Wowpedia:Speedy deletion policy

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This page is an official policy on Wowpedia. This policy has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. Feel free to propose any changes to this policy, but please make sure that changes you make follow the official process and reflect consensus on the discussion page before you put them into practice. Any big changes need to be Adopted or Decreed to be enforced as policy. See Wowpedia:Policies for an overview of Wowpedia policies. See Category:Policies for a list of proposed and adopted policy articles.

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This is part of the overall Deletion policy, but has its own article since the process is quite different.

Why "Speedy deletion"?

There are many essentially blank articles here at WoWWiki, many of which will likely never have any content, or articles which were created by mistake and the author deletes the contents, but forgets to ask for the article to be deleted. This policy is originated in the necessity to be able to skirt long-winded votes for deletion for even essentially blank articles which have never had any content. There is certainly more precision that will need to be articulated here, but articulation usually comes with time, due to the inevitability of judgements that must be made and questions that will arise. Look for more on that as we work this out together.

The idea of this is to let admins know what articles could probably be deleted without collateral damage such as the loss of a fellow WoWWikian.

Process

First, a user will place a Template:Tlink tag at the top of an article and will thus place it in Category:Articles for speedy deletion. Next when an admin comes along, he may either delete the article or decide that the article is too important for a speedy delete. Other users, if they believe that a given article is too important to warrant a speedy delete, can of course also remove the Template:Tlink tag and replace it according to the deletion policy currently in effect.

There should be no removal of text in the process of tagging an article for speedy deletion, no matter what the quality of the text is. If there is a note to be made, it should be made immediately below the flag, and should include whether or not there are any links to the article.

The administrator must judge whether or not the article was flagged only to take a shot at another user. If this happens, the one who flagged the article should be considered a vandal.

Qualifications

Some qualifications follow here (there are more to come and some may be removed as the voting takes place):

1. the page was edited by only one significant contributor (such as – but not exclusively – a user page) and:
   • the author requests deletion or the author deletes all contents of the article later
   • another user decides according to other qualifications
2. the page has never had any content, especially if it appears that it will never have any content

If a page is incorrectly flagged

If you see a page that has the Template:Tlink tag and feel that this page should not be speedy-deleted:

1. Replace the Template:Tlink tag with the Template:Tlink tag.
2. Create a talk page for this article if one does not exist.
3. Pull in {{subst:Delete/Talk}} on the talk page.
4. Vote to keep the page and comment on why (or vote to delete the page and explain why it should not be a speedy delete).

(This is a readers' digest version of the Deletion policy. You may want to read it in its entirety.)