User:Gwen Gale/CSD

If you're reading this it's likely because I deleted your page as part of the speedy deletion process and now you've dropped by to leave me a message asking why I did such a thing.

While I was indeed the one who sent your hard work to the digital dustbin, the deletion was done following established practice as one of the many tasks I carry out as an administrator. This had nothing to do with whether or not I liked your article. Simply put, if I hadn't pushed the button someone else very likely would have done and truth be told, I like some of the articles I delete.

You came here looking for answers and hopefully I can help you find them.

Why did you delete my article?
Articles are always being created and deleted on Wikipedia, sometimes more than one each second. This is one of the cool things about working on a living encyclopedia and shows how helpful working together on a wiki can be. Anyone can edit Wikipedia if they follow its policies. There are established standards for topic inclusion. These have grown out of our core principles.

Speedy deletion is how we handle articles which clearly do not belong. Unsuitable articles are first reviewed and tagged for speedy deletion by an uninvolved editor, then the tag is reviewed by an uninvolved administrator like me, who decides if the deletion tag (or another one) fits. If so, the article is deleted. If not, the tag is taken off and the article stays (at least for the time being). It's very straightforward.

There are more or less four reasons why a new article might get tagged and deleted: It's non-encyclopedic, it's a copyright violation, it's an advertisement (maybe even spam) or an attack page or some form of vandalism.

Non-encyclopedic pages
The root standard for inclusion in Wikipedia is notability, which is to say, whether or not the subject has gotten meaningful, independently published attention elsewhere. Wikipedia is not a place to build one's notability, so things like the band you started with your friends, your business, your YouTube video series, your Internet web site, your boss, your wonderful teacher at school, the shop down the street that sells good donuts or the awesomeness of your friend don't belong on Wikipedia unless they've been written about somewhere else. Moreover, you shouldn't try to write an article about yourself.

What if the topic has been written about somewhere else? The new article you've put up must say so, with an assertion of importance or significance, hopefully in the opening paragraph, to let readers know why there's an article about it. More than half of all speedy deletions happen because this assertion of importance is missing and by far, this is most often because the creating editor has been very truthful but the topic isn't notable.

Speaking of which, any assertion of importance must be at least somewhat believable, which means if you say a band or company is "one of the most famous in the world" and this is clearly not true, the article may be speedy deleted as advertising spam or a hoax (see below). Also keep in mind, a topic need not be about something famous at all, anything notable will do.

Who's Naomi?
Now, let's talk about someone named Naomi. She's notable, has been written about a lot and many folks say she's talented. However, writing an article that only says "Naomi is a wonderful actor and she's been in the movies" doesn't give other editors much to build on. There are maybe 200,000 professional actors in the world but in the last hundred years only a few thousand have been notable, by far most aren't and never will be. What's more, these days, most professional but non-notable actors have appeared on TV or in movies, for small parts, walk-ons, as extras, in reality shows and so on. So who's Naomi? What's so wonderful about her and who says so? How do we find out more?

Rather, if an article starts out with...

Naomi Ellen Watts (born 28 September 1968) is an English-Australian actress. She is known for her roles in Mulholland Drive, the film remakes of The Ring, King Kong, Funny Games and her Academy Award-nominated role in the film 21 Grams.

...this is much more likely to give a reader something helpful.

Ok, but who's Emi?
This brings us to Emi Kobayashi. Someone tagged this article for speedy deletion and I found it while working on a backlog. I had never heard of Emi. I had not a clue as to whether she was notable or not, but straight off I saw the assertion Emi is a Japanese gravure idol. Although I've spent time in Japan I didn't even know what that meant, but clicked on the helpful wikilink and lo, this seemed like an assertion of importance to me. Looking at the short article some more, I saw a bunch references to Japanese TV shows and photobooks. Ms Kobayashi may not be famous in Europe or North America but there were strong hints she's been written about and is widely known in Japan, which would make her notable on en.Wikipedia. Although the English text wasn't clearly written and there were no inline citations, I thought the article had a believable assertion of importance. As an administrator I declined the proposed speedy deletion and instead, to get a little more input, put up a proposed deletion tag which gave the article at least another 5 days to be saved and which even the article creator could remove in good faith. Not long after, someone else did take off the proposed deletion tag and as an editor, I came back to clean up the text.

Shreds
Stuff that can't become an article, such as random or unmeaningful text gets cleaned up here too. Hint: Try using the inuse template straight off when you begin an article, so it won't get deleted for being empty within a few seconds, which can and does happen.

Past deletion discussions
Although a new article may get by speedy deletion, if its notability still isn't clear, any editor may then nominate it for a deletion discussion through the articles for deletion process. Also please keep in mind, if you have been editing Wikipedia on only one topic (or a narrow group of topics), any comments made in these discussions through a single purpose account will tend to carry much less weight.

If a topic is deleted following one of these discussions and an article about it is later re-created, this new article can be tagged for speedy deletion by any editor and then deleted by an administrator, without going through the discussion process again. Notability can change with time, though, or you may later find helpful sources on a topic. So, if a new article on a previously deleted topic makes an assertion of importance and backs this up with new, verifiable sources, it may be kept. Now, you can't merely say new sources have shown up or make new assertions, you'll have to cite them and then you may need to sway other editors that things have indeed somehow changed.

Please be aware, if you carry on with trying to recreate an article which has been deleted through a discussion, hoping it'll somehow slip through, it will very likely be locked and protected against recreation, even if you try to recreate the article under a slightly different name. After a topic has been deleted through one of these discussions and any article names linked with it have been protected against recreation, it will be much harder to create again.

Copyright violations
All the notability in the world won't save a copyright violation. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, so we must use free content (with a couple of fair-use exceptions). If you copied most or all of your article from another website, chances are it's going to be deleted, fast. After all, more often than not the text you pasted into the article is copyrighted by the website you took it from and its unauthorized use could land Wikipedia in a heap of woe. You can write an article using the website as a source but straight copying, or even copying many scattered bits, isn't allowed.

Advertisements or spam
Wikipedia is neither an advertising service nor a directory and the community is not open to being seen this way. If you wrote an article that reads like advertising copy, say if it extolls the helpful features of your product, uses marketing terms like dynamic, capable or up and coming to describe your company/project or boasts about how your website is, say, "the fastest growing forum about elves on the Internet" it's likely going to get deleted. Moreover, most readers want to know what an organization is truly doing (or has done) so mission statements won't do much for them. Likewise, a project may have been put together for a very worthy cause, but that doesn't make it notable.

Startlingly enough, an over-eager take on a company written by a true fan can be mistaken for something drafted by that company's marketing department (after all, it's not so hard to fake). If this is what happened to you, tone it down next time, this is very easy to do and besides, readers are often much keener and more clever than some folks think: If an article is written like an ad, lots of folks won't even bother reading it anyway.

Articles about products, bands, schools and even individuals which have been written (or seem to have been written) mostly to promote their subject will also tumble into this category and will most likely be deleted.

Attack pages and vandalism
Wikipedia does not put up with personal attacks of any kind, whether they're against editors online or someone you know offline. If you want to blow off steam, Wikipedia is not your train whistle. The same goes for pranks of any kind.

So now what?
If you can write up a new article which sticks within these bounds, go for it! However, reposting the same unhelpful content over and over again is most often not a helpful notion.

If your article was deleted and you want the text back so you can work on it some more, feel free to leave a polite note on my talk page and I'll be glad to help you out (but I won't give back copies of attack pages or straight copyright violations).

You can also list a deleted article for review at Wikipedia deletion review although, please believe me, your time and energy will very likely be more happily spent writing a new and stronger version.

I hope this helped answer some of your questions. I know this may be all new to you and even a bit bewildering so if you're still a bit muddled about what to do or if you want to leave a comment, feel free to leave me a message by clicking here. Don't forget to sign your post with four tildes ( ~ ) so I know who you are. I'll answer soon as can be at the bottom of my talk page. Cheers! Gwen Gale