User:Paul 012/Drafts are broken

Wikipedia drafts, or more precisely, the Draft namespace and the way it is currently used, are broken.

Draftspace was created in 2013 mainly as a centralised space to hold Articles for Creation (AfC) drafts, which previously were all over the place. Editors could also use the namespace for their own drafts (as an alternative to creating userspace drafts), whether or not they intended to go through the AfC process. Draftspace also took over the role of the Article Incubator, where articles which needed further work before they met the inclusion criteria could be "incubated" as an alternative to deletion. Incubation thus also became known as "draftifying" or "draftification".

With the formalisation of the New Pages Patrol (NPP) process in 2016, draftification became regarded as a tool for dealing with new articles which were clearly "unready" for Mainspace. New Page Reviewers may unilaterally draftify new articles, a practice seen as a softer alternative to deletion and less likely to bite the newcomers.

However, there are problems with the current practice.

Drafts do not encourage collaboration
Since drafts are segregated into their own namespace, most readers and editors will not come across drafts unless they actively seek out to locate them. This makes it much less likely that someone will come by to fix issues with a problematic draft, compared to an article.

There also seems to be an unspoken assumption that the onus is placed solely on the draft creator to improve it. This might be, in part, a failing of the AfC process, where creators are expected to write an adequate article on their own, and reviews result only in a "pass" or "fail". This process does not encourage other editors to collaborate and help improve the draft. (Some reviewers do provide detailed suggestions, but most rarely edit the drafts themselves apart from general clean-up of accepted ones.) Even with non-AfC drafts, there seems to be a certain reluctance by editors to edit drafts created by someone else. This may be because drafts are seen as a perpetual work in progress, and other editors are wary of interrupting the creator's work.

This reluctance to edit is in direct contradiction of the Ownership of content and Be bold policies, and is detrimental to Wikipedia as a whole.

Stub tags exist for a reason
Identification of very short articles which need expansion as stubs dates to the earliest days of Wikipedia. This is so that other editors may easily find and help improve them. It is also dependent on the article remaining in Mainspace.

Sometimes, seemingly valid stubs are draftified by New Page Reviewers, because they think the article is inadequate in some way. Most often, the reason is a lack of citations. For some subjects with unclear notability, this is a valid concern, as it may not be immediately clear whether the content is verifiable, especially with biographies of living persons. However, for some subjects, identifying further reliable sources is as trivial as a simple Google search. Tagging such articles as a stub needing additional citations is far more likely to attract help from other capable editors than draftifying it and sweeping it under the rug.

Some editors think the draftification tool is overused. The Editing policy explicitly states that Wikipedia is a work in progress and perfection is not required, so there is little reason to hide an incomplete article from view by draftifying it, unless it actually violates some other policy. Some reviewers, however, have a rather broad interpretation of what construes "obviously unready for Mainspace", and some fail to remember that draftification should be considered for articles which "have very little chance of survival at AfD," not the other way round.

In the early days of Wikipedia, practically nothing was cited in-line. Times and policy have since changed, but citations are still not a requirement of an article being allowed to exist. New articles should not be draftified solely because of a lack of citations.

The problem with deleting drafts
Once an article is draftified, it usually goes out of sight and out of mind, unless the creator continues to work on it. Most would then be deleted as abandoned drafts in six months' time. As such, draftification becomes in effect a delayed deletion process with even less oversight than proposed deletion.

On the other hand, for drafts which are actively edited, there exists no efficient way to deal with drafts which clearly have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming a valid article. A 2018 RfC resulted in drafts repeatedly submitted to AfC without any improvements being valid candidates for Miscellany for Deletion, but it is still a waste of time to all involved.

Draftspace has become a huge unorganised mess
Since drafts are neither linked to nor categorised, it is difficult to locate and identify drafts relevant to an editor's field of interest, even when one actively tries to do so. This further fails the purpose of incubation/draftification.

Approaching the problem
To address the problem with Draftspace, we need to ask ourselves a key question: Do we want to continue with drafts being a mainly solitary venture? If not, then we need to find ways to make draft-editing more collaborative. But if the answer is yes, we should be trying to sharply reduce the use of Draftspace, and limit the practice of draftification.