Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion
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This page is an official policy on the English Wikipedia. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
- "WP:SPEEDY" redirects to this article. If you are looking for the "Speedy keep" guidelines, see Wikipedia:Speedy keep.
The "Speedy deletion" policy governs limited cases where Wikipedia administrators may delete Wikipedia pages or media "on sight" without further debate, as in the cases of patent nonsense, pure vandalism, or other specific circumstances. Non-admins can request deletion of such a page by adding an appropriate template (see below). The word "speedy" in this context refers to the rapid decision-making process, not the length of time since the article was created.
Before nominating an article for speedy deletion, please consider whether an article could be improved or reduced to a stub, speedy deletion is for cases where an article contains no useful content. Also, please note that some Wikipedians create articles in multiple saves, so try to avoid deleting a page too soon after its initial creation. Users nominating a page for speedy deletion should specify which criteria the page meets; it would also be considerate to notify the original author—remember, everyone was new once. Note that global sandboxes are exempt from deletion.
These criteria are worded narrowly, and generally so phrased that, in most cases, reasonable editors will agree what does or does not fall under a given criterion. When there is reasonable doubt whether a page does, discussion is recommended, using one of the other methods under deletion policy.
This page contains the criteria for speedy deletion and a list of helpful templates that can be used to tag a candidate for speedy deletion. Articles that do not meet the speedy criteria may be nominated for the alternative deletion processes Wikipedia:Proposed deletion and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion.
The list of current candidates for speedy deletion is at Category:Candidates for speedy deletion.
Contents |
Criteria
Abbreviations are sometimes used to refer to these criteria. For example, "A7" refers to criterion 7 under articles (notability) and "G12" refers to criterion 12 under general (copyright infringement).
General criteria
- Patent nonsense and gibberish, an unsalvageably incoherent page with no meaningful content. This does not include: poor writing, partisan screeds, obscene remarks, vandalism, fictional material, material not in English, badly translated material, implausible theories, or hoaxes.
- Test pages (e.g., "Can I really create a page here?").
- Pure vandalism, including redirects created during cleanup of page move vandalism.
- Recreation of deleted material. A substantially identical copy, by any title, of a page that was deleted as a result of a discussion in Articles for deletion or another XfD process, unless it was undeleted per the undeletion policy or was recreated in the user space. Before deleting again, the admin should ensure that the material is substantially identical and not merely a new article on the same subject. This clause does not apply if the only prior deletions were speedy or proposed deletions, although in this case, the previous speedy criterion, or other speedy deletion criteria, may apply.
- Banned user. Pages created by banned users while they were banned.
- Housekeeping. Non-controversial maintenance tasks such as temporarily deleting a page in order to merge page histories, performing a non-controversial page move like reversing a redirect, or removing a disambiguation page that only points to a single article.
- Author requests deletion. Any page for which deletion is requested by the original author, provided the page's only substantial content was added by its author and was mistakenly created. If the author blanks the page, this can be taken as a deletion request.
- Talk pages of pages that do not exist, unless they contain deletion discussion that isn't logged elsewhere. Subpages (including archive pages) are only deletable under this rule if the corresponding top-level page does not exist. Exceptions to this are user talk pages and talk pages of images on Commons.
- Office Actions. The Wikimedia Foundation office reserves the right to speedily delete a page temporarily in cases of exceptional controversy.
- Attack pages. Pages that serve no purpose but to disparage their subject or some other entity (e.g., "John Q. Doe is an imbecile"). This includes a biography of a living person that is negative in tone and unsourced, where there is no NPOV version in the history to revert to.
- Blatant advertising. Pages which exclusively promote a company, product, group or service and which would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become encyclopedic. Note that simply having a company, product, group or service as its subject does not qualify an article for this criterion.
- Blatant copyright infringement which meets these parameters:
- Material was copied from another website which does not have a license compatible with Wikipedia;
- There is no non-infringing content in the page history worth saving.
- The infringement was introduced at once by a single person rather than created organically on wiki and then copied by another website such as one of the many Wikipedia mirrors.
- Uploader does not assert permission (for images: no assertion aside from tags) or fair use, or the assertion is questionable;
Articles
For any articles that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Articles for deletion or Wikipedia:Proposed deletion.
- Very short articles providing little or no context (e.g., "He is a funny man that has created Factory and the Hacienda. And, by the way, his wife is great."). Limited content is not in itself a reason to delete if there is enough context for the article to qualify as a valid stub.
- Foreign language articles that exist on another Wikimedia project. If the article in question does not exist on another project, the template {{notenglish}} should be used instead.
- No content whatsoever. Any article consisting only of links elsewhere (including hyperlinks, category tags and "see also" sections), a rephrasing of the title, and/or attempts to correspond with the person or group named by its title. This does not include disambiguation pages.
- (This criterion has been merged into A3 and is kept for historical reasons.)
- Transwikied articles. Any article that has been discussed at Articles for Deletion (et al), where the outcome was to transwiki, and where the transwikification has been properly performed and the author information recorded.
- (This criterion has been superseded by G10 and is kept for historical reasons.)
- Unremarkable people, groups, companies and web content. An article about a real person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content that does not assert the importance or significance of its subject. If the assertion is controversial or there has been a previous AfD, the article should be nominated for AfD instead. Note: Avoid the word "vanity" in deletion summaries since it may be considered insulting.
- (This criterion has been superseded by G12 and is kept for historical reasons.)
Redirects
For any redirects that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion. In any case it may be possible to make it a useful redirect to some other target.
- Redirects to non-existent pages
- Redirects to the Talk:, User: or User_talk: space from the main article space. If this was the result of a page move, consider waiting a day or two before deleting the redirect.
- Redirects as a result of an implausible typo that were recently created. However, redirects from common misspellings or misnomers are generally useful; redirects in other languages (such as those in Category:Redirects from alternative languages) are not deletable under this criteria.
Images/Media
For any images and other media that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion.
Please remove images and media from any pages they are used in before marking them for speedy deletion. With respect to fair use disputes, if a fair use rationale is provided, use WP:IFD instead.
- Redundant. Any image that is a redundant copy, in the same image file format and same or lower resolution, of something else on Wikipedia. Likewise, other media that is a redundant copy, in the same format and of the same or lower quality. This does not apply to images duplicated on Wikimedia Commons, because of licence issues; these should be tagged with {{NowCommons|Image:newname.ext}} or {{NowCommonsThis}} instead.
- Corrupt or empty image. Before deleting this type of image, verify that the MediaWiki engine cannot read it by previewing a resized thumbnail of it. This also includes empty (i.e., no content) image description pages for Commons images.
- Improper license. Images licensed as "for non-commercial use only", "non-derivative use" or "used with permission" that were uploaded on or after May 19, 2005, and for which no assertion of fair use is provided. [1] This includes images licensed under a "Non-commercial Creative Commons License".[2] Such images uploaded before May 19, 2005 may also be speedily deleted if they are not used in any articles.
- Lack of licensing information. Images in category "Images with unknown source", "Images with unknown copyright status", or "Images with no copyright tag" that have been tagged with a template that places them in the category for more than seven days, regardless of when uploaded. Note, users sometimes specify their source in the upload summary, so be sure to check the circumstances of the image.
- Unused unfree copyrighted images. Images and other media that are not under a free license or in the public domain that are not used in any article and that have been tagged with a template that places them in a dated subcategory of Category:Orphaned fairuse images for more than seven days. Reasonable exceptions may be made for images uploaded for an upcoming article. Use {{subst:orfud}} to tag images for forthcoming deletion.
- Missing fair-use rationale. 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. Images and other media uploaded before May 4, 2006 should not be deleted immediately; instead, the uploader should be notified that a fair-use rationale is needed. Images or other media uploaded after May 4, 2006 can be tagged with {{subst:nrd}}, and the uploader notified with {{ subst:missing rationale|Image:image name }}. Such images can be found in the dated subcategories of Category:Images with no fair use rationale.
- Invalid fair-use claim. Any image or media with a clearly invalid fair-use tag (such as a {{logo}} tag on a photograph of a mascot) may be deleted at any time. Media that fail any part of the fair use criteria and were uploaded after 13 July 2006 may be deleted forty-eight hours after notification of the uploader. For media uploaded before 13 July 2006 or tagged with the {{Replaceable fair use}} template, the uploader will be given seven days to comply with this policy after being notified.
- Images available as bit-for-bit identical copies on the Wikimedia Commons, provided the following conditions are met:
- The image's license and source status is beyond reasonable doubt, and the license is undoubtedly accepted at Commons.
- All image revisions that meet the first condition have been transferred to Commons as revisions of the Commons copy and properly marked as such.
- All information on the image description page is present on the Commons image description page. That includes the complete upload history with links to the uploader's local user pages.
- If there is any information not relevant to any other project on the image description page (like {{FeaturedPicture}}), the image description page must be undeleted after the file deletion.
- The image is not protected, and the image description page does not contain a request not to move it to Commons.
- The image has been marked with Template:NowCommons or Template:NowCommonsThis for at least one week.
- If the image is available on Commons under a different name than locally, it must not be used on any local page whatsoever.
- For {{c-uploaded}} images: They may be speedily deleted as soon as they are off the Main Page.
- The image's license and source status is beyond reasonable doubt, and the license is undoubtedly accepted at Commons.
Categories
For any categories that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Categories for discussion.
- Empty categories (no articles or subcategories for at least four days) whose only content has consisted of links to parent categories. This does not apply to categories being discussed on WP:CFD or WP:SFD, or disambiguation categories. If the category isn't relatively new, it possibly contained articles earlier, and deeper investigation is needed.
- Speedy renaming. Empty categories that have qualified for speedy renaming.
- Typo fixes (e.g., Brdiges -> Bridges), but not changes between British and American spelling.
- Capitalization fixes (e.g., characters In harry Potter -> Characters in Harry Potter)
- Conversions from singular to plural, or back (e.g., Steamship -> Steamships)
- Renaming to conform with the "by country" categorization conventions
- Abbreviation expanding for country names, e.g. changing "U.S." to "United States"
- Template categories. If a category is solely populated from a template (e.g. Category:Wikipedia cleanup from {{cleanup}}) and the template is deleted per deletion policy, the category can also be deleted without further discussion.
User pages
For any user pages that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion.
- User request. Personal subpages, upon request by their user. In some rare cases there may be administrative need to retain the page. Also, sometimes, main user pages may be deleted as well. See Wikipedia:User page for full instructions and guidelines.
- Nonexistent user. User pages of users that do not exist. (Check Special:Contributions.)
- Fair use galleries. Galleries in the user space which consist mostly of fair use images.
Templates
For any templates that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Templates for deletion. When nominating a template for speedy deletion, surround the speedy deletion tag with <noinclude></noinclude>, so that pages that use the nominated template do not themselves get listed as candidates for speedy deletion.
- Templates that are divisive and inflammatory.
- (This criterion has been repealed by community consensus and is kept for historical reasons.)
Portals
For any Portals that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion.
- Any topic that would be subject to speedy deletion as an Article.
- Underpopulated Portal. Any Portal based on a topic for which there is not a non-stub header article, and at least three non-stub articles detailing subject matter that would be appropriate to discuss under the title of that Portal.
Non-criteria
Sometimes speedy deletion criteria are applied to articles that they do not and were not intended to apply to; also, rules that are not speedy deletion rules are often mistakenly used to justify speedy deletion. This section aims to clarify some of the frequently used "non-criteria" that are commonly cited but are not sufficient, by themselves, to justify speedy deletion. These are not rules and intended only to be commonly-understood interpretations of the criteria above.
- Reasons derived from Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not: "Wikipedia is not a dictionary", "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information" and "Wikipedia is not a crystal ball" are not part of the speedy deletion criteria. However, these reasons can be given at AfD nominations.
- Hoaxes: Articles that present unverifiable and probably false ideas, theories, or subjects. Occasionally these can be deleted as vandalism if the article is obviously ridiculous, but remotely plausible articles should be subjected to further scrutiny in a wider forum.
- Original research: Although we have a policy against material that offers novel theories or interpretations on Wikipedia, this is not a basis for speedy deletion. The reason for this is that it's not always easy to tell whether an article is original research.
- Neologisms: As with hoaxes, unless the article is obviously ridiculous, a wider forum is necessary to evaluate the currency of specialized terminology.
- Non-notable subjects with their importance asserted: Articles that have obviously non-notable subjects are still not eligible for speedy deletion unless the article "does not assert the importance or significance of its subject". If the article gives a claim that might be construed as making the subject notable, it should be taken to a wider forum. However, articles with only a statement like "This guy was like so friggin' notable!" can be deleted per CSD A1 because it gives no context about the subject.
- Author deletion requests made in bad faith: Sometimes an author will ask to have content removed because they feel frustrated with the project and resent it profiting from their work. However, they licensed their work to be used in this way and they have no legal basis for asking for its removal. The article must be "mistakenly created", for example if the author created it unwittingly by misspelling a name. Of course, anyone may request deletion of pages in their userspace.
- Very short articles: As explained above, some very short articles can be speedily deleted, but if they have content and offer sufficient context to qualify as stubs, they cannot be.
- "Copyright violations" whose sources copied Wikipedia: Our content is extensively used without credit, sometimes with modifications. With G12, you must be reasonably sure that the content belonged to the source site first.
- PNGs/GIFs replaced by JPEGs: Even if an image is a photograph or other continuous-tone image, JPEG encoding discards a variety of information that could be important for further editing. Do not delete the original PNG/GIF files.
- Finally, good faith edits are never vandalism. If you cannot be reasonably sure an article was written in bad faith, G3 does not apply.
Deletion templates
| What to type | Criteria | Used for |
|---|---|---|
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The following templates add articles to Category:Candidates for speedy deletion but do not appear in the category themselves: |
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| {{db|reason}} {{db-reason|reason}} {{deletebecause|reason}} {{delbecause|reason}} {{d|reason}} {{delete|reason}} |
Replace reason with a specific reason for speedy deletion. Please try to write out a reason that will be comprehensible to non-Wikipedians. |
|
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Specific reason templates are: |
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| {{db-nonsense}} | CSD G1 | Patent nonsense. You can put {{subst:Nonsensepages|page name}} -- ~~~~ on the user's talk page. |
| {{db-test}} | CSD G2 | Test page. You can put {{subst:test1article|page name}} -- ~~~~ on the user's talk page. |
| {{db-vandalism}} | CSD G3 | Vandalism. You can put {{subst:test2article-n|page name}} -- ~~~~ on the user's talk page. |
| {{db-pagemove}} | CSD G3 | Nonsense redirects that are created from the cleanup of page move vandalism. You can put {{subst:Mp2-n|page name}} -- ~~~~ on the user's talk page. |
| {{db-repost}} | CSD G4 | Copies of material that was previously deleted after an XfD discussion. Articles that were only previously speedily deleted do not fall under this category. You can put {{subst:repost-warn|page name}} -- ~~~~ on the user's talk page. |
| {{db-banned}} | CSD G5 | Contributions made by a banned user. |
| {{db-histmerge}} | CSD G6 | History merge. |
| {{db-move}} | CSD G6 | Making way for a noncontroversial move. Please add the name of the page that is to be moved |
| {{db-afd}} | CSD G6 | An admin has closed an Articles for deletion debate as a "delete" but not deleted the article. |
| {{db-g6}} | CSD G6 | Other non-controversial "housekeeping" tasks, such as reversing a redirect or deleting a disambiguation page that only points to a single article. |
| {{db-author}} | CSD G7 | Speedy request by only editor. |
| {{db-blanked}} | CSD G7 | Page blanked by only editor. |
| {{db-talk}} | CSD G8 | Talk page of a deleted or nonexistent page. |
| {{db-attack}} | CSD G10 | Attack page intended to disparage its subject. You can put {{subst:attack|page name}} -- ~~~~ on the user's talk page. |
| {{db-spam}} {{db-ad}} {{db-advert}} |
CSD G11 | Pages that exist only to promote a company, product, or service. You can put {{subst:spam-notice|pg=page name}} -- ~~~~ on the user's talk page. |
| {{db-copyvio|url=url of source}} | CSD G12 | Blatant copyright violation. You can put {{subst:nothanks-sd|pg=page name|url=url of source}} -- ~~~~ on the user's talk page. |
| {{db-empty}} {{db-nocontext}} |
CSD A1 | Very short articles without context. |
| {{db-foreign}} | CSD A2 | Foreign language article duplicated on other Wikimedia project. |
| {{db-nocontent}} {{db-contact}} |
CSD A3 | No content other than external links of whatever kind, or an attempt to contact subject of article. |
| {{db-transwiki}} | CSD A5 | Transwikification completed. |
| {{db-bio}} {{db-band}} {{db-club}} {{db-group}} {{db-bio-notenglish|language}} {{db-web}} |
CSD A7 | Non-notable biography / article about a person, group, company, or website that does not assert the notability of the subject. You can put {{subst:nn-warn|page name}} -- ~~~~ on the user's talk page, or, if it seems that someone has created a user page in the encyclopedia section instead of their user page, you can use put {{subst:Userfy warning|page name}} -- ~~~~ on their talk page. |
| {{db-redirnone}} | CSD R1 | Redirect to non-existent page. |
| {{db-rediruser}} | CSD R2 | Redirect to user page. |
| {{db-redirtypo}} | CSD R3 | Redirect that is a result of an implausible typo. |
| {{Redundant image}} {{isd|name of replacement image without the image: prefix}} |
CSD I1 | Same or better image exists on Wikipedia (not for now on Commons). |
| {{db-noimage}} | CSD I2 | Corrupt or empty image. |
| {{db-noncom}} | CSD I3 | "No commercial use" or "by permission" images uploaded after target date. |
| {{db-unksource}} | CSD I4 | Lack of licensing -- Should only be used if the image has been previously tagged with {{no license}}, {{no source}}, or a similar template. |
| {{db-unfree}} | CSD I5 | Unused copyright image -- Should only be used if the image has been previously tagged with {{or-cr}}, {{or-fu}}, or a similar template. |
| {{db-norat}} | CSD I6 | Image with fair use tag but no fair use rationale - must have been tagged as such for seven days and uploaded after 2006-05-04. |
| {{db-badfairuse}} | CSD I7 | Bad fair use rationale - image tagged for fair use under a rationale that is patently irrelevant to the actual image, like {{game-screenshot}} on a photo of a celebrity. Please notify uploader on their talk page using {{subst:badfairuse|image name including prefix|tag that was on the image}}. |
| {{db-catempty}} | CSD C1 | Category that is empty for at least four days and has never contained anything other than links to parent categories. |
| {{db-catfd}} | CSD C3 | Category that is used solely by a template that has been deleted. |
| {{db-userreq}} | CSD U1 | User's subpage requested to be deleted by the user with whom it is associated. |
| {{db-nouser}} | CSD U2 | Userpages of users who do not exist. |
| {{db-disparage}} | CSD T1 | Templates that are divisive and inflammatory. |
| {{db-emptyportal}} | CSD P2 | Underpopulated portal. |
Procedure for administrators
- See also: Wikipedia:Deletion process
Make sure to specify the deletion reason in the deletion summary. Also, in some cases the article's creator should be notified.
Before deleting a page, check the page history to assess whether it would instead be possible to revert and salvage a previous version. Also:
- The initial edit summary may have information about the source of or reason for the article.
- The talk page may refer to previous deletion discussions.
- The page log may have information about previous deletions that could warrant SALTing the article or keeping it on good reason.
- 'What links here' may show that the subject of the article is an oft-referred part of the encyclopedia, or may show other similar pages that warrant deletion. For articles that should not be re-created, incoming links in other articles should be removed.
See also
- Wikipedia:Speedy deletions
- Wikipedia:Deletion policy
- Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion/Explanations
- Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace (Grid of warning messages)
| See also | Guide to deletion | Alternative outlets | Undeletion policy | Deletion guidelines for admins | Deletion process Deletion review | AfD Precedents | Archived delete debates | Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense Speedy deletion policy | Policy consensus discussions |
