Wikinews:Criteria for speedy deletion

This is an official policy on English Wikinews. It has wide acceptance and is considered a standard for all users to follow. Changes to this page must reflect consensus. If in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcut: WN:SD WN:SDG WN:CSD

Policies and Guidelines

Neutral point of view Content guide Style guide

Ignore all rules

Administrators

For Wikipedians

Accreditation Archive conventions Avoid weasel words Blocking Bots CheckUsers Cite sources Conflict of interest Copyright Dispute resolution Deletion Speedy deletion Don't disrupt Wikinews to illustrate a point Fair use Global permissions Image use Naming conventions Newsworthiness Oversight Original reporting Permission expiry Page protection Reviewing Three reverts Username

Etiquette

Deletion Speedy Proposed Regular Policy Log Oversight

For current requests, see Category:Speedy deletion.

There are a few, limited cases where administrators can delete Wikinews pages "on sight". Non-admins can ask an admin to delete such a page by adding a {{delete}} tag.

For anything not a valid candidate for speedy deletion, use Wikinews:Deletion requests, or consider other approaches (moving the content to user's own area, editing content).

The criteria

Admins may immediately delete a page, so long as it satisfies at least one of the following criteria. Always check the page history first to see if any previous version can be restored, such that deletion is not necessary.

Articles

1. No meaningful content or history (e.g. random characters or words). See patent nonsense.
2. Test pages (e.g., "Can I really create a page here?").
3. Pure vandalism (see also dealing with vandalism).
4. Very short articles with no context (e.g., "He was a funny man that created Factory and the Hacienda. And, by the way, his wife is great.")
5. Deleting a page for subsequent renaming to that title following a cut and paste move which loses edit history.
6. Advertising or spam.
7. Self-requests by the author with no third-party edit history.
8. Obvious hoaxes, spoofs, April Fools-type pranks or other works of fiction that damage the credibility of Wikinews. In some cases, it may be desirable to preserve the content by moving it to a user subpage of the author.
9. Content reposted without changes that was deleted according to established deletion policy.
   • This does not apply to content that was undeleted with consensus.
10. Foreign language articles which do not appear to be news (for news items, some attempt should be made to move them to the appropriate language edition of Wikinews, if it exists).
11. An obvious copyright violation that is a cut-and-paste exact or near-exact duplicate of content from a copyrighted source. Speedy delete does not apply for public-domain sources, when public domain reprint permission is granted from the original source and specified in the article talk page, or to articles with a third-party edit history
12. Obvious mistaken posting of encyclopedic entry (delete as possible copyright violation from Wikipedia or similar incompatibly licensed source.)
13. A prepared article for which the event in question was at least five days ago, and the prepared work was not developed into an article (either no article was released or it was not based on the prepared work).

Of course, the Sandbox is exempt from these rules and should not be deleted even though it may satisfy some of the criteria. In the case of vandalism, spam, or copyright violations, the violating text should be removed from the sandbox.

Redirects

Redirects can be immediately deleted if they have no useful history and

1. They refer to non-existent pages. Before deleting a redirect, check to see if the redirect can be made useful by changing its target.
2. Were created by moving user pages out of the article space. Sometimes new Wikinewsies accidentally create user pages in the main article space. Move them into the user space using the "Move this page" tool to preserve their history, and consider waiting a day or two before deleting the resultant redirect.
3. Were created, not earlier than 2009, by renaming an article prior to publication.
4. Are the result of vandalism (e.g. renaming a page to a nonsense title; when the page is moved back to its correct name, a redirect is left behind).

Images

1. Any image that contravenes the fair use policy.
   • In particular, images from competing news organizations should be deleted with haste.
2. An image which is a redundant (all bits the same or scaled-down) copy of something else on Wikinews and as long as all inward links have been changed to the image being retained.
3. Unused fair use images.

Other pages

1. Personal subpages, upon request by their owner.
2. Talk and/or comments pages of already deleted articles.
3. User talk pages of non-logged in users where the message is no longer relevant. (This is to avoid confusing new users who happen to edit with that same w:IP address.)
4. Empty categories (no articles or subcategories) whose only content has consisted of a redirect or links to parent categories.
5. User and talk pages on request of the user, where there is no significant abuse, and no administrative need to retain the page. A redirect (to the user's new name, or to perhaps Wikinews:Departure lounge, or just a short note saying User no longer here) should be created to avoid red links and confusion.
6. Comments pages of unpublished articles - these are automatically created properly when an article is published. Further, a comments page can easily become lost if the article is moved prior to publication.

Note: A list of orphaned talk pages can be queried here.