Wikipedia talk:Article Rescue Squadron/Archive 27

the notability of the article has come up before, below is what i done back then. A tag has been placed on Culbann C.P.C, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done because the article seems to be about a person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in Wikipedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not assert notability may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable, and if you can indicate why the subject of this article is notable, you may contest the tagging. To do this, add {{hangon}} on the top of the page (below the existing db tag) and leave a note on the article's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would confirm its subject's notability under the guidelines.

For guidelines on specific types of articles, you may want to check out our criteria for biographies, for web sites, for bands, or for companies. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. --Finngall ^talk 21:14, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the additional info. I've removed the speedy tag. --Finngall ^talk 21:52, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

It has come up again but has been highlighted for deletion, please help me make it more notable and save it, give me ideas on how to do so. also get into the discussion on the speedy deletion page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Culbann_C.P.C --Weeman com (talk) 00:10, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

A request for comments has been started that could affect the inclusion or exclusion of certain fiction articles as a result of a proposed notability guideline directed specifically toward fiction. If you feel inclined, please visit the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(fiction)#Final_adoption_as_a_guideline. Thanks, Schmidt, ^{MICHAEL Q.} 00:15, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

The lead section of the project page seems to be confused about whether you are rescuing topics or content. I'm all for preserving valuble content if there is some, but if an article consists entirely of unusable content, as post literacy did, even if you show up and write a whole new article, you haven't really "rescued" anything. Nerfari (talk) 21:34, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

The point is to rescue content that should be saved and there are many routes including merging. IMHO, article rewrites serve our readers by rescuing them from bad information or poorly written content. They seek information and we work to ensure they can find it. -- Banjeboi 00:31, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

There are articles currently consisting of unusable content that can be rapidly improved by substituting better versions of the content with sources. This falls within the group, because it can be seen as being better versions of the material. If an article can not be improved, or its on a topic that is hopelessly non-notable, it should not be listed here--we need to rescue the rescuable. But opinions will often differ on whether something can be rescued--I have sometimes managed to improve quite unlikely articles to keeps, and so have other people here. Even apparently hopeless gamecruft might turn out to have been the subject of sourced reliable discussions by secondary sources. You can't tell till you look. DGG (talk) 04:17, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

It sounds like I should be nominating some things for deletion and listing them for rescue at the same time. Nerfari (talk) 21:39, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Why not just list them for Rescue and get the problems fixed and bypass the whole AfD thing?!?! Radiopathy (talk) 23:36, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Because if you are going to tag articles for rescue which are not on AfD, the tags will have to go to the talk page of the article, not the article itself. Project tags are never placed on the article itself, but an exception was allowed for the ARS because it was only for the time of the AfD anyway(one way or the other). Other reasons not to do this is that we already have tons of tags for problems witrh articles (notability, cleanup, expert, unsourced, wikify, expand), all with very, very considerable backlogs. Finally, now there are only a handful (some tens) of articles tagged, which makes a focused rescue effort feasible. Having hundreds or thousands of articles tagged for rescue would mean that the few AfD's inbetween would be swamped, and would probably not get any attention before the AfD was over. Fram (talk) 06:37, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Nerfari, how would you rewrite the introduction? please rewrite it here, and we can discuss it. I think we can all understand your concerns better, if you had a feasible alternative, which we could all adapt.Ikip (talk) 07:51, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

I think this is a suitable subject for rescue, as a lack of sources (and not an inherent lack of notability) threatens its deletion. PS: I've already commented, please don't add more !votes to it until these sources have been found. If we can't find any, WP:V means it'll have to go, however notable (or interesting) it may seem. yandman 12:41, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Please help me save Dan Miller (sportscaster) from afd. I really care about this article because I listen to him every week at Lions games. So far its 4 keeps to only 1 delete. Thanks TomCat4680 (talk) 01:33, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

see: Wikipedia:Article Rescue Squadron#So ARS wants to keep everything?:

The Article Rescue Squadron (ARS) is not about casting keep votes

Jack Merridew 15:29, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

After a couple of months of compiling data, I finally finished the first section of my research: User:Ikip/AfD on average day, thanks to a dozen admins who gave me a copy of the deleted material. I found what many article squadron members already know, that our current deletion policy overwhelmingly effect new users:

1. 31 out of 98 articles, nearly one third, which were put up for deletion were created by editors whose very first contributions was the new article.
2. 66 out of 98 articles, 67%, which were put up for deletion were created by editors who had 100 contributions or less when they created the article.
3. 81 out of 98 articles, 82.6%, which were put up for deletion were created by editors who had 1000 contributions or less when they created the article.

Any ideas how I can figure out if there is a definite link in the drop in editing since October 2007 to the treatment of new users?

Further research includes:

1. Finding out the number of contributions that those who nominate articles have.
2. Seeing if any nominator followed WP:PRESERVE or WP:BEFORE before nominating the article for deletion (I postulate that none of them did, or maybe 1)
3. Seeing how many of the articles were nominated because of "notability"
4. Seeing how many users left wikipedia because their article was deleted.
5. Seeing how these new users were treated on their talk pages. Ikip (talk) 05:20, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

They have a tool to see how many things someone has nominated for deletion. Would that help? I think it gives other information too. Notability is almost always the excuse for deleting something. And many rabid deleters do not explain things on the talk page for the article or the user's page, even for a first time contributor. And do you just want to see how many new editors were driven away by their first article being attacked, or do you wish to include those who just made simple first time edits on an article, and without explaining to them what they did wrong, another editor reverted what they did, and warned them against vandalism, even when clearly they were putting something they thought legitimate there? Should the new comer have to post a question asking what was wrong with their edit, or should the editor reverting be the one to explain why they were reverting it? And are you looking at the number of hits the wikipedia gets and the number of new users that register or post as an IP address, or just the number of people that don't make any edits or create new articles ever again after their first unpleasant encounter? They keep track already of what types of articles what percentage of the wikipedia traffic. I wonder how many increases hits the wikia gets, as the number of wikipedia hits goes down in some categories, fans of a series wishing more information, only able to get it on external wikis. Dream Focus (talk) 05:44, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Any ideas how I can figure out if there is a definite link in the drop in editing since October 2007 to the treatment of new users?

There isn't even a correlation unless you can somehow establish that this is a new trend, which would surprise me greatly. New users are the least likely to understand Wikipedia's standards of inclusion. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire - past ops) 05:55, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I agree, it will be very difficult to find a correlation. Ikip (talk) 14:43, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I was thinking about this. Some random thoughts:

• There is to some extent a perception of "This article has lasted this long, there must be some value to it." This was part of what stymied WP:BAND for so long. Personally, I'd rather reverse this stigma (new articles given a chance, old articles with little progress despite their age looked down upon), but it does exist.
• New users are the least likely to understand Wikipedia's standards of inclusion, be they written or unwritten. Long-time users are unlikely to write articles about themselves, their cat, their band, etc.
• It would be very difficult to create an objective standard of "nominated because of notability". The word is slippery, and means different things to different people at different times, particularly before WP:GNG/"On Notability".
• New articles are subject to more scrutiny due to appearing on Special:Newpages; old articles, especially orphans, may only get spotted by bots or people who fool with Special:Random.

Just some thinking. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire - past ops) 21:15, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

• There is this possibility: Once upon a time, when Wikipedia had many fewer articles, it was easier for a newbie to find something worth keeping than it is now. When I started, red links & articles consisting of only a sentence fragment could be found at every turn. Heck, over half of the Roman Emperors did not have articles. I suspect around 2006/2007 Wikipedia passed the point where a new user could think of a missing subject within 15 minutes, so she/he had the choice between something clearly esoteric or obscure -- say an Ethiopian politician -- or something of dubious interest to a stranger -- like garage bands, local celebrities, etc. Some get zapped because they simply aren't notable, which is fine; but some get zapped because the person creating the article doesn't know how to establish notability for the subject in a way that will satisfy a skeptical Admin, which isn't. Briefly put, it's just getting harder to create a new article at Wikipedia, but not yet impossible. -- llywrch (talk) 22:58, 13 February 2009 (UTC)
  • It's odd that you would mention an admin. You don't need to be an admin to nominate something for AFD, or comment at AFD. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire - past ops) 23:07, 13 February 2009 (UTC)
  • I've thought of that, too. There are two things that counter that argument, however. The first is the survey that you can read about in this Signpost article. The second is direct experience. There are huge areas that I know from experience we have woefully incomplete coverage of. Ironically, I often find them when doing rescues. I just found yet another batch of such missing topics in exactly that way. You can see them at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Typoglycemia (2nd nomination) (q.v.). There are still redlinks to be found if one knows where to look.

    Furthermore: Remember how old Wikipedia:List of bad article ideas is. Even four years ago, people writing about themselves, their bands, their pets, and whatnot, was endemic. That's not a new trend at all. There probably only seems to be more of it than there was 8 years ago simply because there are a lot more people editing Wikipedia than there were 8 years ago.

    Let me suggest some food for thought:

    The problem may well be nothing at all to do with a lack of new subjects yet to cover, and rather to do with something else entirely that has been a noticeable trend of late: the rather odd and un-Wikipedia-like notion that redlinks are bad, and that the encyclopaedia is somehow now complete. This is particularly noticable at disambiguation articles, where editors regularly purge them of dangling hyperlinks, under the guise of enforcing style guidelines. We used to treat redlinks at invitations to write. Disambiguation articles, especially disambiguations for initialisms and acronyms, used to be one place where one could find missing topics readily, with many redlinks being placeholders. No longer is this the case. We've already reached the point where editors regard disambiguation articles that have all redlinks as targets for deletion, rather than as invitations to create the missing articles listed. They reach for their deletion nomination templates instead of for "create this article". Witness Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/GADS. Most importantly, witness what happened, after the AFD discussion, to the remaining missing articles that were not created during the discussion. That happens all of the time. Some people even appear to have cooked up scripts for doing it.

    Also notice that on a regular basis there are bursts of nominations of disambiguation articles for Proposed Deletion because "hatnotes on 2 pages suffice". Sometimes they have only two entries in the first place because the other entries, suggesting missing articles that people could create, have been removed.

    If you want a more readily apparent reason for readers (erroneously) thinking that there's nothing new left to create, look to the fact that we now actively hide the redlinks from readers in hundreds of thousands of articles. I used to find ideas for missing articles to create in disambiguations. Did you?

    This effort, to actively purge redlinks from a whole class of pages, that are (by their very nature) some of the most commonly navigated ones in the encyclopaedia, all in the name of "style", is perhaps where you should best lay the blame for not seeing as many redlinks as you used to see years back, Llywrch.

    As I said: food for thought. Uncle G (talk) 02:46, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

    • No, I see lots of redlinks in my corner of Wikipedia, & I make them too like Coffee production in Ethiopia. The people you write about, Uncle G, haven't gotten to my corner yet; I'd like to think it's because I write better stubs about towns & villages than some folks. (More likely it's because I deal in Ethiopia-cruft, & they haven't decided to sluice out that part of the stables yet.) And the two cents I pitched in above were not meant to exclude any other explanation -- just pointing out that the Wikipedia of 2003 is not the Wikipedia of 2009: the windfalls have all been harvested, & most of what White, middle-class Euro-American computer nerds consider the low-hanging fruit have been picked. -- llywrch (talk) 08:14, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
      • You remind me of another rescue: Agriculture in Senegal (AfD discussion). ☺

        That's the point, though. Your personal experience is like mine: There are redlinks and stubs aplenty still to be had. And that's not unexpected, in truth. No reasonable person would expect us to have achieved complete coverage of every existing subject in this time. Our experience bears out what the survey says: There's as much scope for expansion now as there was before. And although there is, quite obviously, systemic bias (including egregious FUTON bias), the point is also that that isn't necessarily a causative factor at all in the creation of the bad articles on the bad article ideas list.

        There have always been people coming here for the wrong reasons — to self-publicize, to hoax, to advertise, to document the undocumented, to add new things that they just made up, or simply to use a free WWW site that costs them nothing as their personal scribbling board (like children with a packet of crayons and a blank wall). The Wikipedia of 2003 (or even earlier) had that problem. It simply wasn't as popular as the Wikipedia of 2009. That popularity alone increases the flow of bad articles. Do we even need to look for another cause?

        Also bear in mind the phenemonon that, for want of a better name, I christen Deletion Patrol bias. If one patrols AFD or Proposed Deletion, one tends to see more of the articles that are down in the dark and dank depths of Wikipedia. (Part of the art of article rescue is giving such articles a good solid shove upwards, in the direction of the lofty heights of Featured Articles. Most times this shove doesn't push the article up beyond the stratum of "good stub".) From that one tends to overgeneralize. But a spot of New Pages Patrol often serves to remind that there are numerous good editors out there whose articles never even come near deletion discussions, in part because they are created the right way. (There's also a New Pages Patrol bias, mentioned above by A Man In Black.) One just needs to do New Pages Patrol with an eye to how many articles one is skipping over, because they cite good sources and have no immediate cleanup issues. The articles that come up for deletion are not representative of Wikipedia as a whole.

        As to the whole "We're scaring off new users!" issue, my personal experience is that that's rubbish. My very first new article (created long before I had an account) was nominated for deletion. It didn't scare me off. I'm — indeed — now an administrator with a long history of article rescues. ☺ We're certainly pushing against the flow of bad articles on the bad ideas list, and discouraging the people who have the bad ideas. But that's also something that is the same as the Wikipedia of years ago. We've always had a clear idea of the project goal, and discouraging the bad has been as much a part of Wikipedia acculturation as encouraging the good. The people that Wikipedia needs are the people who learn from the rejection of the bad ideas, and start having good ideas instead. Uncle G (talk) 11:52, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

RE: "We're scaring off new users!" issue. Before I did this painful research I only had anecdotal evidence, and my own experiences. I have now established that the majority of articles which are deleted, are created by new users.

This may sound shocking, but the quality of those articles deleted, while an important question, is not very important to the question: Are we scarring off new users? Because most new users don't know all of our rules, and are expected to add bad articles (that said, I see a lot of articles in this list which were deleted that have potential). I am going to avoid this question now, because it is subjective, and it will only cause contention and arguments.

My next step is to see what the new editors talk page looks like. I have found that many editors first welcome is "your article is going to be deleted".

Maybe the next step after that is to find 100 random new editors who have e-mail enabled, and who have no longer edited wikipedia for the past month, and ask them why. I hope to get maybe 20 responses, and post those responses.

Ikip (talk) 17:25, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Uncle G offhandedly brings up a good point about new users and turning the corner. At some point, there are going to be good-faith users who just haven't gotten it yet. You can argue what the proportions are, but some of those article written by new users are going to be completely useless conceptually ("John Smith and the Garage Rockers", "my cat Fluffikins", etc.), instead of simply badly-written articles with potential. Most of our "Your first article was deleted, don't give up!" advice pertains to salvaging an article that was savable. How can we better salvage users? How can we better guide a user who has an essentially wrong idea of what Wikipedia is for - but is still trying to help in good faith - become a productive user? I think there's a real lack of "That wasn't what we want, but you can still help!" and more of an attitude of "If you're writing articles about your cat, get lost." I'd rather see, "We don't need an article about your cat, but how about your cat's breed or the history of cats or the animal control situation in the city where you live?" but I'm not sure how to go about that.- A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire - past ops) 21:13, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I agree that editors write articles that are not worth anything. Myself and others recently discussed some possibilities for change at WP:Articles for Deletion. I was disheartened that my userfication idea was so disliked. Ikip (talk) 08:00, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Where's that discussion? I'm losing my sanity doing searching for "userfication prefix:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion" and then looking for "Ikip" on the page.... - Pointillist (talk) 11:32, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I hate my user name, because it is found inside Wikipedia. I also changed my name.

Re: Usersification.

• Proposal: Deletion_wars:_I_propose_a_novel_solution
• Suggestion_to_redirect_most_deleted_pages_to_a_userspace
• Any_deletion_tags_mention_that_users_can_request_userfication_of_deleted_content

Regarding similar discussion as here:

• Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_deletion#82.6.25_of_articles_put_up_for_deletion_are_by_new_users
• Wikipedia:VPP#82.6.25_of_articles_put_up_for_deletion_were_by_new_users

Ikip (talk) 20:48, 20 February 2009 (UTC)