Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-01-10/Speedy deletion

Speedy deletion

Expansion of speedy deletion up for vote

Voting continues this week in a proposed expansion of the speedy deletion criteria. With a full week of voting already concluded, strong trends in the voting were already apparent.

Creation of proposal

Originally developed by blankfaze, the proposal aims to expedite the deletion process for some obvious cases that do not need fuller consideration at Votes for deletion. Blankfaze originally suggested five types of cases that should be covered, but several have been added since discussions began. The sprawling full proposal actually contains eleven different proposals, each being voted on separately.

Started on January 2, this survey will continue until January 16. According to its instructions, any specific proposal would go into effect on "candidates for speedy deletion" if it receives support from at least 70% of voters.

What's passing, what's not

By the 70% standard, the trend of votes being cast indicates that most of the proposals will not pass. In fact, several do not even have majorities in support.

As of the first week's voting, the leading proposal that would succeed is speedy deletion of "articles" that are nothing but external links, tags, or similar trappings. Also apparently headed for passage is the option of speedily deleting articles when requested by their author—if that author is the only person to have edited the article.

Falling a little bit short of having enough votes to pass was a proposal to speedily delete "Extremely short articles which add no information beyond what is obvious from the title." Most of the other proposals were being rejected overwhelmingly.

One particularly odd case was included as a proposal: "Any article which consists only of attempts to correspond with the person or group named by its title." However, unusual as it may seem, this proposal definitely seemed headed for passage. As Humblefool observed, "There aren't many of these anyway, are there?"

It is not clear how much the results of this survey will actually affect speedy deletion practice, or whether any of these measures will reduce the workload headed to Votes for deletion.