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.

Speedy deletion is a useful tool, and without it the project would become bogged down by repetitive and absurd deletion discussions. However, new articles are often mistakenly tagged for speedy deletion. Certain of the criteria for speedy deletion are frequently misinterpreted and occasionally even abused.

In addition, articles at listed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion are often speedily deleted out of process. Most of these articles, however, do not actually meet any of the criteria for speedy deletion; these speedy deletions are justified by citing the essay WP:SNOW, which is itself an interpretation of Wikipedia:Ignore all rules. My opinion is that overuse of speedy deletion at AfD is self-defeating; process is not paramount, but it is important, and little is gained from these speedy deletions.

Patent nonsense (G1)

Patent nonsense is defined as "an unsalvageably incoherent page with no meaningful content." This refers to gibberish, that is, something that is linguistically incomprehensible. It may be random characters, for example, or a string of words so confused as to be hopeless.

Here are some real examples of patent nonsense I have deleted:

• [page name] - opposite of having polka-dots and headbands
• [page name] is from frozen throne and is a highly regarded ID adress
• dhhttfhttyhffgfghffhgerhsbbghdhgfegb+t++k fngmnflgdfiogieogny
• Eat a cliff

Here are some examples of pages that are not patent nonsense:

Blatant advertising (G11)

An article is only deletable under this criterion if it is an unsalvageable promotion for its subject. If the subject is commercial in nature, that alone does not qualify it for deletion.

Here is an excerpt from a real article I have deleted as blatant advertising:

• [page name] was founded in 1999 by a team of veteran tax and software industry experts with the goal to provide the fastest, easiest, most accurate, and affordable way to calculate sales and use taxes. It is a privately held company located on historic [location].

This excerpt is represented of the whole article's style, which was written in the style of a sales brochure. The use of adjectives such as veteran and historic, not to mention the who list of superlatives describing their tax collection method, are red flags for this style. Every sentence would have to be re-written to make the article's style encyclopedic; therefore, it qualifies for speedy deletion.

Here is an example of a page that was invalidly tagged as blatant advertising:

• [page name] stands for [company name]. The Fiber Pool combines alpaca farmers fleece submissions from across the United States into large lots to take advantage of economies of scale. The Alpaca fiber is manufactured in the US and then sent back to the farms who contributed fiber for resale. Their website can be found at [site].

This article does not qualify for speedy deletion because it is written in a matter-of-fact, encyclopdic style, rather than in promotional language.

Lack of context (A1)

To be considered speedily deletable for lack of context, it must be impossible to tell what the article is about from the information given. In my experience, most uses of this tag are invalid. They may be short stubs or dictionary definitions. Dictionary definitions are very deletable, of course, but not via speedy deletion. They must be tagged with ((subst:prod)) or nominated at WP:AFD.

Here is an example of an article that was correctly tagged as "no context". This is the entire text of the article:

• Some things may be considered "[article title]".

As with "patent nonsense", an occasional article is tagged as "no context" because the nominator simply did not take the time to understand it. Although New Pages Patrol is a time-pressured activity for any user, so is working Category:Candidates for speedy deletion for admins, and taking a few extra moments to parse what the article is about shows respect for the process. --Ginkgo100^talk 18:53, 1 September 2007 (UTC)