User:Balloonman/CSD A1 survey


The CSD criteria have been written to tightly define what does and does not qualify for speedy deletion. This is done to ensure that only those articles where clear consensus for deletion exists will be speedily deleted. The criteria are strict because careless or hasty speedy deleter's can do just as much, if not more damage to the project than vandals. Poor quality CSD'ers can chase off quality editors by inappropriately deleting their articles. This can be frustrating to a newbie editor and can tarnish Wikipedia's image. Per the policy, Where reasonable doubt exists, discussion using another method under the deletion policy should occur instead.

WP:CSD

  1. No context. Very short articles lacking sufficient context to identify the subject of the article. Example: "He is a funny man with a red car. He makes people laugh." Context is different from content, treated in A3, below.

I reviewed 20 cases of A1 deletions. In 7 (35%) case, the A1 was appropriately applied. In 11 (55%) cases, I felt that the article should have been sent to AFD, PROD, or Kept. In 2 (10%) cases, I felt the article should be deleted, but on a different criteria than the one given. It should be noted, that these statistics are vastly warped and do not represent the abuse of A1! There are two admins whose deletions I started to ignore after including 5 of their deletions. These two admins delete about 50% of the A1's, but every one I looked at (including ones not included here) was done incorrectly. In every case, they deleted an article without the article being tagged by somebody else.