Wikipedia:Article Incubator/RfC to close down Incubator

By the RFC at Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_107, the Draft namespace was created. With the creation of this namespace, it supercedes the Article Incubator in its function, while also serving as a more logical location for drafts. The roll-out of the new Draft mainspace, an area where pages are not indexed, where AfC submissions will be processed, rescued articles can be parked, and for users' use for their drafts, makes the Incubator essentially redundant. Therefore, this RFC proposes to close the incubator and shift all of it's articles to draftspace.

The two changes proposed are-
 * The current Article Incubator project will be disbanded and it's pages will be marked historical.
 * The fifteen or so articles in the Incubator will be shifted to the draft space.
 * Additionally, any editors who are currently interested in working with the Incubator can carry out the same functions using the Draft namespace, ie to find draft articles and helping improve them to the mainspace.

TheOriginalSoni (talk) 07:20, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Votes

 * Support As proposer. TheOriginalSoni (talk) 07:20, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:57, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support, but move all existing articles in the incubator to draft space. Diego (talk) 09:29, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support but I would really like it if the remaining articles can be improved to meet the criteria for mainspace rather than shifting the problem elsewhere. Ritchie333  (talk)  (cont)   10:52, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support Unifying the efforts for helping editors improve "not quite ready" submissions is a good idea. I was under the impression that Incubator had already been deprecated into AfC. Hasteur (talk) 13:39, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support per nom... I agree the Incubator is superfluous given the new Drafts namespace.  Blueboar (talk) 16:24, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support – I long resisted closing this down, but now that we have a viable alternative with WP:DRAFTS, the incubator is no longer needed. BOZ (talk) 19:12, 23 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Merge it into AfC. This would give anyone who's monitoring Incubator draft articles a place to go, instead of a historical page with no place to go. -- 65.94.78.9 (talk) 20:25, 23 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Support immediate deprecation and not allowing any new article into the incubator but instead sending them to to DRAFT, Userspace draft, or, if it has never been "an article" or was created only in the past few days and with the consent of all substantial authors, to AFC (AFC is not for articles that have spent any significant period of time as an article). I don't care too much if existing backlog is worked-on-in-place, moved to DRAFT:, or with (and only with) the consent of the people at WP:WPAFC, moved to AFC.  Speaking as an active AFC reviewer, I know that AFC is in their own discussions about how to change their workflow now that DRAFT: is live.  Attempting to merge Article Incubator directly with AFC would probably be viewed as "more than we can handle now." davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  20:36, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support Since Draft: makes the incubator redundant, I see no reason not to deprecate it and move the articles to draft. Novusuna talk 23:23, 26 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Support Yes. We have Drafts now. — ΛΧΣ  21  Call me Hahc21 00:55, 27 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Support - Since we now have Drafts which deals with a lot more, it's pretty pointless having the Incubator. →Davey 2010→  →Talk to me!→  05:32, 27 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Support. There are only a handful of pages in the AI (and it seems never to have contained more than a couple of tens of pages at any point in its history), making this a fairly painless change. Cross-namespace redirects from WP:AI/ to Draft: should be retained after the pages are moved to make them easily recoverable. Tag the AI home page as "historical" and add a clear pointer to WP:DRAFTS.  Super Mario  Man  08:30, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose dismantling the incubator. While quite a few of the many functions of Wikipedia see little use, that does not make these functions redundant nor useless. Incubation places articles seen-as-salvageable into an easy-to-find location where they can be looked at and improved. Yes, when "Draft" was created, IT duplicated some of the functions of Incubation but without the easy-to-find functionality. Best point is best described in the inclusion criteria for incubator... different from articles for creation. As a member who has improved incubated articles to the point where they have been returned to mainspace to serve the project, I decry placing seen-as-salvageable articles in a hard-to-find place. That it currently has fewer articles awaiting work now than it did in the past, means the incubation process works.  Schmidt,  Michael Q. 09:48, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support, as redundant to the "Draft" namespace. Lankiveil (speak to me) 11:09, 16 January 2014 (UTC).

Discussion

 * With such a low number of articles in the AI, and virtually no activity, I think it is only sensible we close the AI down. TheOriginalSoni (talk) 07:20, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Also make sure that any references to the incubator in policy are edited to indicate that the incubator is no longer in use/service. AFD in particular. Hasteur (talk) 13:37, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Would there be a difference in functionality? No one seems to be presenting any downsides to support… Cup o’ Java (talk &bull; edits) 17:38, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
 * The only "loss of functionality" I can think of would be if the still-evolving rules for Draft: eventually discouraged or prohibited new-ish (i.e. more than a few days old, but new enough to be eligible for incubation into the Article Incubator) articles from being moved to Draft: space (i.e. as an alternative to PROD or AFD). On the other hand, if such a consensus develops, that can also be seen as a consensus that the practice of moving such articles to an incubator-like space is no longer supported by Wikipedia editors.  Note:  There does seem to be a consensus that brand-new articles can be moved to Draft: as an alternative to PROD/AFD and some article-space CSD reasons (but not "general" CSD reasons).  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  18:05, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
 * User:MichaelQSchmidt makes an interesting remark. It may be useful to have a central place to look for rejected articles that could be improved. However, in my experience the Incubator is not such place; few deleted articles are moved there, and it is hard to find an article on a topic that might be interesting to me. What we need is something like WP:DELSORT, which allows looking for categorized deletion discussions from a single place; but which also have AfD notices in the article itself, so that the discussion can also be found in a decentraliced way by looking the article by name or having it in your watchlist. This dual search mechanism (either centralized or opportunist) would allow the process to work, without either an ever-expanding backlog or a high volume of lost drafts. Diego (talk) 18:12, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you,Diego. A DELSORT solution could work. I would not wish to be forced to search though hundreds or thousands of possible drafts in order to find or salvage those few that were decided at AFD as improvable if only needing some time.  Schmidt,  Michael Q. 21:09, 19 January 2014 (UTC)