User:Novem Linguae/Essays/Thoughts on notability and AFD

A wiki rite of passage: getting your article deleted at AFD

I'll bet most editors can relate to this: They were a newer editor. They spent time writing an article about something they liked. They may have even read WP:N to make sure it passed notability guidelines. Then it got sent to WP:AFD and was deleted a week later. It happened to me when I was a newer editor. It happens to almost everyone, I think. It's basically a wiki a rite of passage.

This is a terrible new user experience. A newer editor works hard, thinks they're following the rules, then gets their article deleted.

Why does this happen? Because our notability guidelines are so complicated that it takes many thousands of edits plus working in a notability-adjacent area (WP:AFD, WP:NPP, WP:AFC) to get familiar with them.

In the AFD of your article, it may feel like the nominator or the !voters are picking on you or your article. This is almost never the case. It's usually just business. It's usually just that more experienced editors are familiar with our complex quagmire of notability guidelines, and you are not quite there yet.

Reading WP:N is not enough

Reading the notability guidelines is not enough to wrap your head around how notability actually works at AFD. Sometimes the notability pages get out of date with current practice due to reverting and stonewalling by a minority faction. Sometimes newer users weigh and cherry pick a certain section of the notability guidelines incorrectly. Sometimes a certain niche of notability is not properly documented (example: WP:ANYBIO's various medals and orders), and the only way to learn it is to check the outcomes of recent AFDs in that niche. Just reading the pages will not make you a notability expert. Trust more experienced users at AFD and their interpretations of notability guidelines and AFD norms.

How to master notability

There are a couple ways. I did it through WP:NPPSCHOOL. You could do it by finding a guru and peppering them with questions. You could do it by participating in a lot of AFDs in a certain niche and paying attention to the outcomes. You could do it by reading good notes on the topic.

However you decide to do it, it will not happen overnight. It will be a journey that takes time and effort. Notability isn't some binary thing. It is a living thing that has its own heartbeat, and that slowly changes with age. The final source of truth for notability is the outcome of recent AFDs in that area. Over time, if the regular's interpretation of the guidelines changes, and their !voting changes on a large enough scale, then the guideline itself will undergo a de facto, undocumented change (example: species articles are always kept at AFD, but it is not an WP:SNG). Attempts to get that change formally into the guideline may be stonewalled and fail, but that does not change the reality.

Another trap: !votes that don't follow GNG will be ignored by the closer

AFDs may look like votes. But that is not the case. There is a closer that will close the discussion at the appropriate time, and this closer will almost always ignore !votes that do not correctly follow our notability guidelines, particularly WP:GNG. The closer will also ignore votes from obvious sockpuppets (blocked users evading a block) and meatpuppets (new users streaming in from somewhere because the AFD was linked to off-site).

In fact, you may notice in this essay that I write the word !vote with an exclamation mark. This is because this is how it works with all closes everywhere on English Wikipedia. In fact, it's part of our WP:NOTVOTE culture at this point. Other wikis, such as English Wiktionary, do straight votes, but this is not how English Wikipedia has decided to do it.

Anyway, when your AFD has 4 keeps and 3 deletes and closes as delete, and you get upset and wonder why, this is why. The system is rigged against folks with unusual spins and interpretations of the notability guidelines, and is rigged against WP:ILIKEIT and other handwavy-type arguments. Rather, the system is rigged towards GNG, and towards the linking and discussion of specific sources and whether or not they meet GNG.

Inclusionism and deletionism

These are naughty words to a lot of people. People don't like these labels. But they may be useful. Let's explore them a bit.

• Inclusionists - Folks that are generally less strict than the status quo about keeping articles. They often mention WP:NEXIST in deletion discussions. They are willing to assume that sources exist rather than demanding links to them. They tend to be content creators, or editors who have been around since the early days of English Wikipedia, when inclusionism was more popular. They tend to dislike WP:AFC, draftspace, and draftification.
• Status quo-ists - Folks that are pretty in alignment with current notability practices. They often mention WP:GNG in deletion discussions. They will ask for the WP:THREE best sources and do a Template:Source assess table in their head to determine notability. If they are in the mood to spend a half hour typing it out, they may even post the table in the AFD.
• Deletionists - Same as status quo-ists, but they lobby for the gutting and deletion of WP:SNGs on the various SNG pages. (Example: the 2022 gutting of WP:NSPORT)
• Newbies - They fail to mention any policies or guidelines in their AFD !votes, or interpret them very incorrectly. They think they are affecting the AFD outcome, but their !vote will be ignored by the closer. If they spray poor !votes in dozens or hundreds of AFDs, they will eventually get taken to WP:ANI and topic banned from AFD.

I am personally a status quo-ist. I spent a lot of time and effort learning what our current notability practices are in WP:NPPSCHOOL. I do not want it changing in either direction because then I will have to re-learn a bunch of stuff.

I think the majority of editors are status quo-ists, which is why it is currently the status quo :)

The premise of GNG and the status quo-ists is reasonable: That it is impossible to write a policy-compliant article (an article that doesn't violate WP:RS, WP:NPOV, WP:OR, etc.) without 3 quality sources to base it off of.

Trends

In my opinion, Wikipedia is currently trending in the direction of deletionism. Every year or two, our SNGs contract a bit more. I predict any attempt to create or expand an SNG right now would fail.

I think this trend towards deletionism may be a natural part of a wiki's lifecycle. In the beginning, there is a huge vacuum of articles and a bunch of article writing needs to occur, so the early years of a wiki favor inclusionism. As the encyclopedia fills up and there are less topics to write about, priorities shift from article writing to quality control, so the later years of a wiki favor deletionism.