Well, 2021 is over, and 2022 seems like it is shaping up to be less exciting. The largest AfD in history has been closed, nobody is running around the United States Capitol in a Viking helmet, and anyone in rich countries who wants a vaccine can just go get one. Still, things are happening in the world, and so too are things happening on Wikipedia. This month in deletion, the ever-present issues of political disagreement flare up in unexpected places, an ArbCom case builds up steam, and a silent battle over a subject-specific notability guideline rages in the background.
In the last two deletion reports, I've started by rattling off a bunch of statistics, including fun facts about the wacky and obscure debates of the month, but this month I will do it a bit differently, and sneak in some actual journalism. We'll see how it goes (I will, of course, retain the first AfDs of the new year as well as the list of AfDs with freaky titles).
At the policy village pump, a discussion was opened on the 19th about the sports notability guidelines that have guided inclusion criteria for many years. For those of us who are not intimately familiar with notability guidelines, I will spare you a ton of tl;dr – Wikipedia articles are generally subject to notability guidelines, which largely govern questions of inclusion (i.e. whether an article is written in the first place, or whether an AfC submission is accepted) and exclusion (i.e. whether an article is retained or deleted at a deletion discussion). Much ink has been spilled over the years defining the finer points of what "notability" means, to the extent that we recognize many " arguments to avoid" at AfD ("the article sucks" is usually ignored, for example, as is "the article is funny").
On Wikipedia, "notability" means that it's possible to write a high-quality encyclopedia article based on reliable sources concerning a subject, and nothing more. The overall standard for notability, based on the accumulated consensus of hundreds of thousands of deletion discussions, is reflected in the general notability guideline, which says that "a topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". This is straightforward enough, but there exist subject-specific notability guidelines for many types of content. NPROF, for example, allows college professors to have articles even if they fall far short of GNG. Conversely, GNG allows professors to have articles even if they fall far short of NPROF. There are several subject notability guidelines, or SNGs ( academics, astronomical objects, biology, books, events, films, geographic features, music, numbers, organizations/companies, people, sports, and websites). There are some SNGs that have been deprecated through community discussions, like WP:PORNBIO (retired after a 2019 RfC), as well as essays treated as de facto SNGs, like NSOLDIER (now deprecated, archived here). Generally, the creation and modification of notability guidelines causes a lot of drama. Some see them as the only way to ensure Wikipedia has reasonable coverage of diverse topics, and the only barrier between us and a project where subjects can only be covered if they're the subject of enough viral tweets to get into the news cycle. Contrariwise, some see them as an underhanded attempt by gangs of nerds to sneak droves of worthless articles about obscure subjects into the project with an end-run around the guidelines everyone else has to follow.
Okay, basically nobody believes either of these things, but they're the extreme points of a spectrum that most people fall on with respect to SNGs. These perspectives are currently coming into play with respect to Wikipedia:Notability (sports).
These notability guidelines, which have existed since 2007, cover a wide variety of sports – 28 of them, from orienteering to rodeo to billiards. They also cover teams, clubs, rivalries, arenas, and collegiate athletes. While the specific criteria differ across sports, the general thrust is that a person is presumed notable if they have played in at least one game at a professional level. This results in some weird edge cases, like an individual page for some guy who pitched a couple innings of a single game in 1890 and nobody wrote down his first name.
Of course, these weird edge case articles can be good. Lewis (baseball), currently a redirect, was previously a quite well-written article. In fact, it was a Featured Article until a contentious AfD in October 2021 (nominated by Therapyisgood, the same editor who had written most of the article). What changed?
Well, it almost goes without saying that standards have evolved on Wikipedia over the last twenty years; even a critically important topic like oxygen looked like this in early revisions. And the bar to becoming a featured article was lower back in the days when they were called " brilliant prose". But Lewis wasn't some holdout from 2005 – it was promoted to FA in 2020 and appeared on the Main Page in March 2021. Its October AfD nomination was part of a larger trend of sports FAs – previously upheld as the highest standard of quality on Wikipedia – being nominated for deletion, and then being deleted.
Doug Ring with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 was previously a featured article (despite an attempted AfD in 2015). It was turned into a redirect following a second AfD nomination in October 2021 by Trainsandotherthings, who this month made a fifteen-article batch nomination of Australian cricketers, including six featured articles and five good articles. Some articles survive the process – the batch nomination was withdrawn, and List of players who appeared in only one game in the NFL (1920–1929) developed a consensus to keep. However, many do not – Ron Hamence with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 (2nd nomination) was almost unanimously merged this month. The winds of change seem to be blowing, and blowing fast.
At the subpage created to host this discussion (split off from the main VPP thread on the 25th), there are a whopping 400,000 bytes of text. The core of it revolves around a proposal, made by RandomCanadian, to abolish the current version of NSPORTS, citing "needless conflict, pointless AfDs and DRVs, and above all bureaucratic waste of time". A pre-RfC discussion was held to determine what aspects of NSPORTS are most problematic. Major categories of complaints include the presumption of notability as used in AfD arguments, the presumption of notability as used in article creation, confusing guidance, the granting of indefinite amounts of time for SIGCOV to be located, and criteria that often fail to correctly predict GNG coverage. Currently, there are six subproposals for guideline amendments outlined on the page.
Normally, I give the largest AfDs of the month by the highest !vote count and the largest character count. This month, something a little confusing happened: the highest !vote count AfD had the second-largest character count, and the largest character count AfD had the second-highest !vote count. While about seemingly-unrelated subjects, both ended up at the center of sometimes-acerbic arguments pertaining to gender politics.
The result was no consensus. and none likely to emerge with established editors making policy-based cases for both sides of the issue. [...] ETA following conversation about my close with JoelleJay, I am explicitly noting that I have no issue with this being renominated if participants or nominator think a different outcome is likely quickly. This appeared to be cleaner than an additional relist.
Apart from those, the largest discussions by character count were as follows:
The result was delete. Sources analyzed in the discussion don't appear to satisfy the WP:NORG standard and there were not alternative sources put forward. Since this article and its redirects have been around a long time, as an editorial action I'm going to recreate them as redirects to Center for Inquiry.
The AfDs with the most !votes cast were:
What counts as the "first AfD" of the year depends on your perspective (and on your time zone). But even then, there are a few different "firsts".
There are a few firsts that I wasn't able to suss out, mostly because I don't feel like spending two hours on database queries. These include the first !vote of the year, as well as the first nomination/closure for each time zone.
In the tradition of WP:DAFT, here is some wacky stuff I found while compiling this month's report.
Deleted articles with freaky titles:
Kept articles with freaky titles:
Merged articles with freaky titles:
Redirected articles with freaky titles:
No consensus articles with freaky titles:
Open AfDs for articles with freaky titles:
Procedurally closed AfDs that were closed "speedy keep" for being nominated in the incorrect venue, but later opened at RfD, relisted there a week later, and closed as "no consensus" with freaky titles:
Well, 2021 is over, and 2022 seems like it is shaping up to be less exciting. The largest AfD in history has been closed, nobody is running around the United States Capitol in a Viking helmet, and anyone in rich countries who wants a vaccine can just go get one. Still, things are happening in the world, and so too are things happening on Wikipedia. This month in deletion, the ever-present issues of political disagreement flare up in unexpected places, an ArbCom case builds up steam, and a silent battle over a subject-specific notability guideline rages in the background.
In the last two deletion reports, I've started by rattling off a bunch of statistics, including fun facts about the wacky and obscure debates of the month, but this month I will do it a bit differently, and sneak in some actual journalism. We'll see how it goes (I will, of course, retain the first AfDs of the new year as well as the list of AfDs with freaky titles).
At the policy village pump, a discussion was opened on the 19th about the sports notability guidelines that have guided inclusion criteria for many years. For those of us who are not intimately familiar with notability guidelines, I will spare you a ton of tl;dr – Wikipedia articles are generally subject to notability guidelines, which largely govern questions of inclusion (i.e. whether an article is written in the first place, or whether an AfC submission is accepted) and exclusion (i.e. whether an article is retained or deleted at a deletion discussion). Much ink has been spilled over the years defining the finer points of what "notability" means, to the extent that we recognize many " arguments to avoid" at AfD ("the article sucks" is usually ignored, for example, as is "the article is funny").
On Wikipedia, "notability" means that it's possible to write a high-quality encyclopedia article based on reliable sources concerning a subject, and nothing more. The overall standard for notability, based on the accumulated consensus of hundreds of thousands of deletion discussions, is reflected in the general notability guideline, which says that "a topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". This is straightforward enough, but there exist subject-specific notability guidelines for many types of content. NPROF, for example, allows college professors to have articles even if they fall far short of GNG. Conversely, GNG allows professors to have articles even if they fall far short of NPROF. There are several subject notability guidelines, or SNGs ( academics, astronomical objects, biology, books, events, films, geographic features, music, numbers, organizations/companies, people, sports, and websites). There are some SNGs that have been deprecated through community discussions, like WP:PORNBIO (retired after a 2019 RfC), as well as essays treated as de facto SNGs, like NSOLDIER (now deprecated, archived here). Generally, the creation and modification of notability guidelines causes a lot of drama. Some see them as the only way to ensure Wikipedia has reasonable coverage of diverse topics, and the only barrier between us and a project where subjects can only be covered if they're the subject of enough viral tweets to get into the news cycle. Contrariwise, some see them as an underhanded attempt by gangs of nerds to sneak droves of worthless articles about obscure subjects into the project with an end-run around the guidelines everyone else has to follow.
Okay, basically nobody believes either of these things, but they're the extreme points of a spectrum that most people fall on with respect to SNGs. These perspectives are currently coming into play with respect to Wikipedia:Notability (sports).
These notability guidelines, which have existed since 2007, cover a wide variety of sports – 28 of them, from orienteering to rodeo to billiards. They also cover teams, clubs, rivalries, arenas, and collegiate athletes. While the specific criteria differ across sports, the general thrust is that a person is presumed notable if they have played in at least one game at a professional level. This results in some weird edge cases, like an individual page for some guy who pitched a couple innings of a single game in 1890 and nobody wrote down his first name.
Of course, these weird edge case articles can be good. Lewis (baseball), currently a redirect, was previously a quite well-written article. In fact, it was a Featured Article until a contentious AfD in October 2021 (nominated by Therapyisgood, the same editor who had written most of the article). What changed?
Well, it almost goes without saying that standards have evolved on Wikipedia over the last twenty years; even a critically important topic like oxygen looked like this in early revisions. And the bar to becoming a featured article was lower back in the days when they were called " brilliant prose". But Lewis wasn't some holdout from 2005 – it was promoted to FA in 2020 and appeared on the Main Page in March 2021. Its October AfD nomination was part of a larger trend of sports FAs – previously upheld as the highest standard of quality on Wikipedia – being nominated for deletion, and then being deleted.
Doug Ring with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 was previously a featured article (despite an attempted AfD in 2015). It was turned into a redirect following a second AfD nomination in October 2021 by Trainsandotherthings, who this month made a fifteen-article batch nomination of Australian cricketers, including six featured articles and five good articles. Some articles survive the process – the batch nomination was withdrawn, and List of players who appeared in only one game in the NFL (1920–1929) developed a consensus to keep. However, many do not – Ron Hamence with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 (2nd nomination) was almost unanimously merged this month. The winds of change seem to be blowing, and blowing fast.
At the subpage created to host this discussion (split off from the main VPP thread on the 25th), there are a whopping 400,000 bytes of text. The core of it revolves around a proposal, made by RandomCanadian, to abolish the current version of NSPORTS, citing "needless conflict, pointless AfDs and DRVs, and above all bureaucratic waste of time". A pre-RfC discussion was held to determine what aspects of NSPORTS are most problematic. Major categories of complaints include the presumption of notability as used in AfD arguments, the presumption of notability as used in article creation, confusing guidance, the granting of indefinite amounts of time for SIGCOV to be located, and criteria that often fail to correctly predict GNG coverage. Currently, there are six subproposals for guideline amendments outlined on the page.
Normally, I give the largest AfDs of the month by the highest !vote count and the largest character count. This month, something a little confusing happened: the highest !vote count AfD had the second-largest character count, and the largest character count AfD had the second-highest !vote count. While about seemingly-unrelated subjects, both ended up at the center of sometimes-acerbic arguments pertaining to gender politics.
The result was no consensus. and none likely to emerge with established editors making policy-based cases for both sides of the issue. [...] ETA following conversation about my close with JoelleJay, I am explicitly noting that I have no issue with this being renominated if participants or nominator think a different outcome is likely quickly. This appeared to be cleaner than an additional relist.
Apart from those, the largest discussions by character count were as follows:
The result was delete. Sources analyzed in the discussion don't appear to satisfy the WP:NORG standard and there were not alternative sources put forward. Since this article and its redirects have been around a long time, as an editorial action I'm going to recreate them as redirects to Center for Inquiry.
The AfDs with the most !votes cast were:
What counts as the "first AfD" of the year depends on your perspective (and on your time zone). But even then, there are a few different "firsts".
There are a few firsts that I wasn't able to suss out, mostly because I don't feel like spending two hours on database queries. These include the first !vote of the year, as well as the first nomination/closure for each time zone.
In the tradition of WP:DAFT, here is some wacky stuff I found while compiling this month's report.
Deleted articles with freaky titles:
Kept articles with freaky titles:
Merged articles with freaky titles:
Redirected articles with freaky titles:
No consensus articles with freaky titles:
Open AfDs for articles with freaky titles:
Procedurally closed AfDs that were closed "speedy keep" for being nominated in the incorrect venue, but later opened at RfD, relisted there a week later, and closed as "no consensus" with freaky titles:
Discuss this story
FeRDNYC ( talk) 20:48, 30 January 2022 (UTC) reply
FAs on the chopping block
I was informed that I was directly mentioned in this article (I would have appreciated being pinged, since it directly discusses my actions) so I figure I might as well explain my rationale a bit. The AfD for Doug Ring 1948 was a long time coming - it was TFA in October 2021, and a number of editors expressed dismay that the article even existed at its FAR which was opened on October 19th. Eventually, consensus there became that the article quite simply should no longer exist, and I was the one to pull the trigger and launch an AfD. Following that one closing with a strong consensus to merge, I've been evaluating the other forks on "Player name with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948" within this featured topic, many of which seem ridiculous to me. There were some very on point comments in 2015 at the first AfD for Ron Hamence 1948:
More of these will likely end up at AfD in the future, whether nominated by me or someone else. Trainsandotherthings ( talk) 15:39, 31 January 2022 (UTC) reply