New geologically speedy deletion criteria introduced
Sick of waiting eons for a proposed deletion to go through for a landmass that obviously needs it?
Many kilobytes of discussion, workshopping, and debate at Wikipedia:Village Asthenosphere (policy) concluded this week with a decision to adopt several new criteria – L3, L4 and L5 – for speedy deletion of land masses, rock formations, and other geological features.
Long-time editor User:Ariana Granite said, in opening the RfC:
| “ | The problem we're having now is that there is a lot of new material being formed on Wikipedia, typically when articles in suspension settle out of the fluid in which they're entrained, come to rest against a barrier, and over a period of time, ions carried in groundwater chemically precipitate to form new crystalline material between the infoboxes and categories. And there are too damn many of them, and they aren't very good. It's not the Hadean eon anymore. | ” |
Many who supported the RfC, including Ariana, argued that problems were being caused by outdated policies enacted billions of years ago, when Wikipedia was still cooling down from its original formation. Wikipedia:Be volcanic, a policy written during the Hadean eon (and still one of our 5 Speleothems), encourages users to "simply deposit material without talking about it". Some argued that this was no longer appropriate for an encyclopedia whose surface is now mostly covered by water.
"I'm not saying that we never see writing created by exposing reliable sources to elevated temperatures and pressures which cause them to recrystallize dramatically", said administrator User:CliffordWeathering. "Just that they overwhelm our review processes, and we need some way to handle substandard content without waiting seven million years for an Articles for Subduction discussion to close. That's too long."
Several geologically speedy deletion criteria already existed, like L1 (patent scree) and L2 (uncooled magma), but RfC participants reached a solid consensus that more were necessary to deal with quality issues. In fact, the discussion broke records, meriting its inclusion in Wikipedia:Times that Wikipedians reached a consensus harder than Mohs 9.5.
The three criteria to be added are L3 (pure sediment and blatant alluvium), L4 (recreation of material that was subducted at a convergent boundary), and L5 (formations available as identical copies on Wikimedia Plutons).