User:VoiceOfReason/Expand CSD

This proposal is something I'm working on and have not yet formally proposed as Wikipedia policy.

Proposal to expand CSD
The below is what I posted to the talk page for CSD expansion: I'm still fairly new at this, and as such I'm hesitant to weigh in on policy matters that have undoubtedly been discussed extensively by much more experienced editors, but what the heck, I'll be bold and give my opinion anyway.

I've been paying dues by spending a fair amount of time browsing Special:Newpages and flagging likely candidates for deletion, and my first impression is that it's downright depressing how many garbage articles are created every single hour. I think the speedy deletion process is a good thing: administrators are supposed to be trusted users, elevated to their positions by clear consensus of the community, and as far as I can tell, admin abuse is exceedingly rare and easily dealt with when it does occur. I have no objection to administrator power being expanded to give them greater flexibility to axe clearly inappropriate articles.

The way it is now, if an article obviously does not belong here but does not fit into any speedy deletion category, an editor's only option is to flag it for proposed deletion and/or start the weeklong AfD process. In the former case, the article's creator (who is often acting in bad faith, WP:AGF notwithstanding) is within his rights to delete the prod and force the latter option. Either way, the offending article will stick around for awhile, and since (in my experience, anyway) the largest category of such articles that are not candidates for speedy deletion are advertising spam, the offender meets his goal... for a little while, anyway.

Therefore, I think a very, very modest step in the right direction would be to expand CSD A7 to include articles on people, groups, or companies that do not assert the notability of their subjects. Even this I think would not go far enough, and I favor earlier proposals to craft an anti-advertising CSD on the same lines as CSD A6 (replacing "disparage" with "promote"), but it would certainly help.

Thanks for your time.

The time I've spent since then patrolling New Pages has only served to solidify my conviction that the CSD process is broken and should be expanded. Therefore I am proposing the following changes to the criteria for speedy deletion:

Articles
7. Unremarkable people or groups/vanity pages. An article about a real person, group of people, band, or club, company, or corporation 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 Deletion of vanity articles for further guidance on this criterion).

9. Promotional pages. Articles that serve no purpose but to promote, glorify, or praise their subject or some other entity (e.g., "Acme Widgets makes the best widgets on the planet.").

My arguments are as follows:


 * Wikipedia is flooded with spammy articles by companies that think that a little free advertising on one of the most widely-trafficked sites on the Internet sounds like a pretty good deal. As of now, these spammy articles fit no speedy deletion category and can only be removed through the cumbersome AfD process.
 * Administrators are by definition trusted users. They have been elevated by the clear consensus of their peers, and they can be counted on not to abuse their authority. Administrators will not in general speedily delete articles where deletion would not be controversial.
 * In the rare event that an administrator does abuse his authority, mechanisms and safeguards exist for dealing with it.
 * Given that nobody wants spam on Wikipedia, the lack of existence of a speedy deletion mechanism encourages rulebreaking. I've seen many articles go up with and be speedily deleted for it, in contravension of the rules. I was also encouraged in the above-linked talk page to deal with spam using the copyvio mechanism. This struck me and still strikes me as bad faith. Most of the spam that happens to contain copyrighted material is posted by the copyright owner himself. The true objection to the article is the content itself, not the copyrighted nature of that content. copyvio is not the ideal solution for ridding Wikipedia of this nonsense.

I believe the reforms I have proposed are both modest and essential. I ask my fellow editors to support them. Thank you for your time. VoiceOfReason 19:13, 21 August 2006 (UTC)