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Can we please allow common sense deletions? I'd like a number of orphaned images to be deleted as they are renamed/moved to commons for instance. Orphaned and unused images with better/similar/identical versions should be deleted under this. -- Cat out 17:36, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
Current wording of A7 is:
I would like to change it to:
Simple idea; basically, many of us are familiar with the idea that "asserts importance" and "asserts Wikipedia notability(TM)" are distinct and should not be conflated. It's probably a good idea if the criterion's wording includes a note about that. There is precedent; see G1 and G4. Thoughts? Any other wordings? Mango juice talk 04:26, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
There seems to be some disagreement as to the intent of the 'A1' condition.
Specifically, do this and this constitute articles which should be speedy deleted under A1?
My understanding and past observation, were that A1 applied to situations where there was not sufficient information in the article to determine what the subject was unless you were already familiar with it. I had never heard of either of these, but could clearly see that one was a language spoken in a specific area and the other a written script used by a particular people. Is something more required for 'context'?
On a similar note, if someone puts nothing but an 'inuse' template on a page it clearly 'lacks context', but does it make sense to delete the page within minutes (causing them to get an edit conflict and lose their work if they don't know how to temporarily store it off wiki)? Couldn't we just wait a while and delete if nothing were forthcoming? Again, I think of the intent... A1 exists to get rid of articles that make no sense. Not to play 'gotcha' with people who are actually working on developing valid articles. -- CBD 20:21, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
I reverted CBD's wording change here becasue I don't see an consensus anywhere on this page to change those words. Also, a dicdef allows someone unfamiliar to understand, but is still not enough content, and certainly not enough context. pschemp | talk 21:06, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
I propose removing the "commercial content provider" clause from CSD A8. We should be deleting all copyvios as quickly as possible, not just ones from for-profit websites. This hopefully would also help alleviate the massive backlog at WP:CP, as more things would be speediable. Really, it kind of reflects current practice anyway, since most taggers and deleting admins don't even bother to check if it's a commercial content provider, they just tag/delete it anyway. -- Rory096 18:35, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
I don't spend much time around WP:CP so I don't know how common it is that copied content is actually intended to be legitimate, but I am wondering if we can phrase this to catch the really illegitimate stuff? What is the proposal was ammended to include only content taken from commercial content providers (e.g. encyclopedias, newspapers, porn sites)? This would exclude "People to Save the Spotted Mink", "Uncle Joe's House of Yarn", and other non-profits that might actually be trying to share content, while covering sites I would consider truly unlikely to do so. Dragons flight 19:50, September 1, 2005 (UTC)
This was discussed above, at #Amending A8? and #A8 changes. Two common problems with speedy deleting copyvios:
To ensure these aren't deleted too:
This could still have the small problem of deleting articles that were actually copied from Wikipedia. There is also the matter of some permission being given, but for the latter I think the CSD is currently much too concerned with it; it does not scale, and they can still give permission if they want. The problem is they don't have Template:Copyvio telling them how, so the note about {{ Nothanks-sd}} could be more prominent, but adding and checking that template is too complicated anyway. — Centrx→ talk • 23:14, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
We could solve the problem of the few cases in which an article from another website is being posted by the author by requiring the deleting admin to notify the poster. Then, the user has a chance to assert his/her copyright. -- Where 23:32, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
A fairly high proportion of the ones I tag are probably the site owner posting his own content and perhaps technically it's not a commercial content provider. But we have no way of knowing for sure if the user name which seems to be the owner is in fact the owner of the copyright. Also, in most case it's a copy and paste with no reformatting and they often look like ads, so even if the copyright problem was ignored they need a complete rewrite and/or should be deleted under some other criteria. Less than 1% would be acceptable if rewritten. -- ArmadilloFromHell 00:44, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
Becuase of the consensus here, I removed the "commercial content provider" condition from A8. Of course, feel free to revert me if you think I am wrong about my assessment of whether we have consensus. -- Where 12:00, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
This is reposted from the {{ Db-copyvio}} talk page, I've moved it here where there is some similar discussion, and someone might be able to comment. Basically, I need some help with the 48 hour aspect of this. I just noticed that this Country Radio Broadcasters, Inc. article is identical to this [1] site. It is older than 48 hours though, it dates from 17:46, 24 August 2006. It should still be deleted under A8 even though it is past 48 hours, right? DVD+ R/W 02:52, 16 September 2006 (UTC) Note, the copyvio has now been surgically removed and the article is beginning to be rewritten. I would like to hear other opinions on why there is a 48 hour requirement though, when it isn't a mirrored site. DVD+ R/W 03:18, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
Criterion R2 allows for speedying redirects to user space, but I just ran into a redirect from article space to a category, namely List of Townlands of Ireland -> Category:Townlands of Ireland. Is there a reason that CSD R2 doesn't include redirects to category space. Does this need to go to RfD? My instinct is that this is speediable but I can't find policy to back this up. Thanks! --- Deville ( Talk) 08:22, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
I would like to find out what the is the appropriate message used in user talk pages for {{ db-badfairuse}} and the rest of the messages which do not have any guide to notify the user who uploaded the image in question. For example, for CSD A8, this message is used - Please notify uploader on their talk page with: {{ subst:nothanks-sd}} Any comments would be welcomed. Another eample is for CSD A7. The rest of the deletion templates do not show any guidance on what kind of messages which are to be used in the usertalk pages. -- S iva1979 Talk to me 04:41, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
I would like to know if anyone else sees the conflict between the criteria listed on the project page, for {{ isd}} and what it actually says. The main page here says the criteria is:
same or better image exists on Wikipedia (not for now on Commons)
while the template itself says something very different:
This image is a redundant (all pixels the same or scaled down) copy of [[:Image:{{{1}}}]], in the same file format, which is on Wikipedia (not Commons), and all inward links have been updated
It mainly came to my attention just now when I added the tag to Image:HiltonHotelsCorporation.gif because I removed the white background to replace it with transparency, and also cropped the ridiculously large margin. Other than that, I did nothing (except convert it from GIF to PNG since it uses partial transparency) The criteria here, it meets - the new version is better than the obsolete one. However, the criteria on the template, it doesn't - the new version is not a bit-for-bit copy in the same format or a scaled-down, but that's not the criteria here. Which of them is the official policy? Because one has to be changed. - Рэд хот 23:09, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
I have noticed both in AFD and in the course of new page patrolling that there are a lot of NN web forums that do not assert notability or importance. Does this fit CSD A7? I don't see that rationale being used much. It seems like a good one, though, given that they are simply groups that occur online. Db-band gets used a lot since nearly every band in existence thinks that if myspace will let them promote their crappy music wikipedia should too. I hardly ever see db-group though. Is there any way that it could be specified in A7 that this also applies to forums? This is by far the most common NN "group" that is posted. Irongargoyle 00:57, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
This is not a vote. You need to actually propose a revision and discuss it, with the reasons why for and against. Otherwise, this is just a waste of time and space. It would also be good to look at the archives—where there has been discussion about this—to see possible variations and reasons. — Centrx→ talk • 15:26, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
My suggested wording, which I believe logically follows from current A7 as well as WP:NOT an internet guide, follows:
Unremarkable web content. An article about a web site, blog, online forum, webcomic, podcast, or similar web content that does not assert the importance or historical significance of its subject. If the assertion is disputed or controversial, it should be taken to AfD instead.
-- Dragonfiend 16:26, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
Is it time for a straw poll to determine consensus? Or should I just go ahead and add it to A7? MER-C 07:45, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
Any objections to the current version?
“ | Unremarkable web content. An article about a web site, blog, online forum, webcomic, podcast, or similar web content that does not assert the importance or historical significance of its subject. If the assertion is disputed or controversial, it should be taken to AfD instead. | ” |
If there aren't any by the weekend, I'll go ahead and add it. MER-C 09:47, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
Implemented, spammed on WP:AN. MER-C 12:41, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
What is the "indentation hack" code for? All of the sections after "Articles" are indented and it makes them all look like they are paragraphs under "Articles". laurap414 21:04, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
I think I3 is not very clear about images which can be used commercially but prevent derivatives - "No Derivatives" licences. The Jimbo email does not mention them [2], the {{ cc-by-nd-2.5}} and {{ cc-by-nd-2.0}} templates redirect to {{ db-ccnoncom}} which is only about non-commercial licences, and the templates {{ cc-by-nd-1.0}} and {{ cc-by-nd}} point to a non-speedy template. There is nothing about ND in the explanations. It appears to have been put back in recently despite not apparently being there before. I am seeking clarification that licences which prevent derivatives are actually speediable (even though they are currently mentioned), and if that is the case, consensus to change the wording to explicitly mention CC-ND licences (and possibly establish on this talk page where this policy comes from). And perhaps a more appropriate speedy template for {{ cc-by-nd-2.0}} and {{ cc-by-nd-2.5}} as well. For example {{ nd}}. Your thoughts, thanks. -- zzuuzz (talk) 00:32, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
_ _ As to speedying Talk pages, there is already G8:
(It could be clearer; it is also misplaced:
_ _ I'd like a new CSD for talk pgs like the one i
improved by removing its pointless list of related articles deducible from the article's stubby text &/or its short what-lks-here list: it now can be seen at a glance to be blank, rather than needing to be scanned to see if it says something editors need to know. IMO, i further improved it by not simply blanking it, but leaving a double-small note, signed (and subject to the consequences of forgery &/or fraud), showing immediately that someone takes responsibility for discarding it. But making such a prematurely created talk page speediable would avoid anyone having to lk to the talk pg to get a "Nothing happening here, folks, move along" advisory. (A
different form of talk page, that would also be better deleted, informs the utterly clueless what article talk pages are for, and has a redundant lk to its article. Yet another form is a blanked (or "ignore me") pg that replaces the rdr created in moving or merging it where it should be; that is the cure for an entirely off-topic talk page, due to discussion abt a person with a name confusable with the proper topic of the talk page in question, or to plain cluelessness that might be useful elsewhere.)
_ _ Here's a draft (incorporating the present G8) to take potshots at, in the process of coming up with a good new section:
=== Talk pages ===
(Short names: Tk1, Tk2, ...)
—Preceding unsigned comment added by Jerzy ( talk • contribs) 03:20, 13 September 2006
This was crossposted, and has probably least to do with CSD. Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy#Informing the creators is being ignored. I've moved the comments that were here, over there. >Radiant< 16:34, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
Would an article that consists solely of an image fall under {{ db-nocontent}}? I want to make sure I'm tagging articles appropriately, and if there's a better tag I'd like to use it. Thanks! -- Merope Talk/ Review 13:49, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
For me, the P2 seems totally useless. almost as a joke. → A z a Toth 01:18, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
This is reposted from the {{ Db-copyvio}} talk page, I've moved it here where there is some similar discussion, and someone might be able to comment. Basically, I need some help with the 48 hour aspect of this. I just noticed that this Country Radio Broadcasters, Inc. article is identical to this [3] site. It is older than 48 hours though, it dates from 17:46, 24 August 2006. It should still be deleted under A8 even though it is past 48 hours, right? DVD+ R/W 02:52, 16 September 2006 (UTC) Note, the copyvio has now been surgically removed and the article is beginning to be rewritten. I would like to hear other opinions on why there is a 48 hour requirement though, when it isn't a mirrored site. DVD+ R/W 03:18, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
Articles that are transwikied over here into the pseudonamespace "Transwiki:" and then moved into the main namespace leave behind an unneeded redirect in the pseudonamespace. I propose that such redirects be speediable. The proposed wording is "redirects created from the result of a transwiki to Wikipedia and a move to the main namespace". MER-C 13:07, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
I6, the "Missing fair-use rationale" criterion, currently says:
"Any image or media tagged only with {{ fairuse}} or {{ Non-free fair use in}}, with no fair use rationale, may be deleted seven days after it was uploaded."
When really it should read:
"Any image or media tagged only with a generic fair use template, with no fair use rationale, may be deleted seven days after it was uploaded."
The reason is that it is not only {{ fairuse}} and {{ Non-free fair use in}} which require detailed fair use rationales; all of the generic boilerplate fair use templates require detailed fair use rationales. An image ought to be deleted (after a week) if it lacks such a detailed rationale, regardless of which boilerplate template was used.
Feel free to alter my wording if you think the point can be conveyed more clearly. -- bainer ( talk) 03:06, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
Speedily informing the user who started an article would avoid a whole lot of confusion. Guaka 20:06, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
Is there a way to disable the talk page in wikipedia for pictures in wikicommons? -- Gbleem 10:53, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
"The word "speedy" in this context refers to the rapid decision-making process, not the length of time since the article was created."
With an obvious vandalism or copyright violation I can see the need to delete something immediately after creation but it is not necessary to delete or even tag other things immediately after creation.
I don't want to say that something has to be up for a certain time period before speedy deletion. I however think that even the templates are a hassle when I'm trying to edit something.
Is there something else that can be put in the policy for clarification?
-- Gbleem 05:00, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
I was on AN/I recently asking about how to help and get practice with the speedy deletion process even without having admin tools, and it was suggested that I come to CSD and make sure that speedy candidates were legitimate speedies. I immediately noticed that a lot of articles tagged with some criteria don't actually meet those criteria, but do meet others. My question is: would admins find it helpful if I were to replace the incorrect criteria with the correct ones? Or would this just be obnoxious and a waste of everyone's time?
Secondly, when an article doesn't meet the narrow speedy criteria but would almost certainly not survive prod, is it worthwhile to remove the speedy tag and put it in prod, or is this a case where one should just
ignore all rules and let it be?
I ask these questions because I would like to get practice with the CSD, in prepration for the unlikely event that the community decides to entrust me with administrator tools, but don't want to get in everyone's way and piss people off in the meantime.
Captainktainer *
Talk 01:37, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
For articles in subject areas with established notability guidelines, is failing to attempt to meet the guidelines grounds for speedy deletion? In other words, quite apart from the question of whether the article actually conforms to the guidelines, can an editor use the guidelines in a more limited sense as a guide to whether an article merits speedy deletion?: if the article does not even appear to be making the attempt to conform to guidelines, but either ignores them or seems unaware of them, is that equivalent to "not assert[ing] the importance or significance of the subject"? -- Rrburke 03:53, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
Unless someone can come up with a reason not to I plan to expand A8 to cover everthing not just articles.20:27, 25 September 2006 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Geni ( talk • contribs)
There are a few templates and categories that are recreated in some form every month or so, and usually deleted per G4 since we've seen them before. The most obvious examples are voting templates and disclaimer templates. I think it would be useful to make a very brief list of those perennials here. Any thoughts on this? >Radiant< 21:34, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
I wish more and more that blatant advertising would qualify for speedy deletion. On several occasions, I have seen people who don't even try to disguise their advertisements as articles, but instead write them as straight-out advertisements, including contact information, in first person voice. This makes me feel they knowingly and shamelessly disregard Wikipedia's intention, and instead think "Hey, I can edit it! Cool, free advertisement space!". Why in the world is this not a speedy deletion criterion? Do we want to turn Wikipedia into a free Internet host? I would love to see a template {{db-we}} which would display:
JIP | Talk 19:16, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
A quick draft: "It is an advertisement masquerading as an article which does not assert notability or it is a userpage of a single purpose advertising account." MER-C 13:00, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
I don't know. Some of these do definately need to be deleted, but I have seen several cleaned up to be decent articles. In my experience this, "when it's always going to get 100% delete votes and 0% keep votes," is simply not true. There are many notable and important companies and products that Wikipedia does not have articles on. Lots of people (sometimes unaffiliated with the company) will copy the company's promotional materials to Wikipedia in order to fill the gap. This is wrong, violates copywrite, etc., but often (though not always) these products deserve an article. We have a clean-up template for advertising; and advertising should 'be cleaned up, not deleted. Copyvios should be deleted, non-notable things can be deleted, and those get rid of half the ads there. The rest, consisting of notable products or companies with articles that read like ads but are not copied directly from websites or press releases, should be cleaned up, not deleted. I really think ad articles need to go through the AFD process to determine which of the three categories of ad articles they fall into. Adding it to the SD criteria is a mistake. ~ ONUnicorn ( Talk / Contribs) 13:47, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
In practice, advertising is speedy deleted all the time. When an article starts out "Our mission is to provide a value-centric people-driven paradigm..." A) there's nothing there which good editors would actually use in an encyclopedia article on that topic and B) It's a copied and pasted right from the company webpage. Yes, sometimes what starts out as an ad can end up a good article, but it has to have some salvageable content, and not be a copyright violation, before any of that can happen. I think that saying we should never speedy delete advertising is relatively naive and doesn't take into account how much spam we get in an average hour, let alone day.
There seems to be a basic problem at work here. A lot of this "about our company" stuff isn't what you or I, as Wikipedia editors would write: Factual information, statistics, history, summary of controversies, etc. All that some companies put into their "about our company" is stuff about how great their product/service is... I've read corporate pages that literally don't give a single objective fact about the company.
At times I've advocated a CSD for "Articles that exist only to promote a product or service", which covers these non-informative company fluff pieces... although perhaps that rule is a bit too given to misinterpretation. If an article has factual information (e.g. "Company was founded in 1917, purchased by X in 1950, moved its headquarters to City in 1997" and so forth) that's all stuff we could use in an article, so articles like that really shouldn't be speedied unless they're copy and paste jobs. -- W.marsh 17:09, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
Personally, I see no reason why WP:PROD is inadequate for dealing with new spam articles. The article creators rarely object in such cases, as they've vanished off of Wikipedia, and if they do, it's because they really do think (for whatever reason) their company or product should be in an encyclopedia. Mango juice talk 17:12, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Brad Patrick, the foundation's legal counsel, has just made comments related to this very issue, that I thought people would be interested in. From Foundation-l:
Full comment here. I think there is a bit of a sea change going on, used to the attitude was "Just slap a tag on it and someone will clean up the spam eventually", not it's becoming more well, I don't even have to exagerate, "shoot on sight". -- W.marsh 17:28, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Seems to have been implemented by Radiant!: [5]. MER-C 11:42, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
"It is a page created by a single purpose advertising account (csd g11)" MER-C 12:24, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
1) Wording of WP:CSD#A7: The bolded text that explains the criterion as "Unremarkable people or groups/vanity pages" seems to me at odds with the actual usage guidelines. Surely it's the assertion of notability, rather than notability per se, that's decisive. "Non-notable subjects with their importance asserted" are, as WP:CSD says, not eligible for WP:SD. Surely "unremarkable people or groups/vanity pages," while candidates for WP:AfD or WP:PROD, are not candidates for WP:SD if they assert even an implausible or unverified claim of notability. Does the wording of of WP:CSD#A7 need to be amended to reflect the distinction?
2) I've been thinking about trudging through band (and possibly album and song) stubs and articles for candidates for WP:SD. In an earlier discussion, it was suggested that any claim of notability renders an article ineligible for WP:SD, and that stating that a band has an album is a de facto claim of notabilty. I presume the adjective "popular" would be, too: as in, "X is popular band from Y." First, is that a consensus position? If it is, would it be fair to consider putting forward for WP:CSD#A7 any band article that says no more than: "X band exists. Bobby, Timmy, Twirly and Jethro are its members. They recently played at open mic night at the Stuckey's on Route 17 to coincide with the release of a single on their MySpace page and are really really sure they're going to be famous" -- or less? This would probably be enough to eliminate dozens of band articles.
3) If bands are speedy-deletable per WP:CSD#A7, shouldn't it follow a fortiori that albums and songs which likewise lack assertions of notability ought to be so too? So how to accomplish this? WP:CSD#A1 sometimes works for this, but even stubs or articles with, for example, full track listings and graphics obviously don't fit the criterion. WP:CSD#A7 only applies to people or groups of people; it seems odd to me there's no criterion to apply to the things they make.
-- Rrburke 21:36, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
Part of the reason for having the "unremarkable people/vanity" wording is that it is a further restriction on the criterion. That is, articles about people who are eminently notable but do not contain an assertion are not, ideally, speedy deletable. There are often articles like "John Bishop (1839-1900) is a pianist": There is no assertion of notability, and if it were an article about a guitarist born 1985 it would be suspicious, but no one is writing vanity articles about 19th century pianists and in these cases the mere "physicist" or "artist" with no assertion should not be deletable under the CSD. The article must first appear to be vanity or unremarkable, and then you check for the assertion. — Centrx→ talk • 04:30, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I have noticed that image talk pages frequently appear in the speedy deletion category, and I don't believe that they should be deleted on the grouds that their respective page doesn't exist (unless the content is truly meaningless, it should be moved to the Commons at worst). For example, I have just declined to delete Image talk:Flag of Poland (state).svg. The problem is an inconsistency between the image page and the image talk page because the latter makes it seem that the image doesn't exist. - Mike Rosoft 11:33, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Given the growing concern over vanity articles, I've suggested a new A9 which will cover vanity articles, but deliberately does not mention notability - if notability is disputed then the article is for Afd. But vanity articles should be speedied REGARDLESS of notability. Cynical 15:05, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I feel that the new spam criterion is okay, but I think it needs some clarification. Different people consider "spam" differently. I think it's important to make it clear in the policy that speedy deletion of spam should only be meant for cases that are not only blatant examples of advertising, but also ones for which the page in question contains nothing else in its history. This will hopefully take care of all the most egregious cases, but I thought of a specific case that will probably be uncontroversial, and applies a bit more broadly than just spam:
In 90% of such cases, the article would be a copyright violation. In 99% of the remaining cases, the only reason a copyright violation wouldn't be an issue is that someone promoting the subject, and working for/with the official website, wants that info hosted on Wikipedia. I can't see why, in those cases, we should accept such material: Wikipedia articles are supposed to meet certain standards of content, which websites basically don't ever meet. Thoughts? Mango juice talk 19:04, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I also warn you now: A deletion criterion that talks about "spam" will result in many controversial deletions. If the experience with electronic mail, such as this and this, tells us anything, it is that definitions of "spam" vary widely, and that many people use it to mean "I don't like this." or even "I don't like you.". People will overuse and abuse "spam" in the same way that they abuse "nonsense". Be clear and name it what it is: Corporate advertising and corporate autobiography.
In practice, the "commercial content provider" restriction is a silly restriction. If the content is copied wholesale from a web page, and the web page is copyrighted and not GFDL licenced, then we don't want it, whoever is publishing the web page, and any granting of permission should occur before any content is contributed. Such content is a copyright violation. It's as simple as that.
If we can apply Copyright Judo speedily to corporate advertisements and corporate autobiographies, in both articles and user pages, which we can if we slacken the restriction on A8, then we don't need the above proposal, we don't need the nebulously and subjectively defined G11, and we don't need a perennial and unceasing education campaign as to what "spam" actually is "in the Wikipedia sense". Uncle G 10:51, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
I have started a deletion review of a page deleted under CSD G5 ("delete pages created by banned users"). Comments would be welcomed. My arguments in favour of restricting G5 in cases where useful content has been created can be seen at the deletion review and also at Wikipedia talk:Deny recognition. Carcharoth 01:25, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Is it possible that there is something wrong with this page (the WP page, not this talk page)? For the last few weeks, whenever my cursor moves over a link on the page, I get an error that says A Runtime Error has occurred. Do you wish to Debug? Line: 3096 Error: Object doesn't support this property or method. I don't remember getting this message historically, so I sifted through old versions and I found the edit in the history where the error first starts happening for me. If seems to be something in this diff. Can someone please take a look at this to see if something is wrong (or maybe I'm just having a personal problem? although I can reproduce it at both home and office.) Thanks -- After Midnight 0001 02:08, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Some tell-tale signs of spam.
Has anyone got any other ideas on useful things to determine what is and isn't spam? - Mgm| (talk) 10:38, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
As I mentioned in one of my edit summaries and elsewhere on this talk page, the more we qualify this particular rule with provisos and definitions, the more loopholes we create. And the more loopholes we create, the more loopholes that will be exploited.
I spent 10 years working the abuse desk for a large regional ISP, and my job included both designing and enforcing an online ruleset. When I first started that job, our definition of "spam" was "20 or more substantially identical emails or newsgroup posts". So, naturally, we had several people who would only send them out in batches of 19.
The rule needs to be short, sweet, and to the point. Specifying criteria that the article creator should meet (e.g., single purpose account, no substantitive edits other than by the creator) will simply provide mechanisms for gaming the system. As somone who fought spam professionally for 10 years, my advice is to avoid providing those mechanisms.
All the best,
Ξxtreme Unction|
yakkity yak
13:30, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
I've been watching this discussion for a while now. Despite the serious efforts of a lot of good editors, the wording of this new proposal remains unacceptably vague. Good CSD criteria are ones where any reasonable editor reading the page can immediately see that a page does or does not meet the criteria. They must be uncontroversial for the system to work.
I'm not averse to the principle of the speedy-deletion of spam but the current definition of spam boils down to "I know it when I see it." I can't convince myself that's a scalable definition. What appears to me to be a "page that exists only to promote a company," etc. may not appear to be the same thing to you. For example, is
Cap Gemini spam or just in need of serious clean-up?
I am seriously concerned that the vagueness of the current wording is more likely to lead to further arguments, DRVs and bickering. It will create more problems than it will solve. I would prefer to withdraw that criterion while we work on the wording some more.
Rossami
(talk) 17:50, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Is this going to become ridiculously long and clutter the talk page? — Centrx→ talk • 00:02, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Article | Description | "Repost of official website"? | Creator is named after company? | Speedily deletable under A8 now? | Speedy deletable if A8 didn't have date restrictions and ignored the possibility of permission? |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Israel today ( AfD discussion) | a straight copy and paste from this copyrighted advertisment ("Copyright 2006 israel today Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.") | Yes | No ( Oaarmo ( talk · contribs)) | No | Yes |
Avesthagen ( AfD discussion) | initial text was a straight copy of this corporate blurb | No | No ( Frontstcorner ( talk · contribs)) | No | No |
Apps Communications ( AfD discussion) | Appears to be original. No peacock terms. | No | Yes ( Dapps007 ( talk · contribs)) | No | No |
Demonic computers ( AfD discussion) | Already subject to vandalism | No No web site exists. | No ( Howie91 ( talk · contribs)) | No | No |
Those are the WP:CORP-related AFD discussions from today's per-day AFD page. Uncle G 00:13, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
OK. I am persuaded by those arguments and withdraw my comments above. Still, I hope this doesn't swing things too far the other way. I have read Brad's post, and he specifically focuses on obvious spam and self-promotion. This shouldn't preclude later creation of neutral articles at the same title. And criteria for business notability need to be sorted. I remember seeing something like that somewhere. Can anyone point me towards them? Carcharoth 15:56, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Hey! I just looked at the change to the page. When did we decide notability of the entity being advertised doesn't matter? I did not agree to this ridiculously over-inclusive wording, and I am violently opposed to this change. Deco 19:37, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Since I placed the speedy tag on both of the articles that were deleted under G11 in the table (I was field-testing the new criteria), I feel that I should comment. While it's true that the Apps Communication article (from my memory) doesn't use peacock terms, the author was linkspamming in other ways. The other article recently started, and didn't even have a website to promote. Remember that the vandalism criteria is also vagued worded due to the nature of vandalism. I don't like expanding A8, because while it was used mainly to avoid spam in the past, its purposed has changed recently to preventing copyvios in general, and expanding the criteria to do two jobs at once seems like it wouldn't be able to do either of them. There's obvious spam out there that isn't copyvio, as well. ColourBurst 23:50, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Since Danny and Brad have been mentioned above, I'd add that Jimbo also commented on the issue in this post to the mailing list. "Deletion is no big deal" is a novel point of view even for the most extreme deletionist; this gives the idea of how much spam is considered a problem. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 13:03, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
I understand the need to keep the deprecated A4 and A6 listed to keep the numbering intact; however, I8 and especially U3 are very new and should have few incoming links yet. I think it's a good idea to remove those lines referring to them, as they serve little purpose. The effect is renaming I9 to I8, but also to make the page look less like a book of law. >Radiant< 16:22, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
The reason for keeping the numbering is that, unfortunately (despite the instructions to the contrary), many people use the CSD numbering system when writing edit summaries for the CSDs they carry out. These won't show up on incoming links, and so the numbering system needs to be kept. It's not too bad, as when it gets excessive, hive off the historical numbers to a note and have the list as : I7, I56, I455, etc! :-) Or just keep a record of the dates when each change took place. ie. From 5th February to 6th June 2006, G87 referred to what became G2 on 6th September 2007. Carcharoth 11:34, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I decided to check and see how the new G11 was working so far. I believe, as I had expected, that it's being vastly overused. I looked through all articles that transcluded {{ db-spam}} just now. Here's what I came up with, and my assesments.
Normally, I would discuss these issues with those who added the tags, but since the policy isn't clear yet, it wouldn't make much sense. What I can say is that there's a CLEAR tendency to describe articles as "spam" when the only thing that's really problematic is its existence on Wikipedia. In other words, in those cases "spam" serves as a way of condemning these subjects as non-notable. I think it's clear we need to add a clarification to G11 that excludes this kind of thing. And I really think we should drop people: promotions of people are rare, will likely meet other criteria, and in the odd case, we can suffer through the other types of process. The current wording of G11 is:
11. Blatant spam. Pages that exist only to promote a company, person, product, service or group, have no other purpose and cannot be reasonably edited into an encyclopedic contribution.
I think we should change it to:
11. Blatant spam. Pages with content solely aimed at promoting a company, product, service, or group, which serve no other purpose and cannot reasonably be edited into an encyclopedic contribution. This does not include encyclopedia articles on companies, products, services, or groups that were likely added only to promote their subject, unless the content itself is blatantly and unsalvageably promotional.
BTW, the one example where spam might be person-oriented with any frequency would be political candidates, but such people are clearly notable enough to merit inclusion (or at least, to pass A7), and it would be a rare case where the article could not be "reasonably edited into an encyclopedic contribution." Mango juice talk 17:22, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
As I warned: People in the world outside of Wikipedia grossly misunderstand what constitutes "spam", and mis-use it to describe things whose sole fault is that they don't like them. We should expect the same here, and indeed that's what's happening. Once again: Call it what it actually is. It's corporate advertising and corporate autobiography. Uncle G 01:18, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
I have made a simpler change to this effect which ties the criterion to the value of the content. Also, this and all criteria work together, so that a combination of weakly satisfied criteria is similar to a single strongly satisfied criterion. For example, the more notable a company or person, the more likely we would want to salvage something from a spam submission on it despite blatantly promotional material. Conversely, if an article is only somewhat spammy but contains a tepid or ridiculous assertion of notability and would invariably be deleted at Afd, in combination this indicates a speedy deletion may be warranted. — Centrx→ talk • 21:49, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
A new way to type Db-spam template has been created: Template:Csd-g11 is now a redirect to the CSD template for G11. Shin'ou's TTV ( Futaba| Masago| Kotobuki) 04:26, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
This is a follow on from a conversation I've had on Improv's talk. [1] A couple of thoughts on this from me:
There is no good reason to start with anything other than the last category. These are the entities no one has ever heard of, and for whom the "advertising" is most valuable. rather than doing things the easy way and just firing with both barrels at anything that looks like advertising, can we proceed with a bit of caution? Less "ohh, shiny new rule, let's use it!" and more "yet another thing to be responsible for, better be careful."
brenneman {L} 05:29, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
I just want to add new arguement. It can from what I saw from
Infotech Strategies. It originally started
its AfD with arguements for G11. Then poor zocky took up the job of cleaning it up.
After he finished (for the time being), the article still had some rather rosy interpretations of the company like "A significant proportion of the company’s consultants have served in senior positions at the White House, U.S. Executive Cabinet Departments, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S House of Representatives." A completely unsourced statement zocky left in when he/she rewriting it. Zocky redid the article and that's very commendable. Unfortunatly, he/she probably should've also redone the first paragraph from scratch. Not trying to target Zocky specifically,(sorry about this) but we're only human here. It's like copyvio text, dangerous to try to rewrite a copyvio article. Unless you are well experienced in doing so, you're likely to end up paraphrasing or leaving a sentence in. And that's still very much plagarism. The same happens here. The content is hopelessly and unavoidably POV in rosy and weasely words toward the subject. Often its unsourced as well. Its a little easier to clean out the massively slanted text without just removing the content, but still very difficult. Aside from phrases, you're likely to end up using terms they originally used. Many of them will contain buzz words or even
search engine optimization terms designed to increase exposure to the company through an article on it appearing at the top of a search engine results page for some specific terms. The whole of a spam article is a quagmire of junk, and ought to be deleted to avoid even the rewrites containing the spam, if only in a more subtle manner.
Kevin_b_er 20:02, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
More G11 abuse is being done by User:Improv. Noted here, it seems bizarre to delete articles on Teddy Grahams and Pepperidge Farms. I never thought I'd see the day, but G11 is an even bigger mistake than A7. -- badlydrawnjeff talk 17:41, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 10 | Archive 11 | Archive 12 | Archive 13 | Archive 14 | Archive 15 | → | Archive 20 |
Can we please allow common sense deletions? I'd like a number of orphaned images to be deleted as they are renamed/moved to commons for instance. Orphaned and unused images with better/similar/identical versions should be deleted under this. -- Cat out 17:36, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
Current wording of A7 is:
I would like to change it to:
Simple idea; basically, many of us are familiar with the idea that "asserts importance" and "asserts Wikipedia notability(TM)" are distinct and should not be conflated. It's probably a good idea if the criterion's wording includes a note about that. There is precedent; see G1 and G4. Thoughts? Any other wordings? Mango juice talk 04:26, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
There seems to be some disagreement as to the intent of the 'A1' condition.
Specifically, do this and this constitute articles which should be speedy deleted under A1?
My understanding and past observation, were that A1 applied to situations where there was not sufficient information in the article to determine what the subject was unless you were already familiar with it. I had never heard of either of these, but could clearly see that one was a language spoken in a specific area and the other a written script used by a particular people. Is something more required for 'context'?
On a similar note, if someone puts nothing but an 'inuse' template on a page it clearly 'lacks context', but does it make sense to delete the page within minutes (causing them to get an edit conflict and lose their work if they don't know how to temporarily store it off wiki)? Couldn't we just wait a while and delete if nothing were forthcoming? Again, I think of the intent... A1 exists to get rid of articles that make no sense. Not to play 'gotcha' with people who are actually working on developing valid articles. -- CBD 20:21, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
I reverted CBD's wording change here becasue I don't see an consensus anywhere on this page to change those words. Also, a dicdef allows someone unfamiliar to understand, but is still not enough content, and certainly not enough context. pschemp | talk 21:06, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
I propose removing the "commercial content provider" clause from CSD A8. We should be deleting all copyvios as quickly as possible, not just ones from for-profit websites. This hopefully would also help alleviate the massive backlog at WP:CP, as more things would be speediable. Really, it kind of reflects current practice anyway, since most taggers and deleting admins don't even bother to check if it's a commercial content provider, they just tag/delete it anyway. -- Rory096 18:35, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
I don't spend much time around WP:CP so I don't know how common it is that copied content is actually intended to be legitimate, but I am wondering if we can phrase this to catch the really illegitimate stuff? What is the proposal was ammended to include only content taken from commercial content providers (e.g. encyclopedias, newspapers, porn sites)? This would exclude "People to Save the Spotted Mink", "Uncle Joe's House of Yarn", and other non-profits that might actually be trying to share content, while covering sites I would consider truly unlikely to do so. Dragons flight 19:50, September 1, 2005 (UTC)
This was discussed above, at #Amending A8? and #A8 changes. Two common problems with speedy deleting copyvios:
To ensure these aren't deleted too:
This could still have the small problem of deleting articles that were actually copied from Wikipedia. There is also the matter of some permission being given, but for the latter I think the CSD is currently much too concerned with it; it does not scale, and they can still give permission if they want. The problem is they don't have Template:Copyvio telling them how, so the note about {{ Nothanks-sd}} could be more prominent, but adding and checking that template is too complicated anyway. — Centrx→ talk • 23:14, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
We could solve the problem of the few cases in which an article from another website is being posted by the author by requiring the deleting admin to notify the poster. Then, the user has a chance to assert his/her copyright. -- Where 23:32, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
A fairly high proportion of the ones I tag are probably the site owner posting his own content and perhaps technically it's not a commercial content provider. But we have no way of knowing for sure if the user name which seems to be the owner is in fact the owner of the copyright. Also, in most case it's a copy and paste with no reformatting and they often look like ads, so even if the copyright problem was ignored they need a complete rewrite and/or should be deleted under some other criteria. Less than 1% would be acceptable if rewritten. -- ArmadilloFromHell 00:44, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
Becuase of the consensus here, I removed the "commercial content provider" condition from A8. Of course, feel free to revert me if you think I am wrong about my assessment of whether we have consensus. -- Where 12:00, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
This is reposted from the {{ Db-copyvio}} talk page, I've moved it here where there is some similar discussion, and someone might be able to comment. Basically, I need some help with the 48 hour aspect of this. I just noticed that this Country Radio Broadcasters, Inc. article is identical to this [1] site. It is older than 48 hours though, it dates from 17:46, 24 August 2006. It should still be deleted under A8 even though it is past 48 hours, right? DVD+ R/W 02:52, 16 September 2006 (UTC) Note, the copyvio has now been surgically removed and the article is beginning to be rewritten. I would like to hear other opinions on why there is a 48 hour requirement though, when it isn't a mirrored site. DVD+ R/W 03:18, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
Criterion R2 allows for speedying redirects to user space, but I just ran into a redirect from article space to a category, namely List of Townlands of Ireland -> Category:Townlands of Ireland. Is there a reason that CSD R2 doesn't include redirects to category space. Does this need to go to RfD? My instinct is that this is speediable but I can't find policy to back this up. Thanks! --- Deville ( Talk) 08:22, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
I would like to find out what the is the appropriate message used in user talk pages for {{ db-badfairuse}} and the rest of the messages which do not have any guide to notify the user who uploaded the image in question. For example, for CSD A8, this message is used - Please notify uploader on their talk page with: {{ subst:nothanks-sd}} Any comments would be welcomed. Another eample is for CSD A7. The rest of the deletion templates do not show any guidance on what kind of messages which are to be used in the usertalk pages. -- S iva1979 Talk to me 04:41, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
I would like to know if anyone else sees the conflict between the criteria listed on the project page, for {{ isd}} and what it actually says. The main page here says the criteria is:
same or better image exists on Wikipedia (not for now on Commons)
while the template itself says something very different:
This image is a redundant (all pixels the same or scaled down) copy of [[:Image:{{{1}}}]], in the same file format, which is on Wikipedia (not Commons), and all inward links have been updated
It mainly came to my attention just now when I added the tag to Image:HiltonHotelsCorporation.gif because I removed the white background to replace it with transparency, and also cropped the ridiculously large margin. Other than that, I did nothing (except convert it from GIF to PNG since it uses partial transparency) The criteria here, it meets - the new version is better than the obsolete one. However, the criteria on the template, it doesn't - the new version is not a bit-for-bit copy in the same format or a scaled-down, but that's not the criteria here. Which of them is the official policy? Because one has to be changed. - Рэд хот 23:09, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
I have noticed both in AFD and in the course of new page patrolling that there are a lot of NN web forums that do not assert notability or importance. Does this fit CSD A7? I don't see that rationale being used much. It seems like a good one, though, given that they are simply groups that occur online. Db-band gets used a lot since nearly every band in existence thinks that if myspace will let them promote their crappy music wikipedia should too. I hardly ever see db-group though. Is there any way that it could be specified in A7 that this also applies to forums? This is by far the most common NN "group" that is posted. Irongargoyle 00:57, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
This is not a vote. You need to actually propose a revision and discuss it, with the reasons why for and against. Otherwise, this is just a waste of time and space. It would also be good to look at the archives—where there has been discussion about this—to see possible variations and reasons. — Centrx→ talk • 15:26, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
My suggested wording, which I believe logically follows from current A7 as well as WP:NOT an internet guide, follows:
Unremarkable web content. An article about a web site, blog, online forum, webcomic, podcast, or similar web content that does not assert the importance or historical significance of its subject. If the assertion is disputed or controversial, it should be taken to AfD instead.
-- Dragonfiend 16:26, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
Is it time for a straw poll to determine consensus? Or should I just go ahead and add it to A7? MER-C 07:45, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
Any objections to the current version?
“ | Unremarkable web content. An article about a web site, blog, online forum, webcomic, podcast, or similar web content that does not assert the importance or historical significance of its subject. If the assertion is disputed or controversial, it should be taken to AfD instead. | ” |
If there aren't any by the weekend, I'll go ahead and add it. MER-C 09:47, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
Implemented, spammed on WP:AN. MER-C 12:41, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
What is the "indentation hack" code for? All of the sections after "Articles" are indented and it makes them all look like they are paragraphs under "Articles". laurap414 21:04, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
I think I3 is not very clear about images which can be used commercially but prevent derivatives - "No Derivatives" licences. The Jimbo email does not mention them [2], the {{ cc-by-nd-2.5}} and {{ cc-by-nd-2.0}} templates redirect to {{ db-ccnoncom}} which is only about non-commercial licences, and the templates {{ cc-by-nd-1.0}} and {{ cc-by-nd}} point to a non-speedy template. There is nothing about ND in the explanations. It appears to have been put back in recently despite not apparently being there before. I am seeking clarification that licences which prevent derivatives are actually speediable (even though they are currently mentioned), and if that is the case, consensus to change the wording to explicitly mention CC-ND licences (and possibly establish on this talk page where this policy comes from). And perhaps a more appropriate speedy template for {{ cc-by-nd-2.0}} and {{ cc-by-nd-2.5}} as well. For example {{ nd}}. Your thoughts, thanks. -- zzuuzz (talk) 00:32, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
_ _ As to speedying Talk pages, there is already G8:
(It could be clearer; it is also misplaced:
_ _ I'd like a new CSD for talk pgs like the one i
improved by removing its pointless list of related articles deducible from the article's stubby text &/or its short what-lks-here list: it now can be seen at a glance to be blank, rather than needing to be scanned to see if it says something editors need to know. IMO, i further improved it by not simply blanking it, but leaving a double-small note, signed (and subject to the consequences of forgery &/or fraud), showing immediately that someone takes responsibility for discarding it. But making such a prematurely created talk page speediable would avoid anyone having to lk to the talk pg to get a "Nothing happening here, folks, move along" advisory. (A
different form of talk page, that would also be better deleted, informs the utterly clueless what article talk pages are for, and has a redundant lk to its article. Yet another form is a blanked (or "ignore me") pg that replaces the rdr created in moving or merging it where it should be; that is the cure for an entirely off-topic talk page, due to discussion abt a person with a name confusable with the proper topic of the talk page in question, or to plain cluelessness that might be useful elsewhere.)
_ _ Here's a draft (incorporating the present G8) to take potshots at, in the process of coming up with a good new section:
=== Talk pages ===
(Short names: Tk1, Tk2, ...)
—Preceding unsigned comment added by Jerzy ( talk • contribs) 03:20, 13 September 2006
This was crossposted, and has probably least to do with CSD. Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy#Informing the creators is being ignored. I've moved the comments that were here, over there. >Radiant< 16:34, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
Would an article that consists solely of an image fall under {{ db-nocontent}}? I want to make sure I'm tagging articles appropriately, and if there's a better tag I'd like to use it. Thanks! -- Merope Talk/ Review 13:49, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
For me, the P2 seems totally useless. almost as a joke. → A z a Toth 01:18, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
This is reposted from the {{ Db-copyvio}} talk page, I've moved it here where there is some similar discussion, and someone might be able to comment. Basically, I need some help with the 48 hour aspect of this. I just noticed that this Country Radio Broadcasters, Inc. article is identical to this [3] site. It is older than 48 hours though, it dates from 17:46, 24 August 2006. It should still be deleted under A8 even though it is past 48 hours, right? DVD+ R/W 02:52, 16 September 2006 (UTC) Note, the copyvio has now been surgically removed and the article is beginning to be rewritten. I would like to hear other opinions on why there is a 48 hour requirement though, when it isn't a mirrored site. DVD+ R/W 03:18, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
Articles that are transwikied over here into the pseudonamespace "Transwiki:" and then moved into the main namespace leave behind an unneeded redirect in the pseudonamespace. I propose that such redirects be speediable. The proposed wording is "redirects created from the result of a transwiki to Wikipedia and a move to the main namespace". MER-C 13:07, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
I6, the "Missing fair-use rationale" criterion, currently says:
"Any image or media tagged only with {{ fairuse}} or {{ Non-free fair use in}}, with no fair use rationale, may be deleted seven days after it was uploaded."
When really it should read:
"Any image or media tagged only with a generic fair use template, with no fair use rationale, may be deleted seven days after it was uploaded."
The reason is that it is not only {{ fairuse}} and {{ Non-free fair use in}} which require detailed fair use rationales; all of the generic boilerplate fair use templates require detailed fair use rationales. An image ought to be deleted (after a week) if it lacks such a detailed rationale, regardless of which boilerplate template was used.
Feel free to alter my wording if you think the point can be conveyed more clearly. -- bainer ( talk) 03:06, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
Speedily informing the user who started an article would avoid a whole lot of confusion. Guaka 20:06, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
Is there a way to disable the talk page in wikipedia for pictures in wikicommons? -- Gbleem 10:53, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
"The word "speedy" in this context refers to the rapid decision-making process, not the length of time since the article was created."
With an obvious vandalism or copyright violation I can see the need to delete something immediately after creation but it is not necessary to delete or even tag other things immediately after creation.
I don't want to say that something has to be up for a certain time period before speedy deletion. I however think that even the templates are a hassle when I'm trying to edit something.
Is there something else that can be put in the policy for clarification?
-- Gbleem 05:00, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
I was on AN/I recently asking about how to help and get practice with the speedy deletion process even without having admin tools, and it was suggested that I come to CSD and make sure that speedy candidates were legitimate speedies. I immediately noticed that a lot of articles tagged with some criteria don't actually meet those criteria, but do meet others. My question is: would admins find it helpful if I were to replace the incorrect criteria with the correct ones? Or would this just be obnoxious and a waste of everyone's time?
Secondly, when an article doesn't meet the narrow speedy criteria but would almost certainly not survive prod, is it worthwhile to remove the speedy tag and put it in prod, or is this a case where one should just
ignore all rules and let it be?
I ask these questions because I would like to get practice with the CSD, in prepration for the unlikely event that the community decides to entrust me with administrator tools, but don't want to get in everyone's way and piss people off in the meantime.
Captainktainer *
Talk 01:37, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
For articles in subject areas with established notability guidelines, is failing to attempt to meet the guidelines grounds for speedy deletion? In other words, quite apart from the question of whether the article actually conforms to the guidelines, can an editor use the guidelines in a more limited sense as a guide to whether an article merits speedy deletion?: if the article does not even appear to be making the attempt to conform to guidelines, but either ignores them or seems unaware of them, is that equivalent to "not assert[ing] the importance or significance of the subject"? -- Rrburke 03:53, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
Unless someone can come up with a reason not to I plan to expand A8 to cover everthing not just articles.20:27, 25 September 2006 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Geni ( talk • contribs)
There are a few templates and categories that are recreated in some form every month or so, and usually deleted per G4 since we've seen them before. The most obvious examples are voting templates and disclaimer templates. I think it would be useful to make a very brief list of those perennials here. Any thoughts on this? >Radiant< 21:34, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
I wish more and more that blatant advertising would qualify for speedy deletion. On several occasions, I have seen people who don't even try to disguise their advertisements as articles, but instead write them as straight-out advertisements, including contact information, in first person voice. This makes me feel they knowingly and shamelessly disregard Wikipedia's intention, and instead think "Hey, I can edit it! Cool, free advertisement space!". Why in the world is this not a speedy deletion criterion? Do we want to turn Wikipedia into a free Internet host? I would love to see a template {{db-we}} which would display:
JIP | Talk 19:16, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
A quick draft: "It is an advertisement masquerading as an article which does not assert notability or it is a userpage of a single purpose advertising account." MER-C 13:00, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
I don't know. Some of these do definately need to be deleted, but I have seen several cleaned up to be decent articles. In my experience this, "when it's always going to get 100% delete votes and 0% keep votes," is simply not true. There are many notable and important companies and products that Wikipedia does not have articles on. Lots of people (sometimes unaffiliated with the company) will copy the company's promotional materials to Wikipedia in order to fill the gap. This is wrong, violates copywrite, etc., but often (though not always) these products deserve an article. We have a clean-up template for advertising; and advertising should 'be cleaned up, not deleted. Copyvios should be deleted, non-notable things can be deleted, and those get rid of half the ads there. The rest, consisting of notable products or companies with articles that read like ads but are not copied directly from websites or press releases, should be cleaned up, not deleted. I really think ad articles need to go through the AFD process to determine which of the three categories of ad articles they fall into. Adding it to the SD criteria is a mistake. ~ ONUnicorn ( Talk / Contribs) 13:47, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
In practice, advertising is speedy deleted all the time. When an article starts out "Our mission is to provide a value-centric people-driven paradigm..." A) there's nothing there which good editors would actually use in an encyclopedia article on that topic and B) It's a copied and pasted right from the company webpage. Yes, sometimes what starts out as an ad can end up a good article, but it has to have some salvageable content, and not be a copyright violation, before any of that can happen. I think that saying we should never speedy delete advertising is relatively naive and doesn't take into account how much spam we get in an average hour, let alone day.
There seems to be a basic problem at work here. A lot of this "about our company" stuff isn't what you or I, as Wikipedia editors would write: Factual information, statistics, history, summary of controversies, etc. All that some companies put into their "about our company" is stuff about how great their product/service is... I've read corporate pages that literally don't give a single objective fact about the company.
At times I've advocated a CSD for "Articles that exist only to promote a product or service", which covers these non-informative company fluff pieces... although perhaps that rule is a bit too given to misinterpretation. If an article has factual information (e.g. "Company was founded in 1917, purchased by X in 1950, moved its headquarters to City in 1997" and so forth) that's all stuff we could use in an article, so articles like that really shouldn't be speedied unless they're copy and paste jobs. -- W.marsh 17:09, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
Personally, I see no reason why WP:PROD is inadequate for dealing with new spam articles. The article creators rarely object in such cases, as they've vanished off of Wikipedia, and if they do, it's because they really do think (for whatever reason) their company or product should be in an encyclopedia. Mango juice talk 17:12, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Brad Patrick, the foundation's legal counsel, has just made comments related to this very issue, that I thought people would be interested in. From Foundation-l:
Full comment here. I think there is a bit of a sea change going on, used to the attitude was "Just slap a tag on it and someone will clean up the spam eventually", not it's becoming more well, I don't even have to exagerate, "shoot on sight". -- W.marsh 17:28, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Seems to have been implemented by Radiant!: [5]. MER-C 11:42, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
"It is a page created by a single purpose advertising account (csd g11)" MER-C 12:24, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
1) Wording of WP:CSD#A7: The bolded text that explains the criterion as "Unremarkable people or groups/vanity pages" seems to me at odds with the actual usage guidelines. Surely it's the assertion of notability, rather than notability per se, that's decisive. "Non-notable subjects with their importance asserted" are, as WP:CSD says, not eligible for WP:SD. Surely "unremarkable people or groups/vanity pages," while candidates for WP:AfD or WP:PROD, are not candidates for WP:SD if they assert even an implausible or unverified claim of notability. Does the wording of of WP:CSD#A7 need to be amended to reflect the distinction?
2) I've been thinking about trudging through band (and possibly album and song) stubs and articles for candidates for WP:SD. In an earlier discussion, it was suggested that any claim of notability renders an article ineligible for WP:SD, and that stating that a band has an album is a de facto claim of notabilty. I presume the adjective "popular" would be, too: as in, "X is popular band from Y." First, is that a consensus position? If it is, would it be fair to consider putting forward for WP:CSD#A7 any band article that says no more than: "X band exists. Bobby, Timmy, Twirly and Jethro are its members. They recently played at open mic night at the Stuckey's on Route 17 to coincide with the release of a single on their MySpace page and are really really sure they're going to be famous" -- or less? This would probably be enough to eliminate dozens of band articles.
3) If bands are speedy-deletable per WP:CSD#A7, shouldn't it follow a fortiori that albums and songs which likewise lack assertions of notability ought to be so too? So how to accomplish this? WP:CSD#A1 sometimes works for this, but even stubs or articles with, for example, full track listings and graphics obviously don't fit the criterion. WP:CSD#A7 only applies to people or groups of people; it seems odd to me there's no criterion to apply to the things they make.
-- Rrburke 21:36, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
Part of the reason for having the "unremarkable people/vanity" wording is that it is a further restriction on the criterion. That is, articles about people who are eminently notable but do not contain an assertion are not, ideally, speedy deletable. There are often articles like "John Bishop (1839-1900) is a pianist": There is no assertion of notability, and if it were an article about a guitarist born 1985 it would be suspicious, but no one is writing vanity articles about 19th century pianists and in these cases the mere "physicist" or "artist" with no assertion should not be deletable under the CSD. The article must first appear to be vanity or unremarkable, and then you check for the assertion. — Centrx→ talk • 04:30, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I have noticed that image talk pages frequently appear in the speedy deletion category, and I don't believe that they should be deleted on the grouds that their respective page doesn't exist (unless the content is truly meaningless, it should be moved to the Commons at worst). For example, I have just declined to delete Image talk:Flag of Poland (state).svg. The problem is an inconsistency between the image page and the image talk page because the latter makes it seem that the image doesn't exist. - Mike Rosoft 11:33, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Given the growing concern over vanity articles, I've suggested a new A9 which will cover vanity articles, but deliberately does not mention notability - if notability is disputed then the article is for Afd. But vanity articles should be speedied REGARDLESS of notability. Cynical 15:05, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I feel that the new spam criterion is okay, but I think it needs some clarification. Different people consider "spam" differently. I think it's important to make it clear in the policy that speedy deletion of spam should only be meant for cases that are not only blatant examples of advertising, but also ones for which the page in question contains nothing else in its history. This will hopefully take care of all the most egregious cases, but I thought of a specific case that will probably be uncontroversial, and applies a bit more broadly than just spam:
In 90% of such cases, the article would be a copyright violation. In 99% of the remaining cases, the only reason a copyright violation wouldn't be an issue is that someone promoting the subject, and working for/with the official website, wants that info hosted on Wikipedia. I can't see why, in those cases, we should accept such material: Wikipedia articles are supposed to meet certain standards of content, which websites basically don't ever meet. Thoughts? Mango juice talk 19:04, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I also warn you now: A deletion criterion that talks about "spam" will result in many controversial deletions. If the experience with electronic mail, such as this and this, tells us anything, it is that definitions of "spam" vary widely, and that many people use it to mean "I don't like this." or even "I don't like you.". People will overuse and abuse "spam" in the same way that they abuse "nonsense". Be clear and name it what it is: Corporate advertising and corporate autobiography.
In practice, the "commercial content provider" restriction is a silly restriction. If the content is copied wholesale from a web page, and the web page is copyrighted and not GFDL licenced, then we don't want it, whoever is publishing the web page, and any granting of permission should occur before any content is contributed. Such content is a copyright violation. It's as simple as that.
If we can apply Copyright Judo speedily to corporate advertisements and corporate autobiographies, in both articles and user pages, which we can if we slacken the restriction on A8, then we don't need the above proposal, we don't need the nebulously and subjectively defined G11, and we don't need a perennial and unceasing education campaign as to what "spam" actually is "in the Wikipedia sense". Uncle G 10:51, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
I have started a deletion review of a page deleted under CSD G5 ("delete pages created by banned users"). Comments would be welcomed. My arguments in favour of restricting G5 in cases where useful content has been created can be seen at the deletion review and also at Wikipedia talk:Deny recognition. Carcharoth 01:25, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Is it possible that there is something wrong with this page (the WP page, not this talk page)? For the last few weeks, whenever my cursor moves over a link on the page, I get an error that says A Runtime Error has occurred. Do you wish to Debug? Line: 3096 Error: Object doesn't support this property or method. I don't remember getting this message historically, so I sifted through old versions and I found the edit in the history where the error first starts happening for me. If seems to be something in this diff. Can someone please take a look at this to see if something is wrong (or maybe I'm just having a personal problem? although I can reproduce it at both home and office.) Thanks -- After Midnight 0001 02:08, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Some tell-tale signs of spam.
Has anyone got any other ideas on useful things to determine what is and isn't spam? - Mgm| (talk) 10:38, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
As I mentioned in one of my edit summaries and elsewhere on this talk page, the more we qualify this particular rule with provisos and definitions, the more loopholes we create. And the more loopholes we create, the more loopholes that will be exploited.
I spent 10 years working the abuse desk for a large regional ISP, and my job included both designing and enforcing an online ruleset. When I first started that job, our definition of "spam" was "20 or more substantially identical emails or newsgroup posts". So, naturally, we had several people who would only send them out in batches of 19.
The rule needs to be short, sweet, and to the point. Specifying criteria that the article creator should meet (e.g., single purpose account, no substantitive edits other than by the creator) will simply provide mechanisms for gaming the system. As somone who fought spam professionally for 10 years, my advice is to avoid providing those mechanisms.
All the best,
Ξxtreme Unction|
yakkity yak
13:30, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
I've been watching this discussion for a while now. Despite the serious efforts of a lot of good editors, the wording of this new proposal remains unacceptably vague. Good CSD criteria are ones where any reasonable editor reading the page can immediately see that a page does or does not meet the criteria. They must be uncontroversial for the system to work.
I'm not averse to the principle of the speedy-deletion of spam but the current definition of spam boils down to "I know it when I see it." I can't convince myself that's a scalable definition. What appears to me to be a "page that exists only to promote a company," etc. may not appear to be the same thing to you. For example, is
Cap Gemini spam or just in need of serious clean-up?
I am seriously concerned that the vagueness of the current wording is more likely to lead to further arguments, DRVs and bickering. It will create more problems than it will solve. I would prefer to withdraw that criterion while we work on the wording some more.
Rossami
(talk) 17:50, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Is this going to become ridiculously long and clutter the talk page? — Centrx→ talk • 00:02, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Article | Description | "Repost of official website"? | Creator is named after company? | Speedily deletable under A8 now? | Speedy deletable if A8 didn't have date restrictions and ignored the possibility of permission? |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Israel today ( AfD discussion) | a straight copy and paste from this copyrighted advertisment ("Copyright 2006 israel today Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.") | Yes | No ( Oaarmo ( talk · contribs)) | No | Yes |
Avesthagen ( AfD discussion) | initial text was a straight copy of this corporate blurb | No | No ( Frontstcorner ( talk · contribs)) | No | No |
Apps Communications ( AfD discussion) | Appears to be original. No peacock terms. | No | Yes ( Dapps007 ( talk · contribs)) | No | No |
Demonic computers ( AfD discussion) | Already subject to vandalism | No No web site exists. | No ( Howie91 ( talk · contribs)) | No | No |
Those are the WP:CORP-related AFD discussions from today's per-day AFD page. Uncle G 00:13, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
OK. I am persuaded by those arguments and withdraw my comments above. Still, I hope this doesn't swing things too far the other way. I have read Brad's post, and he specifically focuses on obvious spam and self-promotion. This shouldn't preclude later creation of neutral articles at the same title. And criteria for business notability need to be sorted. I remember seeing something like that somewhere. Can anyone point me towards them? Carcharoth 15:56, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Hey! I just looked at the change to the page. When did we decide notability of the entity being advertised doesn't matter? I did not agree to this ridiculously over-inclusive wording, and I am violently opposed to this change. Deco 19:37, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Since I placed the speedy tag on both of the articles that were deleted under G11 in the table (I was field-testing the new criteria), I feel that I should comment. While it's true that the Apps Communication article (from my memory) doesn't use peacock terms, the author was linkspamming in other ways. The other article recently started, and didn't even have a website to promote. Remember that the vandalism criteria is also vagued worded due to the nature of vandalism. I don't like expanding A8, because while it was used mainly to avoid spam in the past, its purposed has changed recently to preventing copyvios in general, and expanding the criteria to do two jobs at once seems like it wouldn't be able to do either of them. There's obvious spam out there that isn't copyvio, as well. ColourBurst 23:50, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Since Danny and Brad have been mentioned above, I'd add that Jimbo also commented on the issue in this post to the mailing list. "Deletion is no big deal" is a novel point of view even for the most extreme deletionist; this gives the idea of how much spam is considered a problem. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 13:03, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
I understand the need to keep the deprecated A4 and A6 listed to keep the numbering intact; however, I8 and especially U3 are very new and should have few incoming links yet. I think it's a good idea to remove those lines referring to them, as they serve little purpose. The effect is renaming I9 to I8, but also to make the page look less like a book of law. >Radiant< 16:22, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
The reason for keeping the numbering is that, unfortunately (despite the instructions to the contrary), many people use the CSD numbering system when writing edit summaries for the CSDs they carry out. These won't show up on incoming links, and so the numbering system needs to be kept. It's not too bad, as when it gets excessive, hive off the historical numbers to a note and have the list as : I7, I56, I455, etc! :-) Or just keep a record of the dates when each change took place. ie. From 5th February to 6th June 2006, G87 referred to what became G2 on 6th September 2007. Carcharoth 11:34, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I decided to check and see how the new G11 was working so far. I believe, as I had expected, that it's being vastly overused. I looked through all articles that transcluded {{ db-spam}} just now. Here's what I came up with, and my assesments.
Normally, I would discuss these issues with those who added the tags, but since the policy isn't clear yet, it wouldn't make much sense. What I can say is that there's a CLEAR tendency to describe articles as "spam" when the only thing that's really problematic is its existence on Wikipedia. In other words, in those cases "spam" serves as a way of condemning these subjects as non-notable. I think it's clear we need to add a clarification to G11 that excludes this kind of thing. And I really think we should drop people: promotions of people are rare, will likely meet other criteria, and in the odd case, we can suffer through the other types of process. The current wording of G11 is:
11. Blatant spam. Pages that exist only to promote a company, person, product, service or group, have no other purpose and cannot be reasonably edited into an encyclopedic contribution.
I think we should change it to:
11. Blatant spam. Pages with content solely aimed at promoting a company, product, service, or group, which serve no other purpose and cannot reasonably be edited into an encyclopedic contribution. This does not include encyclopedia articles on companies, products, services, or groups that were likely added only to promote their subject, unless the content itself is blatantly and unsalvageably promotional.
BTW, the one example where spam might be person-oriented with any frequency would be political candidates, but such people are clearly notable enough to merit inclusion (or at least, to pass A7), and it would be a rare case where the article could not be "reasonably edited into an encyclopedic contribution." Mango juice talk 17:22, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
As I warned: People in the world outside of Wikipedia grossly misunderstand what constitutes "spam", and mis-use it to describe things whose sole fault is that they don't like them. We should expect the same here, and indeed that's what's happening. Once again: Call it what it actually is. It's corporate advertising and corporate autobiography. Uncle G 01:18, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
I have made a simpler change to this effect which ties the criterion to the value of the content. Also, this and all criteria work together, so that a combination of weakly satisfied criteria is similar to a single strongly satisfied criterion. For example, the more notable a company or person, the more likely we would want to salvage something from a spam submission on it despite blatantly promotional material. Conversely, if an article is only somewhat spammy but contains a tepid or ridiculous assertion of notability and would invariably be deleted at Afd, in combination this indicates a speedy deletion may be warranted. — Centrx→ talk • 21:49, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
A new way to type Db-spam template has been created: Template:Csd-g11 is now a redirect to the CSD template for G11. Shin'ou's TTV ( Futaba| Masago| Kotobuki) 04:26, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
This is a follow on from a conversation I've had on Improv's talk. [1] A couple of thoughts on this from me:
There is no good reason to start with anything other than the last category. These are the entities no one has ever heard of, and for whom the "advertising" is most valuable. rather than doing things the easy way and just firing with both barrels at anything that looks like advertising, can we proceed with a bit of caution? Less "ohh, shiny new rule, let's use it!" and more "yet another thing to be responsible for, better be careful."
brenneman {L} 05:29, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
I just want to add new arguement. It can from what I saw from
Infotech Strategies. It originally started
its AfD with arguements for G11. Then poor zocky took up the job of cleaning it up.
After he finished (for the time being), the article still had some rather rosy interpretations of the company like "A significant proportion of the company’s consultants have served in senior positions at the White House, U.S. Executive Cabinet Departments, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S House of Representatives." A completely unsourced statement zocky left in when he/she rewriting it. Zocky redid the article and that's very commendable. Unfortunatly, he/she probably should've also redone the first paragraph from scratch. Not trying to target Zocky specifically,(sorry about this) but we're only human here. It's like copyvio text, dangerous to try to rewrite a copyvio article. Unless you are well experienced in doing so, you're likely to end up paraphrasing or leaving a sentence in. And that's still very much plagarism. The same happens here. The content is hopelessly and unavoidably POV in rosy and weasely words toward the subject. Often its unsourced as well. Its a little easier to clean out the massively slanted text without just removing the content, but still very difficult. Aside from phrases, you're likely to end up using terms they originally used. Many of them will contain buzz words or even
search engine optimization terms designed to increase exposure to the company through an article on it appearing at the top of a search engine results page for some specific terms. The whole of a spam article is a quagmire of junk, and ought to be deleted to avoid even the rewrites containing the spam, if only in a more subtle manner.
Kevin_b_er 20:02, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
More G11 abuse is being done by User:Improv. Noted here, it seems bizarre to delete articles on Teddy Grahams and Pepperidge Farms. I never thought I'd see the day, but G11 is an even bigger mistake than A7. -- badlydrawnjeff talk 17:41, 9 October 2006 (UTC)