 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Drafts place the burden of creating an article on a single editor and fail to encourage collaboration. The practice of draftifying new articles worsens the issue. Something needs to be done, but what? |
Wikipedia drafts, or more precisely, the Draft namespace and the way it is currently used, are broken.
Draftspace was created in 2013 mainly as a centralised space to hold Articles for Creation (AfC) drafts, which previously were all over the place. Editors could also use the namespace for their own drafts (as an alternative to creating userspace drafts), whether or not they intended to go through the AfC process. Draftspace also took over the role of the Article Incubator, where articles which needed further work before they met the inclusion criteria could be "incubated" as an alternative to deletion. Incubation thus also became known as "draftifying" or "draftification".
With the formalisation of the New Pages Patrol (NPP) process in 2016, draftification became regarded as a tool for dealing with new articles which were clearly "unready" for Mainspace. New Page Reviewers may unilaterally draftify new articles, a practice seen as a softer alternative to deletion and less likely to bite the newcomers.
However, there are problems with the current practice.