Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-10-02/More CSD

Two new speedy deletion criteria were added this week, and a third was expanded. The first, G10, which covers attack pages, is an expansion of former criteria A6 and I8, which covered attack articles and images, respectively. The second, G11, is a new criterion covering corporate and other spam, in response to a recent mailing list post from Interim Executive Director Brad Patrick, "issuing a call to arms to the community to act in a much more draconian fashion in response to corporate self-editing and vanity page creation." Also, criterion A7, which deals with asserting notability, was expanded to include "companies" and "web sites, blogs, online forums, webcomics, podcasts, or similar web content."

Patrick continued, "We are the #14 website in the world. We are a big target.  If we are to remain true to our encyclopedic mission, this kind of nonsense cannot be tolerated.  This means the administrators and new page patrol need to be clear when they see new usernames and page creation which are blatantly commercial - shoot on sight.  There should be no question that someone who claims to have a "famous movie studio" and has exactly 2 Google hits - both their Myspace page - they get nuked.  Ban users who promulgate such garbage for a significant period of time.  They need to be encouraged to avoid the temptation to recreate their article, thereby raising the level of damage and wasted time they incur."

"Some of you might think regular policy and VfD is the way to go. I am here to tell you it is not enough.  We are losing the battle for encyclopedic content in favor of people intent on hijacking Wikipedia for their own memes.  This scourge is a serious waste of time and energy.  We must put a stop to this now.  Thank you for your help."

In response, G11 was drafted: "Pages that exist only to promote a company, person, product, service or group." The template Db-spam can be used on pages that fit the definition.

G10, meanwhile, was drafted by Radiant!, generalizing the attack page provisions that had previously applied to articles and images, to apply to all pages. It currently reads: "Pages that serve no purpose but to disparage their subject or some other entity (e.g., "John Q. Doe is an imbecile"). 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." The template Db-attack can still be used on attack pages.

A7 simply had "companies" and "websites" appended to the definition, which also covers any article on real people, groups of people, bands, and clubs "that does not assert the importance or significance of its subject." Db-bio can be used for general notability cases, while Db-web can be used for articles on websites.