Bad Jokes and Other Draftspace Novelties
In the bright halcyon days of '13, a proposal was put forth at the Village Pump to alleviate the beaucoup backlog at Articles for creation — then at a whopping fifteen hundred. The idea was that "the task of reviewing submissions will be a less fragmented process, and it will be easier for volunteers to collaborate".
Discussion of this proposal, as well as a subsequent discussion on how specifically to implement drafts, ran to about two hundred kilobytes, and was closed as... well, the close note itself was 575 words. Whatever. What matters is that they agreed we should have a namespace for drafts, and so now we have a namespace for drafts.
The AfC backlog (via Category:Pending AfC submissions) is currently 4,134. The WikiProject attached to AfC has backlog drives every once in a while; the last one was in January 2023.
Many drafts are good, and well-written, and reliably sourced, and make their way into articlespace when a reviewer approves them after a short wait (ha — no — more like six months). Others are obviously crap: unvarnished self-promotion from humanity's roiling sea of Soundcloud rappers, TikTok aspirants, used car salesmen and soi-disant entrepreneurial geniouses[sic].
Somewhere in between, however, lie a treasure trove of digital mushrooms that sprout after the rain. In this magical place, one can find curiosities that defy explanation and texts that challenge the very boundaries of understanding — where the ordinary meets the extraordinary, and the irreverent dances with the absurd.
Some of this stuff is too good to let it disappear after six months untouched! Or, for that matter, too bad. Or too ugly.