FIRSTwiki:Criteria for speedy deletion

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The "Speedy deletion" policy governs limited cases where FIRSTwiki administrators may delete Wikipedia pages or media "on sight" without further debate, as in the cases of patent nonsense or pure vandalism. Non-admins can request deletion of such a page by adding a "Delete" template. The word "speedy" in this context refers to the rapid decision-making process, not the length of time since the article was created.

Before nominating an article for speedy deletion, please consider whether an article could be improved or reduced to a stub. Also, please note that some Wikipedians create articles in multiple saves, so try to avoid deleting a page too soon after its initial creation. Users nominating a page for speedy deletion should specify which criteria the page meets; it would also be considerate to notify the original author — remember, everyone was new once. Note that the Sandbox is exempt from deletion.

These criteria are worded narrowly, and generally so phrased that, in most cases, reasonable editors will agree what does or does not fall under a given criterion. When there is reasonable doubt whether a page does, discussion is recommended, using one of the other methods under Wikipedia:deletion policy.

This page contains the criteria for speedy deletion and a list of helpful templates that can be used to tag a candidate for speedy deletion. Articles that do not meet the speedy criteria may be nominated for the alternative deletion processes Wikipedia:Proposed deletion and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion.

The list of current candidates for speedy deletion is at Category:Candidates for speedy deletion.

Note that administrators should always verify the legitimacy of a speedy deletion candidate before taking action. It is the administrator's responsibility to make sure that speedy deletion tags are accurate; to do this the administrator must examine the history of every page before deleting it.

Contents 1 Criteria 1.1 General criteria 1.2 Articles 1.3 Redirects 1.4 Categories 1.5 User pages 1.6 Templates 1.7 Portals 2 Non-criteria 3 Procedure for administrators

Criteria

People sometimes use abbreviations to refer to these criteria (e.g. "A3" meaning articles, criterion 3), but for the sake of clarity this is not recommended.

General criteria

1. Patent nonsense, i.e. no meaningful content, unsalvageably incoherent page. This does not include: poor writing, partisan screeds, obscene remarks, vandalism, badly translated material, implausible theories or hoaxes.
2. Test pages (e.g., "Can I really create a page here?").
3. Pure vandalism, including redirects created during cleanup of page move vandalism.
4. Recreation of deleted material. A substantially identical copy, by any title, of a page that was deleted as a result of a discussion in Articles for deletion or another XfD process, unless it was undeleted per the undeletion policy or was recreated in the user space. Before deleting again, the admin should ensure that the material is substantially identical and not merely a new article on the same subject. This clause does not apply if the only prior deletions were speedy or proposed deletions, although in this case, the previous speedy criterion, or other speedy deletion criteria, may apply; when no criterion applies, the recreated page may not be speedied, but may be submitted to Articles for deletion or the appropriate XfD process.
5. Banned user. Pages created by banned users while they were banned.
6. Housekeeping. Non-controversial maintenance tasks such as temporarily deleting a page in order to merge page histories, performing a non-controversial page move like reversing a redirect, or removing a disambig page that only points to a single article.
7. Author requests deletion. Any page for which deletion is requested by the original author, provided the page's only substantial content was added by its author and was mistakenly created. If the author blanks the page, this can be taken as a deletion request. Note: Please check the page history to make sure there is only a single author.
8. Talk pages of pages that do not exist, unless they contain deletion discussion that isn't logged elsewhere or notes that would help in creating an article. User_talk pages are exempt from this. Subpages (including archive pages) are only deletable under this rule if the corresponding top-level page does not exist.
9. Office Actions. The Wikimedia Foundation office reserves the right to speedily delete a page temporarily in cases of exceptional controversy.

Articles

For any articles that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Articles for deletion or Wikipedia:Proposed deletion.

1. Very short articles providing little or no context (e.g., "He is a funny man that has created Factory and the Hacienda. And, by the way, his wife is great."). Limited content is not in itself a reason to delete if there is enough context to allow expansion.
2. Foreign language articles that exist on another Wikimedia project.
3. No content whatsoever. Any article consisting only of links elsewhere (including hyperlinks, category tags and "see also" sections), a rephrasing of the title, and/or attempts to correspond with the person or group named by its title. This does not include disambiguation pages.
4. (Obsoleted. This criterion has been merged into A3 and is kept for historical reasons.)
5. Transwikied articles. Any article that has been discussed at Articles for Deletion (et al), where the outcome was to transwiki, and where the transwikification has been properly performed and the author information recorded.
6. Attack pages. Articles that serve no purpose but to disparage their subject or some other entity (e.g., "John Citizen is a moron"). This includes a biography of a living person that is negative in tone and unsourced, where there is no NPOV version in the history to revert to.
7. Unremarkable people or groups/vanity pages. An article about a real person, group of people, band, or club that does not assert the importance or significance of its subject. If the assertion is disputed or controversial, it should be taken to AFD instead. (See Wikipedia:Deletion of vanity articles for further guidance on this criterion).
8. An article that is a blatant copyright infringement and meets these parameters:
   • Material is unquestionably copied from the website of a commercial content provider (e.g. encyclopedia, news service) and;
   • The article and its entire history contains only copyright violation material, excluding tags, templates, and minor edits and;
   • Uploader makes no assertion of permission or fair use, and none seems likely and;
   • The material is identified within 48 hours of upload and is almost or totally un-wikified (to diminish mirror problem).

   </dd></dl>When tagging a page for deletion under this criterion, a user should notify the page's creator using appropriate wording. Before deleting any page under this criterion, an admin should verify that the page creator has been notified — if not, the admin should do so. If the deleting administrator is notified of an error, and finds the claim of error plausible, he should restore the content immediately and, if a confirmation email has not been received, follow the Wikipedia:Copyright problems procedure.

Redirects

For any redirects that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion.

1. Redirects to non-existent pages (although it may be possible to make it a useful redirect to some other target)
2. Redirects to the User: or User_talk: space from the main article space. If this was the result of a page move, consider waiting a day or two before deleting the redirect.
3. Redirects as a result of an implausible typo that were recently created. However, redirects from common misspellings or misnomers are generally useful.

Categories

For any categories that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Categories for discussion.

1. Empty categories (no articles or subcategories for at least four days) whose only content has consisted of links to parent categories. This does NOT apply to categories being discussed on WP:CFD. If the category isn't relatively new, it possibly contained articles earlier, and deeper investigation is needed.
2. Speedy renaming. Empty categories that have qualified for speedy renaming.
   1. Typo fixes (e.g., Brdiges -> Bridges), but not changes between American and British English spelling differences.
   2. Capitalization fixes (e.g., characters In harry Potter -> Characters in Harry Potter)
   3. Conversions from singular to plural, or back (e.g., Steamship -> Steamships)
   4. Renaming to conform with the "by country" categorization conventions
   5. Abbreviation expanding for country names, e.g. changing "U.S." to "United States"
3. Template categories. If a category is solely populated from a template and the template is deleted per deletion policy, the category can also be deleted without further discussion.

User pages

For any user pages that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion.

1. Owner request. Personal subpages, upon request by their owner. In some rare cases there may be administrative need to retain the page. Also, sometimes, main user pages may be deleted as well. See Wikipedia:User page for full instructions and guidelines.

Templates

For any templates that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Templates for deletion. When nominating a template for speedy deletion, surround the speedy deletion tag with <noinclude></noinclude>, so that pages that use the nominated template do not themselves get listed as candidates for speedy deletion.

1. Templates that are divisive and inflammatory.

Portals

For any Portals that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion.

1. Any topic that would be subject to speedy deletion as an Article.
2. Any Portal based on a topic for which there is not a non-stub header article, and at least three non-stub articles detailing subject matter that would be appropriate to discuss under the title of that Portal.

Non-criteria

Sometimes speedy deletion criteria are applied to articles that they do not and were not intended to apply to; also, rules that are not speedy deletion rules are often mistakenly used to justify speedy deletion. This section aims to clarify some of the frequently used "non-criteria" that are commonly cited but are not sufficient, by themselves, to justify speedy deletion. These are not rules and intended only to be commonly-understood interpretations of the criteria above.

• Reasons derived from Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not: "Wikipedia is not a dictionary", "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information" and "Wikipedia is not a crystal ball" are not part of the speedy deletion criteria. However, these reasons can be given at AfD nominations.
• Hoaxes: Articles that present unverifiable and probably false ideas, theories, or subjects. Occasionally these can be deleted as vandalism if the article is obviously ridiculous, but remotely plausible articles should be subjected to further scrutiny in a wider forum.
• Original research: Although we have a policy against material that offers novel theories or interpretations on Wikipedia, this is not a basis for speedy deletion.
• Neologisms: As with hoaxes, unless the article is obviously ridiculous, a wider forum is necessary to evaluate the currency of specialized terminology.
• Non-notable subjects with their importance asserted: Articles that have obviously non-notable subjects are still not eligible for speedy deletion unless the article "does not assert the importance or significance of its subject". If the article gives a claim that might be construed by anyone as making the subject notable, even if this claim seems ridiculous, it should be taken to a wider forum. However, articles with only a statement like "This guy was like so friggin' notable!" can be deleted per CSD A1 because it gives no context about the subject.
• Author deletion requests made in bad faith: Sometimes an author will ask to have content removed because they feel frustrated with the project and resent it profitting from their work. However, they licensed their work to be used in this way and they have no legal basis for asking for its removal. The article must be clearly "mistakenly created", for example if the author created it unwittingly by misspelling a name.
• Very short articles: As explained above, some very short articles can be speedy deleted, but if it has content and offers sufficient context, it cannot be.
• "Copyright violations" whose sources copied Wikipedia: Our content is extensively used without credit, sometimes with modifications. To invoke A8, you must be reasonably sure that the content belonged to the source site first.
• Advertisements or spam: These may be subject to deletion, but not speedy deletion. There is often a chance to replace them with an NPOV version instead.
• PNGs/GIFs replaced by JPEGs: Even if an image is a photograph or other continuous-tone image, JPEG encoding discards a variety of information that could be important for further editing. Do not delete the original PNG/GIF files.
• Finally, good faith edits are never vandalism. If you cannot be reasonably sure an article was written in bad faith, G3 does not apply.

Procedure for administrators

Before deleting a page, an admin should check the page history to assess whether it would instead be possible to restore and salvage a previous version.

Admins should specify the deletion criteria in their edit summary and should notify the article's creator about the deletion, where applicable.