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Nomination of ARTICLE NAME for deletion

The article will be discussed at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/ARTICLE NAME until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

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Articles for deletion (AfD) is where Wikipedians discuss whether or not an article should be deleted. Articles listed are debated for at least seven days, after which the deletion process proceeds based on Misplaced Pages community consensus. Then the page may be kept, merged or redirected, transwikied (copied to another Wikimedia project), renamed/moved to another title, userfied to the creator's user page or user subpage, or deleted per the deletion policy.

This article explains what you should consider before nominating, the steps for nominating single or multiple pages, and how to discuss an AfD. It also links to the list of articles currently under consideration, and to two faster alternatives to AfD: the simpler companion processes, Misplaced Pages:Speedy deletions and Misplaced Pages:Proposed deletion, exist for the deletion of articles that are generally uncontroversial deletion candidates, such as vandalism and patent nonsense.

If you want to nominate an article, the Misplaced Pages deletion policy explains the criteria for deletion and may help you understand when an article should be nominated for deletion. The guide to deletion explains the deletion process. If the article in question meets the criteria for deletion and you understand the deletion process, consult the instructions on how to list pages for deletion.

If you aren't sure if a page should be nominated for deletion, or you need more help, try this page's talk page or Misplaced Pages's help desk.

Before nominating an article for deletion

• WP:BEFORE
• WP:BEGIN

• Read and understand the Misplaced Pages deletion policy (WP:DEL), which explains valid grounds for deletion. If the page can be improved, this should be solved through regular editing, rather than deletion.
• Read the article and review its history to properly understand its topic. Note that stubs and imperfect articles are awaiting further development and so the potential of the topic should be considered, and that some articles may have been harmed by vandalism or poor editing.
• If the article is not already tagged to note a problem, apply a tag, such as {{notability}}, {{hoax}}, {{original research}}, {{unencyclopedic}} or {{advert}}; this ensures that everyone viewing the article is aware of the problem and may act to remedy it.
• Consider making the page a useful redirect or proposing it be merged rather than deleted. Neither of these actions requires an AfD.
• Click "what links here" in the article's sidebar, to see how the page is used and referenced within Misplaced Pages.
• Check interwiki links to pages "in other languages" which may provide additional material for translation.
• Read the article's talk page, which may provide reasons why the article should or should not be deleted; if there was a previous nomination, check that your objections haven't already been dealt with. If there is no discussion then start one, outlining your concerns. Then watch for responses from interested editors.
• Familiarize yourself with the guidelines and policies on notability, reliable sources and what Misplaced Pages is not. Related guidelines include WP:BIO, WP:COI, WP:CORP, WP:MUSIC, WP:WEB, and, for list articles, WP:CLN. For a list of policies and guidelines that can be useful in a deletion proposal, see Misplaced Pages:List of policies and guidelines to cite in deletion debates.
• When nominating an article for deletion due to sourcing or notability concerns, make a good-faith attempt to confirm that such sources aren't likely to exist.
• Before nominating a recently created article, please consider that many good articles started their Wikilife in pretty bad shape. Unless it is obviously a hopeless case, consider sharing your reservations with the article creator or notifying an associated wikiproject, mentioning your concerns on the article's discussion page, and/or adding a "cleanup" template, instead of bringing the article to AfD. If the article can be fixed through normal editing, then it is not a good candidate for AfD.
• Confirm that the article does not meet the criteria for speedy deletion or proposed deletion.
• If you expect that the AfD page will be edited by newcomers to Misplaced Pages (possibly because the article itself is linked from some visible place outside Misplaced Pages), or if you notice this happening after the AfD page is created, you might want to insert the {{Not a ballot}} template into it.
• Note that if you are editing under an IP address because you have not yet created a user account, you will not be able to complete the AfD process, as anonymous contributors are currently unable to create new pages (as required by step 2 of "How to list pages for deletion," below). If this is the case, consider creating or requesting a user account before listing an article on AfD.

Current discussions

Articles being considered for possible deletion are indexed by the day on which they were first listed.

Read how to – Add a new entry

Alternatively, if you believe that deletion of an article would be uncontroversial, you may place the code {{subst:prod|insert reason for deletion}} on the article instead. See also Misplaced Pages:Proposed deletion for more information, and Category:Proposed deletions, for other currently pending nominations for deletion.

• 26 December (Thursday)
• 25 December (Wednesday)
• 24 December (Tuesday)
• 23 December (Monday)
• 22 December (Sunday)
• 21 December (Saturday)
• 20 December (Friday)
• 19 December (Thursday)

Old discussions (open)

• December 18 (Wednesday) (1 open / 54 closed / 55 total discussions; open: 1)
• December 17 (Tuesday) (0 open / 33 closed / 33 total discussions)
• December 16 (Monday) (0 open / 50 closed / 50 total discussions)
• December 15 (Sunday) (0 open / 31 closed / 31 total discussions)
• December 14 (Saturday) (0 open / 40 closed / 40 total discussions)
• December 13 (Friday) (0 open / 29 closed / 29 total discussions)
• December 12 (Thursday) (0 open / 36 closed / 36 total discussions)

Categorized discussions

Biographical | Fiction and the arts | Games and sports | Media and music | Organisation, corporation, or product | Places and transportation | Science and technology | Society topics | Web and internet | Indiscernible or unclassifiable topic | Nominator unsure | Topics not yet sorted

How to list pages for deletion

• WP:AFDHOWTO

This section describes how to list articles and their associated talk pages for deletion. For pages that are not articles, list them at other appropriate deletion venues or use copyright violation where applicable. As well, note that deletion may not be needed for problems such as pages written in foreign languages, duplicate pages, and other cases. Use Misplaced Pages:Proposed mergers for discussion of mergers.

Only a registered, logged-in user can complete steps II and III. (Autoconfirmed registered users can also use the Twinkle tool to make nominations.) If you are unregistered, you should complete step I, note the justification for deletion on the article's talk page, then post a message at Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for deletion requesting that someone else complete the process.

You must sign in to nominate pages for deletion. If you do not sign-in, or you edit anonymously, you will get stuck part way through the nomination procedure.

• To nominate multiple related pages for deletion, follow the multi-page deletion nomination procedure.
• To nominate a single page for deletion, you can use Twinkle, or follow these three steps:

Notifying interested people

While it is sufficient to list an article for discussion at AfD, nominators sometimes want to attract more attention from and participation by informed editors.

All such efforts must comply with Misplaced Pages's guideline against biased canvassing.

To encourage participation by less experienced editors, please avoid Misplaced Pages-specific abbreviations in the messages you leave about the AfD discussion. Please link to any relevant policies or guidelines as well as the AfD discussion page itself. If you are recommending that an article be speedily deleted, please give the criterion or criteria that it meets, such as "A7" or "biography not asserting importance". Unless it is obvious from the page's title, the nomination should also indicate what the nominated article is about (e.g., "Broda Otto Barnes, a physician that developed a now-discredited idea about thyroid function").

Deletion sorting

Once listed, deletion discussions can, optionally, also be transcluded into an appropriate deletion sorting category, such as the ones for actors, music, academics, or for specific countries. Since many people watch deletion sorting pages for subject areas that particularly interest them, including your recent AfD listing on one of these pages helps attract people familiar with a particular topic area. Please see the the complete list of categories.

Notifying WikiProjects that support the page

Many projects have subscribed to Misplaced Pages's article alerts service, a fully automated program that keeps track of AfD discussions for subscribed projects. Projects that have not subscribed may welcome a brief, neutral note on their project's talk page about the AfD.

Notifying substantial contributors to the article

While not required, it is generally considered courteous to notify the good-faith creator and any main contributors of the articles that you are nominating for deletion.

Do not notify bot accounts, people who have made only insignificant 'minor' edits, or people that have never edited the article. To find the main contributors, look in the page history or talk page of the article and/or use TDS' Article Contribution Counter or Misplaced Pages Page History Statistics. For your convenience, you may use these neutrally worded notification templates:

• For creators who are totally new users: {{subst:AFDWarningNew|Article title}} ~~~~
• For creators: {{subst:AFDWarning|Article title}} ~~~~
• For contributors or established users: {{subst:Adw|Article title}} ~~~~
• For an article you did not nominate: {{subst:AFDNote|Article title}} ~~~~

How to list multiple related pages for deletion

• WP:BUNDLE

Sometimes you will find a number of related articles, all of which you feel should be deleted together. To make it easier for those participating in the discussion, it may be helpful to bundle all of them together into a single nomination. However, for group nominations it is often a good idea to only list one article at afd and see how it goes, before listing an entire group.

Examples of when articles may be bundled into a single nomination:

• An article about a band and three articles about its members, none of whom has done anything else notable outside of the band.
• An article about a company/organization and a second article about its founder, who has done nothing else of note.
• An article about a video game/book and related articles for characters within it.
• An article about an album and related articles for its songs.
• An article about any topic and other articles with the same content but with different titles.

If any of the articles you are considering for bundling could stand on its own merits, then it should be nominated separately. Or to put it more succinctly, if you are unsure of whether to bundle an article or not, do not.

For the sake of clarity, debates should be bundled only at the start or near the start of the debate, before most of the discussion.

To bundle articles for deletion, follow these steps:

AfD Wikietiquette

• Users participating in AfD discussions are expected to be familiar with the policy of civility and the guidelines Wikietiquette and "do not bite the newbies".
  • This also applies to the other deletion pages.
• AfDs are public, and are sometimes quoted in the popular press. Please keep to public-facing levels of civility, just as you should for any edit you make to Misplaced Pages.
• Avoid personal attacks against people who disagree with you; avoid the use of sarcastic language and stay cool.
• Do not make unsourced negative comments about living people. These may be removed by any editor.
• Remember that while AfD may look like a voting process, it does not operate like one. Justification and evidence for a response carries far more weight than the response itself. Thus, you should not attempt to structure the AfD process like a vote:
• Do not add tally boxes to the deletion page.
• Do not reorder comments on the deletion page to group them by keep/delete/other. Such reordering can disrupt the flow of discussion, polarize an issue, and emphasize vote count or word count.
• Do not message editors about AfD nominations because they support your view on the topic. This can be seen as votestacking. See Misplaced Pages:Canvassing for guidelines. But if you are proposing deletion of an article, you can send a friendly notice to those who contributed significantly to it and therefore might disagree with you.
• If a number of similar articles are to be nominated, it is best to make this a group nomination so that they can be considered collectively. This avoids excessive repetition which would otherwise tend to overload involved editors. However, group nominations that are too large or too loosely related may be split up or speedy-closed.
• While there is no prohibition against moving an article while an AfD discussion is in progress, editors considering doing so should realize such a move can confuse the discussion greatly, can preempt a closing decision, and can make the discussion difficult to track.

Footnotes

1. "The battle for Misplaced Pages's soul", The Economist, Mar 6th 2008.
2. Seth Finkelstein,"I'm on Misplaced Pages, get me out of here", The Guardian, September 28 2006.
   "At Misplaced Pages, contentious decisions are made by a process of elaborate discussion culminating in administrative fiat. Deletions go through a comment period. The process is not a vote, but the result forms a recommendation to the administrators."

How to discuss an AfD

AfDs are a place for rational discussion of whether an article is able to meet Misplaced Pages’s article guidelines and policies. Reasonable editors will often disagree, but valid arguments will be given more weight than unsupported statements. When an editor offers arguments or evidence that do not explain how the article meets/violates policy, they may only need a reminder to engage in constructive, on-topic discussion. But a pattern of groundless opinion, proof by assertion, and ignoring content guidelines may become disruptive. If a pattern of disruptive behavior persists after efforts are made to correct the situation through dialogue, please consider a dispute resolution process outside the current AfD.

There are a few basic practices that most Wikipedians use in AfD discussions:

• Usually editors recommend a course of action in bold text, e. g., "Keep" or "Delete".
• Start your comments or recommendations on a new bulleted line (that is, starting with *), and sign them by adding ~~~~ to the end. If you are responding to another editor, put your comment directly below theirs, making sure it is indented (using multiple *s).
• Please disclose whether you are an article's primary author or if you otherwise have a vested interest in the article.
• Please have a look at the article before making a recommendation. Do not base your recommendation solely on the information supplied by the nominator. To understand the situation, it may also help to look at the history of the article. Also, please read the earlier comments and recommendations. They may contain relevant arguments and further useful information.

The following are practices that should be avoided:

• The debate is not a vote; please make recommendations on the course of action to be taken, sustained by arguments.
• When making your case or responding to others, explain how the article meets/violates policy rather than merely stating that it meets/violates the policy.
• Do not use multiple accounts to reinforce your opinions. Multiple recommendations by users shown to be using "sock puppets" (multiple accounts belonging to the same person) will be discounted and the user manipulating consensus with multiple accounts will likely be blocked indefinitely.
• Do not make conflicting recommendations; if you change your mind, modify your original recommendation rather than adding a new one. The recommended way of doing this is to use strike-through by enclosing a retracted statement between <s> and </s> after *, as in "* Delete Speedy keep".
• Unregistered or new users are welcome to contribute to the discussion, but their recommendations may be discounted, especially if they seem to be made in bad faith (for example, if they misrepresent their reasons).

There are many good ways to advocate keeping, deleting, or even redirecting an article. This includes:

• Arguments commonly used to recommend deletion are: "unverifiable" (violates WP:V), "original research" (violates WP:NOR), and "non-notable" in cases where the subject does not meet their respective notability criteria. (In the cases of non-notable biographical articles, it is better to say "does not meet WP:BIO" to avoid insulting the subject.) The accusation "VANITY" should be avoided , and is not in itself a reason for deletion. The argument "non-neutral point of view" (violates WP:NPOV) is often used, but often such articles can be salvaged, so this is not a very strong reason for deletion either.
• If you wish for an article to be kept, you can directly improve the article to address the reasons for deletion given in the nomination. You can search out reliable sources, and defuse the deletion arguments given using policy, guidelines, and examples from our good and featured articles. In certain cases, if you believe the article topic is valid and encyclopedic, and it lacks only references and other minor changes to survive, you may request help in the task by adding a bolded {{rescue}} tag below the AfD template, in accordance with info given at WP:RESCUE. Please do not do this for unencyclopedic articles of no redeeming value, which are likely to be eventually deleted anyway, on grounds other than simple incompleteness or poor writing (see WP:SNOW).

  If the reasons given in the deletion nomination are later addressed by editing, the nomination should be withdrawn by the nominator, and the deletion discussion will be closed by an admin. If the nominator fails to do it when you think it should have been done (people can be busy, so WP:AGF on this point), leave a note on the nominator's talk page to draw their attention.

• If you think the article should be a disambiguation page, or a redirect to another article, then recommend "Disambiguation" or "Redirect". Do not recommend deletion in such cases, because deleted pages cannot be redirects or disambiguation pages.

You do not have to make a recommendation on every nomination; consider not participating if:

• A nomination involves a topic with which you are unfamiliar.
• You agree with the consensus that has already been formed.

Please also see Misplaced Pages:Notability.

What to do after an AfD discussion has passed with a confirmation

Nothing. If the discussion has been listed according to the rules above, at the end of the discussion period (seven days), it should be closed within a few more days at most. Asking for someone to close the discussion is unnecessary.

How an AfD discussion is closed

After seven days have passed, the discussion is moved to Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Old, and a disinterested (i.e. one who has not participated in the deletion discussion) admin or editor in good standing (observing the recommendations for non-admin closure) will assess the discussion and make a decision to Keep, Delete, Merge, Redirect, or Transwiki the article based on a judgment of the consensus of the discussion. If there has been no obvious consensus to change the status of the article, the person closing the AfD will state No consensus, and the article will be kept. If not enough people have joined in the discussion to judge consensus, the article will be relisted for several more days.

The majority of AfD discussions are expected to run for at least seven days. In some cases a closure earlier than seven days may take place if a reason given in either Misplaced Pages:Speedy keep or Misplaced Pages:Criteria for speedy deletion applies. If there is some concern over the validity of the closure, questions may first be asked of the person who closed the AfD, and, failing satisfaction there, raised at Misplaced Pages:Deletion review.

Related pages

Please DO NOT try to update these pages or start a new day yourself. (Note: These pages are not the deletion log pages referred to in step 3 of the instructions, above).

• Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Log/Today
• Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Log/Yesterday
• See the proposed deletion current nominations – (Note that this is under the separate Misplaced Pages process Misplaced Pages:Proposed deletion rather than Articles for Deletion.)

Purge server cache for today's AFD page

• Misplaced Pages deletion