criteria shakeup
flag How about we re-order much of the article SD criteria to apply to all pages, like so: ...as well as deleting a few that seem duplicated:
 * Articles:
 * 1) Self-requests by the author with no third-party edit history.
 * 2) Obvious hoaxes, spoofs, April Fools-type pranks or other works of fiction that damage the credibility of Wikinews. In some cases, it may be desirable to preserve the content by moving it to a user subpage of the author.
 * 3) Foreign language articles which do not appear to be news (for news items, some attempt should be made to move them to the appropriate language edition of Wikinews, if it exists).
 * 4) An obvious copyright violation that is a cut-and-paste exact or near-exact duplicate of content from a copyrighted source. Speedy delete does not apply for public-domain sources, when public domain reprint permission is granted from the original source and specified in the article talk page, or to articles with a third-party edit history
 * 5) Obvious mistaken posting of encyclopedic entry (delete as possible copyright violation from Wikipedia or similar incompatibly licensed source.)
 * General
 * 1) No meaningful content or history (e.g. random characters or words). See patent nonsense.
 * 2) Test pages (e.g., "Can I really create a page here?").
 * 3) Pure vandalism (see also dealing with vandalism).
 * 4) Very short pages with no context (e.g., "He was a funny man that created Factory and the Hacienda. And, by the way, his wife is great.")
 * 5) Deleting a page for subsequent renaming to that title following a cut and paste move which loses edit history.
 * 6) Advertising or spam.
 * 7) Content reposted without changes that was deleted according to established deletion policy.
 * Image
 * 1) Any image that contravenes the fair use policy.
 * 2) Unused fair use images.
 * User
 * 1) Personal subpages, upon request by their owner.
 * 2) User and talk pages on request of the user, where there is no significant abuse, and no administrative need to retain the page.

It might also be worth creating a section for threads: I personally am generally unsure when to delete a thread, or when to let the discussion run its course. — μchip08 11:15, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Thread deletion
I'm of the opinion that threads should be deleted if:
 * 1) Solicit an illegal act.
 * 2) Are substantial copyright violation without any plausible justification.
 * 3) Breach a court order which could apply to the WMF, or to contributors.

Any other suggestions? --Brian McNeil / talk 15:55, 16 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Spam, and testing/nonsense (obviously). The first is hard to define; much that is illegal here is lawful over in Florida where the servers are. Are we basing this in FL and US Federal law? Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 16:43, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
 * How about "solicit an obvious, and widely illegal act"? So, murder, property damage are the no-brainers, with the rest (as is always the case on Wikinews) sinking into ever-darker shades of grey. --Brian McNeil / talk 10:09, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I just came back to this page about to open a new discussion about this, only to find my past self already here. I've just tried to delete a page (Comments:Whitney Houston has 'wardrobe malfunction' during UK debut on TV show 'X Factor) which, if it were an article could be speedily deleted under "patent nonsense". However, as it was a comments section, it technically didn't contravene any rules (so I resorted to WN:IAR). I think it would be helpful to generalise many of the currently article-specific criteria, such as "test page", to apply to any page. I suspect the reasons we haven't done so are purely an oversight on the part of the original creators of the policy. Microchip08 (talk) 21:34, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, the criteria rarely mention non-mainspace pages; threads and comments, templates, project space, user space. I've always just stretched principles to fit when it made sense. Certainly generalizing is preferred over detailing; thus avoiding red tape.  I've always especially liked our blocking policy, which says at the top that admins have to exercise their good judgement and everything else on the page is going to be just guidelines; and, especially, when blocking for creation of a page I've often treated Special:Nuke as an instrument of the blocking policy.  If creating a page is block-worthy, surely the page is speediable. A bit of thought may be wanted in exact wording, to encourage being a bit more lenient on some points (though not others) in user space. --Pi zero (talk) 01:36, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
 * My issue with the current policy, as I read it at least, is that at the moment it says (e.g.) spam can only be deleted if it is in mainspace. I'd like to explicitly move most article-based reasons (everything but A8 Hoaxes?) to be under "general" instead of "article". I think that reflects de facto policy anyway. Microchip08 (talk) 17:24, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
 * A few miscellaneous thoughts.
 * The article-oriented criteria don't actually say "mainspace", and articles do sometimes show up in other spaces; prepared articles often reside in project space, and articles are sometimes set up in userspace. It seems the main issue here would be clarifying criteria that ought to apply to pages regardless of whether or not they're "articles" as such, with a secondary goal of making it especially clear that those criteria, and even the ones that really are about "articles", aren't limited to mainspace.  There might also be one or two additional non-article-oriented criteria we'd like to make explicit.
 * I'm not sure but what there may be several criteria under "article" that don't actually make sense for anything that isn't an article, provided one has clarified that an article isn't necessarily in mainspace. Though that sort of thing could get tricky; for example, might "obvious hoax" apply to some pages that aren't articles?  With some exceptions...
 * If the criteria are moved around in some such manner, the existing anchors on them have to be kept the same so that old links to those anchors &mdash;many of them in permanent edit summaries&mdash; continue to work correctly. (This is why I never really liked having generic anchors like "A3" or such anyway, but, what's done is done.)
 * At this point I think we're sorting our thoughts out, preparatory to fashioning a draft. --Pi zero (talk) 18:11, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

No "attack" category?
Have wandered over here from Wikipedia while clearing up some content related to the (possibly hoax) "Nongoloza cult", and was surprised to see no equivalent criteria to Wikipedia's db-attack. For 24 hours or so, Wikinews had a photo of a named individual with a prominent red "WATCH OUT! CULT LEADER" banner pasted across the bottom, and no sources to back that assertion up. I flagged it for speedy deletion but User:Pi zero rejected it with the suggestion that we "wait and see" how the admin action alert played out. (It looks like they demurred and deleted it as "Contravention of fair use policy" a few hours later.)

Should Wikinews have a simple db-attack criteria for (in the words of Wikipedia's version) "pages that disparage, threaten, intimidate, or harass their subject or some other entity, and serve no other purpose"? --McGeddon (talk) 14:29, 21 April 2017 (UTC)


 * If I'd been sure it was an attack, of course I'd have deleted it. As I recall (and yes, contrary to rumor I'm human and have been known to make mistakes), when I looked at the article it was not immediately clear to me that the image was making an claim about the individual rather than somehow illustrating something; it needed further investigation on my part, which I think was happening at the same time we had an inundation of student submissions on the review queue.  --Pi zero (talk) 14:36, 21 April 2017 (UTC)


 * On the general principle: I don't see that we need anything we don't already have.  Obviously we won't host an attack on someone; if I were deleting something for that reason and I didn't want to bother with a custom-written reason for the deletion I'd probably select "vandalism" from the menu.  If something didn't work as well as it should have in this case, the thing that didn't work seems to be that we should have been having a discussion about whether or not that the image was actually an attack, yet for some reason discussion kept taking other directions.  I'll certainly be thinking about what I could have said differently/better along the way that might have guided things in the more needed direction.  --Pi zero (talk) 14:58, 21 April 2017 (UTC)


 * I might have deleted it as "HOAX/SPAM", but I'd have had to understand the context first. I don't think anyone would hesitate to delete an attack page, the moment it became obvious it was such. I've deleted some of those myself at some point, but I'm not sure what justification I used. I probably just selected "custom" and put a summary of "attack page". That's what I'd do today.


 * I'm actually in favour of adding an attack criteria though, just to spell out in writing what everyone already does in practice. &mdash; Gopher65talk 20:30, 12 August 2018 (UTC)


 * One would have to word such a criterion robustly against wikilawyering: neutral news about a person is not an attack, regardless of whether a reader might construe it to reflect badly. --Pi zero (talk) 22:50, 12 August 2018 (UTC)


 * There are also some situations where removing a particular edit in a discussion becomes deletion of the page &mdash; removing an off-topic remark from a talk page when it's the only thing on the page sometimes becomes deletion, and removing an off-topic thread from a comments section means deleting a thread. --Pi zero (talk) 01:44, 24 September 2018 (UTC)