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Often times, an article will be nominated for deletion because it is poorly written or un-sourced. Sometimes, in the course of the AFD debate, significant improvements will be made to the article, and people who formerly wanted to delete it will acknowledge that it is now fit for inclusion. In other cases, the article will be deleted because no-one is willing to do the work to clean it up, even if the subject meets the criteria for inclusion (i.e. wp:N and wp:V). Such instances represent a severe departure from the purpose of AFD. The Criteria for Deletion clearly states that if an article can be improved, this should be done through regular editing, rather than nomination for deletion. AFD is only appropriate when an article cannot be improved to meet Wikipedia's standards, not when it has not been improved to meet Wikipedia's standards. The principle of wp:NOTDONE applies here: just because the current article isn't great isn't grounds to delete it. In short, Don't nominate an article to AFD just because it isn't very good right now.