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Tl;dr: the proposal passes, but by a narrow margin and with caveats.

This is an extremely long RfC, probably among the largest in Wikipedia's history by length even if not by number of participants. Part of the reason for the length is probably the volume and variety of articles under discussion; it may have been easier to establish a consensus for a smaller subset, but equally that would mean more smaller RfCs which are likely to take up the same amount of time overall so there's no easy solution.

I count (very roughly) 700 individual comments and not quite 120 bolded votes, with a 60/40 split in favour of the proposal. Unfortunately there were several unhelpful comments on both sides. Some of the oppose comments were bordering on hysterical, with appeals to emotion along the lines of "when will it end" and "nobody is safe". What is proposed here is not a spree of indiscriminate deletion moving from one topic to the next until we've dramatically culled the total number of entries in the encyclopaedia; it is a targeted approach to resolve a problem created by an editor whose conduct has been found to be disruptive, both by the community and by ArbCom, as a result of which he is now banned. Some would argue not targeted enough and that is fair comment (see my opening paragraph); there may be merit in discussing how to handle the rest of Lugnuts's articles outwith the constraints and voting of an RfC. Equally, some of the support comments seem based purely on an opinion of Lugnuts and his actions rather than on the question at hand and the merits of these articles.

I find that there is a rough consensus in favour of the proposal, and a stronger consensus that they should not be left in mainspace, even if this proposal is not everyone's preferred outcome. The question wasn't asked in this RfC, but there seems to be a weak consensus to apply this to other of Lugnuts's bot-like creations of very short articles. However, I would urge the proposers not to charge headlong into the draftification process without further thought. A lot of people are uncomfortable with the large number of articles—a list of 1200 people from different eras and different nations is very difficult for humans to parse and I would urge the proponents to break it down into smaller lists by nationality, era, or any other criteria requested by editors who wish to evaluate subsets of articles. I would also urge care to ensure that the only articles draftified are those which clearly meet the criteria outlined, even if that takes longer or even considerably longer—we won't fix mass editing without due care by mass editing without due care. There is merit in the idea of a templated warning being applied to the articles before draftification takes place and in a dedicated maintenance category to give interested editors a chance to review. To that I would add a suggestion to check for any articles that exist in other language versions of Wikipedia. Every possible effort should be made to help editors locate articles they're interested in or that they feel may have potential for improvement otherwise this is just an exercise in reducing the article count by ~1200; some may find that desirable but the comments below clearly show that there is wheat to separate from the chaff. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 22:37, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

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Should the following 1,182 biographical microstubs, which were mass-created by Lugnuts and cover cricketers, be moved out of article space? 06:17, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Details (mass draftification of cricket articles)

Selection criteria: Generated using a Quarry query, these 1,200 articles are a subset of the articles that meet the following criteria:

1. Articles are created by Lugnuts
2. Articles are on cricketers
3. Articles are smaller than 2,500 bytes^[a]
4. Referenced only to CricketArchive or ESPNcricinfo^[b]
5. No significant contributions from editors other than Lugnuts^[c]

If this proposal is successful: All articles on the list will be draftified, subject to the provisions below:

1. Draftified articles will be autodeleted after 5 years (instead of the usual 6 months)
2. Any editor may userfy any draft (which will prevent autodeletion)
3. Any WikiProject may move a draft to their WikiProject space (which will also prevent autodeletion)
4. Any draft (whether in draftspace, userspace, or WikiProject space) can be returned to mainspace when it contains sources that plausibly meet WP:GNG^[d]
5. Editors may return drafts to mainspace for the sole purpose of redirecting/merging them to an appropriate article, if they believe that doing so is in the best interest of the encyclopedia^[e]

Background (mass draftification of cricket articles)

In the 2022 Deletion ArbCom case, ArbCom found (Finding #6) that User:Lugnuts had created over 93,000 articles, "the most articles of any editor ... Most of these were stubs, and relatively few have been expanded to longer articles", which led to sanctions from the community and to Lugnuts being indefinitely sitebanned by Arbcom.

Arbcom also mandated an RfC on mass deletion. A mass creation RfC took place but the mass deletion RfC did not, and the RFC mandate was rescinded, leaving the question of how to handle mass-created microstubs such as these unresolved. In March a proposal was made to draftify approximately 1000 articles on Olympians as a possible resolution to this. The proposal was successful and this proposal continues that process.

Survey (mass draftification of cricket articles)

• Support The alternative to continuing to address such mass creations through this process is bringing hundreds or thousands of articles through AfD each month^[f] and that alternative is not practical. These are articles that took minutes, sometimes seconds, to create; each AfD consumes hours of community time and it would be a waste to spend more collective time assessing each of them individually than was spent on their creation. Further, editors who support keeping these articles object on the grounds that the workload is too high; that it is impossible to search for sources with the diligence required in the time available and as a consequence articles on notable topics are deleted.
  This proposal resolves both of those issues; editors will have time to search for sources and considerable amounts of our most limited resource, editor time, will be saved.
  We also cannot leave the articles as are; we have a responsibility to curate the encyclopedia, to remove articles that do not belong on it due to failing to meet our notability criteria or due to violating our policies on what Wikipedia is not. Failing to meet this responsibility is harmful to the project; it reinforces the perception among the public that Wikipedia is mostly empty around the edges and that anything is notable, and it reinforces the perception among editors that creating large numbers of microstubs that do not inform the reader is as good or better than creating smaller numbers of informative articles.
  These are articles that all violate the fifth basic sports notability criteria, on topics that usually lack notability, that no one edits, that almost no one looks at, and that are so bereft of information that they are of no benefit to the reader. Removing the group will improve the quality of the encyclopedia, and by doing it in this manner we provide the best hope of the articles on notable topics being identified, improved, and returned to mainspace. BilledMammal (talk) 06:17, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support per proposer. My feeling is that this is a good way to deal with the low-quality and WP:SPORTCRIT-failing microstubs with enough leeway for any editor who wants to keep any of the articles to do the needed research to expand the article. starship.paint (exalt) 06:46, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose. The Olympics draftification has not resulted in any objective improvement to the encyclopaedia and this is just more of the same. Thryduulf (talk) 07:10, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support. Having a massive number of microstubs is detrimental to cleanup efforts and maintenance. If anything, this proposal is quite generous for articles that never should have been created in the first place. A good compromise overall, and it gives several options for anyone that might take an interest in one or more of these articles. I also support carrying this out for all other articles that meet the listed criteria. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 07:29, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support, except for "If this proposal is successful" point no. 3: wikiprojects have no business holding onto drafts; it's just not normal, and it encourages the extremely bad habit of wikiprojects behaving like walled gardens and flexing in a WP:GANG + WP:OWN manner toward content they claim is within their scope. Draftspacing and userifying are entirely sufficient options. Aside from that, I wholeheartedly agree with draftifying (one way or another) these miserable micro-stubs, most of which have no hope of ever becoming proper encyclopedia articles. We have far too many half-assed pseudo-articles on minor figures in sport, acting, and other pop-culture subjects.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:53, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support Their deletion would disencourage masscreation of microstubs based on databases. It would save a lot of time for the potentual participants in AfDs. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 07:59, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Found this 3 rationales cited by Cbl62 further down in support of draftication pretty much convincing and would like to reproduce them here again.

  (1) Mass creation. The articles at issue were the product of Lugnuts' well-documented mass process in which thousands of articles were created, often at the rate of approximately a minute per article.

  (2) Lack of substance. The articles are microstubs that contain very limited narrative text, simply reciting that the person was a cricket player who appeared in X number of games for X team. If the articles are ultimately deleted, nothing of real substance is lost. If SIGCOV is later uncovered and brought forth, and given the fact that only a minute or so was devoted to the original effort, the articles can be re-created without any meaningful loss of prior effort.

  (3) Violation of SPORTBASIC. The articles violate prong 5 of WP:SPORTBASIC which provides: "Sports biographies must include at least one reference to a source providing significant coverage of the subject, excluding database sources." The articles here are sourced only to database sources and do not include SIGCOV.

  For transparency I must admit there was a fourth one, but that one I do not support the same way.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 10:54, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

  Paradise Chronicle - WP:NORUSH. The rush to mass create these articles and the rush to mass delete them seem like two sides of the same coin. Getting it right is more important than speed.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:10, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  “Two sides of the same coin” implies comparable effect - but that is not the case. One is essentially vandalism, the other is just respiring the situation as it would have been had the vandalism not taken place. FOARP (talk)| FOARP (talk) 21:09, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  @FOARP - The idea is the same - it would take too long to do the research for each individual article and we need to do this NOW so we can move onto the next article despite WP:NORUSH. Lugnuts followed the rules when he created the articles. The rules have since changed. Those same rules may change again tomorrow.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:48, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

• Comment - I think we need more granular detail on the people concerned. Personally I think someone who played more than 20 First Class matches in any country recognised by the ICC is notable. Someone who played 10 is possibly debatable, someone who played less than 5 probably isn't. For me there are extreme edge cases (for example some who appears to only have played one match in 1890) which can be redirected to a list. There are a bigger group where the sourcing is bad but could likely be improved (in my example maybe someone who played regularly for a first class team) and an intermediate group which could/should be draftified until such time as more information is found. Of course this requires buy-in from WikiProjects being prepared to engage in improvement; failing that I agree that we might as well just draft with a high likelihood that nobody will work on them and they'll be deleted. JMWt (talk) 08:12, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  In terms of granular detail, BilledMammal was kind enough to sort out a query for me that included the team categories. I've got a version of this at User:Blue Square Thing/sandbox6 - it includes was more than just the 1,200 listed here. It doesn't get into the number of appearances because that wouldn't be categorised so it's not possible to pull that off. But it may be of some use.

  From cutting that list down, I think the 1,200 here are probably split up as:

  Indian - 283 (24%)

  Australian - 262 (22%)

  South African - 137 (11%)

  Sri Lankan - 122 (10%)

  New Zealand - 94 (8%)

  Pakistani - 83 (7%)

  English* - 70 (6%)

  Others - about 13% - Bangledishi, Afghan, Zimbabwean, West Indian and a few others.

  I would think most of the Australians, New Zealanders and English* will be on the redirect list eventually. Means we lose a lot of south Asian and African articles (list are less well developed in these cases). Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Caveat there are some issues regarding the redirect list that I need to get to, but if those are resolved then with the caveat that articles to be draftified should be tagged for a period of 7 days before that occurs I might be able to get to a position where I could think about being more supportive of this. There are simply too many articles here for anyone to check through, but individual editors may have them on watchlists and might be able to step in and deal with them in such a period (there are a number of cricket editors with an interest in and sources dealing with specific teams). A number of articles have already been removed from the initial lists produced, but there are simply too many here to check through.
  This is complicated somewhat by the inclusion of articles in this list where there are already prose sources in the article rather than simple database entries. This is a complicated issue, but essentially the CricInfo articles will sometimes contain prose, occasionally prose that originated from The Cricketer or Wisden - both clearly excellent reliable sources. CricketArchive occasionally also does this. It's difficult to know for sure how many, partly because there's just so many articles here. Again, tagging for a short period would allow editors with an interest in individual articles to check and ensure there there's no people included who already meet the source that could plausibly... condition. This would include people like Brett Matthews (cricketer) (where there's already a prose source which contributes in the article - this is the only one of the 250 or so articles I've checked which are still on the list to be on it in error in my view), Brett van Deinsen, Brendan Creevey, Brad Oldroyd for example. These are snapshots, but each has something that makes me feel that WP:NEXIST means that if we were to dig more that we'd easily find more on them. Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Brett Matthews shouldn't be on the list, per the note attached to selection criteria #4 due to the presence of this reference. The reason it is on the list is because that reference is linked in an extremely unusual way; I've manually removed him from the list and am currently working to determine whether the problem applies to any other members of the list. BilledMammal (talk) 08:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Thanks for that. Things like this are part of the reason I'd rather tag for a period so that things can be checked. I suspect there may be a handful of others. Blue Square Thing (talk) 09:36, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Fixed. Six articles were on the list incorrectly and have now been removed. If I can work out how to have the template display a different message in main space than it does in draft space I don't mind leaving the articles in main space for a week after adding the template before moving them to draft space. BilledMammal (talk) 10:16, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support Extraordinary situations require extraordinary solutions. This 1,200 is only a mere subset of Lugnuts' work, and certainly among the least developed. Put them in draft space where they can either be incubated or ultimately removed. -Indy beetle (talk) 08:44, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support, per Indy beetle.—S Marshall T/C 09:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose any thinking that begins with an artificial sense of urgency, or claims that We also cannot leave the articles as are (we absolutely can; you just don't want us to), so we must do something right now. Don't just stand there, do something! (Except for genuinely trying to expand and source any of the articles yourself. People might discover that it was possible, and we can't have that, because it would interfere with our deletion goals.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 11:20, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  A very good point this, thanks for bringing it up. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:15, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Since posting this, I asked a website for a random number (3 out of 10), went 30% of the way down the hidden list above, and found Anwell Newman. I don't know anything about cricket, and I've never heard of this person, but in a little more than an hour, I'd turned the article into a decent start that cites half a dozen recent news sources and learned something about the apartheid era in cricket and discovered that veterans leagues are a thing, even though we don't have an article about Veterans cricket.

  I've obviously got no way to know whether this is just randomly the only one in the entire list that could be expanded, but I doubt it, because it was a randomly selected article that I know absolutely nothing about. This confirms my feeling that the "problem" here is Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions#Nobody's working on it (or impatience with improvement) rather than an actual problem with the article (which was 100% accurate, BTW). IMO m:Immediatism is a more honorable philosophy when you're willing to roll up your sleeves and do the work, rather than hiding accurate information from readers because nobody else WP:VOLUNTEERed to do the work on your schedule. WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:45, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  People might discover that it was possible, and we can't have that, because it would interfere with our deletion goals. That is a bizarre statement. Of course it is possible; if it wasn't we would be proposing deletion, rather than draftification. The issue is distinguishing between the minority that it is possible to expand from the majority that aren't, and handling said majority in a way that doesn't consume a disproportionate amount of the communities time. BilledMammal (talk) 13:00, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Keep or Delete Draftifying this many articles is like stuffing your mess inside a closet —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:14, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  No it isn't, it is making order in the main space and leaving what possibly still needs grow in draft space. The articles will likely only get expanded them if they are threatened in some way either by drafitifcation or deletion. They didn't get expanded until now, yet they (I believe mostly) exist since years. And if they get nominated one by one, the vast majority gets deleted or redirected in my experience.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 16:30, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  I doubt they will get touched at all in draftspace. Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 13:00, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support, reluctantly - I just tried to rescue seven articles at random using relatively basic internet searches and went 0-for-7. I'm sure we're going to overlook at least one actually notable cricketer, but those articles can be re-created. SportingFlyer T·C 12:29, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  @SportingFlyer, I'm 1-for-1, with a randomly selected article. Would you like to post the names of the seven you looked at? Maybe someone else would like to have a go at them (or to make sure that they're looking at different ones). WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:52, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  @WhatamIdoing: I searched for Aaqib Khan, Akoijam Tenyson Singh, Alfred Browne (cricketer), Alexander Robinson (cricketer, born 1924), Alexander Slight, Alfred Carlton, and Brian Murphy (Jamaican cricketer), and I just now searched for Dennis Thorbourne. I would send them all to AfD if this is opposed. SportingFlyer T·C 17:35, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  I should also note my WP:BEFORE was cursory enough - two searches per person - but the only hits I could find were for database sources, or for other people with the same name, with the exception of Alfred Browne who is related to another, more famous cricketer. SportingFlyer T·C 17:36, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  I had no luck with regular web searches, as the top hits were all duplicative databases. I had better luck with news-specific searches. For your first, I see a description of him as a 17-year-old right-arm medium-pacer and another called him a young right-arm seamer (I don't know what that means, but I assume it means something. I also don't know what it means if someone pulled medium-pacer Aaqib Khan to deep fine-leg – the jargon here is deep). He was included in a list of youngest players,[1] and I'm pretty sure that this gives his recent salary, or at least something like it. He's Muslim.[2]

  But it turned out that what we really needed was the Hindi-language newspapers. The transliteration of his name is आकिब खान, and with that, you can ask your favorite search engine to look for non-English sources. For example, in the third-biggest daily newspaper in the largest country in the world, there are three sources that handle SIGCOV issues pretty nicely: https://www.livehindustan.com/uttar-pradesh/saharanpur/story-aaqib-khan-of-saharanpur-selected-in-under-19-india-team-2870012.html looks like a couple hundred words about his childhood and becoming a professional cricketer. https://www.livehindustan.com/uttar-pradesh/saharanpur/story-aaqib-of-saharanpur-is-ready-to-play-against-afghanistan-2871651.html is even longer and gives his parents names and professions and says he's the first from his town to be chosen for the Under-19's team. https://www-livehindustan-com.translate.goog/uttar-pradesh/saharanpur/story-aaqib-khan-selected-for-practice-bowler-in-mumbai-indians-3935545.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp announces him being selected as (what machine translation calls) a "practice bowler" with (what I'm guessing is) a professional team.

  Machine translation isn't great for Hindi, but I don't think we need a perfect translation to discover that these three news articles alone count as that ideal for the GNG, "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:27, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  @WhatamIdoing - I've been in way too many AfD discussions where someone searches up the romanized version of someone's name and says "there's no coverage on this person". Then, when you search their name in their native language, a lot more results start popping up. It's a major problem on this website and I do hope something is done about it in the future. It'd be like searching Tom Brady in Bhojpuri and claiming he's not notable because no results pop-up.KatoKungLee (talk) 15:29, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Off topic, but I think it is worth considering adding a transliteration tool to Template:Find sources AFD, at least for articles with Category:AfD debates (Biographical). The issue is that editors don't think to search for their native name, particularily when it isn't included in the article; including such a tool in that template might provide the subtle hint necessary to boost the rate of searches for that name. If you open a discussion about that somewhere, please ping me; I would be interested in participating. BilledMammal (talk) 15:41, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  @KatoKungLee, it would probably help if the articles consistently provided the local/original spelling for people's names. Most of us can copy/paste into a search engine, but fewer can figure out the relevant languages and make the transliteration. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:57, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I'd support that, @BilledMammal, but it could be extended to a lot more than BLPs. A very common issue I encounter is with foods/dishes. I've seen foods that were considered national or regional dishes not show up in romanized searches and have had to resort to using google translate to convert the English rendering back into the native language, which is also iffy. It's particularly a concern for places like India, where most regional dishes will have renderings in at least two languages. Valereee (talk) 13:32, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  The first and third articles are routine transactional news that mostly contain reports of what people affiliated with him said/thought, not independent commentary. The second piece seems to be an expansion on the first piece, despite being published before. It's also under the stricter provisions of YOUNGATH and so unlikely to count towards notability at all. JoelleJay (talk) 23:14, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support largely per my comment at the last RfC. If someone spends a few moments doing something mildly disruptive we should not be afraid to undue it – even if it's a page creation, even if they did it 1200 times. If someone finds a cache of sources and wants to create a well-sourced article on any of these cricketers, the existing articles would be of no help whatsoever. Ajpolino (talk) 12:46, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  I just expanded one, and that was not my experience. I specifically found three bits of information to be useful: the team he played for, his birth date (because Cricket World Cup is "50-over" tournament, and I spent a long time trying to figure out whether the "Over-50's Cricket World Cup" was the same thing or if it referred to the age of the players), and the year that he started playing first-class matches (so I could make sure that an article about his second career was the same person). WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Removed Anwell Newman, thank you for expanding it. That information is easily available in database sources; us mirroring said sources doesn't make it easier to write articles. BilledMammal (talk) 12:57, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Generally, when someone says that they found ______ easier than the alternatives, you should probably believe them. I personally found that it was easier for me to expand the article when that information was right there in front of me than if I had to do the extra work of looking it up on a different website.

  More generally, if you genuinely believe that you know more about my personal experience than I do, then the world needs you to consider a different hobby. Mindreading comes to mind; you might be the first person in history to actually be able to do it. Otherwise, please don't tell me that I don't know what was easier for me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:44, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  I picked three arbitrarily: David Mailer, Craig Marais (cricketer), and Chengkam Sangma. I personally did not find the existing articles helpful as they restate what's available at ESPNCricInfo, which is also the first Google hit when I search them. I used Google and TWL's Gale and EBSCO subscriptions with a handful of keywords (team name, approximate dates, etc.) and couldn't find any real coverage. I did find Mailer's obit which doesn't give much more to go off of. Just snippets of routine match coverage for the others (both of whom are still alive, best I can tell). Now I don't have the deepest confidence in my ability to dig up source material on cricketers, but my poking around plus the criteria for the article selection make me think these articles are mirrors of database content on topics that don't meet GNG. As for dealing with them en masse, my thoughts align with GreenC's below. Ajpolino (talk) 16:22, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Looking at your first in TWL's NewspaperArchive.com, I find 159 records for David Mailer from 1874–1937 in Australia. I'm having trouble reading the fine print, but it's possible that there is something useful in there. The obit, which looks written by the newspaper rather than a paid advertisement, would support a sentence about a post-cricket career of grazier, and to say that he was married but had no offspring. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:15, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Noting I've conducted my own search on Mailer and I found decent sources on Trove, a free Australian newspaper archive. Most coverage was under "Dave" rather than "David". – Teratix ₵ 05:56, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support per my general support for reducing the number of short stubs unlikely to ever be significantly expanded. - Donald Albury 12:55, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose - "Lugnuts didn't take his time creating these, so why should we" is an entirely valid feeling. I found Lugnuts frustrating, too, and nobody is going to be forced to improve these articles or spend any time on them. It does not, however, create any urgency to [not just ignore but] delete them. None of these articles have been evaluated for notability. None of these articles have been evaluated for quality. It's use of draftspace to circumvent the deletion process (see WP:DRAFTIFY), and based entirely on metadata rather than anything to do with article subjects. I would support mass deletion of any stubs created after consensus formed that it's not ok to mass create articles based on databases. No need for draftification there. For articles created before that, though, it just seems vindictive. The articles aren't policy violations; there's no emergency that demands they be dealt with. If you're still feeling resentment towards Lugnuts, perhaps take comfort in the knowledge that he can no longer create articles at all, and then find something totally different to work on. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 13:03, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Problem is, there are still getting created numerous articles on autopatrolled only sourced to dependent databases. There needs to be some solution for that, and draftifying such articles seems an acceptable one for me.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 16:36, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose - For several reasons:

  1) The Olympian draftifcation had multiple articles on there that were drafted erroneously like Addin Tyldesley and we already have spotted articles that don't belong there with this one. How many errors are going to be in this list? Nobody knows or cares. Why does getting articles drafted supercede drafting articles correctly? WP:NORUSH. Mass-creating and mass-drafting articles seems to be two sides of the same coin.

  2) Deleting large batches of articles is obviously not encyclopedia building behavior. These articles do no harm to anyone by being here and many of them may be able to be expanded and improved. Drafting them makes them less likely to be improved.

  3) WP:BIAS and WP:SBEXT plays a role here. We do not have access to the informational resources of various countries in the Middle East and Oceania, which limits research. Even if we did, being able to read other languages is yet another hurdle. We also know the English speaking media has generally little interest in non-political topics from these places.

  4) Lugnuts does not WP:OWN any articles, yet he keeps being mentioned. He has nothing to do with this and should not be mentioned. Articles with limited information or sources is a collective failure.

  5) The wikipedia notability rules were followed at the time of the creation of these articles. The notability rules were then changed and likely will be changed again in the future due to situations like this. It is asking a lot of articles to not only follow current rules, but follow future rules that do not currently exist and/or may only temporarily exist.KatoKungLee (talk) 13:44, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support For the same reason I supported the olympian draftification. To the contrary of the poster above, an article failing current notability rules is an excellent reason to delete it. Old articles are not exempted from the current notability rules. (t · c) buidhe 14:09, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • an article failing current notability rules - Do these? This is a list based on article creator + size + current sourcing, not notability. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:35, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

    @Rhododendrites: I think most of these fail WP:GNG, and all of them fail WP:GNG "on their face." They did not fail the guideline at the time because it was not tailored to GNG. The alternative is going through and searching for sources for every single one of these to see if they can be expanded, which is frustrating, given how little effort was put into their creation. SportingFlyer T·C 17:39, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Alternative, First put them all in a maintenance category, if not already in one, so they can easily be found and identified. Merge and redirect wherever reasonably practicable. Most can probably find a home in a list or other article where they should have been in the first place. Apart from saving information, this might show people that it is better to put the information into an existing article if it is so sparse, and split it out when there is enough to be worth the trouble. Any that are unsuitable for a merge and redirect should probably be deleted. Any that are still not merged or improved can be relisted after a year or so. Maybe someone can write a script for doing this quickly. If anyone wants to make a real article from any of them they can do it any time. Hiding them in draft space without an action plan is unlikely to save anything in the long run. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 14:12, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  I would say this is feasible but the absolute lack of progress on almost every maintenance project means that the burden falls on a very very small subset of editors, who frankly have dwindling patience to clean up other people's messes. Sennecaster (Chat) Sennecaster (Chat) 15:47, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Pbsouthwood: See this discussion that I just opened at BOTN; note that it doesn't just cover articles that this process would apply to as I didn't see the need to limit the application of maintenance tags in that way - in other words, just because an article is on that list doesn't mean it would ever be proposed to be draftified under this process. BilledMammal (talk) 17:51, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support but I think the idea Peter Southwood presents may be a good step 1: tag all those proposed into a maintenance cat, and then re-notify the appropriate projects that these will be draftified in, say, 6 months unless there is significant improvement on them, and then follow the steps above. This should allow those that are easily proven notable to be taken out of the cat, or catch errors, so that there is far less bemoaning when the draftication happens. --Masem (t) 14:20, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  I think this is a better idea. Maybe give it a year and put up a notification on each categorised page. SportingFlyer T·C 17:40, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. This is such a terrible, terrible, really bad idea. To start, I want to let anyone thinking of voting here know that if this passes, BilledMammal will continue with several others every few months, until we've backdoor-deleted tens-to-hundreds of thousands of historical athletes and wasted enormous quantities of editor time. Is that really what makes the encyclopedia better? Now, for my reasons to oppose: many of my previous points at the Olympian discussion also apply here:
  • Mass draftification is not the right approach for potentially non-notable articles. For one, it actually violates policy; WP:DRAFTIFY specifically states "Older articles should not be draftified. As a rule of thumb, articles older than 90 days should not be draftified without prior consensus at AfD." These articles are much older than 90 days, and this is not AfD. And it also states that it is not intended as a backdoor to deletion: this is effectively what this proposal is. Additionally, there are many more appropriate and more beneficial to the encyclopedia ways that these could be dealt with—for example, BilledMammal (the proposer) made the template Template:No significant coverage (sports) for the sole reason that articles would not have to be mass deleted (–BilledMammal: "I've created Template:No significant coverage (sports) to give editors an alternative to immediately [removing from mainspace] articles lacking significant coverage.") You could nominate the articles for deletion at AfD, PROD them, redirect them, or, my favorite, expand them.
  • Many of these are notable and can be expanded. I admit that, unlike the Olympian discussion, I know nothing of cricket and am not great and finding sources for such articles, but I've seen users like Blue Squared Thing doing expansion after expansion after expansion to these articles before and after the discussion started. That clearly shows these are often notable and have the potential to be expanded.
  • There is no wrong in keeping these. Unlike the deletionists seem to argue, the encyclopedia is not harmed in any way by the inclusion of stub articles. It is harmed, however, in my opinion by discussions like these which waste enormous quantities of editor time and result in the mass backdoor-deletion (specifically against policy) of enormous amounts of potentially notable articles. Explain in what way is Wikipedia made better by getting rid of notable articles (even if those articles are stubs)—would you rather have short articles on people you're interested in, or nothing at all?
• I could argue more but I am too tired to. BeanieFan11 (talk) 14:56, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  For one, it actually violates policy; WP:DRAFTIFY specifically states... WP:DRAFTIFY is an essay, not policy. Further, the section you are referring to, WP:DRAFTIFY#During new page review, isn't discussing draftification generally, but draftification during new page review. BilledMammal (talk) 15:19, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  The section is irrelevant—it still states that. But if you want a policy, see here: Incubation must not be used as a "backdoor to deletion". BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:22, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  It isn't being used as a backdoor to deletion; above, KatoKungLee gave an example of a Olympian from the previous RfC who has been improved and returned to mainspace, and you improved and restored Gyula Iványi - I see I made a few small edits to that one as well.

  It is being used to incubate the articles, so that those that are improvable can be improved and returned to mainspace. BilledMammal (talk) 15:43, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  It isn't being used as a backdoor to deletion; above, KatoKungLee gave an example of a Olympian from the previous RfC who has been improved and returned to mainspace, and you improved and restored Gyula Iványi - I see I made a few small edits to that one as well. – You're avoiding the 1,000 others that have not been improved... not to mention when I improved Gyula you and S Marshall tried really hard to delete it BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:49, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  You're avoiding the 1,000 others that have not been improved... We have five years to improve those articles. Of course, many can't be and in time will be deleted, but that is the purpose of this proposal; it is to give us time to sift through these microstubs that were dumped on the encyclopedia and improve the ones that are suitable and delete the ones that aren't without overloading processes like AfD. The fact that some have already been improved and restored to mainspace is proof that this isn't a backdoor to deletion.

  not to mention when I improved Gyula you and S Marshall tried really hard to delete it At an AfD where after you and I collaborated to find a reliable source I !voted keep, a position that S Marshall concurred with BilledMammal (talk) 16:20, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  The fact that some have already been improved and restored to mainspace is proof that this isn't a backdoor to deletion. Er... no. The fact that 2/1000 (0.2%) of the articles (of which, a much, much larger proportion are notable) were saved is not. at. all. proof that this isn't a backdoor to deletion. At an AfD where after you and I collaborated to find a reliable source I !voted keep, a position that S Marshall concurred with – Of course, after you initially voted delete and over an hour and a half of arguing about whether the sources were good enough switched to "keep" BeanieFan11 (talk) 16:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Bringing articles to AfD is incredibly time-consuming. Multiple editors have to weigh in and do their due diligence in searching for sources to argue for or against notability (or whatever grounds the article is nominated for). Then there are debates which can just be so energy-draining. And hundreds of articles are sent to AfD a week. If notability were to be challenged on every single one here, that would take time and energy away from other deletion discussions. Doing it in bulk like this, while takes a month and a hundred-plus editors, takes far less time and editors' hours overall. SWinxy (talk) 01:03, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Where did I say AfD is the only option? BeanieFan11 (talk) 01:06, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support - Best route to go. GoodDay (talk) 15:06, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose per WhatAmIDoing.  Spy-cicle💥  ^Talk? 15:08, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support It is clear that microstubs with insiginificant database sources are unacceptable. If you think some of these are notable and can be expanded, then no one's stopping you. But the interpretation that playing a single game of sport means you are automatically notable here and exempt from sourcing requirements is wrong and outdated. Bulk draftification is absolutely an appropriate response to recognizing that these articles are simply not ready for mainspace, and I believe the impossiblity of sorting though Lugnuts's mass-creation individually justifies an extension of the rule of thumb regarding article age. Reywas92^Talk 15:15, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose I thank BilledMammal for the courtesy ping. I don't like the idea of hiding the intent to mass delete these articles. Delaying a mass deletion by 5 years is still a mass deletion, I think we're be better off with a more honest proposal to massively delete them on a more immediate time scale. I also am concerned that these files affected would be disproportionately be of Indian, South African, and Sri Lankan athletes where Wikipedia already has an Anglo-American skew, and this proposal would have the disparate impact of making that issue worse. I also don't like that this proposal seems to be a punitive one aimed at Lugnuts. I admit that I personally don't like that Lugnuts took no care in creating or maintaining the articles that they created. I also definitely sympathize with those who do the work of curating Wikipedia and the kind of mess that we've inherited from Lugnuts's negligence. Abzeronow (talk) 15:33, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose I am opposing this for the reasons I opposed the Olympic one, although this one is even easier to expand the articles on because some are actually around recently enough to have digital coverage! QuicoleJR (talk) 15:45, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Upon further inspection, many of these are not notable, and I have struggled to find sources online. I still do not feel comfortable supporting, but I am moving to Neutral. QuicoleJR (talk) 17:28, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support - As I commented in the original WP:LUGSTUBS RFC: It's clear that some kind of cleanup is required, and increasing AfD workload by something like half for literal years simply cannot be the only solution. The proposed extremely extended draftification seems like a suitably conservative approach (to the point that I'm not sure five years is truly required), giving editors plenty of time rescue any articles that warrant rescuing while ensuring that (most of) those which do not warrant retaining are eventually (even if after an extensive wait) removed. -Ljleppan (talk) 16:06, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose as an obvious backdoor to deletion. And quite frankly, anyone who doesn't think that mass draftification won't hit their editing area of choice sooner or later is naive. --Rschen7754 16:07, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  If my area of editing had a mess like this, I would be ashamed of it and first in line to get it cleaned out. This philosophy of "everything related to my area of editing should automatically warrant its own article without regard for high quality sources" just creates a mess that other users then have to clean up, and I'm glad to see that it's getting shot down more and more frequently. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:08, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  You seem to forget that we are all volunteers with other things to do besides Wikipedia, and as others have commented re the last RFC, "improving" an articles is often not sufficient to get it to be kept. Rschen7754 01:55, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose per Rschen7754. Obvious backdoor to deletion. Where does it end? LEPRICAVARK (talk) 16:30, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose - Thanks for the notification; my stance has not changed. I oppose the mass deletion of articles whether it is explicit or via a backdoor, and whether it is done immediately or boiling frog-style. The latter is more insidious, though; per David Eppstein's comment from the original proposal: (I oppose this) not so much because I care about these Olympian sub-stubs, but because I do care about WP:CREEP and about not expanding the already-problematic process of using draftification as a way of getting rid of articles for which there is no immediate prospect of active improvement and resubmission. Regardless of whether the gotten-rid-of-articles are deleted from draftspace or just left there to molder forever, they have been eliminated out-of-process as Wikipedia content, debasing both our proper deletion processes and our proper use of draftspace to foster drafts. I also oppose -- as strongly as it is possible to oppose something -- the continued personal insults toward Lugnuts that seem to crop up in every single one of these things. WP:CIVIL is a policy. Gnomingstuff (talk) 16:33, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose: Other editors have addressed several cogent policy concerns, and @WhatamIdoing has demonstrated that at least one of the cricketers listed meets WP:GNG or WP:ATHLETE. My concern is more procedural. Rather than having deletion discussions every few months to deal with Lugnut's work, time might be better spent organizing with the relevant WikiProjects to systematically review articles for notability and only then nominating verified non-notable articles for mass deletion (or PRODing individual articles as articles are evaluated). There's no reason to give other editors five years to fix things; the community should start that work now. voorts (talk/contributions) 17:11, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  These have already been around for years, clearly no one really cares to systematically review them and it seems disingenuous to think someone will actually get through tens of thousands of these. If people do in fact care to sift through all of them, they can from draftspace as well. Reywas92^Talk 19:47, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• 'Oppose per Rschen7754 and also... they aren't great, but it isn't really a crisis, is it? Let them simmer in the big pot of mainspace a while, the flavour will probably improve; no need to kick them back onto the cutting board (draftspace). Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 17:23, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Edward-Woodrow I don't have an opinion on this proposal, but I've found that the attitude of Let them simmer in the big pot of mainspace a while tends to end up with poor quality articles not being improved at all. They tend to be improved when there's a time limit. This is why people who participate at AfD discussions tend to be sensitive about AfD being used as a method of improving articles articles instead of exploring whether or not articles need to be deleted. (Summoned by bot) I dream of horses ^{(Contribs) (Talk)} 18:14, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  @I dream of horses: The thing is when someone proposes so. many. articles. to be draftifed, and after that, so. many. more. articles, to the point that there's tens of thousands of articles in draftspace that will soon be deleted, there's gonna be a whole lot of improvable articles being removed through the backdoor. BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:23, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  @BeanieFan11 Unfortunately, mass-direct-deletion will cause more controversy, to such a degree that it's not going to happen. I dream of horses ^{(Contribs) (Talk)} 20:11, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  a whole lot of improvable articles being removed through the backdoor. Exactly. Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 17:21, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Most of these have already been simmering for many years...there's a reason they haven't been expanded already and a reason it only took mass-creation to write them, these simply are not notable people needing articles. Reywas92^Talk 19:35, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support the solution to mass-X is mass-Y. Nothing wrong with this method it's a measured response to a previous action. Slippery slope fear mongering presented by Rschen7754 is a logical fallacy aka appeal to fear ("mass draftification won't hit their editing area of choice sooner or later is naive"). -- GreenC 17:47, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  For the record, BilledMammal has not left the option of expanding this to other articles off the table, albeit admitting: If we ever go down that path we'll need a tool more powerful than Quarry to build the list.. While this is a hypothetical, they have stated as a concrete idea: While I don't plan to include creations by multiple editors in the same group, consideration has been given to creating groups of mass created cricketers made by other editors, such as BlackJack. You can read the full discussion here, although it's understandable you weren't aware of it since it wasn't made public in this RfC. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:27, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  He does seem to want to go after others, see his comment there: However, I do want to use this group to stretch the boundaries of what the process can be used for; in it I want to do at least some of the following: Change the article selection criteria, to avoid the specific values of the first group becoming a standard part of the process; Nominate articles created by editors other than Lugnuts, to avoid the process becoming a "Lugnuts cleanup process"; Nominate articles on topics outside the sports topic area - or at least the Olympics topic area - to avoid the process becoming a "sports cleanup process"; [and] Nominate a larger number of articles, to avoid the process being limited to ~1000 article batches BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Yes; I have considered other groups of mass created articles, such as those created by BlackJack. I would agree that there isn't a slippery slope here though, as it will only ever apply to groups of mass created articles that don't include any significant coverage. BilledMammal (talk) 18:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  You go look at User talk:BilledMammal/Mass Creation Draftification - where one proposal said Nominate articles on topics outside the sports topic area - or at least the Olympics topic area - to avoid the process becoming a "sports cleanup process". Please tell me how it is supposed to only apply to sports. --Rschen7754 20:43, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support We've long since discussed this repeatedly at this point and it relates back to many other discussions the community has already had, including making NSPORT explicitly clear that all sports related biographies must meet the GNG when challenged. The alternative to draftification here is outright deleting all of these articles, which I would also support, because the vast, vast majority of them are non-notable athletes who should have never had pages made on them in the first place. And any who are notable can very easily be recreated, considering the existing micro-stubs pinned only to database entries are tantamount to not having an article at all in the first place with how useless they are. Any sports Wikiproject editors above should probably focus on actually having good properly referenced articles on athletes in the first place, rather than complaining after the fact. The former should have been your requirement from the get-go and y'all should have challenged Lugnuts on their mass creation right when it started. Then we wouldn't have a mess to clean up at all. Silverseren^C 17:59, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • And any who are notable can very easily be recreated ... Any sports Wikiproject editors above should probably focus on actually having good properly referenced articles on athletes in the first place – Silver seren, do you know how difficult it is to write a properly referenced decent-sized article on a historical athlete? To find the sources, read them all, rephrase them and write them in the article - to add the references, do all the formatting, etc.? It often takes me hours to do that and in some cases (e.g. Draft:C. O. Brocato, my current project) days. You think us "sports Wikiproject editors" can "very easily" do that to tens of thousands of articles, with the consequence mass deletion if we do not? BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:41, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    • Not what I said at all. I said the Wikiproject should have prevented the mass creation done in the first place (and should be actively preventing any such creation going on right now without proper referencing). Draftification is a very minor consequence, compared to deletion, of this mass creation of improperly made articles that should have been dealt with years ago. Silverseren^C 18:48, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

      Draftification results in deletion, so it is exactly the same consequence as deletion. The proposal here is not materially different from saying "I'm going to delete this unless you do a lot of work on my timeline". The timeline might sound generous to some editors – the proposal is ultimately to require the clean up of an average of two articles about cricketers every day for the next five years (plus one article about early Olympiads, plus who knows how many others will be proposed in the coming weeks), but it is still a proposal to delete them if people don't do the work on his timeline. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

      Is it better to send cricketer after cricketer to AfD individually, though? SportingFlyer T·C 21:40, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

      @SportingFlyer - Mass drafting articles is no different than mass creating articles. In both cases, the person behind it didn't feel like putting in the time (despite WP:NORUSH existing) to research the article due to time concerns.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:19, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

      Yes, but most of these wouldn't survive an AfD, and the alternative - if this fails - is to AfD them one by one. SportingFlyer T·C 18:41, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

      We don't know that most of these wouldn't survive an AfD. We have editors asserting their preferences with no proof.

      So far, I've looked into three of the players proposed for deletion-via-draft, and I've found newspaper articles (articles entirely and specifically focused on each individual, not just a sentence in an article that's really about a game they played in or a list of team members) for all three of them. For two out of the three, a bit more than an hour's work (each) showed that the subjects are clearly notable, and for the third, 10 minutes' work showed that it was at least possible that he's notable.

      Where's your evidence that what's true for these three would not also be true for the next three, or for the next 300? WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:08, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support Such sloppy articles written by a condemnable fan don't deserve space on this wiki. Either an editor performs research and writes about notable subjects or they can leave this website. I, for one, enjoy seeing the political winds turn as we become more exclusionist. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:03, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  And here's those violations of WP:CIVIL I mentioned above. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose, all I have to say has been summed up pretty well by BeanieFan11: if this passes, BilledMammal will continue with several others every few months, until we've backdoor-deleted tens-to-hundreds of thousands of historical athletes and wasted enormous quantities of editor time. LilianaUwU ^{(talk / contributions)} 18:47, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Okay, so let's clear out more of Lugnuts's junk all at once. Reywas92^Talk 19:36, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support per Silver seren and others, but 5 years is way too long for them to sit in Draft space before deletion. I would prefer 1 year. Nosferattus (talk) 19:08, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support. Not convinced by the oppose arguments. There's no slippery slope that'll come for your WikiProject next. These were mass-creations straight from databases. When a user (DG) had systemic reliability issues in GAs, the presumption was to delete-by-default and rescue on a case-by-case basis. This one is about a user with systemic issues re: notability, and the logical response is the same as for DG. If this were a WikiProject I'm a member of and have to deal with the maintenance burden of, I'd have opposed these mass-creations from the start, and I'd now be screaming on rooftops for them to be draftified. What exactly are we here to do, except build good, minimum-medium-length articles on notable topics? Microstubs aren't fine to keep around indefinitely, they're an anomaly to be eventually eliminated; they don't provide encyclopedic coverage and go against the first pillar and WP:NOT. Non-notable articles must eventually be deleted, so to keep them around is to require editors to eventually go through each and decide whether to merge, redirect, or delete. We're talking many thousands of articles, and this unequivocally creates a huge maintenance burden, for articles that no one is reading. When someone created them with only minutes of effort, and even claiming that he inserted false statements into the microstube, that's disruption, and the best response is to mass-draftify. Not just these, but every single Lugnuts microstub sourced exclusively to databases. That's what we should have decided back when Lugnuts was banned, and it's really too bad we're now seeing "RfC fatigue" on this issue.
  By the way, are we supposed to completely disregard WP:SPORTBASIC #5, which was added after strong agreement at a well-attended RfC? The real "back door" is stealth-overriding that RfC outcome, not back-door deletionism. These articles must cite a non-database SIGCOV source inline; "the sources exist" is irrelevant. DFlhb (talk) 19:16, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose We thankfully have very guidelines guidelines for Cricket player notability. It states that "cricketers who have played at the highest domestic level, or in the lower levels of international cricket,[a] may have sufficient coverage about them to justify an article". I examined a random subset of these articles, and they are clearly articles that by and large fall within this gray area of potentially notable depending on source material. Just because the stub uses 1-2 sources today doesn't mean they don't exist, we have to take each article on its own and edit it. Given that there is no deadline, mass draft-fying these is basically backdoor deletion, which is against deletion policy. Steven Walling • talk 19:31, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Scroll up a bit on that page, which says "In addition, the subjects of standalone articles should meet the general notability guideline." as well as "Trivial coverage of a subject by secondary sources may be used to support content in an article, but it is not sufficient to establish notability. This includes listings in database sources with low, wide-sweeping generic standards of inclusion, such as Sports Reference's college football and basketball databases." and "Sports biographies must include at least one reference to a source providing significant coverage of the subject, excluding database sources. Meeting this requirement alone does not indicate notability, but it does indicate that there are likely sufficient sources to merit a stand-alone article." These pages do not meet this standard and should be out of mainspace if they aren't shown to do so with significant coverage. "May have sufficient coverage" does not mean "must have an article". Reywas92^Talk 19:41, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  The fundamental problem with this proposal is that it's trying to impose a WP:DEADLINE on improving them. Other people must meet my deadline because I don't like the current state of these articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:16, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  Any editor can challenge the notability of articles and sent them to AfD without improving them, whenever he wishes. If a rule prohibiting "deadlines" existed, it would be impossible to delete non-notable articles altogether. Avilich (talk) 21:19, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  This isn't AFD though, it's a proposal to generate a backdoor to deletion which is explicitly against our deletion policy.

  BilledMammal is doing this because they know that mass AFDs would never pass, but they can pretend each draft will get considered before being eventually deleted. (struck per my comment elsewhere) The policy is against draftifying older articles because everyone knows it means putting them in a graveyard no one will ever see. Steven Walling • talk 01:54, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  BilledMammal is doing this because they know that mass AFDs would never pass, but they can pretend each draft will get considered before being eventually deleted. That's an WP:AGF violation. Please strike it.

  The policy is against draftifying older articles because everyone knows it means putting them in a graveyard no one will ever see. Policy is against draftifying older articles without consensus. This is an extremely prominent discussion; the notion that we are quietly slipping them into a graveyard without anyone seeing is bizarre. Further, if there is a consensus for this I will be providing lists of articles to the relevant Wikiprojects. BilledMammal (talk) 10:31, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Steven Walling, I have to agree, you should strike that. Valereee (talk) 10:35, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  I'm not striking anything. "This guideline does not require that editors continue to assume good faith in the presence of obvious evidence to the contrary".

  The last RFC close clearly noted that there were many members of the community that objected to using a Village Pump survey to circumvent normal deletion processes and policy. Ignoring this objection and presuming that the first RFC close creates a precedent as if it were an approved policy or guideline is an obvious pattern of behavior, and BilledMammal has numerous user pages (like User:BilledMammal/Sander.v.Ginkel Olympian stubs) that show an intent to keep trying to use this polling tactic to remove stubs from mainspace as a form of backdoor deletion for which there is no support in policy. Steven Walling • talk 22:09, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Steven Walling, please indicate what constitutes obvious evidence. What you've described is opinion. Valereee (talk) 22:46, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  Here's the problem: is doing this because they know that mass AFDs would never pass, but they can pretend each draft will get considered before being eventually deleted is assuming bad faith. You are discussing motivations rather than edits. That's a problem. Valereee (talk) 22:55, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  BilledMammal has a long history of nominating sports bios at AFD. Here is just a sample. One time they nominated dozens of footballers in one day, which resulted in an ANI thread where at the end of it they explicitly declared they were going to go around trying to stop people from creating large numbers of stubs. This notion was discussed and roundly rejected at an ArbCom-mandated RFC. So next they proposed WP:LUGSTUBS and all the potential next polls they want to run. I'm sure they think they're trying to improve the encyclopedia, but don't tell me it's not obvious they don't want these stubs deleted, because they've done so directly in the past. Steven Walling • talk 00:44, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

  Dozens of editors have a "long history of nominating sports bios at AfD". This is because there have been tens of thousands of sports bios that do not meet GNG. BilledMammal has also redirected a very large number of sportsperson articles that objectively fail SPORTSCRIT, rather than trying to get them deleted. And a non-trivial number of the articles he successfully AfD'd were only taken there after his redirects were reverted without the page being improved. So no it is not "obvious" he or anyone else supporting this proposal wants the stubs deleted as opposed to simply moved out of mainspace until they comply with guideline requirements. JoelleJay (talk) 01:12, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Steven Walling, In the link you provided Billed Mammal says, To prevent the problem of mass created articles from expanding I have also been looking at editors currently engaged in mass creations and asking them to determine if there is a community consensus for the actions. In some cases, this may be forthcoming; in others it might not.

  Today, one of these editors was kind enough to do so, and has opened a discussion at the bots noticeboard. Interested editors may contribute to this test case there. Note that this discussion should focus solely on content, not conduct; the editor is clearly acting in good faith and has done nothing wrong, even if there isn't a consensus for this mass creation. There, BilledMammal seems to simply object to mass creations that don't have consensus; nothing there that provides evidence of nefarious motivations. The ANI you're linking to found that All WP:MASSCREATEd articles (except those not required to meet GNG) must be cited to at least one source which would plausibly contribute to GNG: that is, which constitutes significant coverage in an independent reliable secondary source. Again there is nothing that provides evidence of Billed Mammal's motivations. I feel a little uncomfortable having to explain to an admin the difference between discussing edits and discussing bad-faith motivations, especially when that admin keeps doubling down. You got it right when you said I'm sure they think they're trying to improve the encyclopedia, but you got it wrong when you said is doing this because they know that mass AFDs would never pass, but they can pretend each draft will get considered before being eventually deleted, and if you can't tell the difference, there's a problem. Valereee (talk) 09:58, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

  So @Steven Walling, this is a no? Valereee (talk) 22:30, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

  Valereee: I'm not going to argue in circles with you about this. It's painfully obvious from BilledMammal's actions that they're on a mission to remove mass numbers of stubs from Wikipedia in any way they can. If you can't see that something is a duck when it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I can't help you. Steven Walling • talk 05:02, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support For at least 10 years the instructions at WP:NSPORT have been that "The topic-specific notability guidelines described on this page do not replace the general notability guideline" and "the article must still eventually provide sources indicating that the subject meets the general notability guideline". The bulk of the articles nominated here were clearly created in violation of that. There is no evidence that this is a "backdoor to deletion", since this RfC is being broadcasted through the front door in a community forum, and the whole argument just sounds like obstructionism and stonewalling. Avilich (talk) 20:37, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Comment - the established, consensus position when top-level cricketer articles which can't be improved come to AfD is that redirection to a suitable list is the preferred alternative. Sometimes lists don't exist so we delete (or some mug goes and creates the list). Sometimes people have created articles on cricketers that have not played at the top-level and we delete those.
  There are something like 573 articles listed below that BilledMammal is prepared to redirect to straight away - these were the easy ones to identify. They provided me with a list of 625 other articles (which, annoyingly, is two short of 1,200). I've been through those. I think something like 306 have suitable redirect targets. That would leave 319 to send to draft (list at User:Blue Square Thing/sandbox7 - where there will be some notes about this eventually because the geography is interesting).
  Honestly, that seems about right. **If** we're redirecting the 573+306, then I'm not that unhappy about drafting the others. To be honest, I could probably identify 15 or so that should be flat out deletes. I'm sure we'll have ended up missing some we'd want to keep - but people can work those up anyway if they want to.
  I think the first thing to do is to confirm that we're looking at redirecting almost 75% of these. If that's OK, then I could probably get on board with this despite my general reservations Blue Square Thing (talk) 21:04, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Comment - this is going to sound really lame but I'll end up supporting whatever @Blue Square Thing decides. I don't think I've ever made a statement like this at an RfC or RfA. I know Blue Square Thing's been looking at this issue for weeks now and they've done a lot of detailed analysis. He/she is a prolific cricket editor but also supportive of purging unsuitable articles. A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 01:37, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Some additional explanation. The initial planning for this was done at User talk:BilledMammal/Mass Creation Draftification. This caused some concern among some other editors and discussion ensued at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cricket#Heads up. Since then, Blue Square Thing has been involved in looking at this from the cricket content aspect.

  I believe mass-deletion, properly done, is a good way to fix the problem of insufficiently referenced stubs.

  Each BLP represents a serious obligation by all of us to the person who's the subject of the article to keep their article correct and prevent it being subverted for libelous attacks. We have over 6 million articles to watch now. With BLPs, if in doubt as to notability and the availability of good refs, I believe we should err on the side of deleting or draftifying marginal articles.

  -- A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 03:01, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Yikes! I just saw the comment below about Lugnuts admitting that he introduced deliberate errors [3] to BLPs. If in doubt about a group of these BLPs, we definitely need to get them out of article space. A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 11:47, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Fwiw I've yet to come across an article about a sports person where I consider Lugnuts has introduced deliberate errors. There are errors, of coure - we all do that. But nothing that I can even begin to imagine is in any way deliberate. And I've looked at, well, a "few" of their article creations over the years... The outgoing message you linked to was clearly a "fuck you all" response by someone who clearly felt hard done by at that point. It's a shame, because it will presumably prejudice any appeal they might want to make, but it's not the first time someone's responded like that and it won't be the last. I should say, btw, that I appreciate the sentiment above. Thanks. Blue Square Thing (talk) 13:21, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I think the first thing to do is to confirm that we're looking at redirecting almost 75% of these. Yes; as long as no reasonable objections are raised to the redirect targets then that is what we are looking at doing as a WP:BOLD action permitted by If this proposal is successful #5. The only question is whether you would prefer the articles to be moved to draft space and a new redirect created in their place, or a redirect created over the existing article? I am satisfied with either option. BilledMammal (talk) 07:06, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I think we have to redirect the article as it stands now. There are a number that have been developed from stubs that Lugnuts created (Alfred Hollings for example) and if we add a new redirect and have a draft then I don't see how people would find the draft? It also preserves the page history, sources, images where they exist (like the one mentioned below) etc... I appreciate that there may be people who would like to see articles like these just removed, but a really substantial subset of them have potential for development - unfortunately it's difficult to be certain which ones do without digging quite hard.

  The targets can be changed if they need to be - there are ones I added to the list at my sandbox where I was choosing one of a number of possible redirects quickly, but that's easy to change at any point Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:12, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Personally, I see benefits of both approaches. Creating the redirect over the existing article makes it easier to find the underlying content, prevents it from even being deleted, and makes it easier to restore if improved. Meanwhile, having a new redirect, and thus allowing the article to be put in draft space, makes it easier for editors to work on the draft.

  I would say that for the second option I would create a R from draftified template, that would include a link to the draftified article and thus make it easier for interested editors to find the draft.

  Overall, I don't have a preference; I want whatever option works best for the editors invested in the topic area, and if there is anything I can during the process of redirecting/draftifying that can make it easier for those editors I am happy to do so. BilledMammal (talk) 15:18, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Blue Square Thing: Considering the lack of objections to a WP:BOLD redirect in line with If this proposal is successful #5, and the success of automatically creating lists of players based on these current articles, we are definately looking at redirecting 75%+ of these; I suspect we will in fact redirect almost all of them.

  My plan, if this proposal is successful, is to immediately tag them all with an appropriate version of Template:Special draft; I will then create the redirect targets where they don't already exist and produce a list of proposed targets. I'll run that list by you and the rest of WikiProject Cricket, and then when any issues with it have been resolved implement it.

  This last step will probably take a month, so there should be plenty of time for editors to notice the template on the articles and remove it if in error, in line with our previous discussion at WikiProject Cricket. BilledMammal (talk) 08:12, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support I've had concerns about these articles for awhile. The very early entries will have been hand written by umpires at a time when spelling was option, later collated into stat books, and so onto an online database. Where there are no other sources to prove existence, there's nothing to say any particular article isn't just someone elses details written down wrong or fudged during the multiple format shifts. I've been few several, both after this RFC started and when I originally became aware of the issue, and haven't been able to find any additional sources. The solution to all this is to create properly sourced articles, something only longterm editors seem to be able to get away with ignoring. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:05, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support per WP:LUGSTUBS. Lugnuts at the very least was excessively careless when creating articles and, if his parting message is to be believed, purposefully put errors into his articles (yes I know many think he wasn’t serious about this).The response to mass-creation of failing articles has to also be something of mass-effect, otherwise the problem is unsolvable. Clicking on five at random I found five short, single-reference articles about 19th-century/early 20th century cricketers with limited numbers of appearances. If articles do not match this profile, then bring them back to main space. FOARP (talk) 21:06, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose First, I see above a great point - Mass-creating and mass-drafting articles seems to be two sides of the same coin. Second, I see above the repetition of a not-great point, that the creation of these articles took little effort so why put effort into expanding them... if that's anyone's actual view, I don't know what they think Wikipedia is. Why it's being repeated as an argument is greatly confusing. Third, most importantly, there are users like myself who are interested in expanding such articles, but the Olympian mass draftification was so recent that there's no attention span left as well for these. The speedy mass-draftification of many more articles was a major concern introduced in the Olympian discussion, and I'm sad to see that it has proved true. WP:NORUSH. Kingsif (talk) 21:23, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support per above. Therapyisgood (talk) 21:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Noting that I chose one random person on the list - Clement Bengough - and despite knowing barely anything on where to look for sources on cricketers, was able to quickly locate a full-page article on him from a major newspaper — 38 years after his death. BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:03, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  With all due respect, I'm not quite sure that article shows what you're hoping for it to show, i.e. that these articles can be easily sourced - you've managed to pick one person at random who received a full-length story on him in an American paper not because he was a cricketer, but because he was a local interest story for being a foreigner and "social outcast" who moved to the area. His cricket career is but a sentence in that story and doesn't even mention the games he is supposedly notable for. SportingFlyer T·C 22:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  "you've managed to pick one person at random who received a full-length story on him in an American paper not because he was a cricketer, but because he was a local interest story for being a foreigner and "social outcast" who moved to the area" - LOL. I don't want to be mean to Beaniefan but when I saw his description I was expecting a full bio from the NYT. Instead it's a "Here's this weird old English dude that used to live here" local interest story from a small town newspaper. And this really was the issue with a lot of the LUGSTUBS: even when they were notable, they weren't notable for the thing Lugnuts wrote the article about. It's like the time I checked a cricketers's article and they turned out to have been an RAF Air Marshal. In this case, cricket barely features and the story is entirely about what an outcast this person was - it's a nice piece but I'd hesitate to say it shows anything towards notability. FOARP (talk) 21:07, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose per Whatamidoing. Ideally these articles should probably be merged into lists, but as it stands there's nothing too wrong with the status quo. J947 † ^edits 23:05, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support. I made a lot of arguments at the prior RfC that are applicable here, so I won't repeat them. JoelleJay (talk) 23:13, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Strongly Oppose Mass draftification of this many articles without scrutiny is reckless and irresponsible. This also bypasses and usurps the existing AfD process. A quality check by users needs to be implemented before even suggesting these articles be purged. As I've stated twice before already, this is Wikipedia equivalent to the Beeching Axe. This action would also set a bad precedent for future actions toward other projects and articles on Wikipedia. This could be seen as the website purging articles to fulfill a political or social agenda by parties outside the website. Use the AfD process, not mass purge. Otherwise, content that meets notability guidelines in a mass purge could be easily removed and deleted, much like how crucial rail lines were destroyed during the Beeching Axe, creating logistical and public transportation-related nightmares for the United Kingdom which still plague the country today. The same scrutiny which was used to remove railway lines during the Beeching Axe is being demonstrated in this proposal. I refuse to support "The Great Purge" or a repeat of the Beeching Axe.— MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 00:20, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  What a strange concept to compare elimination of physical infrastructure that people rode in their daily lives to the removal of single-line descriptions of sportspeople with brief careers only appearing in databases..... Reywas92^Talk 04:58, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  That still doesn't change the fact the mentality of this proposal mirrors the reckless behavior done during Beeching Axe. I also don't appreciate the attempt to undermine my point with a passive aggressive sarcasm, as that is very unprofessional. And it's also the precedent this sets, as well as the fact AfD is being entirely bypassed and usurped. If I remember correctly, there are hundreds of articles tied into this. Do you know for a fact if all of them are not notable? Have you evaluated every single one? Can you say for certain wiping out over 300 articles at a time without scrutinizing every single one of them first through the AfD process isn't potentially reckless? — MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 08:03, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  User:MatthewAnderson707, how familiar are you with the background of this proposal? Were you at WP:LUGSTUBS? It feels like you're just finding out about all this today. Folly Mox (talk) 08:18, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Again, it's the dangerous precedent this could set for other projects and articles beyond the ones related to WP:LUGSTUBS. Purging hundreds of articles at a time without properly checking the content? Can you not see how that could get out of hand should this be allowed? At the very least, use a more careful approach and ensure if EVERY article being deleted isn't notable.— MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 08:26, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  The entire point of an RfC is to gather input from people who were previously uninvolved in the discussion. Literally the first sentence of WP:RFC. Requests for comment (RfC) is a process for requesting outside input concerning disputes, policies, guidelines or article content. (bolding mine) Gnomingstuff (talk) 14:22, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  What was reckless was creating one stub per minute without assessing if they were notable BEFORE they were created and then expecting thousands of man-hours to be spent debating them individually at AFD, what a joke. I find it sad that people can put zero effort into making pages but them expect others to scrutinize if scraping them from databases was appropriate (hint: it was determined long ago at WP:MASSCREATE and elsewhere that it's not). Reywas92^Talk 14:33, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  And I find it sad people support a reckless mass deletion of hundreds of articles without any proper checks or balances first, to ensure they're not all mass created stubs. So we should just take one person's word for it and done without questioning it? What's to stop an individual using this proposed process from going too far with this and getting articles they don't like, abusing this power? Suppose one article happens to meet guidelines ends up in the list of articles to be mass drafted? This also doesn't excuse the fact this is a blatant back door usurpation of AfD. This may seem like a good idea at first and may work out to the benefit of an actual problem, but there is every way this could snowball out of control later and cause massive damage and abuse of power, going from bypassing a bureaucracy to get something done to deleting something "because I said so". Better to try and kill this before it starts than deal with cleaning up a recklessly created mess later. — MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 04:49, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  First, this isn't coming through the backdoor. It's coming through the front door, with a herald announcing that it is doing so. In theory, it could have been proposed at AfD, at it is appropriate to propose draftification at that venue, but I think, and I hope you would agree, that it is better for these proposals to be done in a more visible location.

  Second, you don't need to take my word for it. You are welcome to check the query that produced the list. Further, if an article that does happen to meet the criteria above ends up in the list of articles to be mass drafted then it can be restored by any editor to mainspace. Given that the process is highly scrutinized and operates only by consensus it cannot be abused in the way you fear. BilledMammal (talk) 05:11, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  The checks and balances are the five extra years the articles are protected from deletion plus the greater attention and prioritization they will receive from wikiprojects. JoelleJay (talk) 00:52, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support. I am generally opposed to mass actions of this type. Despite my reservations, and as with the prior Olympics RfC, I support this proposal given its narrow focus. My support is based on the following:

(1) Mass creation. The articles at issue were the product of Lugnuts' well-documented mass process in which thousands of articles were created, often at the rate of approximately a minute per article.

(2) Lack of substance. The articles are microstubs that contain very limited narrative text, simply reciting that the person was a cricket player who appeared in X number of games for X team. If the articles are ultimately deleted, nothing of real substance is lost. If SIGCOV is later uncovered and brought forth, and given the fact that only a minute or so was devoted to the original effort, the articles can be re-created without any meaningful loss of prior effort.

(3) Violation of SPORTBASIC. The articles violate prong 5 of WP:SPORTBASIC which provides: "Sports biographies must include at least one reference to a source providing significant coverage of the subject, excluding database sources." The articles here are sourced only to database sources and do not include SIGCOV.

(4) Cleanup of "deliberate errors". A departure from normal processes is also warranted by the unique case involving Lugnuts' admission in August 2022 (here) that he added "countless deliberate errors on pages that have very few pages views." Draftification of these microstubs allows us to undertake screening for such errors before any such articles are returned to main space.

In sum, I support draftification in this narrow situation. However, this RfC should not be precedent to evade regular order in less egregious circumstances. In such circumstances, normal AfD or redirect procedures should be followed. Cbl62 (talk) 00:35, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

I think the claim of countless deliberate errors is just plain trolling. It is just too much hard work to be plausible. Has anyone detected any of these countless errors? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 12:41, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: I'm not convinced it would be hard work at least compared to the work that it took to create these. My programming skills are very limited, but if I had whatever was being used to create these I imagine I could in maybe 3 hours or less create code to do such a thing. Something simple like Var Evil = random (0, 1); If Evil > 0.95, YOB =+ randomint (-2, +2); If Evil > 0.97, FirstClassMatches =+ randomint (-2, +2) would work if the import process mean that data was structured and also that already had a way of dealing with FirstClassMatches being 0 (well with this simple code you'd also need to ensure the FirstClassMatches variable can't be negative or or you way of dealing with 0 works the same when it is negative). If it wasn't you'd need a more complicated approach perhaps using a carefully crafted search of the text or maybe even something which tries to recognise data patterns like dates so you know they're dates and can finagle them more easily; still whichever path you're taking it doesn't seem that hard. Note that I'm assuming an effort is being made to avoid obvious errors. If you don't care that you're saying someone was born on 32 January or 31 April then it's easier. Also I come back to what I said earlier about the work required to create these in the first place. The less structured it was, the more difficult to automate both the error creation and import in the first place. So yeah you'd spending more time adding errors, but you also spent more time making them. On the whole, I can't imagine it would add more than ~10% extra time. Nil Einne (talk) 23:00, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support per previous RFC on Olympic athletes mass draftification. The fundamental question is if these articles would survive AFD if hypothetically debated in full, and based on the criteria described, they would all be closed "delete" without some compelling discovery of new sources. Even editors who would !vote "keep" in such AFDs can hopefully agree that a hypothetical article with such patchy sources would have a rough time at AFD. Since this is draftification not deletion, if it turns out that there was something valid to use as the basis of a future article, it'll still be there. But given that it's been some years since these were created with no substantial edits from others (per the criteria to build the list), it seems highly likely that most of these articles simply don't pass the notability bar. SnowFire (talk) 04:25, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  They wouldn't all be closed delete. If they were individual AfD we'd probably be looking at something like 20-30% keep based on expansion; 50-60% redirect and 20% delete. That's the way that these sorts of articles have gone at AfD over the last couple of years in general. Blue Square Thing (talk) 06:11, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Blue Square Thing: SportingFlyer says they sampled 7 articles and tried to see if they could be improved with more sources, and went 0/7. I'm not much of a cricket expert so my opinion might not matter, but I just tried 2 of those articles with simple Google searches, and also turned up nothing useful. I think 20-30% "keep by expansion" is a very optimistic estimate, and I'm not torn up about the difference between redirect and draftification/deletion. SnowFire (talk) 16:49, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I'd be interested in knowing what kind of searches @SportingFlyer: performed; a plain google search won't do the trick. Also, @SnowFire: I would trust Blue Square Thing as he seems to be the cricket expert here. Also, FWIW, I went 1/1 and so did WhatamIdoing. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:07, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  @BeanieFan11: Do you mean Clement Bengough for the article you investigated? Because I would absolutely still !vote delete on that article, even if the new mention you found was integrated, and I don't think my !vote would be unusual. I say this as someone who has voted reasonably inclusionist-y on things like D-list actors, so I'm absolutely a gettable keep vote if non-trivial coverage can be found. SnowFire (talk) 18:00, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  You really don't think full-page feature stories from major newspapers improve his case for notability? BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:02, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Full-page feature stories are never bad, but in his case it's a local story about someone who used to live there, completely unrelated to the reason why we claim he's notable (being a cricketer). I'd !vote delete at AfD if that were the only additional source presented since it's a human interest feature story unrelated to cricket. As far as my searches go, I use a couple major search engines with a focus on news and try a couple different search terms, which works well for modern players and horribly for older players, and also check the database sites to see if they have any additional news links. I feel like modern Indian players will be the easiest to save, at least using English language sourcing. SportingFlyer T·C 18:39, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  @SnowFire: possibly, but 36% of the list are Australian, English or New Zealand cricketers and those are the easiest to expand - for example, Alfred Carlton - one of the ones SF looked at (and the only one who falls into any of those nationalities I think) - I could find sources for using Trove (he played for North Melbourne for example and there's a decent amount on him). It might not be a clear-cut keep and perhaps I should have stuck at 20%, which is where I started! If you factor in that a random percentage will have some kind of additional prose or linked article at either CricInfo or CricketArchive (for example, Edwin Mills (cricketer) who's not on this list but will be on the next one, has a detailed prose profile behind CricketArchive's paywall) then it won't be far off 20% at worst - and I'm largely writing off the majority of South Asian cricketers in this as they rarely get kept due to the transliteration problems, but if we could do the sort of thing that WhatamIdoing managed above then 20% starts to look low Blue Square Thing (talk) 17:25, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support, and I would suggest the same for all athletes. I've personally had to convert a lot of filler-articles into redirects for Olympic athletes who didn't win medals. It seems like every other random article is one of them. I would suggest that this also applies to cricketeers. Wikipedia isn't a database or other indiscriminate collection of athletes, or anything. Just because someone competed in 2010 Ice Hockey event in the Olympics doesn't make such person independently notable nor alone fulfill the GNG. InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 18:57, 26 July 2023 (

  So in other words you don't like a different set of articles and are projecting your dislike onto this set of articles that you have not reviewed. Thryduulf (talk) 19:28, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. Nothing ways out the lose in this situation. There is no win doing this so it isnt suppost to even be an option and per BeanieFan11 who made realy good arguments. Themanwithnowifi (talk) 17:12, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 1: Survey (mass draftification of cricket articles)

• Oppose The policy WP:ATD-I says "moving articles to draft space should generally be done only for newly created articles . . . or as the result of a deletion discussion. Older articles should not be draftified without an AfD consensus, with 90 days a rule of thumb". A desire to avoid performing a search for sources does not justify violating the policy WP:ATD-I. If I have to spend many, many, many hours searching for sources with Google (and I do have to do that these days), then there is no good reason why the rest of you should be allowed to avoid doing that. The proposer freely admits that he has not looked at any of these articles, but ran an automated query instead. Automated queries are worse than useless. The proposer's claim that these articles are only referenced to CricketArchive or ESPNcricinfo is false, as some already have other references. For example, Angus Marshall is already referenced to "Marshall Retires", The Telegraph, Brisbane, 1934. The automated query presumably failed to detect this because the reference is not a footnote. James500 (talk) 06:14, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I share this concern, and which is why I requested for the Quarry query below (Link to query). @BilledMammal or whoever constructed the query needs to go back to the drawing board to better catch ALL references, not references that strictly follow a specific format. Soni (talk) 06:28, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Looking at the Angus Marshall example it appears that the article includes a picture which in turn includes a refernece. I doubt even many humans would think to check whether the picture has a reference that the article doesn't; I wouldn't. As for a machine, because the reference isn't even on enwiki but is instead on commons, it is all but impossible to check. I think that such a bizarre outlier is acceptable, and given that the article doesn't include the reference within the criteria set out above. BilledMammal (talk) 07:18, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  A reference is a reference, no matter how it is formatted. Linking to a file on the commons is a widely used form of reference on this site. And Angus Marshall is not an outlier or bizarre. There are similar problems with, in particular, Adam Maher (cricketer), Alan Davidson (cricketer, born 1897), Alan McInnes, Alan Reid (cricketer), Albert Bowden, Albert Brown (Australian cricketer), Albert Lansdown, Albert McGinn, Albert Scanes, Alex Ridley, Alexander Barras, Alexander Fisher (cricketer), Alfred Sullivan, Amit Banerjee, Andrew Lamb (cricketer), Andrew Pringle (cricketer), Aquib Nabi, Archibald Dean, Arthur Allsopp, Arthur Evans (cricketer), Arthur Kenny, Arthur McBeath, Arthur Muhl, Arthur Pellew, Arthur Wells (Australian cricketer), Athenkosi Dyili, Barney McCoy, Barry Rhodes, Bernard Mlambo, Berry Webb, Bill Beath, Bill Tallon, Brad Doody, Brad Oldroyd, Brad Stacey, Brian Murphy (Jamaican cricketer), Bruce Such, Cecil Bryce, Cecil Gray (cricketer), Cecil Hanify, Cecil McKew, Charles Alsop, Charles Griffith (Australian cricketer), Charles Morgan (Victoria cricketer), Charles Patrick, Charles Ross (Australian cricketer), Christopher Dwyer (cricketer), Clarence McCoombe, Clement McFarlane, Colin Stibe, Dale Turner (cricketer), Dane Hutchinson, Daniel Noonan (cricketer), Darren Dempsey, David Mailer, Dean Bartlett and Des Hansen. On the face of it, all of these items should be removed from the list. You could easily have examined all of the articles, and the links in them, manually, and you have done so. James500 (talk) 12:24, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Linking to a file on the commons is a widely used form of reference on this site. If it is then it shouldn't be; WP:CIRCULAR tells us that if we want to reuse a reference from elsewhere, whether that elsewhere is intrawiki or interwiki, we are required to confirm that the reference supports the content and then use it directly. Do you have examples of where this is done outside of Lugnut's mass creation sprees?

  Even when looking at a sampling of the references on commons I am not really seeing SIGCOV; I'm primarily seeing things like game recaps that involve mentions of the player. Of course, if you can find two examples of WP:SIGCOV you are welcome to add them on enwiki and I will be very happy to remove the article from the list.

  I am seeing some articles on your list with single references in the article, but for the most part those were added recently such as at Darren Dempsey. I think I can be forgiven for not having a crystal ball. With that said I am also seeing some articles, like Brian Murphy (Jamaican cricketer), that should have been excluded based on them not meeting the criteria set out above at the time the query was run. I have corrected the error that resulted in them being included and will update the list when the query returns. BilledMammal (talk) 12:41, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I've updated the list. Note that this means the number is now less than 1200; I don't want to force editors like Blue Square Thing who have done a lot of work with this list to have to redo that work with articles replacing those removed. BilledMammal (talk) 17:43, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  You have not removed the Wikipedia articles that have newspaper coverage in Trove. Would you like me to add footnote references to the Wikipedia articles in question, so that your automated query will actually work?

  For the avoidance of doubt, I am seeing significant coverage (or at least things that are capable of contributing to significant coverage). The following are a few examples already in the articles I listed above: Marshall Retires is significant coverage of Angus Marshall. "Stibe Looks Likely Sheild Batsman" is significant coverage of Colin Stibe. "C H Ross" is significant coverage of Charles Ross (Australian cricketer). "Bryce's Patience as a Batsman Rewarded" is significant coverage of Cecil Bryce. Where a person has one newspaper profile like that, there is likely to be more coverage. Accordingly, a WP:BEFORE search is actually necessary, which is why the policy requires an AfD. So, for example, when I run a search for Angus Marshall in Trove, I find a lot of newspaper articles that are entirely about Angus Marshall. And I find a massive amount of other coverage of Angus Marshall. (For the avoidance of doubt, Marshall played both soccer (including as an intermational for Australia) and cricket, so the soccer articles are about him: [4] [5]). The conclusion that I reach is that Angus Marshall, an example that I originally chose at random, satisfies GNG, he should be removed from the list, and his article should be rewritten to reflect the fact that his soccer career was important (and possibly more important than his cricket career). James500 (talk) 19:39, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  @BilledMammal Can you please move the list to a separate page and then transclude it back here? Not only is parsing the rest of this page extremely difficult, I cannot doublecheck removed entries or similar without going through Village Pump history instead of reading page history + any talk page comments/diffs. Right now everything feels a bit haphazard Soni (talk) 20:47, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  @BilledMammal or whoever else is maintaining the list: Please remove Alan McInnes, Albert McGinn, Albert Scanes, Archibald Dean, Barney McCoy, Berry Webb, Bill Beath, Bill Tallon, Cecil Bryce, Charles Morgan (Victoria cricketer), Charles Ross (Australian cricketer), Colin Stibe, David Mailer, Angus Marshall and Des Hansen from the list. Each of them now has reference footnotes to full periodical articles (and I could add a lot more), and they clearly do not satisfy the criteria of this proposal. James500 (talk) 02:45, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose as setting a bad precedent (per BeanieFan11 above). Frankly, the "strategy" discussion at User talk:BilledMammal/Mass Creation Draftification is quite alarming to read. It does not express a sincere intent to improve the encyclopedia and is more focussed on achieving a pre-determined course of action, rather than consensus building.
  Whatamidoing's analysis above shows that these articles are quite likely to be notable. – SD0001 (talk) 06:56, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support, but only if pageviews are used as a criterion. I have found that stubs that get more than three pageviews a day are usually on notable subjects, and ten or more a day nearly always are. The nominator said nobody is reading these stubs, so that should be checked beforehand. Abductive (reasoning) 07:29, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  If we could figure out a way to list these by page views, that might be an interesting notability heuristic. SportingFlyer T·C 07:48, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Abductive and SportingFlyer: I previously only did spot checks of this group but I have now done a comprehensive check; see User:BilledMammal/Cricketer page views. Three (0.25%) recieve more than ten page views a day on average; Aaqib Khan, Ali Haider (cricketer), and Aquib Nabi; I expect they will be easy to find references for. 79 (6.5%) recieve more than three page views a day on average. BilledMammal (talk) 08:18, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  My point exactly. The small fraction with pageviews like that should be allowed to remain in Mainspace. Some are probably because a non-cricketeer shares the name, but out of an abundance of caution..... Abductive (reasoning) 08:33, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I've been trying to find sources for Aaqib Khan that would demonstrate notability but I am struggling to do so; even when searching for his name in Hindi I few results and they appear to either be primary or fail to contain significant coverage of him. I'll keep looking; I would prefer not to start excluding articles on the basis of criteria not included above, but if I can find coverage for any of those three I will be happy to pull them on that basis.

  With that said, I would support my proposal with your pageview criterion as a second choice to the base proposal. BilledMammal (talk) 08:50, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I just updated Aquib Nabi's article with a couple additional non-database sources, and there is more there. I already did a search for Aaqib Khan, it looks like he shares most of his name with an actor, there was a game recap but not much else came up for me. Haider Ali (not the listed Ali Haider) is a current notable cricketer. Balwinder Sandhu shares a name with a more famous cricketer. Going down the list, Nabi needs to be removed, Chintan Gaja needs to be removed as there's a photo and Cricinfo game recap on him specifically, Chetan Bist can be easily sourced, Abhinav Sharma is difficult to search for but there's at least a couple results. SportingFlyer T·C 08:52, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Abductive - Pageview counts don't matter. See WP:NOBODYREADSIT.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:26, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  My experience with tens of thousands of articles is that pageviews do matter. For example, one can look at redirect views, and discover redirects that can/should be made into articles. In the case of Importance-assessing for Wikiprojects, if an article gets greater than 30 pageviews a day, and certainly more than 100 pageviews a day, it is always deserving of being Importance-assessed as Mid according to the rules of the Wikiproject, any Wikiproject. Less than 1/day means the topic might fail WP:V or the title is misspelled. It's astounding how much pageviews can be used in decision-making. Abductive (reasoning) 19:05, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. These need to go to AFD individually. My reasons 1) we're going to be deleting notable cricketers. 2) We're not a printed newspaper and these articles can sit there without causing any overheads. 3) Lugnuts created these articles within policy at the time. It is spurious to say we need to discourage more mass creation of this kind because policy changed and it couldn't happen like this again. 4) There's no rush. Desertarun (talk) 09:51, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  This is untrue: per WP:MASSCREATE, approval has always been required for large-scale page creation, and WP:NSPORT has always said "In addition, standalone articles are required to meet the General Notability Guideline" as well as "Trivial coverage of a subject by secondary sources may be used to support content in an article, but it is not sufficient to establish notability. This includes listings in database sources with low, wide-sweeping generic standards of inclusion, such as the College Football Data Warehouse." Lugnuts just blatantly ignored these. I believe it's poor faith to expect countless pages created in seconds by one person have to be debated for a week each by many, consuming many times more manhours. For the same reason no one wants to have thousands of individualized discussions, no one wanted to research these to create them properly individually either. Reywas92^Talk 14:45, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  The articles were not required to meet the general notability guideline at the time; it said before WP:NSPORTS2022 that "The articles should provide reliable sources showing it meets the general notability guideline or the sport-specific criteria below." BeanieFan11 (talk) 14:49, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Oh come on BF, you know that the article providing sources that show it meets GNG or SNG is a wholly different instruction than the requirement that the subject meets GNG. Lugnuts did not ensure that any of these subjects actually did meet GNG. JoelleJay (talk) 23:29, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  Prior to 2022 cricketers were presumed notable if they'd played 1 first class game. All of those added by Lugnuts had done this - so you're retrofitting notability. Desertarun (talk) 15:27, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  We're cherry-picking. NSPORT said in 2021, "This guideline is used to help evaluate whether or not a sports person or sports league/organization (amateur or professional) is likely to meet the general notability guideline, and thus merit an article in Wikipedia." Articles which passed SNGs were still deleted for clearly failing GNG. SportingFlyer T·C 18:48, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Nope. Let me tell you exactly what Nsports used to say about cricket - and I quote policy "A cricket figure is presumed notable if they; 1) Have appeared as a player or umpire in at least one cricket match that is judged by a substantial source to have been played at the highest international or domestic level". One first class match was sufficient to presume notability. There is no wriggle room or ifs and buts. Desertarun (talk) 19:47, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Don't nope me. I quoted very first line from WP:NSPORT from a random date in late 2021 - before all of this happened. Here is the link. First, as a sport guideline, NCRIC had to follow NSPORT, and second, A cricket figure is presumed notable. Presumed is a rebuttable presumption - if an article didn't pass the GNG, it should have been deleted, and often was (each AfD is different, obviously.) SportingFlyer T·C 21:01, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Nope. Ncric did follow Nsport, if you can't see that - this is your problem. Desertarun (talk) 21:09, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I can see that. I've just shown you NSPORT clearly said that GNG had to be met. The sport-specific SNGs were supposed to be aligned to the GNG. Cricket wasn't. SportingFlyer T·C 21:40, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  NSPORT has always required its subjects meet GNG, and as NCRIC is a subset of NSPORT it was not exempt from this requirement. Plenty of AfDs resulted in deletion/redirection of NCRIC-passing cricketers prior to NSPORT2022: [6][7]

  The result was redirect to Federally Administered Tribal Areas cricket team. The "keep" !votes argue that this person meets NCRIC. However, that is only a guideline designed to be a shortcut to identify persons that are likely notable according to GNG. Once notability is challenged, however, NCRIC is not enough and it has to be established whether or not the subject meets GNG.[8]

  The result was delete. There is by now a relatively broad community consensus that participation in certain sporting events establishes a presumption of notability per the sport-specific notability guidelines, but that this is not enough to establish actual notability if, as here, no sources beyond participation records can be found at AfD.[9]

  The result was delete. Consideration of this discussion was almost perfectly balanced in terms of numerical consideration. Moving to consideration of policy, two major disputes occur: the traditional NSPORTS/NCRIC vs GNG one, and the belief that there must be sources in other languages and it should be kept on those grounds.
  
  Meeting an NSPORTS criterion does not remove the need to pass GNG when challenged, as multiple editors pointed out. Those arguing that NCRIC was met did not generally also argue that GNG was met.

  [10]

  The result was delete. As pointed out by a number of editors, passing an SNG is irrelevant if an article doesn't pass GNG.[11]

  The result was delete. While there is some consensus that he satisfies the SNG those suggesting that the SNG was met have not provided any sources exist and there is a consensus that he does not pass the GNG.[12]

  The result was delete. Inclusion requires that WP:GNG is met, which requires WP:SIGCOV (significant coverage) from multiple, reliable sources. This means coverage that is more than trivial and mentions more than stats. Whether it is cricket, football, underwater basket weaving, whatever, it doesn't matter. That is the core of what is required to pass the first test for inclusion for any article, regardless of what any other guidelines on notability says, simply because they all derive their authority FROM WP:GNG. Through this lens, weighing the !vote not on their numbers as much as on the strength of their policy based rationale, I see a consensus to delete.[13]

  The result was delete. Subject-specific notability guidelines (SNG) do not override the general notability guideline (GNG). SNGs are simply shortcuts that say, "a topic will probably have enough sources to fulfill GNG if it satisfies the SNG criteria".[14]

  The result was delete. This is a fairly standard NCRIC vs GNG dispute. As NSPORTS specifically requires GNG to also be met, and there isn't a clear IAR exemption case made here, and there is a very clear consensus that GNG is not met, deletion is the appropriate outcome.[15]

  Note that these were closures by 9 different admins. JoelleJay (talk) 23:49, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  At the time, the "presumed" notability functioned as de facto automatic notability (with the exception of one-game soccer players and those without known first names) - also, you're missing the part where it says in bold that to be notable, "The article should provide reliable sources showing that the subject meets the general notability guideline or the sport specific criteria set forth below." BeanieFan11 (talk) 21:04, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  First - the bold part is about making sure sourcing exists in the article to demonstrate either a GNG pass or a SNG pass. And "presumed" was de facto notability, apart when GNG wasn't met - for instance the arguments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Abel Valdez (I did a lot of sleuthing to find an old AfD where it was clear GNG trumped SNG, even though this was no consensus.) It did mean a lot of players which passed the SNG weren't brought to AfD, but the entire reason we're here discussing this now is because that ice got thinner and thinner over time and finally broke. SportingFlyer T·C 21:38, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  As I said, it acted as de facto automatic notability except for soccer players with low amounts of appearances, plus those who we didn't have names for (e.g. the baseball player Smith) - until Pete Vainowski in December 2021 (after these cricket articles were created), which resulted in the destruction of NSPORT (the NSPORTS2022 discussion was due to that), meeting NSPORT functioned basically as automatic notability. BeanieFan11 (talk) 21:42, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  That's true, but Reywas92 is still correct: the phrase In addition, standalone articles must meet the General Notability Guideline. has specifically been a part of WP:NSPORT since 2010, and was incorporated via linking to WP:BIO before that. So they've always been required to meet GNG, but whether we enforced it properly is a different question. SportingFlyer T·C 22:23, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  But then it also said "Subjects that do not meet the sport-specific criteria outlined in this guideline may still be notable if they meet the General Notability Guideline or another subject specific notability guideline," which implies that satisfying the sports criteria was sufficient to have an article; the whole thing was contradictory, but the practice at the time was that it was alright to have stubs and that they were notable if they met the sports criteria (playing top-level cricket games). I don't see why we're arguing about this though, since the criteria have changed, so I'm done discussing this point. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:08, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  That's not what that sentence implied - just that the SNGs were not exclusionary - but it doesn't matter. SportingFlyer T·C 10:18, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. As noted by many above this comment, this draftication (actually deletion) does nothing to improve the encyclopedia. Let's build an encyclopedia instead. If there is a concern that these articles are introducing content that fails verification, we should act. Ktin (talk) 15:31, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support per BilledMammal. I checked ten of these at random and was unable to find significant coverage for any of them. Checking these ten articles took me about an hour; editors should not be required to spend this amount of time establishing the non-notability of these mass-created stubs. My first choice would be outright deletion, but I support draftification as a compromise. The information contained in these articles is readily available online, and none of them took more than a few minutes to create, so any one of them can be easily re-created if better sources are found. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 15:41, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  User:Sojourner in the earth, as a courtesy to avoid possible duplication of work, might you be able to list here the ten articles you spot-checked? Or mention on their respective Talk pages that you were unable to locate sources? Folly Mox (talk) 22:08, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  The articles were Al Bashid Muhammed, Bikash Chowdhury (cricketer), Bakhtarullah Atal, Athi Mafazwe, Ashby Mutumbami, Arthur Dean (cricketer), Anuj Raj, Andrew Durham, Alok Chandra Sahoo, Alfred Black (cricketer). The most promising of these was Alfred Black, who according to this source took part in the Eureka Rebellion, but even with this lead I didn't find anything but passing mentions. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 05:38, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  I'd like to add to my comment, in answer to those who are citing WP:NORUSH, that kicking the can down the road is not a sensible solution. As DFlhb said above: Non-notable articles must eventually be deleted, so to keep them around is to require editors to eventually go through each and decide whether to merge, redirect, or delete. The purpose of this proposal is to save thousands of hours of editor time. The urgency of the problem is not a relevant consideration; the only question is whether one thinks that the possibility of saving some of these articles is worth the massive expenditure of time that it will take to evaluate each one individually. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 05:55, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

• Neutral Comment I have fewer strong opinions on cricket notability than I do on Olympic notability, nor do I know the Cricket Notability requirements as well. I am generally in agreement with @WhatamIdoing and @Abzeronow's concerns, particularly that this will disproportionately affect Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Sri Lankan cricketers, but am aware that this is an area where I can't really help in expanding stubs so would feel bad giving a full oppose, given @BilledMammal's logic is reasonable. 20:35, 9 July 2023 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Redfiona99 (talk • contribs)
• Oppose, largely per Thryduulf and Whatamidoing. In addition, given that the underlying authority for deletion here appears to be the GNG, I would also note that doing mass-anything under a guideline, which is intended to have common-sense exceptions, is somewhat contradictory. (It does not appear to me that these articles fail WP:V#Notability, since the objection is not that they have no reliable sources, but that the source is a database.) Beyond that, I am troubled by the false urgency and the unsubstantiated claims that these articles are somehow hurting the encyclopedia by existing. From where I sit these stubs seem obviously to provide a net benefit to the interested reader, even if they are never expanded. Moreover, content attracts contributors, so mass deleting these articles (which is the only realistic outcome of mass draftification) is only going to aggravate the shortage of contributors who have the knowledge and interest to improve our coverage in the area. In sum, this seems to me to be unambiguously harmful to the project: mass removal of encyclopedic content can only diminish Wikipedia. -- Visviva (talk) 03:50, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose per Rhododendrites, BeanieFan11, and Rschen7754. There's no rush, and it does seem like this plan violates several policies. GretLomborg (talk) 05:25, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  Could you explain what policies those are, GretLomborg? Because the existence of these articles as they currently are are already a violation of WP:NSPORT and would otherwise result in them immediately all going to AfD for deletion. This draftification alternative, which was already approved of in a previous RfC, is a way to ensure any notable subjects do get articles kept rather than just mass deleting/redirecting them. Silverseren^C 05:31, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose as they are less likely to be improved as drafts than as articles. I they are trash, just delete as it may be better to have nothing, and let someone write from scratch if they wish to. I can easily see many of these getting a G13 demise if they are converted to drafts. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 07:13, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • @Graeme Bartlett: I'm a little confused. A major argument of other opposers is that draftification is a backdoor to deletion and this is bad. If you're okay with deletion, and if these articles are all truly beyond salvaging (which I believe to be largely true), then draftification will eventually accomplish this after 5 years passes. This seems like it should maybe be a "Support but should go even further" vote, but maybe I'm misinterpreting you. SnowFire (talk) 03:40, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    • Well I will change this to strong oppose to make this clearer. A 5 year in draft space with other drafts having only 6 months is a bad idea. If all drafts have a 5 year delay before G13 it would not be so bad. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:30, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose Individual AfD discussions appears to be the accepted way to delete articles.Harper J. Cole (talk) 09:15, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support. Disruptive mass-creation of database-entries masquerading as stub articles can only be effectively remediated by mass action - individual discussions at AFD is not practical with volumes this high. Mass-deletion would be entirely appropriate; however, this proposal is a reasonable compromise that allows interested parties a substantial window to expand these database entries into actual articles (although the percentage where that will be possible is very low) and return to main space. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 10:07, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support but only with the standard 6-month term, no special 5 year system which is setting up more exceptons for the sake of exceptions. Stifle (talk) 10:20, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose. I have concerns regarding checks and balances with this proposal. Where does it stop? This could easily snowball to become a backdoor deletion 'policy', lacking community input and consensus. A much more constructive option would be to create a taskforce which methodically goes through each one and expands them; then a decision can be reached, as there will be articles there which can be signficiantly expanded upon. StickyWicket aka AA (talk) 12:38, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  What exactly do you think this is? It's community input and seeking consensus. Please don't make baseless slippery slope arguments. This is so unrealistic to actually think that anyone will be going through so many thousands of articles (a task they can also do in draftspace). Seems you're concerned about your pages like Jack Sterland, who played a mere two games and similarly lacks significant coverage. Reywas92^Talk 13:14, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  It's cute you stalk my contributions. I wonder if you have a problem with Francis Lacey, or Milo Talbot, or Erroll Tremlett, or perhaps John Manners? I'm actually more concerned about notable individuals being deleted, who might not appear to be notable. If we can take the time to go through this entire process, then yes, we can find the time to go through each on a case-by-case basis. StickyWicket aka AA (talk) 13:48, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  Of course I don't, they have significant coverage. But we're not deleting them, and there's still time for a case-by-case process for those interested. Reywas92^Talk 14:15, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support per well reasoned rationale from DFlhb (that everyone should read). Aza24 (talk) 13:24, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support, rather reluctantly, as the best of two bad choices. It seems likely that the great majority of these would be deleted at AfD, and there is definitely harm to the encyclopedia in choosing an option that leads to massive extra work. Editors' labour is a finite resource and that has to be taken into account. And there's no prejudice against recreating any given one of these for which notability can be shown. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:27, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  Adding a note to say that listification is also fine with me. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:07, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support. Mass-created articles with minimal amounts of information don't benefit the encyclopedia, and overwhelm our ability to handle them through normal deletion processes. The list of articles to be impacted has been tightly curated, and while any list of this scale is going to be inherently imperfect, it bears remembering that WP:NODEADLINE applies to creation just as much as to deletion: if a subject is notable, I trust that the community at large will eventually identify it and give it a proper article. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 16:26, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose I don't think merely not being notable is a sufficiently serious concern to bypass the usual deletion processes like this, and there don't seem to be any policy-based objections to these articles. Hut 8.5 17:46, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
• Suggestion - start taking these 10 at a time to AfD now. Don't cherry-pick. Just take 10 in a sequential row. See what happens.
  It may shed greater light on the pros and cons of mass-deletion here. It'll also demonstrate how unwieldy (or wieldy?) the alternative of AfDs is.
  Plus, if this RfC fails, you've at least got a small head-start on cleanup. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 18:17, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  P.S., I'm not talking about doing many batches of 10 right now -- just 1 or 2 as an experiment to better inform this discussion. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 18:19, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  I might suggest taking the next ten to AfD (although ten is a lot if there's scope for improvement - perhaps with the caveat that if we think they genuinely can be improved that we put a hold on it?) - i.e. the ones that would be next on the list. I've not looked at them but will dig the links out in a minute and add them here with my initial thoughts. Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:25, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Blue Square Thing, thank you for the many dozens of hours of careful thought, analysis and cricket expertise you've put into this initiative. I have a lot of confidence in this project based on your work.

  -- A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 14:04, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  I support this kind of experiment with a small set of articles (and I left a comment to that effect below). Just a note to say that the "next ten" approach is much less informative than a "random ten" approach, as first name is a confounder here. Suriname0 (talk) 15:21, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  Although the random 10 nature means you might easily get 10 one-appearance Sri Lankans, say (which I might also easily have gotten with the next 10 fwiw). If someone wants to generate 25 random numbers between 1 and about 5,000 I'll create a list of articles that people can look at. I'd rather have a few more than 10. Blue Square Thing (talk) 16:29, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  1323, 2344, 4592, 1206, 1387, 1569, 438, 3650, 1452, 2775, 3930, 4888, 313, 2216, 3558, 2524, 1539, 4457, 4776, 1250, 2941, 925, 1904, 666, 2160, according to my phone app that uses brownian motion in its gyroscopes to generate true random numbers. Folly Mox (talk) 16:34, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  I'm not wed to the particulars of my suggestion above. 25 at random, 10 in-a-row, whatever. Mostly, I'm interested in a good experiment to partially prove or disprove many of the assertions made here. Also, something not cherry-picked to produce a certain result. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 16:34, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  Understand that, but it might be interesting to try anyway. If anyone can think of a better way I have a spreadsheet with 4,102 names in it... Blue Square Thing (talk) 16:57, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose I might support a more targeted attempt at mass draftification - the issues with Lugnuts' work are well-documented by now, and I don't think much of the "played two matches in 1905" sorts of stubs - but a lot of these articles are on contemporary players on top-level teams in major South Asian countries. Given how popular cricket is in India, for example, I have a hard time believing that the likes of Chintan Gaja and Agniv Pan didn't generate plenty of coverage playing for state teams. (I know very little about both cricket and the Indian sports media landscape, so I'm the wrong person to investigate, but Gaja at least seems to have plenty of coverage just from a cursory search.) I'm persuaded by the concerns that incubation on this scale is a backdoor route to deletion, and I think removing this many articles on likely notable subjects from South Asia would reinforce Wikipedia's systemic bias. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 20:30, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  Leaving aside the arguments about "backdoor deletion" that have already been addressed by others, using poorly-sourced or unsourced mass-created microstubs as a means of 'addressing' Wikipedia's systemic bias feels to me a lot like tokenism. XAM2175 ^(T) 10:05, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

• Strong support A good gentle middle of the road solution for this mess. So anyone who wants an article to stay can adopt it. I also don't like the "backdoor" (to deletion) pejorative characterization of the motive or process. This type of thing doesn't work at AFD. AFD (where it takes 100 times as much volunteer time to delete a microstub as it did to create it) would make this unsolvable. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:44, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Clarifying, my post was answering the "draftification" question. Like others, I was misled by the section title and did not directly answer the actual RFC question which was to move (in some way) out of article space. Although the answer can be deduced from my response, per the first close, that might be missed. I'll now answer it directly. Support moving out of article space Sincerely,North8000 (talk) 19:45, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose per James500's concerns. I agree with the premise and the need to clean up these articles in a bundled manner. I think the current implementation needs more work, as there's both a lack of sufficient clarity on the overall lists (and which of it got manually rechecked after), as well as James' point about skipping articles with references. Soni (talk) 23:44, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support mostly per ActivelyDisinterested. This measure is unfortunately necessary given how overburdened AfD is. — SamX [talk · contribs] 00:47, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  Addendum: I disagree with those who argue that this is a backdoor to deletion. Yes, unilaterally moving the articles to draftspace one by one would be a backdoor to deletion, and one that I would not support. I agree with Folly Mox—a widely advertised and well-attended RfC is absolutely not a "backdoor" process. This is essentially a mass AfD that's being conducted at an unorthodox venue, with draftification as the desired result rather than imminent deletion. If this were a traditional AfD, I would !vote draftify or redirect. It's been established that Lugnuts failed to exercise due care when verifying that the databases he used to create the stubs were reliable sources. Their sheer volume prevents them from being examined individually, so their continued presence in mainspace is an ongoing threat to Wikipedia's reliability and credibility. To prevent citogenesis and other misfortunes, the articles should be moved to draftspace until they can be thoroughly checked for accuracy and notability. — SamX [talk · contribs] 21:50, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  Second addendum: I also disagree with the opposers who argue that the stubs should be kept in order to be expanded into full-fledged articles. The stubs (at least in the state Lugnuts left them in) read as follows: [Name] is a [Nationality] [former] cricketer. [He/she/they] played in [event]. None of that information useful for an expansion, and it can all be found by having a quick look at the databases Lugnuts used. BLP is also a serious concern—many of the articles are about living people, and if the databases contain inaccuracies we may have a ticking time bomb on our hands. — SamX [talk · contribs] 05:26, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• Support, like the Olympians they may be notable, but they currently fail to demonstrate this, and to see these being kept because of their presumed, but unproven notability, must be frustrating for new editors when their own submissions are required to be of a much higher quality. The argument that this is backdoor deletion does not work for me. The rapid speed with which editors are finding sources in an effort to oppose this proposal demonstrates that five years in draftspace gives plenty of time for improving these articles, especially with the support of a wikiproject dedicated to the subject area. If this proposal fails will editors continue from the current interest in improving the A-D articles or will the E-Z articles be forgotten about. EdwardUK (talk) 12:56, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose per cogent points by Whatamidoing and BeanieFan11; and above all, as being contrary to policy WP:ATD-I. Draftfication is not to be used as a backdoor to deletion, and, as I expected, the previous exception granted by the Olympians RfC (and all the accompanying drama) has lead to a slippery slope of draftifying more generally useful and harmless articles. There is no deadline. If you want to prevent a similar case of mass-creation in the future, go draft a new appropriate policy, but as it stands, mass deletion draftification of articles just because who their author was flies in the face of pretty much all existing policies. No such user (talk) 13:22, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  I'm not even sure I'm in favour of this proposal, but it's somewhat astonishing to me how many opposers are characterising a CENT-listed Village Pump discussion as a "back door" to anything. The only places more visible are ANI and the Main Page. Sorry to single out your comment, User:No such user, and the reason I've chosen to express my somewhat astonishment here in a reply to you is that you've also characterised the sole reason for draftification as authorship. If any other user had flooded the encyclopaedia with such quantities of barely sourced, possibly notable microstubs, we'd be having the same conversation (and judging from the RFCBEFORE, we will be, with regards to similar articles by users BlackJack and Carlossuarez46). Folly Mox (talk) 13:43, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  The "backdoorness" isn't about it being done in secret, but about circumventing our deletion policy. It's use of draftspace to effectively delete a lot of articles that haven't actually been evaluated for notability, and which themselves do not violate any policies. If this went through proper process for deletion, we'd first ask "do they qualify for CSD?" (perhaps, if any were created after consensus was clear that articles shouldn't be mass created based just on databases, but not for all of these). Then we'd ask "would deletion be controversial" (apparently the answer is yes, so PROD is out). Then we'd go to AfD, where (assuming AfD weren't flooded to the point of being unable to function) they would be evaluated for notability, etc. Nothing in the deletion process says an article qualifies for deletion if it was created by Lugnuts + below a certain size + uses only databases as sources. Would a lot of these be deleted if they went through AfD? Probably, but not all, and at least then we wouldn't be signalling [again] that it's ok to delete things just for being stubs (which, based on comments throughout here, is a broader goal of several supporters). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:43, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  That makes more sense, thank you. I'm tryna understand all sides here, and thus far have been confused by some of the opposition. Folly Mox (talk) 14:49, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support per North8000. --Tserton (talk) 13:26, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support This seems like an extremely fair compromise on at least one part of an issue that generates a lot more controversy than seems warranted. CarringtonMist (talk) 14:07, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose - this is a notability issue and we have a process for that: tag with ((notability)) to add to the queue, PROD/AFD for more serious cases, or, you know, fix it. Presumably these are BLPs and WP:BLPREMOVE could apply, but what is the contentious information we're compelled to remove? That these individuals play[ed] cricket? I fail to see how that could be considered contentious to a degree warranting mass deletion. There are currently nearly 60,000 articles tagged for notability review, why do these 1,200 warrant special treatment? The answer is that they don't. This proposal fails WP:AFDISNOTCLEANUP and WP:BEFORE. Also, if any of these stubs are demonstrably non-notable, moving them to draft would prevent their deletion per WP:NDRAFT, which could just make the problem the proposal is trying to address worse in the long run, especially with the 5-year carveout from G13 deletion. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 15:20, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  I wonder if BilledMammal can run a query to tell us how many are possible BLPs? Out of interest. The whole set includes a great many dead New Zealanders and (probably) Australians for example Blue Square Thing (talk) 16:32, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  Should be possible, I'll give it a go when I have time. BilledMammal (talk) 00:44, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. According to our deletion policy, draftification must not be used as a "backdoor to deletion". This is an explicit backdoor to deletion that is being proposed, and I do not find the benefits sufficient to ignore our deletion policy here. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 00:35, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  Can you explain why you see it as a backdoor to deletion? That certainly isn't the intention; while deletion will be the result for many of these, some can and will be restored to mainspace, as evidenced by that having already happened for some of the articles on Olympians. BilledMammal (talk) 00:44, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  as evidenced by that having already happened for some of the articles on Olympians – that's not evidence at all! Since then, only 2/1000 (0.2%) of the articles (of which, many, many more are notable) have been restored; if anything, that's clear evidence its a backdoor to deletion. BeanieFan11 (talk) 00:59, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  912 were draftified, and so far 7 have been restored; ~0.75%. However, the draftification was only done a month and a half ago, so we are only 2.5% of the way through the period that editors have to restore these articles.

  To me, that is evidence that this is working as intended; editors are given time to discover and improve the ones that are notable, and the ones that are not notable will eventually be deleted without the need to waste disproportionate amounts of the communities time. In other words, it's not a backdoor deletion process. BilledMammal (talk) 01:20, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  And of those seven that were restored, five had been previously improved and never should have been draftified in the first place. That leaves us with Ivanyi and Godfree, so 2/912 - 0.2% - I was correct. And while you say that the draftification was only done a month and a half ago, so we are only 2.5% of the way through the period that editors have to restore these articles, do you not realize that you are at the same time trying to dump tens of thousands more there? We do not have the editor time to go through all of those; many are notable, and thus it will act as a backdoor to deletion as many will never be gotten to in time. BeanieFan11 (talk) 01:28, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  The correct figure of improved articles appears to be five (the extra two were turned into redirects to different people with similar names); Alexander Duncan (athlete), Alfred Keene, Douglas Godfree, Gyula Iványi, Julius Jørgensen. Jørgensen was improved during the draftification process, but I think it is reasonable to count him giving that the improvement reason was Seeing that this was suggested for draftification, expanded with additional refs.

  Of course, if we include all the articles improved during the extended draftification process and as a consequence of the process then the percentage will be even higher and your argument even weaker.

  If you don't think we have the editor time to go through these then what do you propose we do? Take them all through AfD, at a rate of 500 or a 1000 a month, and consume even more editor time? The fact is that this is the way most likely to result in their improvement and restoration; less will be deleted than taking them through AfD and applying the time pressures of that process, and less community time will be wasted as we will be saved from needing to spend hours discussing those that are not notable. This is why it is not a backdoor to deletion, because aside from going through the frontdoor with a herald announcing that it is doing so it is going to result in far less deletions than taking these articles through AfD would result in. BilledMammal (talk) 01:56, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  I don't care if its 0.2% or 0.7%, in what absurd world do you live in where 99%+ of articles being deleted through the backdoor is classified as not being backdoor deleted due to "about five of the one thousand being improved"? That is a ludicrous suggestion! If you don't think we have the editor time to go through these then what do you propose we do? Take them all through AfD, at a rate of 500 or a 1000 a month, and consume even more editor time? Doing nothing at all would also be a perfectly acceptable solution, as would tagging them for Template:Notability or Template:No significant coverage (sports), the latter of which you created for the sole purpose of not having to mass remove articles; additionally taking some to AfD, redirecting some (I don't think all that many would be contested, really), PRODDING them, etc. etc. (and my favorite, actually improve the encyclopedia and expand them) would all be much better solutions and would help the encyclopedia better than getting rid of articles with decent chances of notability by the masses. BeanieFan11 (talk) 02:03, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  I don't care if its 0.2% or 0.7%, in what absurd world do you live in where 99%+ of articles being deleted through the backdoor is classified as not being backdoor deleted due to "about five of the one thousand being improved"? As I said before, we are only 2.5% of the way through the time that has been provided to improve the articles - and if you feel longer is needed you are free to move them to your user space, which is further evidence that this is not backdoor deletion.

  Doing nothing at all would also be a perfectly acceptable solution I disagree, because they are WP:NOT violations, and because of the reasons I presented in my !vote. I don't think we are going to agree here, so I'm going to step back from the conversation; I think I have adequately proven that whatever this process is, it is not intended to be nor does it function as a backdoor to deletion. BilledMammal (talk) 02:12, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  And yet the first RfC found sufficient consensus for draftification... How many editors would change their !votes if the draftification time limit was infinite? I doubt many supporters would care (because the intent isn't to get these deleted, it's to get them out of mainspace), but I also doubt it would change the minds of many (any?) opposers. JoelleJay (talk) 00:47, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  If there wasn't a totally arbitrary deadline for deletion, then I'd switch to support moving them to drafts. Like I said in my comment, it's ambiguous if all of these are actually notable per WP:NSPORTS. If this isn't going to produce a backdoor mass deletion in violation of policy, then it's fine to take a batch questionable stubs and move them to drafts. People do that boldly all the time. Steven Walling • talk 00:28, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Steven Walling, all of them objectively fail NSPORTS as they do not meet SPORTCRIT #5. We had very strong consensus that a SIGCOV IRS source must be cited in all athlete bios to remain in mainspace. JoelleJay (talk) 18:36, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

  Where is the consensus that the sources cited by these articles don't constitute reliable significant coverage? Steven Walling • talk 05:51, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  I think it is quite obvious that such database sources don't constitute significant coverage. However, if you need a consensus for this position, see WP:SPORTSCRIT #5 which requires sports biographies to include at least one reference to a source providing significant coverage of the subject, excluding database sources emphasis mine. BilledMammal (talk) 06:45, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  Ok if you believe these are all 100% non-notable according to sports guidelines, then why aren't you filing deletion requests or just boldly mass merging to the existing lists of cricket players?

  This draft proposal isn't worth anyone's time if the articles are known with certainty to not be notable. They should just be deleted. The only conclusion I can draw is that you actually don't know for certain that they lack notability, and therefore the entire proposal to mass draft-ify, merge, or delete them is not valid. These articles need to evaluated and dealt with individually without an arbitrary deadline, like normal on Wikipedia. Steven Walling • talk 20:54, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support Though this discussion should not need to be held, as this was decided already at the gargantuan Olympics. That decision should be a Green Light to just draftify and get it done. Zaathras (talk) 00:51, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • The Olympics discussion (just barely) reached a decision to draftify only that group of Olympians, not thousands to tens and hundreds of thousands more of other articles... BeanieFan11 (talk) 01:01, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
• Strongest possible oppose, many of the articles are notable and should be looked at on a case by case basis, even if it takes forever.--Ortizesp (talk) 03:15, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  ... and you should have up to forever, if you wish it, to look at those articles on a case by case basis, from draft space. Ravenswing 18:23, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

  Nope. They get deleted beyond a point :)
  Which is a major issue, and why some people have called it "backdoor deletion". Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 18:12, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support - per my vote at WP:LUGSTUBS. These articles represent a highly unusual pattern of disruptive editing (the former editor carelessly created hundreds of mini-stubs sourced only to a single database daily), and a highly unusual process is necessary to address the well-established need to remove these from mainspace. If anything, our AfD processes are more overloaded in recent weeks with post-WP:NSPORTS2022 notability failures than they were when LUGSTUBS began. We simply cannot use the conventional processes over the next tens of years to clean up Lugnuts' mess. 03:46, 12 July 2023 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jogurney (talk • contribs) 03:46, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support in strongest possible terms per my previous comments; I genuinely believe that the fact that we need to hold even this RFC is already far too much of a barrier to removal (that is to say, I think that someone ought to have been able to draftify them without discussion) - a sweeping, multi-article action that was taken with no discussion, and which has no significant interveining edits or discussions building an implicit consensus for it, should always be reversable without discussion. Lugnuts took a WP:BOLD action, people objected, now it gets reversed until / unless an affirmative consensus is found for it. We shouldn't need to demonstrate a consensus to draftify them - now that there's an objection, anyone who wants to keep them in article space must demonstrate an affirmative consensus to place them there. To do otherwise encourages WP:FAIT actions and further WP:BOLD mass-edits without consensus, as well as encouraging people to simply ignore objections knowing that article creation is so difficult to reverse. People who believe that there is something salveagable here can always examine and restore individual articles, preferably after getting consensus for doing so if they want to restore large numbers (now that doing so is clearly controversial, per the usual principles of WP:BOLD), but per WP:BURDEN, the burden for doing so rests on them - the people above who argue that the responsibility to demonstrate that each individual article is ought to be draftified are turning BURDEN on its head. If you want to retain or create something, you must step up and produce the sourcing necessary to support it; you can't demand that other people somehow prove that they're allowed to undo a plainly WP:BOLD action. --Aquillion (talk) 08:24, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
• Most of these are properly sourced, and there is a backlog of articles with no sources at all; there are more in the 2007 categories than in this list, and the date in the template is usually when the template was added sometimes several years after an article was created. Quality has been mentioned, and that one or two sentences in a list would be acceptable, but an increase to three or four with an infobox, more than would be included in a list, could never be acceptable quality and would require either an increase to five or more or reduction to one or two in a list, but I disagree, as quality is unrelated to article length. This looks more like a WP:BATTLE against Lugnuts, or against cricket, and not an attempt to improve Wikipedia. Not opposing, as random AFDs leaving gaps in the coverage would be worse. Obviously there should be two (or more) Wikipedias. To make it easier to maintain all would be edited at the same site; there could be one that only displays articles that are longer than stubs. Peter James (talk) 21:08, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support Once draftified, editors can work on those drafts and move them out of draft-space when ready. Also, I would suggest that the draftified articles be auto-deleted after a year instead of the proposed 5 years (5 years is too long). Some1 (talk) 23:07, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
• Userfy to the userspace of User:Lugnuts, with the same intention, except do not complicate the WP:G13 rule or the processes of draftspace. SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:19, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose Meh. Stubs are not a problem, if you come across one that you find, after proper WP:BEFORE searches, that needs to be dealt with, do so. These kind of mass reactions to harmless stubs are pointless. We don't have to do anything, except the normal process of expanding, editing, merging, deleting, etc. stuff when we come across it. --Jayron32 12:02, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support: If, in all these months after Lugnuts was shut down, the cricket project had felt moved to do the work to source these articles, we would have less of a problem. (If Lugnuts himself had ever felt moved to do the work to source his tens of thousands of sub-stubs, he never would've been sanctioned or banned in the first place.) If the cricket project had been less focused for many years in general obstructionism with respect to sub-stubs and the need for tighter notability guidelines, we not only would have had less of a problem, but the movement to deprecate participation standards sports-wide may never have gotten up a head of steam. I am mortally tired of the time of dozens and hundreds of editors sucked into the deletion and sourcing whirlpool while others piously maintain that there's no real problem here. By all means, let's move to draftify these articles, and let the people who claim that They're! All! Notable! do the sourcing work to prove their claims. The same way we've been doing on the other end: one article at a time.

  And by the bye? This IS the compromise option. This gives people who want to do the work -- as should have been done in the first place -- to source the articles. My preferred option would be to simply take every cricket bio Lugnuts ever created with a current byte size of less than 2,500, mass delete them all, and leave it to those editors who profess to care to do the work to recreate them, one article at a time. I recognize that would never gain consensus, but enough's enough. Ravenswing 14:10, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

• Comment This is a very technical discussion and proposal, yet, to me, it seems like a case of the Law of triviality. Can anyone say what the benefits would be if all these articles were draftified, or if they were not draftified? Notability was mentioned, as well as What Wikipedia is not. This is actually a discussion about heuristics. In that case, it raises a bigger question, and everything here is moot, aside from serving a case example. Namely, it applies to all articles of the nature outlined in the OP, and it's not limited to just Lugnuts. I assume we have tens of thousands of such articles, maybe in the 100k-200k range. Looking at it through that lens, I don't really know what to say. For whom are we incubating these aticles? The majority of them receive few views anyway, and I assume that enthusiasts don't mind the sparsity as much. This does lead us back to WP:NOT, but then, draftspace is not an indefinite repository, and 5 years is really stretching the limits. Why not just give all the articles 5 more years, and then decide whether mass-deletion is appropriate? This is really a way of 'cleaning up' a blocked user's mistakes. That is an understandable motive. However, it also feels like doing something for the sake of doing something. Dege31 (talk) 15:49, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

  Can anyone say what the benefits would be if all these articles were draftified? Here's one benefit: every article in mainspace carries a maintenance burden that eats away at editor time. There are ~40,000 active editors attempting to curate an encyclopedia that contains over 6,600,000 articles; it's in our best interest to minimize the time we spend working on articles that are going to end up being deleted.

  Take a look at the history of some of these articles. Some of them have had more edits than others, but all the ones I've checked so far have had at least one or two edits from people other than Lugnuts; mostly small things like changing categories or adding short descriptions. For instance, look at Anmol Malhotra. Its categories have been altered twice; its references have been renamed; it has been vandalized by IPs twice; another two IPs have made good-faith but incorrect edits which were reverted; a minor bit of information has been added to the infobox; a wikilink has been removed; and some empty spaces have been added and removed. Each of these edits might have only taken a few seconds; but add to that another few seconds per edit wasted by anyone who has that article on their watchlist, and then multiply that by 94,000 (the number of articles created by Lugnuts), and now you have a major timesink on your hands.

  The amount of time we spend editing and maintaining these articles pales in comparison to the time we could potentially spend discussing them, if we had to AfD them one-by-one, so if we believe that non-notable articles should be removed from Wikipedia, it makes sense to do so en masse where possible – but if anyone says (as you seem to be saying) that non-notable articles should just be left in mainspace, the maintenance burden I described above is one reason why I can't agree with that. There are other reasons (e.g. little-watched articles are more likely to contain errors, which have the potential to proliferate across the internet; the existence of non-notable articles encourages the creation of more), but the timesink factor is one that's easy to overlook. Putting these articles out of the way would just save us a heck of a lot of wasted time, and consequently give us more time to work on the encyclopedia proper. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 21:13, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

  I don't necessarily disagree, since I was not primarily arguing for or against the proposal. My opinion is that this argument is broad, and the selection is arbitrary, since it applies to many more articles than the ones listed. Therefore, I cannot view it in isolation, and I do not think that makes sense. Dege31 (talk) 10:07, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support. 5 years is long enough for anyone to fix the issue and bring them to mainspace if the subject is notable enough. Taking all of these to AFD would be tiresome and burdensome. It feels like a tiny little "backdoor to deletion" but our AFD process can't handle this volume of discussions. Draftyfying for a long time is a good middle ground. ✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 17:22, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
  • 5 years is long enough for anyone to fix the issue and bring them to mainspace if the subject is notable enough – for what will be tens of thousands of articles on old athletes, for which sources have always been more difficult to find? I don't think so. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:25, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

    Then they shouldn't have been created in the first place, if that was done with no intention to source them, should they have? And we shouldn't keep them around indefinitely, if those editors who would otherwise want to save them have no intention to work to maintain them, should we? Ravenswing 03:32, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

    @BeanieFan11: It's my understanding that provision #2 of the proposal would allow you to move every one of these articles to your own userspace, if that's what you want to do. Then you could work on them for as long as you like without any threat of deletion hanging over you. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 17:05, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

    Still, there's absolutely no way I can write tens of thousands of articles (its taken me years to do 800 and article creation has been my main contribution) - even if I moved them to my userspace, it may not be deletion, but it in a way functions as that since they will almost assuredly never be mainspace articles again. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:08, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

    If no one cares enough/has time enough to do the work (and surely this proposal neither rises or falls on your personal ability to pick up the slack), then they shouldn't be mainspace articles. Ravenswing 22:07, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

    Would it be better if I were to say that the Wikipedia community as a whole does not have the time to go through the quantity of the articles in the timespan of the proposal, which would thus make many draftified articles that would survive at AfD be deleted through the backdoor, which is explicitly against Wikipedia's deletion policy as the articles do not meet WP:DRAFTIFY's required standard of "obviously unready for mainspace"? BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:05, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

    They are obviously unready for mainspace. They fail SPORTSCRIT #5, so they should not be in mainspace. JoelleJay (talk) 23:10, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

    SPORTCRIT does not say that "all articles failing this must immediately be removed from mainspace"; and also, BilledMammal created Template:No significant coverage (sports) for the sole purpose of not having to mass remove SPORTCRIT-failing articles from mainspace. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:14, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

    SPORTCRIT says Sports biographies must include at least one reference to a source providing significant coverage of the subject, excluding database sources. We also don't say all articles sourced only to a primary source must immediately be removed; that doesn't mean such articles are PAG-compliant and "ready for mainspace", and the existence of the primary sources template does not prevent draftification. JoelleJay (talk) 00:43, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

• Listify all as first choice. I didn't have a strong opinion about this until today, after I spent several hours fixing miscited page numbers on hundreds of moth substubs, often where the incorrectly cited source was the only one, and in some cases where the article was so short my addition of a citation template now accounts for more than 30% of the byte size. Now I have feelings about maintenance burdens someone mentioned above.
  • Listifying articles retains the entire content, and can be performed with rapid cut-paste manoevres.
  • Listifying leaves redirects for easy expansion when interested editors find additional sourced information.
  • Listifying lowers maintenance burden, since many smol related changes can be made on a single page instead of thirty or two hundred.
  • If a player can be placed into multiple lists, Labeled section transclusion can be used to keep the data in one place for consistency and ease of maintenance.
  • Although some of these subjects pass WP:N, by certain objective measures these are amongst Wikipedia's worst articles, and they degrade the average quality of the encyclopaedia (whether "average quality" is a valuable metric is an open question).
    • Articles like these make WP:N look like a mockery to newcomers. It's tough to explain with just a handwave to WP:OSE that someone's favourite youtuber with thirty million subscribers doesn't qualify for an article because traditional media have not reported on them, but a dead athlete whose professional career spanned all of a half dozen matches is worth holding on to a single sentence standalone article about.
    • People come to the Teahouse with some frequency asking specifically how to exclude sportsperson biographies from Special:RandomPage, because such articles are so numerous it degrades that page's functionality for the user.
  • All this stems from the choice to make the Article the fundamental unit of Wikipedia. There's no fixing that, but User:Iridescent's excellent Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway is the ideal example of what we can do about borderline notable content. Contextualise it, have a smol sourced blurb for everything contextually relevant, with a link to a standalone article if and only if the topic warrants it. This applies in general too: cricketers, moths, and substubs in my own content area of concentration, early China. Some dude was monarch of a polity of a few thousand at some point for an unknown period of time, and all we know about him is his name, predecessor, and successor, but now we have to have an article just for him specifically? All the information present in these articles is more useful in context anyway, as well as easing navigation and reducing cruft.
• Userfy to User:Lugnuts/* as second choice. Clears up all the problems of leaving the articles in mainspace, and avoids the G13 ticking time bomb. As a bonus, treat parsimoniously. Treat active players with greater leniency. Maybe leave their articles in place while the dead and retired are moved. Active players are more likely to be searched and more likely to attract interested contributors, and as a bonus a greater proportion of them are from outside the Anglosphere, so it would help a little with our systemic bias problem. Folly Mox (talk) 05:20, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose for at least the Australian cricketers. Having sampled some Australians from the list and researching on Trove, an Australian newspaper database, I've been able to expand and source perhaps half the sample, notably David Mailer, David Taylor (Australian cricketer), Daniel Cullen (New South Wales cricketer). (Note I'm not saying every article I could expand is certainly notable, but they would definitely merit a proper AfD discussion if they were up for deletion). I didn't do a particularly thorough job on each and I don't even have any pre-existing experience in researching cricketers – I'm sure someone who knew the quirks of the subject area and spent more time looking would do even better. I'm satisfied that if this proposal passed, it would put an unacceptably large number of notable articles at risk of unjustified deletion. – Teratix ₵ 06:26, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

  If they're truly notable, they can easily be recreated. SportingFlyer T·C 22:26, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

  @SportingFlyer: I've seen this point made repeatedly by those who support this but in reality, no, that's not going to happen; the notable ones will not be "easily recreated." Since NSPORT has been destroyed, people just don't really make many articles on historical athletes (for example, I've been pretty much the main creator of decent biographical articles in American football for a while now). Do you know the difficulty it takes to create articles nowadays on historical athletes, especially the older ones? To dig through tons of newspaper archives, then determine which are useful, then rephrase the text and add it to the article, include the references, the formatting, etc. etc. and hope it passes NPP (though autopatrollers don't have to go through that last step)? In reality, what's going to happen if this passes are a very low number of the actually notable articles here are going to be improved (like the 0.2% of the Olympians) and BilledMammal is then going to propose to get rid of 40,000 more, which will make it even more difficult to go through as we do not have the editor time to work on that many articles with deletion the consequence if we don't! BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:54, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

  User:BeanieFan11, I certainly appreciate your passion for the sportsbio space and all the work you've done in it. I don't even want to draftify these articles (I just opined listify above, and disagree there should be any deadline for improvement if the articles are removed from mainspace), but it seems to me the process you're describing – research, rewriting source material, adding references, and properly formatting – are just the basic steps of article creation. If I didn't know better from your participation here and in the preceding Olympians RFC, I could interpret your statement above as an argument against these articles existing at all, due to the clear lack of diligence and care in their creation. Folly Mox (talk) 23:14, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

  What I am trying to say is this: we've got these articles here currently – many are notable, and they do not meet WP:DRAFTIFY's standard of "obviously unready for mainspace," and on top of that creation of historical athletes has gotten ten times harder than it was in the past. Draftifiying these would result in very few actually being improved/returned, and would only make the deletion of huge quantites of notable articles (not to mention BilledMammal wants to propose getting rid of tens of thousands after this; there is no possible way to get through that many before they're deleted). That does not improve the encyclopedia at all. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:23, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Folly Mox - The issue isn't notability, it's that there's few editors here, limited cricket knowledge and extra hurdles like non-romantic language barriers and overly eager AfD debaters that dissuade people like myself from even beginning to look into these people.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:28, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

  But we have no way of knowing which of these are actually notable or not notable, because no one has bothered to check. That's both why we are here and why NSPORT became deprecated in the first place! Listifying would be fine because it would give potential creators a place to start. SportingFlyer T·C 08:48, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

  I don't care that we don't know which are notable, the fact that we would be deleting large amounts of notable ones is what makes this unacceptable. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:21, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

  I sympathise with the cricket editors here, and I'm in agreement with the opposition in that I don't want the information in these articles removed from the encyclopaedia. I just think the way we're managing the information (thousands of individual tiny articles) is far from ideal. Maybe the farthest from ideal? Folly Mox (talk) 19:25, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

  The fact remains that this proposal will probably mean deleting many articles on notable topics. That shouldn't be acceptable to us. – Teratix ₵ 00:05, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

• Suuport on the same grounds as my support in the original LUGSTUBS, and per ActivelyDisinterested and Aquillion here. XAM2175 ^(T) 10:00, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support. I have been considering this since my comment below, questioning the much more diverse range of articles here than in the previous RfC. I lean now towards support. All the articles share the same issues that defined the query, being procedurally (and uncaringly, if they have similar effort to the Olympic stubs) generated from databases. The inclusion of WP:BLPs initially concerned me, as they would be much more likely to have so-far unadded coverage (especially South Asian cricketers, whose coverage may not be in English), but conversely, BLPs are where we should be most cautious about these sorts of slapdash efforts. I find the reference to WP:DEADLINE in oppose votes curious. This proposal is being considered now, not in the future. There is no deadline to have some stats in the mainspace, especially not for BLPs. CMD (talk) 07:32, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
  • There's also no deadline for removing these articles out of mainspace - and right now we have these articles. That is what the opposers are arguing. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:21, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

    Thank you for repeating the reference I mentioned. As I said, someone has proposed something we could do now, and that is what I considered for my view. CMD (talk) 07:40, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

• Comment - Counting very roughly I make it 47 support 35 oppose at this point, with maybe 2 listify/userfy. That's very roughly that same 60:40 split as at the original LUGSTUBS discussion. FOARP (talk) 09:23, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

  WP:DETCON says "Consensus is ascertained by the quality of the arguments given on the various sides of an issue, as viewed through the lens of Wikipedia policy." The number of !votes is irrelevant. James500 (talk) 02:51, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  The number is not decisive, but nor is it irrelevant. If I'm saying anything at all here, it's that if the final numerical split of the votes is similar, and the arguments are similar, the outcome should also be similar. FOARP (talk) 13:50, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  The policy says that the number of !votes is irrelevant. One of the reasons that the consensus policy does not take into account the number of !votes is because such an approach would encourage sockpuppetry and other forms of vote stacking.

  The arguments are not similar. These articles have far more coverage than the Olympians. James500 (talk) 23:02, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

• Weak support as long as all the criteria in the nomination are correct, and if any have been expanded since the start of the RFC, then they are excluded from this move. Most of these articles are likely non-notable based on the criteria for their selection, and those that are can always be expanded and then moved back to article space. Joseph2302 (talk) 10:02, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support per pervious RfC. This is basically the same situation just on a different subset so all previous rational applies here. I would have preferred a much shorter time period than the 5 years, but the proposal is still better than the current situation. --Gonnym (talk) 17:23, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support per the previous RfC and Donald Albury and SMC. Ealdgyth (talk) 17:32, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support some of those stubs are in my watchlist and all I'm going to do is expand them until they surpass 2,500 bytes (I know they're notable). Any notable figure that gets their article deleted will eventually get their article recreated in theory precisely because they're notable. Super Dromaeosaurus (talk) 19:42, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
  • But why would notable articles need to be moved to draftspace and/or deleted for them exist as non-stubs? Why not go through the much more simple process of expanding them in mainspace? And to Any notable figure that gets their article deleted will eventually get their article recreated in theory precisely because they're notable – that's not necessarily the case. Creating notable articles on historical athletes has gotten many times harder since NSPORT was destroyed and there's already enormous quantities of notable athletes that have never been created in 20 years of wikipedia (so using logic, if the articles get much harder to be created and already huge amounts of notable ones that have never been written, how would getting rid of tens of thousands of the notable ones we already have make it likely they'll all be recreated in a better state?) BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:56, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

    In my opinion some of Wikipedia's most problematic articles are those that are right below the threshold of notability. It might take years until someone realises there's not actually that much to say on a given person. I've been on Wikipedia for years and it is still hard for me to judge whether some people are notable or not, and I believe it will always be like that because of the quite abstract nature of the policy.

    Lugnuts has created tons of short articles based on data repositories. Some are definitively not notable. Whether on draftspace or on mainspace, it will take us years to go through all of them. I believe in that case that it is better to keep bad content out of the mainspace and to progressively recover good articles than to keep trash for years here. This is a really exceptional treatment for a really exceptional (once-in-a-Wikipedia so far) case. Super Dromaeosaurus (talk) 20:34, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

    @Super Dromaeosaurus - I think there's maybe only two others whose article-production in the long-term deserves this analysis. I'm not going to put them on blast by naming them here but if you're familiar with Iranian village stubs and bot-created Indian sub-continent geostubs you'll know who I'm talking about. FOARP (talk) 13:48, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  • Also, on a side note, @Super Dromaeosaurus:, you can expect the deletionists to give you hell whenever they can for all the draftified articles you move back to mainspace after expanding (as evidence, when I spent about an hour expanding the draftified Gyula Iványi from the prior discussion, I then had to waste several more hours arguing in several places with multiple users about why he was worth moving to mainspace and only after that did they finally agree he deserved an article - expanding it alone they don't view as sufficient and only block-worthy "gaming the system"; you also have to find SIGCOV which they agree is SIGCOV (very rare) and that they agree is a reliable source and that they agree covers said athlete in the correct context (I've had articles I did significant work on deleted because although they had sufficient SIGCOV, that SIGCOV didn't cover them in the right way) - and usually you need to have multiple pieces of it). BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:03, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

    Deletionist–inclusionist conflicts are going to happen no matter what solution we apply and also outside of this group of articles until the end of Wikipedia. I don't think the same will happen to every single other article.

    For the record: I would define myself as an inclusionist. Super Dromaeosaurus (talk) 20:34, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support. It's theft. Summarizing two or more sources is not stealing, that's creating a new work, but simply copying from another website and pasting the contents onto this website is just plain stealing. Scraping another website and copying thousands, or tens of thousands, of its pages and pasting them onto Wikipedia, that's just theft on a large scale. It's highly immoral. It doesn't matter if what's being stolen are "just" statistics; these websites are doing all the work (and investing the money) to gather these statistics, and then Wikipedia comes along and just copies them by the thousands? Not cool. In addition, when I Google "Aadil Rashid" [16] (to take one example), Wikipedia comes up first and ESPNcricinfo comes up second. So not only are we stealing their content, but we're stealing their traffic as well. Is this what we want? When people want to look up a cricketer, we want them to come to Wikipedia instead of some other website, even if all the information we have was simply copied from the other website? No way. This sort of content theft contradicts the ethos of what Wikipedia should be; it's hypocritical of Wikipedia to permit it (nevermind celebrating it), and we should delete all of these articles for no other reason than to deter anyone else from engaging in this sort of immoral mass-copying-and-pasting.

  Nobody has actually read these "articles." Aadil Rashid received less than 0.5 page views per day this year. I do not believe Lugnuts read all the 90,000+ articles he created. The difference between these mass-copied-and-pasted articles and a regular article is that when an editor creates articles one at a time, they actually read the articles they create, so at least one human being has actually read the article before we publish it. Not so with these mass creations, we don't know if even one human being has ever read it. It's irresponsible of Wikipedia to publish something that nobody has read first (nevermind verified). At least some of these articles are WP:BLPs. Publishing unread BLPs is not just irresponsible, it's reckless.

  While I prefer WP:CSDing these immoral and irresponsible if not reckless mass-stolen articles (or at least the BLPs), not everyone is on board with deleting them all at once. There are too many to take them to AFD, even in batches (neither spending years going through this, nor flooding the AFD queue, are reasonable options). This proposal is a good compromise that takes them out of mainspace while still allowing 5 years for interested editors to improve them and bring them back to mainspace as articles or redirects, whichever is better for the particular article, just like the last RFC about Olympians. Levivich (talk) 03:02, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  • - Levivich - Pageview counts don't matter WP:NOBODYREADSIT.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:25, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

    Pageviews do matter if the argument for not draftifiying these articles is that putting them in draftspace means that no-one will see them and no-one will improve them. In reality, no-one is reading them anyway. FOARP (talk) 20:08, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

    Except, as repeatedly explained to you, real humans do view these pages. Please stop repeating demonstrably false claims. Thryduulf (talk) 20:47, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  • It's theft. – Are you kiddin' me? That's one of the most nonsensical suggestions I've seen in this entire discussion! If this is stealing, than all of Wikipedia is! Actually, summarizing sources is much more "stealing" than going from a stats website, and creating a one-sentence stub article based on the fact that Beanie Fan played two XI cricket matches for Gloucestershire in 1997 - you claim we're taking their "hard work and money" but there's much more in those databases that Lugnuts wouldn't mention (for example, stats – and ESPNcricinfo (if I remember correctly) also has prose for some of the athletes; if Lugnuts was actually word-for-word copying that, than I would agree they should be deleted; but he wasn't.) You claim that we're also stealing their views; I'd claim the opposite. First, you can click on them as the second result on google or you could read our Wikipedia article, which is very short and contains a link to that website; the fact that its very short would likely incline its readers to click on the link, thus giving them more views actually. And you say that, but right after say that "nobody reads these articles in the first place" (a side note: if no one reads these, how are we stealing other websites' views?) – you point to a link that shows a cricketer getting 0.5 views a day and say that we shouldn't have articles no one reads, but right there that's evidence that over 100 people reading it per year! BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:02, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

    @Levivich@BeanieFan11 - Since IP is my profession, I have given this some thought over the years. Morally I can't disagree that simply going through a database and reproducing the numbers from it as Lugnuts clearly did is cheesy in the extreme. Legally, well, mere facts are not copyright protected. Barring the existence of "trap listings" (e.g., fake listings put into the database just to catch copiers) it is hard to see where the legal case could be. Where it gets murkier is things like database rights where any liability would rest on things that I have little insight into (e.g., to what extent did Lugnuts reproduce the structure of the Cricinfo database and to what extent is that protected?). I don't see any clear case for IP infringement but I don't know everything.

    On the readership point, 100 hits a year almost certainly represents zero actual humans reading the article, as articles will get crawled by bots (e.g., search-engine indexers) about that many times in a year. FOARP (talk) 13:31, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

    The page view statistics count human and non-human views separately. For example Agniv Pan last month received views from 94 users,[17] 64 spiders,[18] and 5 "automated" (i.e. non-spiders non-humans) [19]. While the determination of "user" isn't exactly equal to "human" it is close and typically fewer than 5-10 "user" hits a year can be attributed to non-humans. Thryduulf (talk) 08:04, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 2: Survey (mass draftification of cricket articles)

• Strong Oppose I was leaning support upon initial reading of the discussion. Doubtless, many of these are poor articles that do deserve to be deleted. However, many are not; they are simply articles that have not been improved to the level we expect at Wikipedia. Those would not pass deletion at AfD, and should not pass here. I would encourage a much more thorough list, that looks into vernacular sources, though I acknowledge that it will need much more effort than what has been expended here already. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 04:26, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  This is similar to the spirit of WP:PRESERVE, but what good is PRESERVE for zero-effort, mass-created articles? There's no work to preserve. Another assumption underlying PRESERVE is that articles are more likely to reach X state (e.g. B-class) by a given date, if they exist, than if they need to be remade from scratch. That assumption holds true for articles that are merely bad. Not for barren articles that contain nothing but database info. DFlhb (talk) 12:00, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  For the record, my research suggests it isn't even true for stubs in general, although it is more true for stubs like those than micro-stubs like these. BilledMammal (talk) 12:21, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  By keeping the useful ones in mainspace, we encourage people to add to them. How many casual visitors go and edit drafts vs how many edit mainspace? I support the removal of articles where there is truly no notability, but a mass draftification essentially puts the burden of improvement on a very small number of editors, thus being de-facto deletion. I would support a second list if it came with checks regarding vernacular sources. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 15:07, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  How many casual visitors are we expecting to come across these articles in mainspace and add multiple sources of IRS SIGCOV to produce a PAG-compliant article? No one besides Lugnuts has substantially edited any of these stubs ever over the last 10 years. And I suspect the vast majority of cricket Lugstubs that have been expanded satisfactorily by others have been expanded by the most active members of the cricket wikiproject, all of whom should be aware of this proposal and thus aware that they can visit the list and work on drafts should they wish to. Their being in draftspace won't impede these editors if they happened to come across SIGCOV of some player and want to add it; they'll know to check the list if the name is a redlink. JoelleJay (talk) 01:50, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  The argument that someone who isnt an extremely dedicated Wiki editor wont be able to add SIGCOV is wrong; Even a casual fan might drop by and add the day's news report on the cricketers career. Putting the burden on a small section of editors is essentially backdoor deletion, which I dislike.
  If this is supposed to be an AfD, then it should come with better checks. I am not satisfied with the criteria. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 12:30, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  That just does not happen. You can look at the histories of the articles that didn't meet the draftification criteria to see who has added genuine SIGCOV and when they added it. For example, out of all 48 pages in category:cricketers from Manipur, we have only 2 that have a secondary independent source other than Cricinfo stats. One has a match recap added by Lugnuts, the other has a primary match recap added by another cricket project member. Neither is non-routine/SIGCOV, so wouldn't qualify to get out of draftspace anyway. Out of the 7 additional pages in category:Manipur cricketers, which is a separate category for some reason, one has a routine match recap added by Lugnuts.

  2/12 Lugstubs in category:cricketers from Allahabad have sources besides stats databases: one with some obits added by a highly active sports contributor, the other with a news report added by Lugnuts.

  4/11 Lugstubs in category:cricketers from Lucknow: 1,2,3 with non-stats sources added by Lugnuts, 1 with sources added by a highly active cricket project member.

  3/18 Lugstubs in category:cricketers from Dhaka: 1,2,3 with non-stats sources added by Lugnuts.

  0/9 Lugstubs in category:cricketers from Fremantle with non-stats independent sources.

  5/29 Lugstubs in category:cricketers from Newcastle, New South Wales: 1,2 with non-stats sources added by active project members, 1 with primary, non-independent sources added by a random editor, 1 with an ANYBIO #2 source unrelated to cricket added by an admin, 1 with a non-stats source added by Lugnuts. JoelleJay (talk) 01:00, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

• Listify, followed by draftify – there's no good answer here, but I think one of listifying or draftifying would be the best solution. Listifying keeps the content in mainspace, while also keeping it all in one place where anyone can pick one and expand it if they meet standalone notability criteria. Draftifying isn't great, and honestly these articles took such little work to create that I don't think deleting them loses much of anything, but outright deleting articles on potentially notable subjects would also be subpar. I don't like the backdoor to deletion possibility, but I think 5 years is enough for anyone who cares to make an edit and postpone G13 in draftspace. I'd also much prefer just looking at the full set rather than a subset, as the result won't change much for the rest of the set. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 19:34, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  I don't know if this is the case, but I suspect that all of these are already in mainspace lists containing much of the same bare data found in the stubs. JoelleJay (talk) 22:36, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  Yeah, there's already lists by team, by country and so-forth. What's the point in listifying? FOARP (talk) 13:33, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  It sounded like we didn't have everything covered in lists (African players, etc.), but if I'm wrong on that front then there is not much point. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 23:41, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

  The current list articles only contain career stats, but not vital dates, birthplaces, or individual citations to their cricinfo entries. My !vote for listification was based on a process whereby all the information in the current articles would make its way into an appropriate list article. Folly Mox (talk) 00:10, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

• Listify (and then possibly draftify). It was hard to oppose outright, but mass draftification proposal as stated seemed both too complex and still a bit heavy-handed. But I didn't want to oppose only on principle in hopes that we could find a way to improve the encyclopedia. So I'm glad other editors have come up with this solution. It's actually pretty good. —siroχo 19:45, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Siroxo - This same process was already applied in the previous WP:LUGSTUBS case, so, complex or not, it is perfectly do-able. I'll also say, the articles draftified in the previous case haven't exactly been missed. FOARP (talk) 13:35, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  I can appreciate that. Still, I feel that do-able in the moment can lead to complexity after the fact. The 5 year clause is the most clear example of something that will certainly be confusing to some editors in a couple of years. Thus I prefer to keep things more within the realm of standard processes. —siroχo 09:05, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Siroxo: In regards to The 5 year clause is the most clear example of something that will certainly be confusing to some editors in a couple of years, the deletion after six months of drafts is a semi-automated process (admins are given a list of articles that are coming up on a deadline), and the exception for the five years clause has already been incorporated into that process. BilledMammal (talk) 09:08, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  Complexity is a fickle beast. It's very difficult to reduce complexity without changing requirements, mostly the complexity ends up shifted. I appreciate that people are trying to shift the complexity into an automated system. However, the state machine editors keep in their heads will have another set of states for this particular subset of drafts, due to this, and some editors may not even realize this in a couple years time. —siroχo 09:19, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support Levivich makes some interesting points and BeanieFan's reply seems to me to miss the point. What do these articles add to the body of knowledge on the internet? Sure, a regular article must combine pre-existing information. But that combining and and then presenting it in a different way is the value add of a Wikipedia article. As Levivich demonstrates that's not what's happened with these articles.(Looking at the example Levivich gave, BeanieFan's claim that is not the case is unconvincing) Without these articles nothing is lost - the source it was "stolen" from (in Levivich's terms) provides it just the same. The proposal is a workable compromise. DeCausa (talk) 10:14, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

  Comment . I'd support this per Levivich and this report on the way AI machines are poaching massively on wikipedia's articles, hijacking the often arduous reading and writing of volunteer editors. If, as it appears to be the case, editors here are using similar algorithms to sweep the net and mechanically reproduce sporting material without the critical eyes of editors combing independently through the web sources to winnow rubbish and build an article, then they are putting global knowledge in double jeopardy, since the A1 world, which hopes to cannibalize wikipedia's distinctive verifiable knowledge base, will like the proverbial moronic computer that 'thinks' at the speed of light', reproduce massive loads of data here that have been inserted indiscriminantly and indeed by a form of automatic larceny. It would be painful for me, as a cricket addict from infancy, to uncritically support this erasure, despite the cogency of the case for deletion, but whatever the cost we must be accountable, and give warrant for our reliability in verifying, editor by editor, the content here. My reserve relates to WP:Systemic bias, that blanket erasure without close supervision, case by case, will mostly affect non-European cricketers. But articles like those on Afghani cricket (one of the two good things to come out of the devastatingly stupid war, the other being female access to education) show that solid individual work can or does cover thirdworld cricketers who otherwise might have risked neglect in coverage. Automatic erasure, like automatic stub generation, in annuling the human agency that is fundamental for wikipedia, is equally problematic.Nishidani (talk) 10:33, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

  These articles (and especially the Australians) are being expanded and improved right now. Moving them into draftspace would prevent expansion and improvement by editors who are not prepared to expand or improve pages while they are in the draftspace.

  It would have been better to have revived Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub improvement and then given the list of stubs to the wikiproject. The wikiproject could have done the search for sources, and the article improvement, that the draftification supporters are unwilling or unable to do, and then reported back a revised list of stubs for which no additional sources are available. James500 (talk) 20:27, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

  Editors have had up to ten years in some cases to improve these articles (not just the cricketer ones) in mainspace. They didn't. Many people have also suggested wikiprojectifying these sort of stubs in the past, and that is in fact an option for editors to do for any draftified stub in this proposal. But that suggestion has also been shot down by project members (not necessarily (just) cricket) who have been unwilling to and/or uninterested in expanding these stubs because many they don't believe the stubs are problematic or potentially unencyclopedic in any way. Additionally, these stubs are so lacking in content that the difference in effort between expansion and recreation is essentially a single template and a database source, so it's not like removal from mainspace presents some insurmountable hurdle for anyone trying to add SIGCOV. JoelleJay (talk) 01:34, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  - JoelleJay - See WP:NOEFFORT. The article shouldn't be deleted for its current status only because no one has improved it yet. Such deletion would prevent editors from improving it in the future.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:21, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  This assumes that the articles are improvable, but the truth is that 99% of them or more just aren't, and the remaining ~1% or less need essentially re-writing as new articles. FOARP (talk) 14:33, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  I highly, highly, highly doubt what you're saying is true. There's several different editors above who have found plenty of expandable ones. BeanieFan11 (talk) 14:39, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  BF, you were the most active opponent of the original LUGSTUBS proposal and even you were only able to bring back a hand-full of the articles that were eventually draftified. I'm pretty happy with my 1% estimate to be frank. FOARP (talk) 15:08, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  Because (1) I only have access to old American and Canadian newspapers, and (2) because I've got other things in life I want to do than endlessly expand old Olympian articles. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:10, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  The key fact here is (1), because it means that no sources exist as far as we know. "But there must be sources" is a well-worn fallacy on here. BTW, if it's UK coverage you're looking for the Wikipedia Library has the British newspaper Archive in its collection, also there are free online archives of Welsh and Australian newspapers. FOARP (talk) 15:15, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  FOARP - Multiple articles here have already been improved and taken off the list. But just as a bunch of articles were created without a ton of researching going into them, a bunch of articles are now facing deletion/draftication without a ton of research going into them. Two sides of the same coin. This is despite there being WP:NORUSH.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:42, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  In my commment below I gave the figures for the number from the original LUGSTUBS proposal that were draftified and have since returned to mainspace - it's roughly one-half of one-percent. I'm sorry, but this proposal is just taking out articles that are overwhelmingly notability fails. FOARP (talk) 15:05, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  The fact that 0.5% of the articles have been returned does not show that they are overwhelming notability fails; rather, it shows quite clearly that both proposals are just attempts to backdoor delete (i.e. violate policy to delete) enormous quantities of articles which the proposer does not like. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:08, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  Sorry I don't follow you here: how is the fact that vanishingly few of the articles previous draftified will ever get returned to mainspace evidence that this is back-door deletion? What it is is evidence suggesting that we should just delete and not draftify as nearly all of them are deletion-worthy, but I'm OK with draftification because ultimately the few that hand be saved will be saved and the overwhelming majority that can't will be deleted.

  What if I switch it around: if more articles were being returned to mainspace, would you accept that as evidence that draftifying them was the correct decision? Or would you say it was evidence that they should not have been draftified? Then how is the opposite contention viable - i.e. that very few of them being returned to mainspace means that they should not be draftified but instead should be kept in mainspace? FOARP (talk) 15:22, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  Well lucky for you these articles are being draftified, not deleted, so editors are still able to improve any they consider viable. JoelleJay (talk) 19:00, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  @JoelleJay - 100% agree here. Throwing the problem to a Wikiproject that is itself the source of the problem (via the previous WP:NCRIC guide, and their bitter-end defence of Lugnuts's and his mass-created stubs) is not a viable solution. FOARP (talk) 13:39, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

• Comment - I see a lot of people, particularly amongst oppose !voters, commenting as though WP:LUGSTUBS hadn't already happened and we weren't already in a position to assess the outcome of it. WP:LUGSTUBS closed on 11 May 2023, and of the 960 stubs in the originally-proposed list just 18 of them are presently blue-linked. Of those 18 blue-links:
  • 8 were never draftified.
  • 3 were returned to mainspace on the day they were draftified
  • 2 were returned to mainspace within a week of being draftified, and
  • 4 are redirects.
  • Only 1 has been returned to mainspace since the start of June.
• Even assuming (dubiously in some cases) that every one of the articles returned to mainspace actually belongs here and won't ultimately end up getting deleted/upmerged/redirected, this represents a grand total of roughly one-half of one percent of the total that actually got draftified. Given the lack of any articles being returned to mainspace in the past month, it is very possible that in the end no more than about 1% ever get returned to mainspace during the five years that draftification of these articles is due to last, and those that will return, will return as essentially new articles.
  The mass-slaughter of potentially-expandable articles did not happen. What happened instead was we cleared out hundreds of failing articles in a way that allows time for the vanishingly-small percentage of them that could be an article to come back to mainspace. If anything, the evidence very clearly supports the position of those that preferred straight deletion of the articles. However, I'm still happy to endorse draftification since in the end they'll all go the same way. FOARP (talk) 14:27, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  Cricket is the national sport, or the national summer sport, in some Commonwealth countries. English and Australian cricketers are far more likely to receive coverage than the vast majority of Olympians. In England and Australia, cricket receives an exponentially greater degree of coverage than the vast majority of Olympic sports and disciplines. Any estimate that tries to equate cricketers with Olympians is obviously mistaken because it is based on a false premiss. James500 (talk) 23:06, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

  This is somewhat wild hyperbole. I lived in the UK during the 2005 Ashes and in China during the 2004 Olympics, and it would be hard for me to say which was more hyped. Obviously I was way more interested in the cricket, being British, but the nationalistic fervour with which stuff like pistol-shooting and synchronised diving (or anything with a Chinese competitor in it) were treated in China was something to behold. They were still regularly showing replays of every Chinese medal win on the CCTV channels in China getting on a year after the end of the Athens games.

  But more to the point, there just isn't coverage out there for most late 19th/early-20th century cricketers who played a handful of tests and ar ethe subject of presently-failing stubs. FOARP (talk) 14:04, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  It is not hyperbole. It is a verifiable fact that is verified by a very large number of reliable sources, which say that in express and unambiguous words: [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25].

  Your analysis of English and Australian newspapers is simply mistaken. The sort of sports that are likely to receive coverage in an English newspaper are football (including soccer and rugby), cricket, tennis, horse racing, Formula One, boxing and snooker. In Australia, you can add Australian rules to that list. Those sports (and especially football, cricket and horse racing) receive endless massive coverage every day of every year. The Olympics (and most of their sports and disciplines) get a brief burst of limited coverage once every four years, and they get far less coverage, both in absolute terms, and relative to the number of sportsmen, than county cricket. An Olympian normally only gets coverage in an English newspaper if he is British and he wins a gold medal. That is why Torville and Dean are famous, and most British ice skaters have virtually no coverage at all and languish in total obscurity. Whereas English county cricketers get endless massive coverage, second only to (the winter sport) football today (and second to none in the nineteenth century).

  As far as I can tell, most of the Australian cricketers did not play a handful of matches. The problem is that the numbers in the articles usually only include the inter-state Sheffield Shield games played for Australian states, and do not include grade cricket (ie Premier Cricket) games played below that level. That is like counting the number of games a footballer has played in the British Home Championship and ignoring games played in the Premier League and the Scottish Premiership. As far as I can tell, most of the Australians played games for grade cricket (ie Premier Cricket) clubs as well as for the states. Grade cricket (ie Premier Cricket) is a statewide competition and has plenty of suitable coverage.

  As far as I can tell, there is sufficient coverage out there for most of the late 19th/early-20th century Australian cricketers. I have actually have examined the sources for a large sample of them, and I am satisfied that the coverage actually exists.

  In any event, criteria 4 of this proposal says that it is for articles referenced "only to CricketArchive or ESPNcricinfo". That is what everyone is !voting for. If a cricketer has coverage in Trove or other periodicals, or in a book like The A-Z of Australian Cricketers, he does not satisfy the criteria of this proposal and should not be draftified, because nobody has !voted for that. If you want to start a separate proposal for "articles referenced only to Trove", I cannot stop you, but I can predict with the assurance of a prophet that such a proposal would have WP:SNOW chance of success. James500 (talk) 23:45, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  "The sort of sports that are likely to receive coverage in an English newspaper..." - Thanks for explaining British newspaper coverage to me, a British newspaper-reader. FOARP (talk) 07:57, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

  "WP:LUGSTUBS closed on 11 May 2023" ... and who says that 2 months later is a fair deadline for assessing the proposal? Those drafts will be autodeleted after five years. That's the point at which a fair conclusion can be drawn about whether it was in effect AFD or not. Steven Walling • talk 03:22, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Steven Walling - We're talking about a list of 960 articles. For even 10% of these to returned to mainspace in five years we would expect roughly 2 a month to be returned. Instead none of them are being returned, because they were exactly the overwhelmingly-failing articles that the people who supported the original LUGSTUBS proposal said they were. FOARP (talk) 13:56, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  (edit conflict) none of them are being returned, because they were exactly the overwhelmingly-failing articles that the people who supported the original LUGSTUBS proposal said they were – That is completely false. The actual reason that they are not being returned is not because they're not notable (I've actually identified several other notable ones but haven't gotten to them yet, not to mention BilledMammal et al gave me hell for the ones I did try to improve), but because (1) we don't have many interested editors, (2) its difficult to find sources for them (but with enough work is possible), and (3) because all of those who were interested in improving them are now occupied with this proposal. If you dump a thousand articles in draftspace, a few might be improved, but if you dump a thousand more, and then right after 40,000 more, do you really think we will get to all of them? (contrary to what you say, many are actually notable) The interested editors do not nearly have enough time to do that. There is WP:NODEADLINE to get rid of these articles. BeanieFan11 (talk) 14:53, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  OK BF, you totally have notability for those articles but I wouldn't know them, they go to another school. FOARP (talk) 16:03, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  May I please ask @BeanieFan11 to turn down on the rhetoric a bit. Gave me hell can be understood as a personal attack in a rather large environment and directing that to et al. is not really fair as well. At least I am trying my best to help making wikipedia a more informative encyclopedia with less articles that leave one still wondering about what that actually is after having read them.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 05:18, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

  I understand that you (and BilledMammal, etc.) believe that this proposal will help the encyclopedia; I do not. As for gave me hell, it certainly felt unpleasant spending about an hour of my time expanding an article, then immediately after I return it to mainspace I had to spend three more hours arguing over whether it was notable (which it was), not to mention all the debate it took for me to remove the few that I did during the Olympian discussion (for which one user brought me to ANI for edit-warring, when I had not violated it, and BilledMammal had doubled it). That seemed pretty unfair to me and the stress it caused has made me cease expanding the other Olympians from that list for now. BeanieFan11 (talk) 14:28, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

  The analysis is inherently flawed.
  Indeed, what the data presented shows is that after draftification, the interest in participation drops off substantially with time and the "draftification" becomes de-facto deletion.
  As such, we should hold the articles to the same standard as we do at AfD, which is clearly not met by this proposal. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 12:34, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  @CapnJackSp - Arguing in favour of keeping these articles on the basis that:

  "the interest in participation drops off substantially with time and the "draftification" becomes de-facto deletion"

  is contradictory - either these articles will eventually be improved into viable articles and should be kept, or they overwhelmingly will never be improved (because they can't be) and therefore draftification of them is sensible. It cannot be that they are viable articles BUT ALSO no-one will ever improve them into viable articles. Being in main space or not doesn't really affect this. Few if any of which have any obvious evidence of having been read, much less edited, by human hands since their creation - the number of hits they get is consistent with being visited by webcrawlers only, so no-one is looking at them. FOARP (talk) 13:51, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  Im not arguing for all of these to be kept.
  Im arguing for a better list of articles, which include things like checks against vernacular sources.
  Draftifying drastically reduces visibility, and therefore pushes the burden on a small group of editors to improve the notable ones.
  Assuming that a draft wont be improved only because it cant be improved is essentially assuming these deserve deletion and working backwords. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 16:32, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  "Im not arguing for all of these to be kept" - If you're opposing this measure, this is what you are effectively doing since these articles will never be dealt with in any other way.

  "Draftifying drastically reduces visibility" - But these articles are already not being read by human beings. The number hits per year is consistent with them being crawled by web-crawlers every few days and zero humans reading them.

  "Assuming that a draft wont be improved only because it cant be improved - That's not just an assumption, that's simply the way logic works: if it can't be done then it won't be done. The steel-man version of your argument is that you expect WP:CRIN to come back and WP:NSPORTS2022 to be undone at some point in the future so they won't need to be improved any more? But that's just not going to happen. FOARP (talk) 08:07, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

  If you're opposing this measure, this is what you are effectively doing since these articles will never be dealt with in any other way.
  No.
  These will be dealt with when someone nominates with a better set of checks, even if in a mass format.
  Not in the current format, however.
  But these articles are already not being read by human beings.
  I am admittedly not the expert on web crawlers, but I doubt these generalisations hold for all the articles.
  That's not just an assumption, that's simply the way logic works: if it can't be done then it won't be done.
  Logical fallacy, just because A-->B does not mean B-->A.
  If it wasnt done, does not mean it cannot be done. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 08:59, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

  But these articles are already not being read by human beings. The number hits per year is consistent with them being crawled by web-crawlers every few days and zero humans reading them. as already explained at least once in this discussion this is completely false - human views and webcrawler views are counted separately and when you look at the evidence you will see your claim is utterly false. Here are 7 examples selected at random:

Article	User (i.e. human) views (2022)	Spider views (2022)	Automated views (2022)
Abdul Naseri	96	235	85
Abinash Saha	120	357	80
Alfred Black (cricketer)	88	292	82
Arthur Bauer	209	398	141
Chingakham Ranjan	56	161	50
Danush Peiris	78	267	86
Derreck Calvert	75	180	71

• Even the least view of these, Chingakham Ranjan, was viewed by a human on average more than once per week. Thryduulf (talk) 09:32, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

  Two things; first, to identify automated views, I believe the system relies on what the user agent tells the system. That means there are a significant number of false negatives caused by bots and spiders that don't properly identify themselves.

  Second, a significant number of those views will come from humans using Special:Random. I haven't been able to determine exactly how many times that button is clicked per year, but this Wikimedia article suggests it is approximately two billion times per year.

  Due to how Special:Random functions, these page views aren't evenly distributed, but they can easily account for most if not all of the views articles like Chingakham Ranjan receive. BilledMammal (talk) 11:14, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support per Avilich and others. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:41, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
• Comment. The arguments about this being some form of "illegal" backdoor to deletion strike me as bureaucratic wikilawyering designed to prevent any actual action from ever being taken. What we have here is a ton of stubs that are of questionable notability, low quality, and have essentially no visibility. It is reasonable to have an argument over whether these are valuable to keep around in their current state. What is unreasonable is to oppose this on the grounds that it's not the "right" way to do it, full well knowing that there isn't a standard way of doing this (and WP:LUGSTUBS is the closest we have). A mass AfD would be an obvious WP:TRAINWRECK, 1182 individual AfDs would not be much better, and of course if someone goes through and takes actions on individual articles without an RfC they'll be accused of skirting consensus process. It's fine to think that no action should be taken here, but if an RfC listed in centralized discussion isn't the right way to determine whether action should be taken here, what is? Dylnuge ^{(Talk • Edits)} 16:45, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  What is?
  Well, do the exact same thing done here, but put in slightly more effort and check for sources from where these guys play. Quite a few examples have been shown above where the person is notable. I would support a second list if they checked for vernacular sources. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 17:23, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  To clarify, I think your opposition is entirely reasonable and well reasoned. I think many of the oppose !votes are entirely reasonable. I also haven't reviewed these in depth and don't have a strong opinion if this should or shouldn't happen. I just find all the kafkaesuqe "the only valid way to do this is one by one at AfD" arguments silly enough that I felt it was worth saying so. Dylnuge ^{(Talk • Edits)} 17:51, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Dylnuge - Right. But this is the argument that is always made about why we can't clear up mass-created articles. Someone creates en-masse tens of thousands of low-quality single-sentence stubs with coverage only in an all-encompassing database, and then a group of editors on a Wikiproject will simply decide that the articles will never be touched even if they obviously know that they fail our policies and guidelines. Any way of dealing with them is stymied by a Kafkaesque merry-go-round of:

  • AFD the articles and you get endless "Keep - obviously notable, what was the nom thinking!? They should be TBAN'd from AFD!" !votes, or at best redirection (but never as the first step).
  • PROD the articles and you get taken to ANI for "abusing" the PROD system.
  • Redirect the articles and you get told you have to AFD them by exactly the same people who abuse you for AFDing them.
  • Propose draftifying and that's deletion-by-the-back-door.

  All from people who regularly say that they are well-aware that these articles fail our standards.

  I'm not even the person who is the target of all this - what I'm describing above is just what I've seen other editors who tried to deal with mass-created articles go through (mostly @BilledMammal and @Dlthewave). Let's not forget that the articles we are talking about ones the creators of which said they purposefully put errors into and which, purposefully or not, regularly included systematic errors. FOARP (talk) 08:41, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support. I can somewhat understand the concerns raised by others above about the precedent involved here, but ultimately I find those 'slipper slope' arguments uncompelling in this case. We are talking about a very unique situation created by a problem user whose own actions in mass creating the articles in question was itself out of process and inconsistent with article creation guidelines. I find the proposal very narrowly tailored in its scope and reasonable, all factors considered. It sets five strict criteria (each of which is narrow in its own right and all five of which have to be met for any given article) for creating the pool of articles to be draftified, and it carves out robust rules for permitting whatever small fraction of these articles may meet GNG/have some actual hope of becoming legitimate articles that meet our content guidelines to be rescued by any parties actually willing to do the requisite work. This option feels to me to be more restrained and less disruptive in the long run than the only real alternative under typical process: mass AfD nominations, which are going to run into huge hurdles when it comes to making the case to make immediate final decisions on such a sweeping scale and monolithic/non-specific analysis. Honestly, this feels like a very thoughtfully considered solution, given the circumstances. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 21:09, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

  I don't want to bludgeon, so I will strike my comment if this is in violation- but I have not yet seen a compelling explanation as to why this is a unique case. Disregard the current issue and the pro vs contra for a moment: how and why does it make sense to limit the scope, when there are many other articles of the same nature, except that they have a different creator? The "slippery slope" is the contra interpretation, but it's something that inevitably follows. Dege31 (talk) 19:38, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

  Disregard the current issue and the pro vs contra for a moment: how and why does it make sense to limit the scope, when there are many other articles of the same nature, except that they have a different creator? When you are talking about articles with the same issues, are you talking about other mass created articles, or just low-quality articles that were created artisanally?

  The former may well be addressed by this process; for example I have considered applying this process to articles created by BlackJack, although I will need to improve the tools I use first. The second can't be, for many reasons, of which I consider three particularly important:

  • First, problematic mass creations can only be addressed through mass action; our normal processes cannot deal with them. Our normal processes can handle articles that weren't mass-created fine, and so the justification for these extraordinary measures don't exist.
  • Second, mass created articles by a single editor follow an extremely similar pattern that allows us to group them together. When we start looking at articles created by multiple editors that pattern fades and it becomes less appropriate to group them. Even when we only look at mass created articles the pattern fades; for example, BlackJack's mass created cricketers differ significantly from Lugnuts, to the extent that I don't feel grouping them together would be appropriate.
  • Third, mass creation is indiscriminate. The fact that these articles were chosen to be created is no indication that they are possibly notable because all the editor was doing is working down a list and churning them out in the same manner as a bot would. That isn't true for non-mass created articles; if an editor who only created a few articles on cricketers chose to create one on a specific cricketer there is likely to have been prompted by something, even if the article doesn't currently indicate it, and it is worth giving that possibility more consideration than this process affords.

  This process can only be applied to mass created articles that lack significant coverage; it wouldn't work for other articles, such as the ones you create, and that is why approving this group isn't a slippery slope. BilledMammal (talk) 07:32, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

  BilledMammal - When talking about other articles with the same issues, I refer to all articles that meet the exact same criteria, except "created by Lugnuts". As for your third point, the exact same argument is often used here- "the (vast) majority of them will never be improved beyond stub-class". Statistically, this is true.

  It is clear that this is a reflection of wider disagreements within the community, so having a bunch of incremental RfCs is upside-down. Also, I just think it would be better if the proposal kept them in mainspace- draftification feels like it was reflexively chosen. That is, unless it is forbidden to delete articles after a certain time if they're not in draftspace, and I'm not aware. Dege31 (talk) 18:49, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

  Dege31, apologies, I am just seeing your question. As it happens, BilledMammal adressed substantially the same points I would have, and if anything more fulsomely. But I will summarize in my own terms. This really comes down to pragmatics. We can identify with a high degree of confidence that the contributions by this editor in this area almost exclusively fail to meet basic inclusion criteria, and the selection criteria themselves are honestly more narrow than they need to be. Further, draftification is a more reserved (if anything, very generous, given the deficits in reliable sourcing) approach to mass handling this inappropriate content.

  I stand by my assessment that I don't think the "slippery slope" argument is a nonsequitor: we have a banned user who mass created nearly a hundred thousand articles using automated methods and non-reliable source databases entries, and the vast, vast majority of those articles have been found to fail even the most generous of readings of our WP:Notability standards. That's an incredibly rare situation and the requested greenlight here is tied specifically to these precise circumstances. There's no reason to believe we will see any bleed-over impact into the normal deletion policy as a consequence of this. And any analogous scenario with a similar problem editor using similar methods to generate junk articles mounting into the tens of thousands arguably should have a similar technique applied. It's pretty justified and to the benefit of maintaining our content standards and protecting the project from abuse.

  Otherwise any sufficiently motivated SPA, superfan, or even LTA will be empowered to use similarly mechanized tactics to mass generate content of their favourite sort and overwhelm the project, which needs a handful of editors debating over the course of usually at least a week to remove each and every AfD entry using the standard community response. The math for the amount of disruption enabled versus the amount of effort necessary to undo it just is too ridiculous to contemplate anything but a semi-automated response by the community, and BM's proposal is very reserved one for formulating a methodology for that. I honestly don't see what the other choices are, other than "just leave all of these junk articles on the project, for years or decades to come, knowing full well that most of them come nowhere near GNG (or even the relevant SNG for that matter)", which to my mind, is no solution at all. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 09:05, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

  Snow Rise - My point is that pragmatics is the wrong way to do it in this case, due to the broader context. As I said, I am expressing neither positive nor negative assessments of a "slippery slope", which does logically follow. There is no reason based in statistics or policy to limit it to this one user.

  If anything, I think it would be more fair and would solve many long-standing issues, for the time being, if the scope was vastly expanded, so that the issue was deliberated extensively.

  Aside from that, I just think draftification is a weird measure; it would be better if the proposal had been to keep them in mainspace, but delete them after 5 years (or less). Dege31 (talk) 18:26, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

  Well, I feel we might be talking past eachother a bit here, so I will attempt to be more precise in my response this time:

  "...a "slippery slope", which does logically follow.

  I simply fundamentally disagree with this. I see no reason why the idiosynratic approach taken in the semi-unique circumstances we are dealing with here has to or would lead to knock-on effects for the normal AfD process. Can you explain in more detail how you imagine this would happen? This proposal is isolated to discrete and concretely identified articles. And if the approach were to be adopted in any speculative future cases of other problem editors creating tens or hundreds of thousands of articles that violate content policies, using mechanized methods, I fail to see how that would be a negative thing.

  "There is no reason based in statistics or policy to limit it to this one user."

  Except there clearly is. We have an established process for dealing with most articles which violate content policies to an extent where deletion is warranted (typically but not exclusively on notability grounds). Those systems work, albeit with a fair amount vigorous debate shall we say, and the community clearly has no appetite for fundamentally changing them. Nor should we, imo. However, this is a unique circumstance needing a unique response, as there is no remotely realistic chance that a task force or other solution will otherwise be able/willing to nominate all of these articles--and if they did, it would constitute months or years in editor work hours in order to have all of those AfD discussions, all just to delete articles that we know, right now, with a high degree of certainty do not meet inclusion criteria.

  So, why on earth should we choose such a labour intensive solution to removing content we know is a problem, as defined by the very criteria of the proposal? What happens when vandals, LTAs, and tendentious fan account realize we will not meet automation with automation and use increasingly sophisicated tools to overwhelm our capacity to respond to this kind of mass created content? The statistical basis here is 1) that we know virtually every article created by this user violates fundamental polices, 2) that the very terms of this narrow proposal limit the current group of articles in question to those which expressly do not meet policy, and 3) there is no realstic way that even a fraction of the problematic articles will be appropriately processed according to those same policies without a mass approach.

  "If anything, I think it would be more fair and would solve many long-standing issues, for the time being, if the scope was vastly expanded, so that the issue was deliberated extensively.

  As to that, you may be correct, if you are saying we should have a standard policy response to mass created / un(RS)-sourced stubs. But that's not the proposal in front of us at the moment, and I see no reason not to work out the wrinkles of such a methodology with this proposal first.

  "Aside from that, I just think draftification is a weird measure; it would be better if the proposal had been to keep them in mainspace, but delete them after 5 years (or less)"

  But here I must return to disagreement again: that is clearly reversing the normal standard for inclusion on this project: we do not give grace periods for complying with basic content / notability policies. And if we did, this would be the opposite of the circumstances where it would be most warranted, given we already know these articles (by definition of the search paramters that populated the page list) lack any reliable source support. Five years of presumptive right to remain in mainspace for articles we know do not comply with even basic sourcing policies makes no rational sense to me.

  In my opinion, BM's proposal is, if anything, overly generous in maintaining even a draft space reserve for these articles for such a long period of time; giving ample opportunity for anyone who wants to build upon them the chance to do so--though in the majority of cases, that is just not going to be possible because of sourcing shortfalls. Keeping them in mainspace meanwhile is a non-starter, and likely to only encourage further disruptive additions in the manner done here, until the community recognizes the fact that you can't respond to this manner of disruption / problem content with purely manual responses. We'll lose that fight every time, exhaust immense amounts of community resources, and create unending an volume of needless disputes in the effort. Why do that? I don't see the counter-argument for burying our heads in the sand in this way. Aside from "this is not how we usually remove problematic content", which is not sufficiently compelling in the circumstances. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 19:31, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, we are talking past each other. You're repeating counterarguments for why this should be done, as if I'm arguing it should not be done, in the broad sense. I am not talking about that. It is precisely the idiosyncratic approach that's the issue. We both know that the fundamental problem is not mass-creation: would you say mass-creation of featured articles is bad? No, of course not. The problem is the articles. Therefore, it's purely out of pragmatic concerns that it is limited. However, precisely because this is a topic of long-standing disagreement in the community, the incremental, idiosyncratic, piecemeal approach is not good.

  As for your last point: draftification is already a grace period, and I'm not sure how deletion from mainspace is any more encouraging than deletion from draftspace, I didn't mention AfDs. The only difference is that you limit how many people can improve it, and, if we're making an exception in one place, why not also make it here?

  Yes, the proposal might be generous. Or it might not be. That's the thing, the proposal is not the contention, noone views it as an isolated thing. Dege31 (talk) 20:25, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. I hope I'm putting this in the right place. This runs counter to the basis of our collaboration and will undermine our objectives of breadth of coverage and avoidance of systemic bias. Disregarding notability and sourcing on the basis of disapproval of the editor who created themt imposes a deadline (regardless of deferral, that deadline will eventually arrive) and places the onus on other Wikipedians to improve a whole class of articles in order to save them. "Lugnuts liked to create articles about this topic" does not equal "This is a non-notable topic". Fellow editors should not be compelled in this way to work on a particular class of articles; AfD is bad enough, and at least that leaves a trail for someone who later realizes an article existed but was deleted. Also, while I appreciate the offer of a place to list articles that have already been improved in order to forestall deletion, its being in BilledMammal's user space implies an element of personal control of this process that does not sit well with me. The functional requirement to list an article there also undercuts the basis of this discussion, especially Criterion #5, No significant contributions from editors other than Lugnuts. During the Olympians discussion, I read the list and chose Julius Jørgensen to improve; here's my edit. Nonetheless, almost a month later, along came BilledMammal to escape the categories, and it got draftified. Luckily I'd kept a note of the article title and thought to find that note and check; I then had to waste 5 edits restoring the article, plus one reassessing it on the talk page. Not doing that (I don't like to presume to evaluate my own work) may have been my fatal error; or I may have missed a similar offer to note my effort on some list, whether in BilledMammal's user space or not. But nobody who improves an article should be expected to draw attention to that in order to forestall its being ignored and ultimately deleted. Mass draftification without examination of whether the articles all meet the criteria is ultimately damaging in exactly the same ways as unexamined actioning of speedy deletion nominations, including its potential to turn off editors who happened to arrive at an article and improve it in ignorance that it was under a swinging ax. Moreover, while in the discussion about draftifying Olympics articles, one rationale was that Lugnuts had said he included deliberate inaccuracies, I don't see that rationale being mentioned here. I have seen little evidence that such inaccuracies were found, and in any case not mentioning it here makes the argument here, in my view, fall quite heavily into the IDONTLIKEIT basket. So no. The Olympics round demonstrated that the dangers outweigh the putative advantages, and the advantages being adduced here are not even as great. Yngvadottir (talk) 02:22, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

  These articles all objectively fail NSPORT's requirement that sportsperson articles must cite a SIGCOV source. They're not eligible for mainspace from that alone. And the reasons this group was selected are not dislike of the creator or baseless worries over intentional errors. I've participated in hundreds of sportsperson AfDs including many Lugnuts cricket stubs (and a substantial proportion had more sources cited than what we have here). The strong majority of them have been removed from mainspace because GNG could not be established or even presumed; cricket project members have themselves been responsible for the deletion/redirection of dozens of these articles. If these stubs didn't have such an abysmal track record already, I'm 100% certain @BilledMammal would not have pursued this draftification proposal. JoelleJay (talk) 05:51, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

  Not all.
  Several examples have been found, see above. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 06:21, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

  Can you point those examples out to me? A few examples were found early in the process, but I believe I have updated the query to ensure that neither they nor any like them are included in the proposal; if I have missed any, please say so. (There are some articles that have been improved, but that isn't the same thing). BilledMammal (talk) 06:30, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

  See my survey above - a grand total of 6 articles have been returned to mainspace out of the 960 articles originally listed for draftifying in the WP:LUGSTUBS proposal. That's less than 1%. @Yngvadottir may be irked by that, but this appears to me to be a very good example of why this draftification process was the correct way to go. You probably would see a higher rate of re-creation at AFD than this. FOARP (talk) 08:48, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

  That's one way of seeing it: that very few have been improved and thus saved, so on the whole, they were without merit. It's equally plausible—more so, in my view, since many editors who might have worked on an article will now be unlikely to realize there was such an article—that hiding them away in draft space has inhibited work on them. These discussions, with people arguing in a broad manner that the whole class of topics lack notability, also have a discouraging effect. Plus, I need to point out that there's supposedly a 5-year grace period for the draftified articles in these groups, rather than the usual 6 months. Your argument seems to imply that we can discount the remaining 4.75 years. But I hope you counted Jørgensen. Yngvadottir (talk) 09:20, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

  "many editors who might have worked on an article will now be unlikely to realize there was such an article" - We're going round in circles here, but these articles have been around for years with scarcely anyone even reading them, let alone working on them. The NEWEST stub articles by Lugnuts date to December 2021 (you know, when he was banned from creating any more because he was creating such trash articles...) and many of these are 10+ years old. No-one's coming to rescue these overwhelmingly-failing articles, but if they are any time in the next five years, these articles will still be there in draft space.

  These articles only exist because of the crazily-lax CRIN standard, which has now been abolished. Without that, no new Lugnuts is in the wings to mass-create stuff based just on a database. FOARP (talk) 12:34, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

  "No-one's coming to rescue these overwhelmingly-failing articles" Can we see into the future now? Wikipedia is by its very nature a work in progress and we are not here to make all articles immediately perfect right now. If anyone thinks they can prove that 100% of these 1,000+ articles with sources are not notable, take them to AFD and discuss each one on its merits, like we should be doing when we evaluate articles for notability. That is the way our deletion policy is designed to work for a reason. Steven Walling • talk 02:37, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  Can we see into the future now? No, but we can see into the past. Lugnuts has created approximately 12,000^[g] articles on Cricketers. Of these 12,000, 93% still have the most significant contributor being Lugnuts. Of the rest, 5% were improved by members of WikiProject Cricket, and 1% was improved by non-members, although I recognized some of those names as being associated with the project. (The final 1% were improved by editors who only improved one article; I did not check those editors for affiliation with the project, although there were a significant number of obvious COI editors such as Muhammad Farrukh 1 at Mohammad Farrukh and Fahadshahnawaz at Fahad Shahnawaz)

  Further, of these articles, 70 were improved by editors with less than 1000 edits (including the WP:SPE/WP:COI editors), and an additional 91 were improved by editors with less than 10,000 edits. History proves that these aren't articles that some new editor was going to stumble across and decide to improve; the few that are improved are done so by established editors, and most of those established editors are involved with Wikiproject Cricket and thus will be aware of the draftification.

  Wikipedia is by its very nature a work in progress and we are not here to make all articles immediately perfect right now. That's true; articles don't have to be perfect. However, articles do have to abide by our minimum standards; in the case of sports biographies this means not violating WP:NOT or WP:NSPORT. These articles violate both WP:NOTDATABASE and WP:SPORTSCRIT #5.

  If anyone thinks they can prove that 100% of these 1,000+ articles with sources are not notable, take them to AFD and discuss each one on its merits, like we should be doing when we evaluate articles for notability. And any editor who tried to take these 1000+ articles through AfD in a reasonable timeframe would quickly find themselves hauled off to ANI, even though the result of those AfD's would no doubt demonstrate that the nominations were proper. Would you argue in that editors defence if that happened?

  Further, even if the editor was not dragged to ANI, doing this would make it harder to save the articles; it would mean that editors interested in doing so only have six months or a year to review the entire group, rather than five years. In addition, they would only have a week or two for each article; they wouldn't be able to put one aside becasue they believed there may be SIGCOV in a resource they didn't currently have access to but would have access to at a later date.

  I genuinely believe that there will be less articles incorrectly deleted using this process than would be deleted if we used AfD.

  And these issues are before we get into the exorbitate amount of editor-hours that 1200 AfD's would consume, an amount that would be ludicrously disproprortionate to the time spent creating these articles. BilledMammal (talk) 08:54, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  Would you argue in that editors defence if that happened? Yes actually. I saw that in the past you got hauled off to ANI for nominating a couple dozen Swedish footballers or something. There is no policy that says there is a limit to how many pages we can discuss whether to delete or not. There is, however, a section of deletion policy that explicitly says older articles shouldn't be draftified as an alternative to deletion. The reason is because when you do this, you're in effect deleting the articles because there is no redirect from mainspace to the draft, and drafts aren't visible in search engines. Steven Walling • talk 06:24, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  Thank you, I am glad to hear that.

  Regarding that section of ATD-I, I think you have misread it. It does allow older articles to be draftified; what it doesn't allow is for them to be silently moved to draftspace, as in such circumstances it is possible, even likely, that no one will notice and thus the article is in effect being deleted.

  Looking at the debate that added that section, that reason was indeed why I supported it, and it appears why the broader community supported it. It wouldn't apply to this extremely prominent discussion. BilledMammal (talk) 15:58, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  The vast majority of editors who would have worked to improve any of these articles are already aware of the draftification. I suspect it is very, very, very rare for random editors not in the cricket project or involved in general sports editing to encounter these stubs at all, let alone add a GNG-contributing source to them. The latter is what is required for these stubs to be in mainspace. JoelleJay (talk) 22:20, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

  The subjects for which a GNG source has been added won't be in the draftification pool. So yes, all of the articles eligible for draftification objectively fail NSPORT. JoelleJay (talk) 22:14, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

  Leaving aside the dozens of articles that do now cite a SIGCOV source: Some of the articles do not need to satisfy NSPORTS because they are about "gentleman amateurs" who are primarily notable for things that have nothing to do with sport.

  In any event, the guideline NSPORTS does not authorise violations of the policy WP:ATD. NSPORTS does not authorise draftification without an AfD in violation of the policy WP:ATD-I. Further, WP:ATD says "If editing can improve the page, this should be done rather than deleting the page". Accordingly, if the article does not cite any SIGCOV source, but a SIGCOV source exists in Trove or elsewhere, then it is mandatory (not optional) to add a citation to that source to the article, instead of deleting the article on grounds that it lacks such a citation.

  NSPORTS assumes that a WP:BEFORE search will be done before an article is taken to AfD. NSPORTS assumes that a citation to any SIGCOV source found during that search will be added to the article. NSPORTS assumes that the instructions given in WP:ATD will be followed. James500 (talk) 04:40, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

  lso, while I appreciate the offer of a place to list articles that have already been improved in order to forestall deletion, its being in BilledMammal's user space implies an element of personal control of this process that does not sit well with me. I placed it there because if there is a consensus for this proposal I am likely to be the one implementing it, and that list (with the right format) will be used to aid in that implementation and then forgotten about as no longer being relevant. However, if you or another would feel more comfortable with it being elsewhere, feel free to move it; perhaps to under Wikiproject Cricket?

  Nonetheless, almost a month later, along came BilledMammal to escape the categories, and it got draftified. Yes, unfortunately I missed that. My initial attempt to findd improved articles involved a less prominent broad request to list articles that had been improved, approaching editors who I knew had been working on them and asking for their lists, and running queries focused on said editors to catch any they forgot to provide.

  I've since improved on that initial approach; I now run a general query to list articles that may have been improved to allow for manual inspection, and hopefully the more prominent broad request will be also be beneficial. The issue should not reoccur this time; part of the benefits of using a standardized approach will allow us to improve it over time, make the system more robust and better at minimizing both false positives and false negatives - although I'll note that due to the extremely conservative nature of the query false negatives are near-zero, and the few that do occur are corrected for by modifying the query. For example, Quarry queries are limited in that they don't allow us to run queries on the text of the article, which is why I am working on script that will do so.

  Moreover, while in the discussion about draftifying Olympics articles, one rationale was that Lugnuts had said he included deliberate inaccuracies, I don't see that rationale being mentioned here. The rationale does exist, and I think a few editors have mentioned it; Lugnut's claim to have introduced deliberate inaccuracies wasn't limited to just his Olympians. The inaccuracies do exist, but I'm not certain they were introduced deliberately; it is reasonable to believe that they were made accidentally due to manual aspects of his semi-automated process and a lack of care over those aspects. BilledMammal (talk) 07:06, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose All our criteria concerning notability, including specific notability criteria, are guidelines, not policies. People are allowed to express their own opinions on deletion and have their views scrutinised and considered. There are no "wrong" opinions. Unless our deletion policy changes for people no longer living, mass deletion and draftification are completely contrary to Wikipedia's principles. Thincat (talk) 15:56, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose I have already commented, but this is now my vote. Ultimately, I think this is the wrong approach for the core of the problem. Dege31 (talk) 19:34, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose as per WP:NOTPAPER and that in my experience most draft articles are abandoned pretty quickly once the creator disappears. Having said that, am not opposed to conversion to lists with redirects providing no information is lost and then a list entry can be converted to a standalone article if an editor finds enough significant coverage, imv Atlantic306 (talk) 20:19, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
• Comment: Some articles there listed already exceed 2500 bytes (as of now). Alfa-ketosav (talk) 15:10, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support. I concur with so many other people here who support this move, that the creation was excessively careless, that these articles are a burden, fail SPORTBASIC, and that holding good-faith discussions on each and every one of these would be exhausting and we would run out of steam quickly. Some users also suggested moving them to subpages of Lugnuts's user page, and that sounds good to me. In addition, I suggest we visit how SNGs interact with GNG. NSPORT used to lower the bar significantly, but now says people should meet GNG. Should SNGs be an alternative GNG, or should they established the "presumed" criteria of GNG instead? SWinxy (talk) 18:43, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose, for the same reason I opposed draftifying the Olympics articles: Draftspace is a graveyard. If the articles can be improved, that won't happen in draftspace - they will become invisible, and will eventually be deleted. If the articles cannot be improved, just delete them now. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 23:00, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
• Support - These articles fail SPORTBASIC, many have no potential for expansion and funneling all of them through AfD would be an enormous time sink. –dlthewave ☎ 12:55, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

  Most of the Australians satisfy GNG. James500 (talk) 13:47, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

• Support: Many of these articles are stubs supported only by lists of stats showing the subject existed, which have little chance at gaining the needed WP:SIGCOV. Giving 5 years in draftspace for the articles of actually notable subjects is a very fair compromise. User:Let'srun 03:20, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
• Support: They are junk and there is no reason to keep them around. scope_creep^Talk 23:11, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
• Support just like I did last time. There are a lot of articles here that add no value to the encyclopedia, and although they CAN be improved, the real question is if they WILL be. That's what the Draft space is for. (Also, having a list of these somewhere would be very helpful.) casualdejekyll 16:03, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

  Most of the pre-1960s Australians (who are certainly notable because they have a mountain of WP:SIGCOV in Trove, and I have seen that coverage) absolutely will be expanded and improved if they remain in the mainspace, because I will personally see to it that they are expanded and improved. If they are moved into the draftspace they will probably not be expanded or improved, because I am probably the only person willing to expand and improve most of them in the near future, and I will not expand or improve them while they are in the draftspace. James500 (talk) 20:25, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

  So they aren't going to be expanded in draftspace, because you are not willing to expand them while they are in draftspace? Thats stupid2600:4040:475E:F600:BCEA:1857:BCB9:FD4F (talk) 21:32, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

  Who is going to expand or improve these articles if they are moved into the draftspace? Has anyone promised or offered to expand or improve them if they are moved into the draftspace? (I can't find any such promise or offer on this talk page). Will anyone promise or offer to expand or improve them if they are moved into the draftspace? Are you going to expand or improve them if they are moved into the draftspace? Will you promise to do that if they are moved there? James500 (talk) 22:44, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

  This is just an attempt to create an WP:IQUIT-style veto. You claim to be able to improve these articles, which have not been improved to meet our standards in all the years they have been in mainspace, but refuse to do so if they are draftified. If you could do it, why haven't you done it already? If you're going to do it, why don't you do it in draft-space and return the articles to mainpsace when you have? Also, colour me sceptical that a bunch of match-reports in Aussie newspapers, with a low likelihood of any actual SIGCOV of cricketers themselves, will be sufficient to meet our notability standards for sports-people. FOARP (talk) 12:28, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  I have only just seen this thread.

  Regarding FOARP's question why don't you do it in draft-space . . .?: The draftspace does not benefit readers. The draftspace is impossible for readers to navigate. The draftspace breaks links. The draftspace is not indexed in external search engines or included in the default settings of our search engine. Readers never visit or see pages in the draftspace. The draftspace makes it hard to delete bad articles and easy to delete good articles. The draftspace is a disruptive content fork. The draftspace either causes duplicate articles (the mainspace article sometimes being worse than the draft) or prevents the creation of new improved better articles in the mainspace. The presence of these pages in the draftspace for five years would make it impossible to end the disruptive dispute over Lugnuts, but would cause that disruptive drama to continue for another five years. Keeping these articles in the draftspace would pour more petrol on that fire and keep it going for five years. The draftspace is a toxic environment. Draftifying these articles would create a toxic atmosphere around these articles, that would be likely to follow them out of the draftspace. If these articles are draftified, the implication is that something nasty might happen to me if I mainspace them or ask for them to be mainspaced. There is no satisfactory procedure for moving these articles out of the draftspace. The draftspace is offensive. Asking me to expand these articles while they are in the draftspace is an insult. I do not expand pages while they are in the draftspace, and I am not prepared to start now. Allowing others to coerce me into expanding pages while they are in the draftspace, by threatening to delete the articles if I don't expand them while they remain there, would create a very dangerous precedent. Trying to force people to expand pages while they are in the draftspace is stalkerish. Expanding these articles while they are in the draftspace would condone and encourage the continued existence of the draftspace.

  The five year deadline is not really a factor, and the comments below in this thread are mistaken in assuming this my primary concern. I think I could probably expand a group of articles that seems to be on the order of two hundred articles within a period of several months, provided they remain in the mainspace and the threat of draftification is taken away.

  The bottom line is that making edits to Wikipedia is WP:NOTCOMPULSORY. No-one is not entitled to demand that I make edits in the draftspace, or any other namespace. No-one is are not entitled to demand that I make any edits to Wikipedia at all.

  I have made an offer to improve the pre-1960s Australians in Trove. Since I am the one making an offer to do something that I would otherwise have no obligation to do, I am entitled to qualify that offer with such terms and conditions as I see fit. My offer is final and non-negotiable. The community is entitled to either accept my offer or decline my offer. That choice is yours. What other editors are not entitled to do is to demand that I change the terms of my offer.

  The most disturbing thing about FOARP's comment is that he does not answer the question that I asked, but instead tries to change the subject. If the community reaches a consensus that these cricketers should not have stand-alone articles in the mainspace (and I don't believe such a consensus exists for all of these articles at this time), and no-one will promise to expand them in the draftspace . . . then they should be listified or otherwise merged, or redirected, or deleted as soon as possible, and should not be subjected to a WP:DRIVEBY draftification by editors who have no intention of expanding them. James500 (talk) 02:28, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  why haven't you done it already? because there isn't a deadline and they haven't had the time to do so.

  f you're going to do it, why don't you do it in draft-space and return the articles to mainpsace when you have? mainly because there isn't time to do it before the deadline, and secondly there are countless examples of editors needing to spend a lot of time explicitly justifying this action on the talk page, at AFD, etc.

  Also, colour me sceptical that a bunch of match-reports in Aussie newspapers, with a low likelihood of any actual SIGCOV of cricketers themselves, will be sufficient to meet our notability standards for sports-people. your skepticism is noted but it's not at all relevant because notability is judged based on what sources actually exist or don't exist, not on editors' beliefs about what they think is likely to exist based on vague feelings (particularly when those vague feelings have been proven incorrect in several cases). Thryduulf (talk) 13:13, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  mainly because there isn't time to do it before the deadline Five years isn't long enough? Further, there is the option of moving the articles to user space that would remove any deadline. BilledMammal (talk) 13:27, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  Moving the articles to userspace makes it even harder for editors to discover these articles exist, which is the exact opposite of what we need to be doing. Also five years is still an arbitrary deadline and probably isn't enough time to properly evaluate thousands of articles when time has to be spent fighting off attempts to delete them all without review (like this one), time spent rebutting challenges to the closures of attempts like this. Then repeat that for the next subject that takes your fancy, and then the one after that. Thryduulf (talk) 15:01, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  Moving the articles to userspace makes it even harder for editors to discover these articles exist, which is the exact opposite of what we need to be doing. Perhaps, but it does address the concern about there not being time for specific editors to do it before the deadline. Further, if you are concerned about editors not discovering the articles, move them to space within WP:WikiProject Cricket. Of the very few Lugnuts cricket substubs that are being improved, almost all are being improved by editors affiliated with that project; there should be no impediment to them discovering these there.

  However, given your concerns about these time limits I'm curious. At some point, all of these articles need to be reviewed for notability. I assume you propose they are reviewed individually?

  How long do you propose we wait before doing that, and when we do do it how many do you propose we do per day, and how long do you believe the community should spend on each of these? Keeping in mind that Lugnuts created dozens of articles most days, sometimes hundreds, and that he spent just minutes, sometimes just seconds, on each one. Would you object if, should this be closed without a consensus for draftification, I took them to AfD at the same rate that Lugnuts created them? BilledMammal (talk) 15:17, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  Every article should be evaluated individually, and this should not be done to any arbitrary deadline. Each review should take as long as it takes to either improve it so that it is at least Start class or to determine, after attempting and failing to find sources in (at least) the place most likely for those sources to exist (which may or may not be known to and/or accessible by Google). If it is determined that the article is not notable after such a review then it should be taken to AfD where the nomination should summarise the findings of the review, including noting where and how sources where attempted to be found (to avoid duplication of effort). The community has repeatedly rejected nominating AfDs at the rate you suggest ("dozens, sometimes hundreds a day") so if you do that then please prepare for a swift trip to ANI.

  In summary every article in Wikipedia that does not meet one or more speedy deletion criterion must not be deleted without giving the community sufficient time to find sources that demonstrate it is (or is not) suitable for Wikipedia. Flooding AfD with similar nominations does not allow this. Sending hundreds or more articles to draftspace does not do this. Thryduulf (talk) 16:14, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  You create a standard here that would make it impossible to address these. For articles that took minutes or seconds to make you ask editors to spend hours doing a review that goes far beyond what WP:BEFORE asks for, even though there is no obligation to follow BEFORE in circumstances like this.

  You then make that situation worse by suggesting you will drag editors to ANI for trying to review these in the same timeframe they were created.

  The creation of such standards is considered incompatable with the nature of our project; see WP:FAIT.

  You ask for sufficient time to find sources to demonstrate that an article is or is not suitable for Wikipedia; I ask for a process that allows us to address these in a manner compatable with FAIT and that doesn't consume disproportionately more of the communities time and effort than was spent creating them. This proposal is a compromise that does exactly that. BilledMammal (talk) 16:30, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  Insisting on slow-rolling individual AFDs for tens of thousands of identikit database-entry stubs that were disruptively mass-created necessitates an unacceptable drain on community resources that is more disruptive than the creation itself. Remedial action for disruptive mass-activity is necessarily a mass-activity. A cursory check of the current article state and immediate deletion would be appropriate here. However, an alternative has been presented here as an alternative and any drawn-out evaluation of these policy and guideline failing database entries would then be done in draft space, with an excessively long time being given for sources to be found. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 16:40, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  Creating articles in accordance with all the policies that existed at the time of creation is not disruptive, no matter how much you want it to be. The only FAIT we're risking is the deletion of notable subjects because nobody has had time to review them because you don't like they way they were created. I'm not asking for anything disproportionate, I'm asking only that we follow the policies that exist - i.e. we determine whether articles are actually notable before deleting them on notability grounds. Thryduulf (talk) 17:34, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  To those discussing disruption versus creation according to policy at the time: we've had this discussion many times already, with some editors being unpersuaded by the others. I suggest not rehashing it here, and seeing what can be done to improve the state of Wikipedia overall. That may be some compromise of getting interested WikiProjects involved, and some flexibility on a rolling target date. I imagine if steady, sustained progress is made, editors will be open to allow the work to go on for as long as needed. isaacl (talk) 17:44, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  I imagine if steady, sustained progress is made, editors will be open to allow the work to go on for as long as needed. Personally, I believe five years will be more than long enough, but if I am wrong and in five years editors are still making progress on the drafts and wish to continue working on them in draft space (as opposed to user space or project space) I would support extending the period in draft space for as long as those editors need.

  In response to Thryduulf's comment, I'll just say that the articles weren't created in accordance with policy at the time, including but not limited to MASSCREATE which required approval at BRFA. BilledMammal (talk) 17:50, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  seeing what can be done to improve the state of Wikipedia overall. the easiest way to do that would be to stop attempting to mass delete or draftify hundreds or more articles at a time (and then objecting every time consensus is found not to support that) and instead spend that energy improving them (or at the very least allowing other editors to do that without artificial deadlines). Thryduulf (talk) 18:07, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, that's the current status quo. The question is if something can encourage more improvement of articles for subjects that do meet Wikipedia's standards of having an article, and reducing maintenance costs of having articles for subjects that fail these standards. Some WikiProjects maintain improvement lists, for example, to provide a tangible overview of progress. There may be some middle ground that helps both objectives. isaacl (talk) 18:17, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  I'll just say that the articles weren't created in accordance with policy at the time, including but not limited to MASSCREATE which required approval at BRFA - Did I miss something? Were these articles created using automated or semi-automated tools? Otherwise, I know you know that's not an applicable policy, because we both participated in the RfCs that attempted to change it. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:10, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  Lugnuts used semi-automated tools; he created boilerplate texts that were automatically populated using excel. BilledMammal (talk) 19:25, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  Please show me the consensus that using boiler-plate texts is "using semi-automated tools" because the last time I remember this being discussed the consensus was against such a definition. Thryduulf (talk) 19:27, 30 August 2023 (UTC)\

  I don't recall that consensus, but I think you missed part of what I said: created boilerplate texts that were automatically populated using excel. BilledMammal (talk) 19:30, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  The discussion I remember did not make any distinction between how boilerplate texts were produced or populated (because it's frequently impossible to tell and generally irrelevant even if it were possible). So once again, please point to the policies this actually violated, rather than ones you would like it to have violated. Thryduulf (talk) 19:32, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  Lugnuts used a simple computer program to fill in fields in a boilerplate text. If you want, you can argue that filling in the fields manually does not cross the line into "semi-automated" (although MEATBOT would apply), but automatically filling the fields clearly does.

  If it helps, I can prove that Lugnuts did this. BilledMammal (talk) 19:42, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  (edit conflict) Where is the consensus that that could as "semi-automated content page creation"? I do recall you made an effort (several, perhaps) to include language about "boilerplate" creation in a guideline about mass create, but none of those found consensus. Yet now you're just skipping the consensus part and insisting that's part of the definition. The WP:GAMING is exhausting. Is the issue Excel? Are you counting that Excel is a semi-automated page creation tool? Presumably if Lugnuts drafted in Google Docs, used a screen reader, or copied a style guide from a WikiProject, he was also using "automated or semi-automated content page creation" tools? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:36, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  I do recall you made an effort (several, perhaps) to include language about "boilerplate" creation in a guideline about mass create, but none of those found consensus. There was a discussion about making an explicit definition of mass-creation, with my proposal involving the use of boilerplate texts (now outdated by the advent of large language models). That discussion never went to RfC, and there was never a consensus that boilerplate texts weren't included within the current definition of mass creation. However, that is not relevant, because in this case Lugnuts used excel functions to automatically populate fields in the boilerplate text; as I said to Thryduulf,you can argue that filling in the fields manually does not cross the line into "semi-automated" (although MEATBOT would apply), but automatically filling the fields clearly does. BilledMammal (talk) 19:45, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  The justification of barely clearing the low-bar notability guideline in place at the time was never a green light to bypass policy. Blindly duplicating a database (with no regard for it's questionable accuracy) has not been compliant with policy right from the very early days of the project. And yes, you are absolutely asking for disproportionate remedial actions to deal with what was always disruptive mass-creation. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 18:23, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  Once again I'm going to have to ask what policies in place at the time this actually violated, rather than ones that you would like it to have violated or which have since been changed so they would now be in violation. Blindly duplicating databases of notable topics was, in the early days of the project, generally regarded as a Good Thing. Any disruption which these creations caused, which has yet to be actually demonstrated (despite much assertion to the contrary) pales into comparison to the disruption caused by this debate and which would be caused by mass draftification or deletion. Thryduulf (talk) 19:30, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  "Once again I'm going to have to ask what policies in place at the time this actually violated" - Lugnuts violated WP:MASSCREATE, WP:N, WP:NPA, WP:DISRUPT (via WP:CIR but also intentionally if his parting statement about intentional errors is to be believed) to name just four, not once but continually. He kept doing this right up until he finally was stopped last year, this wasn't just some early-days stuff. I'm sorry if he was a mate of yours or something, but he didn't get banned because of something that was just made up on the spot is only recent practise.
  

  The reason why Lugnuts managed to carry on for so long is not because the rules only changed recently. It's because the Friends of Lugnuts(TM) managed to stop anything being done about it every time anyone tried. FOARP (talk) 20:49, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

  There was no attempt by Lugnuts to verify that the subjects of his articles actually did meet GNG, which has always been a requirement of NSPORT. JoelleJay (talk) 19:28, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

  Here's a link to the version of NSPORT that was in place on the day he created the first article listed above. Could you point out to me where it says that editors were required to verify that the subjects of their articles actually did meet GNG? The main line says "The article should provide reliable sources showing that the subject meets the general notability guideline or the sport specific criteria set forth below", which is not quite the same as requiring editors to verify that the ones meeting the sport-specific criteria additionally meet the GNG

  (We can't, of course, know what any editor did or didn't "attempt" to do.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:49, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

  This guideline is used to help evaluate whether or not a sports person or sports league/organization (amateur or professional) is likely to meet the general notability guideline, and thus merit an article in Wikipedia.

  If the article meets the criteria set forth below, then it is likely that sufficient sources exist to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article.

  In addition, the subjects of standalone articles should meet the General Notability Guideline. The guideline on this page provides bright-line guidance to enable editors to determine quickly if a subject is likely to meet the General Notability Guideline.

  Q1: How is this guideline related to the general notability guideline?
  A1: The topic-specific notability guidelines described on this page do not replace the general notability guideline. They are intended only to stop an article from being quickly deleted when there is very strong reason to believe that significant, independent, non-routine, non-promotional secondary coverage from multiple reliable sources is available, given sufficient time to locate it. Wikipedia's standard for including an article about a given person is not based on whether or not they have attained certain achievements, but on whether or not the person has received appropriate coverage in reliable sources, in accordance with the general notability guideline.

  Q2: If a sports figure meets the criteria specified in a sports-specific notability guideline, does this mean they do not have to meet the general notability guideline?
  A2: No, the article must still eventually provide sources indicating that the subject meets the general notability guideline.

  JoelleJay (talk) 23:12, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

  Note given sufficient time to locate [sources] (something you omit from the answer to the Q2, where it is phrased as "a reasonable amount of time") and eventually. This proposal is all about preventing editors from being given sufficient time to locate sources by imposing arbitrary deadlines, and changing "eventually" to "now" if they are in article space. Also omitted from the quote is the note that sources are harder to find for historical sportspeople, which means that the period of time which qualifies as "reasonable" and "sufficient" is longer than for contemporary sportspeople. The majority of articles this proposal would impact are historical figures and/or from non-English speaking nations - another factor that increases the complexity of finding sources and thus increases the length of time which is necessary to give editors a "reasonable" opportunity to find sources. Thryduulf (talk) 23:36, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

  Thanks for that, JoelleJay. I appreciate it. It's hidden in a collapsed box. The version on the page at the relevant time (3.7 years ago) is slightly different, but not, I think in ways that significantly change the meaning.

  I suspect, then that this, ultimately boils down to one side saying "eventually means 'in less than 3.7 years'" and "longer than 3.7 years is not IMO 'reasonable'", and the other side saying "eventually means not today" and "3.7 years is IMO 'reasonable'". WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:53, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  The point here is that "eventually" is not "at the time of creation" so the creation was entirely within policy as it stood at the time and thus was not disruptive. Maybe with enough searching the supporters will manage to find some rule it violated, but given they haven't been able to do so in many months and this is the only thing they are relying on demonstrate these were and/or are in any way disruptive (the ostensible reason for wanting to remove them from article space) it's not looking likely. Thryduulf (talk) 01:05, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  The policy compliance at the time of creation isn't the only reason editors want these articles out of mainspace. The major reason for me at least is that they currently violate the global consensus that all sportsperson articles must cite a SIGCOV source to exist in mainspace, a requirement that has no explicit exception for historical athletes and no grandfathering in of articles created prior to the RfC. This is coupled with the fact that the majority of cricket lugstubs that have been taken to AfD so far--including those with substantial contributions from other editors and sources beyond stats--have ultimately been removed from mainspace. JoelleJay (talk) 02:21, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  Do note majority - this is important because after individual review some of the articles were deemed appropriate for inclusion in the encyclopaedia. Deleting (directly or via draftspace) these articles would have harmed the encyclopaedia in exactly the same way you are proposing to harm the encyclopaedia with this proposal. And while there is no explicit exception for historical athletes or grandfathering in old articles, the lack of consensus to do anything about them en mass shows that there is an implicit agreement that these factors must be taken into consideration. Thryduulf (talk) 12:33, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  That it's merely the "majority" is strongly influenced by the fact that some of the articles taken to AfD already had non-stats references and prose expansion. Those wouldn't have been included in this batch. And anyway, how is deleting a stub on even a "notable" topic always "harmful to the encyclopedia"? NOPAGE exists for a reason, and in basically every case the individual is already mentioned in the relevant lists, so really--what encyclopedic info is being lost? Also, there has been a consensus to get historical athlete stubs out of mainspace en masse: LUGSTUBS. JoelleJay (talk) 17:32, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  IMO it is harmful for readers searching for a specific bit of information ("That Australian cricketer dad was always going on about – which team did he play for again?") to be sent to a privacy-invading site to get the information they want because some editors decided that having information on a subject that qualifies for a separate article ('a "notable" topic', in your words) was undesirable because the page wasn't WP:FINISHED yet.

  Just to be clear, a statement like "Alice Athlete played for Team A from 1924 to 1932" is encyclopedic info. It is encyclopedic info that could additionally or alternatively be presented in a list, but it is still encyclopedic info. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:11, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

  .............So your argument is that wikipedia should host standalone pages that have no info beyond what is already in a list on another page, because that protects readers from having to retrieve that same info from one of those professional, comprehensive, constantly-updated free databases famously known to invade privacy? Seriously? Didn't you argue in some other thread that blacklisting a certain crappy pseudoscience-peddling health site wasn't necessary because it's not Wikipedia's job to protect readers from the websites we link to in references? JoelleJay (talk) 20:45, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

  You're right: I have long believed that the Wikipedia:Spam blacklist should not be used as a censorship tool. It should be used to stop spammers, not to stop readers. People should be able to read whatever they want. If they want to get their information here, then I support them reading it here. If they want to get it in the form of a two-sentence stub rather than a 100-line list, then letting them have the two-sentence stub is no skin off my back. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:07, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

  5 years -- or really, 8+ years -- is more than a reasonable enough time to find sources. JoelleJay (talk) 02:23, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  For up to 90,000 articles? No way. Even if sources were available for every single athlete, and I tripled the amount of time I spend here and did it only to expand Lugnuts' creations, I still don't think I could come even close to improving every single one he wrote. BeanieFan11 (talk) 12:26, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  90,000 articles are not in danger of being draftified, come on. I don't know if @BilledMammal has run a query on the percent of all of Lugnuts' articles that would meet the "stats source + no expansion by other editors" criteria, but it is certainly much less than 90k. But even if all his microstubs were deleted right now, what info would be lost from the world? Nothing, because the exact same info--actually, much more comprehensive, accurate, and automatically updated info--is still available in the stats sources; Lugnuts imparted zero biographical value by creating those stubs. All that would happen is there would be some redlinks in team rosters. The difference between improving stubs on the truly notable subjects and just recreating their articles once GNG sourcing is found is utterly trivial (literally click the red link, add the prose + sources you would have added to improve the article in the first place, click publish; if the sources are actually sufficient for GNG or even just SPORTSBASIC you don't need anything else besides a sentence asserting significance that meets the very low threshold for passing CSD), plus the latter has the added benefit of letting someone else increase their article creation count, the only parameter that anyone here seems to care about anyway. JoelleJay (talk) 17:55, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  Last I heard, BilledMammal had not made any undertaking to restrict his deletion-esque efforts to only pages with those two criteria; perhaps you have updated information? The metrics he chose in his essay on Wikipedia:Abandoned stubs suggests that he has concerns with fully a third of Wikipedia's 6,808,578 articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:17, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

  Last I heard, this RfC was about a strict subset of ~1000 cricketer stubs that objectively fail our guideline requirements for being in mainspace, not whatever metrics you're reading into an essay that wasn't cited as justification for and doesn't share inclusion criteria with this RfC. JoelleJay (talk) 21:10, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

  @JoelleJay: See here (and the talk page for it), where it was discussed several options to propose getting rid of ultimately 40,000 articles and to afterwards stretch the boundaries of what the process can be used for ... [by doing the following]: [1] Change the article selection criteria, to avoid the specific values of the first group becoming a standard part of the process; [2] Nominate articles created by editors other than Lugnuts, to avoid the process becoming a "Lugnuts cleanup process"; [3] Nominate articles on topics outside the sports topic area - or at least the Olympics topic area - to avoid the process becoming a "sports cleanup process"; [4] Nominate a larger number of articles, to avoid the process being limited to ~1000 article batches – that implies to me that BilledMammal wants to do more than just these 1,000. BeanieFan11 (talk) 21:17, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

  What good does speculating on future RFCs now do, save off-topic debating.? Sanctioning BM for this or preventing the creation of further RFCs in LUGSTUBS' vein are unserious proposals. Mach61 (talk) 21:26, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

  Well, for me at least its another reason to oppose - I don't want this to be a gradual step in the ultimate reduction of tens-to-hundreds of thousands of historical sports articles - especially since the criteria will be loosened and loosened more for further proposals and they will increase and increase in quantity. This should be rejected unless we want to lose tens-to-hundreds of thousands of potential-to-likely notable sports articles and waste enormous quantities of editor time when we could have just been improving them instead. BeanieFan11 (talk) 21:30, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

  Mach61, I think that when someone's telling you that he'd really like to go down a very long path, you should think about whether or not you want to take the first steps with him. If we draft-delete a 500 articles here and 1000 there, then eventually that might feel like a normal thing to do. If you don't want that to become normal, then one option is not to do it at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:46, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  There've been any number of incremental changes we've made over time that we look back and think "Yeah, that was the right direction to go in, even though 100 years ago it was unthinkable and at the time some thought it would cause the end of the world". The most recent incredibly profound one I can think of is probably same-sex marriage. Did we get there in incremental steps? Yes. Does that mean it was a bad thing? Valereee (talk) 01:30, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

  That's a slippery slope argument, which is a logical fallacy. Let's stop it where we think it should be stopped instead of saying "If we don't stop it at X, it'll eventually become Y." Stop it at X if X is bad. But don't argue we can't do X because while X is fine it might lead to Y, and Y would be bad. Valereee (talk) 01:21, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

  So? I'm totally fine with it becoming normal to draftify large groups of mass-created articles via discussions like this. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:32, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

  ...And I'm not, which is why I opposed... BeanieFan11 (talk) 01:37, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

  Stop it at X if X is bad. X is bad, Y would be even worse. Thryduulf (talk) 08:29, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

  The metrics he chose in his essay on Wikipedia:Abandoned stubs suggests that he has concerns with fully a third of Wikipedia's 6,808,578 articles. I don't know why it suggests that to you, because the thought has never crossed my mind. BilledMammal (talk) 21:35, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

  @BeanieFan11 - "For up to 90,000 articles? No way. Even if sources were available for every single athlete..." - you get why this is bad, right? You get why the articles should have been properly sourced right from the start? You get why this is an argument to just deep-six this whole junkyard of broken articles? FOARP (talk) 20:53, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. As others have shown above, a number of these articles are about notable subjects. 𝕱𝖎𝖈𝖆𝖎𝖆 (talk) 10:06, 1 September 2023 (UTC)
• Support Either we have standards or we don't. If you are an inclusionist and disagree with the current standard, please accept that your personal philosophy is not in keeping with the community. Corrupting the community to satisfy your policy desires is wrong in itself. Chris Troutman (talk) 19:03, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  Either we have standards for deletion or we don't. If you are a deletionist and disagree with the curernt standard of scruitiny reuqired, please accept that your personal philosophy is not in keeping with the community. Corrupting the community to satisty your desire to delete encyclopaedic and potentially encyclopaedic information without adequate review is wrong in itself. Thryduulf (talk) 19:28, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  He he... Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 05:31, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support. I believe this will help to address a huge number of articles that are currently non-compliant with policy. Plenty of time is provided to allow articles to be salvaged and these can always be recreated in future if necessary. MarchOfTheGreyhounds (talk) 15:49, 2 September 2023 (UTC)
• Had ignored this discussion before it was re-opened. Was initially inclined to support but WhatamIdoing's arguments here, alongside the existence of WP:NODEADLINE, has caused me to oppose this. If a good percentage of these can be expanded, then best not to make future editors re-do what's already been done. Elli (talk | contribs) 04:12, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

  @Elli, what is a "good percentage"? And note that the evaluation of SIGCOV for sportspeople requires coverage be non-routine (rules out most match recaps, almost all transaction announcements) and excludes almost all coverage of subjects when they were minors. A lot of the sources editors unfamiliar with NSPORTS have been putting forth would fail at AfD. JoelleJay (talk) 17:02, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support It's clear that, were these articles created today, they would not survive NPP. It's time we have consistent standards, not de-facto grandfather clauses. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 04:14, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
  • Nobody here is disputing this. How to enforce those standards is the question: whether to evaluate subjects for notability or assume they all fail, whether to follow the deletion policy or mass draftify so we don't have to actually evaluate them before removing, etc. It's "IAR to get rid of Lugnuts' stubs?" more or less. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:59, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
    • I said "de facto grandfather clauses'. If this proposal fails, then almost certainly nobody will actually do that work and the result will be that the stubs, through no further fault of anyone, will have been grandfathered. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 14:47, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

      You (or anyone else) will be free to take them to AfD individually or in small groups as long as you do an appropriate BEFORE and don't overload the processes. There is no grandfather clause, de facto or otherwise, that immunises these articles against normal community processes - just abnormal processes. Thryduulf (talk) 15:46, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

      Yes, in theory the process could work that way. In practice it almost certainly won't. I think it's clear further discussion is unlikely to convince either of us to change our minds. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 16:00, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

      I have stated, multiple times now, that I will personally expand the Australians in Trove if they remain in the mainspace. If I say that I will do that, then I will actually do that, unless I am physically unable to edit. I have already done a WP:BEFORE search for them. That task has been done. James500 (talk) 21:14, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

      My understanding is that every Australian has an existing valid redirect target (and if they don't, I am confident I can create them, like I created List of Western Province representative cricketers). As such, per my commitment to Blue Square Thing and #5 of If this proposal is successful, even those Australians that you haven't found and added sources for (thank you for doing that, by the way) will remain in mainspace, as redirects. Does that address your concerns? BilledMammal (talk) 21:23, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

      If you did a WP:BLAR on the existing page for each of those Australians, and the existing page was not moved out of the mainspace, and the existing page history of that page was retained beneath the redirect, and the page was tagged with Template:R with possibilities, and no draft was created, that would certainly be better than draftification, and it would not violate WP:ATD. I cannot, however, endorse the redirection of large numbers of Australians in Trove who I know satisfy GNG, especially without the merger of encyclopedic content not in the lists (such as full names, dates and places). Apart from violating GNG itself, redirection without merger would also violate WP:PRESERVE. In any event, I can merge or redirect any remaining non-notable pre-1960s Australians myself, after I have expanded the notable ones in Trove. James500 (talk) 03:53, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support, no one would approve a bot to mass import cricketers in x databases today, which is effectively how Lugnuts acted. Systematic problems need systematic solutions. NSPORTS2022 applies retroactively. Mach61 (talk) 05:45, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
  • What Lugnuts did is still allowed today (apart from the sourcing). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:59, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
    • It is allowed today (apart from the sourcing), only if BRFA granted approval for his semi-automated mass creation - and as Mach61 says, no one would approve a bot to mass import cricketers in x databases today. BilledMammal (talk) 13:24, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
      • You keep saying this, but it's based on your own definition of "semi-automated tool" to apply to off-wiki software that people use to prepare an article. "Semi-automated editing tools" are tools you use to edit Wikipedia. AWB, for example. It doesn't apply to spreadsheets, word processors, citation management tools, note-taking software, and all of the other things Wikipedians use apart from Wikipedia. If they're editing the article themselves, by every definition of "automated or semi-automated" I've seen, they're not doing so, and I'd appreciate a link to show otherwise. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:02, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

        It's also worth noting that not only is this your (BilledMammal's) personal definition, community consensus has rejected that definition. Thryduulf (talk) 14:26, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

        Can you link that consensus? BilledMammal (talk) 14:29, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

        At Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 44#Ideas sought to arrive at a definition of "article creation at scale (aka mass creation) you repeatedly floated the idea of incorporating boilerplate text into the definition and got basically no support from anyone. Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 181#WP:MASSCREATE and WP:MEATBOT contains some relevant discussion, from a quick glance the suggestion to include boilerplates garnered two explicit opposes and no support. Neither of these are the discussion I remember (which came to a clearer consensus against) but I've run out of time to continue searching for that now. My search results did not include any editor clearly expressing support for a proposed definition of mass creation that included boilerplate text. Thryduulf (talk) 16:01, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

        I remember seeing this at WP:ACAS#Question 17: Amend WP:MASSCREATE but it closed as "no adequately robust consensus", not consensus against. Folly Mox (talk) 16:28, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

        (edit conflict) First, in those discussions I proposed that the use of a boilerplate alone, even when the fields are manually populated, constitutes "assisted editing". That is a different situation to what Lugnuts did, which is use a simple program to automatically populate the fields - a much less ambiguous situation which clearly meets the definition (added in 2008, five years before the earliest of these creations) in WP:BOTPOL. This consensus may be relevant to this situation.

        Second, there is no consensus in those discussions against any of the proposals, mine or anyone elses, with most editors discussing the ideas without supporting or opposing them in preparation for the RfC that never happened. BilledMammal (talk) 16:40, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

        The definition at WP:BOTPOL is the use of tools which assist with repetitive tasks, but do not alter Wikipedia's content without some human interaction. A repetitive task would be manually filling out a boilerplate tens of thousands of times; a tool to assist with that would be an excel sheet that automatically fills them out. BilledMammal (talk) 14:28, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

        (edit conflict) Your alternative definition would also not make sense; it would allow editors to do things like mass create articles using ChatGPT - There is a difference between allowing and not addressing. Hence WP:LLM. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:29, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

        We could have an extensive debate over how BOTPOL applies to the use of large language models, but it isn't relevant to this discussion and would be a distraction. Which is why I removed that part of my comment 15 minutes after I made it - 45 minutes before your reply. BilledMammal (talk) 15:42, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

        (Your second edit may explain why Rhododendrites got an edit conflict.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:21, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

    What I meant was that if someone did formally nominate a bot account for that today, it would easily be disapproved. I don't care for the nuances of the bot policy; Lugnuts is banned as is. Mach61 (talk) 23:17, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support poor quality stubs created against policy, draftification provides mechanism for any that do have potential to be sourced and improved by interested users. Polyamorph (talk) 12:47, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  Leaving them in article space provides also provides a mechanism for those that do have potential to be sourced and improved by interested users, with the added benefits of them being very significantly easier to find and there being no deadline for them to do so. Any articles that do not have such potential can be evaluated and nominated for deletion just as easily in either location. Thryduulf (talk) 12:52, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  My comment is based on the fact that it would be vastly more resource intensive to nominate what would be the vast majority for deletion just to save the very few that may one day be expanded. Polyamorph (talk) 13:09, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  If you have any evidence that "the vast majority" cannot be expanded? Despite many claims that this is the case nobody has yet managed to actually provide any evidence to support it that isn't just guesswork and supposition. Thryduulf (talk) 13:16, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  The burden for what you ask is on the creator, they are tiny stubs, created by a site-banned user who admitted adding factual inaccuracies into articles. TBH I would support mass deletion of the lot. Redlinks have more potential than these creations. That's my opinion and my !vote. Polyamorph (talk) 13:55, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  There is a slight consensus that the "factual inaccuracies" claim is itself the factual inaccuracy. You are entitled to your opinion, but it is just that - an opinion - and carries no more weight than any other that is unsupported by evidence. Thryduulf (talk) 14:13, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  Well there is evidence that these are poor quality stubs, with little or no prospect for expansion, users above me have provided this. Maybe provide the evidence that I'm wrong instead, otherwise yours is also simply opinion. Polyamorph (talk) 14:24, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  Many of these are indeed poor quality stubs. However users above me have proved that many of them actually do have prospect for expansion, in some cases great than 50% of the ones they spot checked. That to me is clear evidence that you are wrong. Thryduulf (talk) 14:35, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  Not those spot checked by Sojourner in the earth. The fact that some might have prospect for expansion justifies the move to draft-space, and not outright deletion (although I would support that). In any case, as I alluded to, it's no more difficult to expand a red-link in the case of the articles that have been selected for draftification. I don't see a convincing rationale for keeping any of these in mainspace. Polyamorph (talk) 14:50, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support per many above reasonings and the nomination. Mass-draftify is a suitable answer to mass-creation by editors who couldn't be bothered to expand their own creations and instead left them to rot. Taking these all to AfD is patently unfeasible, so draftifying them and letting them either be expanded by editors who want to, or eventually deleted as stale, is acceptable. Happy editing, SilverTiger12 (talk) 18:50, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
• Support This sort of mass creation needs a mass-draftity. These articles which mostly only contain statistical information are really of no use. The stats site that the information is from will be updated, but who's checking the Wikipedia "mirror"? Nigej (talk) 17:32, 13 September 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose: there's no evidence that spending more time in the Draft namespace helps the quality of Wikipedia. Nemo 04:38, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose per last time. Anarchyte (talk) 14:18, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose, the oppose editors have valid points-of-view, and since those exist then removing these articles and hiding them in draft space seems a work-around of the deletion policy. Since the opposed editors have valid arguments the weight of status quo takes on full merit. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:22, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

Discussion (mass draftification of cricket articles)

If there is a consensus for this proposal than I plan to boldly create the following redirects in line with If this proposal is successful #5, unless there are issues with doing so that I have missed. This is in response to a request by members of WikiProject Cricket.

BilledMammal (talk) 06:17, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Convenience break (mass draftification of cricket articles)

• @BilledMammal: - why only A-D? How about E-Z? starship.paint (exalt) 06:47, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Doing from A-Z would have involved nominating ~5000 articles. We decided that was too large a step up from the first RfC and so decided to limit this nomination to the first 1200. BilledMammal (talk) 07:11, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  I see. Thank you. starship.paint (exalt) 07:30, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Who is "we"? Why do the discussions among this unspecified "we" not appear in the Background section of this RfC? It would seem like important background. Gnomingstuff (talk) 16:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Since @BilledMammal did not feel it necessary to answer this question, I did it myself. The discussion happened on this subpage of his user page, and the "we" in question appears to be Paradise Chronicle, Avilich, Levivich, Dlthewave, S Marshall, and FOARP. It does not seem to be a widely publicized discussion. I wouldn't call it "secret," because it is a public page; but I will note that when MatthewAnderson707 found it via Google, BilledMammal's reaction was I'm a little confused how you found this discussion, and when BeanieFan11 commented, the reaction was the same (I found it by going through BilledMammal's contributions. I suppose I should apologize for drawing public attention to this public page.)

  I would agree with the comment by @Spike 'em: hiding this away in user space and demanding to know how people found it does not come across as collaborative to me. Its omission from the "Background" section is misleading. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:23, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Since @BilledMammal did not feel it necessary to answer this question I did not notice this question; it had only been up for two hours and this discussion has already become extensive. It would have been helpful if you had pinged me on the first message you left, rather than just the second.

  Regarding the rest of your comment, there have already been a couple of discussions on that opened by an LTA; see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1129#Failure to assume good faith and Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 182#NSPORTS proposal and outcome should be null and void. BilledMammal (talk) 18:35, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Thank you for the links to the discussions. (I had assumed you had seen it since you had responded to other comments in the intervening time; apologies for the assumption.) These should also have been included in the Background section; "the proposal was successful and this proposal continues this process" elides a lot of context. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:52, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  I liken the idea of "mass draftification" of articles to be similar to what Richard Beeching did with British Railways in the 1960s. Removing vast pieces of the system without much care creates issues that still impact the United Kingdom today. This is very much the Wikipedia equivalent to the "Beeching Axe" and appears to be more of a reckless mass purge than something that would benefit the website. "The Great Purge", if you will. This action could easily be taken or misunderstood by the general public as "Wikipedia is purging articles as part of an agenda" or something of the like, coming back to impact the entire website in a negative light. I'd like to please appeal to the masses that this is a bad idea and will only create negative repercussions. I would also like to add that this could be a "back door" to bypass the AFD process and save time. I left a similar comment expressing the red flags mass draftification put forward in the discussion I was apparently not supposed to see, according to Gnomingstuff. — MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 18:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Gnomingstuff, BilledMammal is being hounded. His edits are followed and targeted by people who want to disrupt what he's doing. He started a discussion in his own userspace about which RfC to pursue next, and his stalkers materialised very promptly indeed. Note that there is no reason at all why that discussion had to be public. It was a strategy discussion, not one that would lead directly to a change. But prominent pointers to it were swiftly posted in the places where sports inclusionists gather, and they soon arrived en masse. I agree with you that there's un-Wikipedian behaviour in evidence here. I don't agree with you about who's perpetrating it.—S Marshall T/C 18:57, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  I sincerely hope this isn't an accusation that I'm hounding or "stalking" BilledMammal, considering this was a reply to my own comment and not Gnomingstuff. If this was an accusation, then allow me to provide a defense in response. I came across the discussion in question by chance and have never interacted with or paid much attention to said user before or since. The only reason I even participated in this discussion is because I was notified after being mentioned. I have a right to partake in a discussion involving myself in any shape or form. If anything, I felt I should share my misgivings about the situation since I was brought into the conversation. I would like further to clarify the link to the discussion in question was provided most kindly by Gnomingstuff, allowing me to refresh my mind on this topic. I would like to conclude with if this happens to be an accusation directed at myself among others, I do not appreciate defamation or being likened to slanderous behavior or implied of causing such, and would ask you take your personal attacks elsewhere. — MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 19:06, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  You think its the "inclusionists" who are hounding others and are being un-wikipedian? I would say the opposite; there's at least one "deletionist" who's hounded the heck out of me for the past several months. BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:09, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  @S Marshall: I can confirm this has happened, after reviewing talk page archives for BeanieFan11, linked for everyone's convenience. I apologize in advance if this assessment is wrong, but at a glance, it appears BilledMammal has also participated in hounding, as there are several messages on BeanieFan11's archives, accusing the user of negative activity. Your accusations and slander are not only a potential violation of WP:CIVIL, but are a case of the teapot calling the kettle black. Also, accusations of hounding doesn't change the fact key details pertaining to the goals and purpose of this RfC were withheld from the RfC discussion page in a private talk page that would normally be unseen by users participating in this discussion. — MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 00:37, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  FWIW, MatthewAnderson707, BilledMammal wasn't the user I had in mind, though he's done a bit of that as well. BeanieFan11 (talk) 00:49, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Calling people "stalkers" is, unquestionably, a personal attack. (As someone with several friends who have experienced actual, real-world stalking, I find it rather offensive.) For that matter, I don't especially care about sports (besides very casually watching the NBA playoffs), let alone enough to be a "sports inclusionist" or to "gather" wherever those people gather. One of these days, people will start enforcing WP:CIVIL, which is official, longstanding policy.

  As far as "disrupt[ing] what he's doing," it is more disruptive to create a RfC with an incomplete version of the context, discussion, and planning leading up to that RfC than to provide links to it so that people can make informed arguments. It is more disruptive to hold an un-publicized discussion among a handful of editors with the stated intent of deleting thousands of articles and bypassing established deletion processes, while questioning anyone who happens to find it. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:33, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  I believe S Marshall is only saying that hounding has occured, which is obviously true, not that any of the editors here where involved. It's more likely some LTA trying to cause arguments. Also this wasn't planned in secret, although user space isn't necessary high visibility it is still publicly viewable. If it had been planned offwiki then it could be an issue, but that's not the case here. It was also brought to light both at ANI and VPP that the discussion was ongoing in BMs userspace. I do feel though that having somekind of pre-discussion at VPI could have alleviated some of these concerns. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:14, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  The question is, why were key details only talked about in a private user talk page, rather than on the RfC for better transparency? It's still withholding key details from the public to easily see or access without stumbling across it by accident or actively searching through Billed's activity to find. If an RfC is being made, people deserve to know all details involved with it and not have those details kept to private discussions, otherwise it gives the impression there is something to hide from people voting on the decision. — MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 00:07, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  There's often discussions done between editors before RfCs, and anything not in the RfC isn't considered by the closer. It's normal. SportingFlyer T·C 08:55, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

• @BilledMammal: - Help me out here - there are ones in the top list (Arthur Nott for example - just happens to be the first one I clicked on!) who should almost certainly be in this list aren't there? Is this list the ones where there was a link in the article to "List of..."? Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:11, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Is this list the ones where there was a link in the article to "List of..."? Yes. Happy to work on trying to add others to the list if you have any suggestions; where do you think Arthur Nott should redirect to? BilledMammal (talk) 08:19, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  List of Gloucestershire County Cricket Club players I should think. I'll check the other Gloucs ones at some point as it might well be that they were all done in one set and so the link wasn't included. Thanks btw - it makes sense to have filtered them on that inclusion. It would possibly be useful to include a column in the top table that indicates they're in the bottom table? Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:42, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Luguts created the Gloucs ones in 2014. It seems the List of... links started to be added in 2015, so this might be an easier thing to deal with than I thought. What's going to be easiest - add the List of link to those articles are re-run the redirect query? Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:52, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  I think I'll be able to fix that looking at the categories; it shouldn't be necessary to add the links unless you want to do so for unrelated reasons. I'll look into it when I finish looking into the Brett Matthews problem.

  Regarding adding a column to the top table, I want to keep this possible WP:BOLD action separate from the formal proposal; however, if you want a list of articles that do not currently have a redirect target (I assume that is the reason you wanted that column) I can create that for you elsewhere? BilledMammal (talk) 08:57, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Ta - it might make life slightly easier. You could add it at User:Blue Square Thing/sandbox7 if that's suitable. Blue Square Thing (talk) 09:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Done. Will work on using categories to expand the list of proposed redirects when my mind is fresher. BilledMammal (talk) 13:05, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• This is a much more mixed list than the last one. In particular, the mixture of much older athletes (eg. Arthur Nott) together with BLPs of currently active players (eg. Chintan Gaja) creates different considerations. Unlike with Olympic athletes, it's also less obvious to me where their context (if encyclopaedic) might be contained. (The Olympics info was already present elsewhere happily, how orphaned or not are these cricket articles?) CMD (talk) 09:58, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Most are contained within lists. Some, like Chintan Gaja, aren't because some of the lists are incomplete - although I have added him now. I'm going to try to craft a query that will allow me to identify those that should be in a given list but aren't. BilledMammal (talk) 12:28, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• BilledMammal Like the last RFC, I notice that there is mention of a Quarry query using those 5 metrics, but no accompanying query with it. Can you first show the query itself as well? In particular I am curious how you plan to implement #4 (only CricketArchive or ESPNcricinfo refs) and #5 (no other editors) without adding some assumptions.
  Likewise, you should have added #6 (Alphabetically first 1200 among all articles that follow 1-5), because it wasn't clear to me without reading discussions that you restricted this to A-D (As opposed to taking everything that matched 1-5). In other words, I want to confirm again that the list provided above has no assumptions other than the 5 points mentioned above
  Soni (talk) 12:10, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Quarry:query/73984

  Regarding your #6, I did say these 1,200 articles are a subset of the articles that meet the following criteria, emphasis mine, but I could have made it clearer. BilledMammal (talk) 12:28, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  @BilledMammal That still does not clarify my main question. Did you apply any other metric other than #1-#5 (and #6, alphabetcal) when curating this list? I'm trying to figure out how much additional filters were applied.

  For example, did someone do a run-through of the list manually to quick-check things and remove any "this is obviously a mistake"? I'm trying to tell if there was any manual (or automatic) filtering from the quarry query Soni (talk) 06:22, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, while not every article in the list was reviewed we did review a substantial portion; when errors were discovered (articles that should be excluded per the criteria) we would modify the query to ensure that those errors, and any like them, were excluded. BilledMammal (talk) 07:22, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I estimate that I've probably looked at 300 or so in some detail - clicking through to the CricInfo reference on each - and maybe another 200 or so briefly. Obviously people have looked at others as well. The scale of the list and the sheer amount of work required the check is really problematic and something that I'm still not entirely comfortable with (although, as indicated above) I'm not unhappy to compromise). I think there are better ways to approach future lists - the list with team categories that BilledMammal provided is a really helpful way of picking out people that are more likely to show up as interesting. In some ways, providing a list for checking of, say, English cricketers (there are 298 that Lugnuts created that fall into the sort of category of articles BM is suggesting) would be much more manageable - it would let us pick out people like David Partridge (cricketer) quickly (he played in over 100 top-level games in England - there will be a tonne of coverage on him, although he falls into the time span where it'll be difficult to find online sources (he's worth removing from the list actually - I already have three or four sources)). I appreciate that there's a demand to get through the 5-6000 articles that have been identified, but smaller, more targeted lists might be a better longer-term approach perhaps Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:25, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

• @BilledMammal: Can we make a "Draftified Lugnuts articles" category to keep track of all of the Cricket and Olympic draftifications? It would be quite useful. QuicoleJR (talk) 15:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  See Category:All drafts subject to special procedures BilledMammal (talk) 16:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  See what? QuicoleJR (talk) 16:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  NVM, I see it now. QuicoleJR (talk) 16:52, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  Yeah, I messed up the link; thank you BeanieFan11 for fixing it. BilledMammal (talk) 16:54, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• I think there are around 573 articles in the list for redirection, yes? On a rough count. BilledMammal provided me with a list of 625 articles (at User:Blue Square Thing/sandbox7). Working through that and looking for other redirects I **think** I have another 306 or so which have lists to redirect to. That leaves 319 to draft - lists at that sandbox. There are a number of shortcuts that we could adopt in this sort of situation in future - I've noted those at that sandbox. I'll comment above regarding this as well as there are a few issues. Blue Square Thing (talk) 20:53, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Random question: are we going to treat suspected WP:BLPs differently? SportingFlyer T·C 21:41, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  I don't think I've come across a BLP of this kind where there's anything in the articles that isn't 100% verifiable fwiw Blue Square Thing (talk) 06:16, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

• I understand the thought process of discussing these mass created articles in chunks rather than all at once, but it raises another question: are we going to have to go through this agonizing debate every single time? I don't see the level of consensus significantly changing between WP:LUGSTUBS, this discussion, and the next one, but I do see it taking up many cumulative hours every single time a new one of these is opened, and more bad blood forming each time. And let's say that becuase of who happens to show up for a given discussion, the consensus does change. Say the consensus for E-H tilts oppose while the consensus for A-D and I-L tilts support. Does this mean we have an island of thousands of cricketers whose names start with E, F, G, and H that are immune to mass draftification and have to be sorted manually simply because of a procedural quirk? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:21, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  The problem is that there's so many to check, especially when it comes to identifying redirect targets. The 625 that I checked through yesterday to identify redirects (309 ahve redirect targets) cost me a few hours of time. I think there are some future shortcuts we might take to be clever, but it's not straightforward Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:29, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I'm definitely going to be able to create the redirects targets in an automated way even when the article doesn't currently include a link to the list using categories. I also expect to be able to expand lists that are currently missing players based on the categories, but I will want to take that through a WP:BRFA first.

  In general I will want to go through larger groups in the future - my plan if there is a consensus for this is to do the rest of the articles that meet this criteria in a single group - but I also want to do whatever I can with quarry and possibly a bot to make it easier for you. BilledMammal (talk) 08:33, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I'm not sure you'll get consensus for that many at once. I'm not sure that I could be persuaded that it's a good thing. There are better ways of dealing with these I think. We can get it done in a decent timeframe still, but there are significant issues that a number of editors have raised about checking articles; I don't think this passing gives consensus for presenting a much longer list you know. Trying to check 1,200 has been hard work; over 4,000 in one hit is a different ball game. Blue Square Thing (talk) 13:14, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  My thinking is that while these RfC's are better than 1200 AfD's in terms of consuming the communities time they still do consume considerable amounts of time, and the community will become worn with them if done too often or frequently. At a rate of one every four months, and ~1200 in each, it will take us ten years to go through Lugnut's mass creations alone, assuming that half of them need to be brought through a process like this or similar.

  That doesn't mean we can't adjust the process. Perhaps if the list was provided to the relevant WikiProject - in this case WikiProject Cricket - three months in advance? BilledMammal (talk) 13:20, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Be much easier to deal with the lists broken down by nationality. There are about 1,200 Australians in all, for example. We know what we're doing with them - there are redirects for virtually all of them, but we might also be able to filter out some articles that there's clearly a good reason for setting to one side. The problem with the way they're broken down right now is that you're jumping around geographically so much, which has a major impact when you're considering redirects and sources and so on.

  If we broke those Australian's down further it would be even easier - people can cope with a list of 234 Tasmanians or 320 Victorians. That's manageable. Someone can sensibly sit down and push through most of the list in a day or so, make some decisions and then recommend some solutions. I think that's a way forward. Well, for me it is, but there's probably people who have created cricket articles who are sticking pins in effigies of me right now. Blue Square Thing (talk) 13:30, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  Would it be suitable if I provide the lists with groupings like that to WikiProject Cricket, but when it comes time for the RfC to group them together? I would prefer not to keep them split in that manner both because it limits the size of the group and because it will result in accusations about racism and systematic bias regardless of which nationality the group is "targeted" at. BilledMammal (talk) 13:36, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I was worried about that element as well - but the reality is that we have much better sourcing for some nations than others. And people have more of an interest in some teams than others - someone's already looked over the Surrey ones to check that there's nothing obvious that really shouldn't be there, for example. It's also going to be worth asking at various other wikiprojects - there are IPL and PSL projects and they might fancy looking at Indian and Pakistani articles. There are certainly enough people editing cricket articles from the south Asian area that if they saw a list might do something about it perhaps.

  I think the list at my Sandbox6 probably already does what we need to a greater or lesser extent. I'v just worked up a formula in Excel to check how many cats a players is in - if it's not 2 then there are decisions to be made. There are probably some other technical things that we could do to make things a little simpler to handle, but it'll take a little while to get that done. It would certainly be easier to categorise in various ways, just so as someone can say "hey, I got the Otago list; can someone else do Canterbury" Blue Square Thing (talk) 13:54, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

  I'm happy to send the subsets anywhere you like; it would make sense to let editors from the area take a look and see what they can do.

  I'v just worked up a formula in Excel to check how many cats a players is in - if it's not 2 then there are decisions to be made. It's probably easier for me to get that done in Quarry; just let me know the sorts of categories you want included in the count. In general, if there is some questions you have about the full dataset it might be easier to ask me; even if you're not convinced that it can be automated I might be able to manage something, particularly since I've recently started looking at bots - I'm hoping I can use them to reduce both the false negative and the false positive rate from our article selection criteria (for example, a bot would allow us to look at the number of words of prose, rather than estimating whether an article is substantial based on the number of bytes.)

  If it needs a bot rather than a quarry query it might take a little more time for me to get you the answer, but I suspect it will still take far less time than doing it manually. BilledMammal (talk) 15:09, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

• Comment - I supported the previous draftification, but I'm hesitant to support this process in general. In particular, the selected query criteria seem a little arbitrary, and I would love to see better justification for the selected criteria. This process makes me think of bot approvals discussions for things like vandalism removal or error fixing: a total set of articles is identified, but a small random sample is retained for initial, manual evaluation. Basically, what is the precision of your query, i.e. what percentage of these articles should we expect to be truly non-notable vs what percentage would be found to be notable (and improved) if submitted to WP:AFD? I would suggest that a test would be relatively cheap: submit a random 50 of these articles to AFD and see what happens. Has there been a thought about running a test like this, rather than Village Pump discussions about 1000 articles at a time with slightly varying criteria? Suriname0 (talk) 04:57, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  Comment -@Suriname0 - The plan at one point seemed to be to mass draft even more than 1,000 articles at a time. KatoKungLee (talk) 17:33, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  Multi-article AfDs have generally ended as train wrecks, and sending 50 articles singularly to AfD has resulted in threads at ANI as the AfD process isn't up to the task of some many discussions happening at the same time. Hopefully a better solution than these RFC's can be found, but other methods have already been attempted. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:32, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  ActivelyDisinterested - If the people who want these articles gone don't want to actually see if these people are notable and if the same people also don't feel like even making the case for them to be deleted in AfD, are the articles really problems? The more this goes on, the more it becomes clear to me that the people mass creating these articles without proper research and the people calling for these articles to be deleted without proper research, really seem to be two sides of the same coin. The articles just HAVE to be made/deleted without proper research as soon as possible despite there being WP:NORUSH.KatoKungLee (talk) 13:27, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  My comment was in regard to how the AfD processed isn't really setup to handle large volumes, if you have any ideas about that I'm more than willing to listen. I have no interest in redoing the argument that has been going on, as it's been going round in circles for months. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 14:10, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

  To be clear, I was suggesting 50 independent AfD submissions, with the intent of estimating the precision of the query used to identify this set of articles. If the concern is that this is a backdoor to deletion, it would be nice to know approximately how many notable articles would be incorrectly "deleted" in this way. Suriname0 (talk) 02:14, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  And as I said if you send 50 articles to AfD today, you find yourself at ANI tomorrow. This isn't a new issue, it has gone round and round these ideas. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 11:14, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

• Comment. I think the "If this proposal is successful" caveats 1-5 make this proposal too complex. I think it'd have a better chance of passing and of being implemented smoothly without those caveats. For example, trying to make G13 not apply to these for 5 years is going to mess up reports and require special tracking of when the 5 year timer is up. The special tracking will require special reports, special templates, special categories, and modification of the text at WP:G13. Requiring that these pass GNG to be returned to mainspace would require some kind of detection and enforcement mechanism. Allowing userfication and adoption by WikiProjects is already allowed and probably doesn't need to be mentioned explicitly. I think the normal draftify rules would be best, and the only caveat should be that no one is allowed to return these to mainspace en masse. –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:24, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  Would you have any objection to anyone bringing them back en masse as merge and redirects? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 17:15, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

  Sorry if I'm being obtuse, not enough coffee yet, but how logistically would bringing them back en masse as merge and redirects actually work? If this is just a stupid question from a non-techie editor, feel free to take it to my talk instead of here. Valereee (talk) 10:21, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

  Imagine a world in which a group of dedicated volunteers got together to build an encyclopedia that was both inclusive of all encyclopedic content, and laid out usefully so that little bits of it were not scattered around and hard to find. Maybe some of them have the skills to code a gadget to take some of the the scattered bits and put them in places that make the encyclopedia more user-friendly by adding them to articles where they are in context by category, and easily accessible by searches. While you are indulging these flights of whimsy, imagine that the editors had the good sense to do this in the first place... Then drink your coffee and come back to reality, and the herding of cats. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:13, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

• Just noting I'm sampling and investigating some of the Australian cricketers to see if there's coverage on Trove – a useful but often overlooked Australian newspaper archive. So far I have investigated and found sources for David Taylor (Australian cricketer), which I believe would now need to be removed from the list. – Teratix ₵ 02:36, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose Per many others' comments. In addition, I see such a step leading to prevention of steps such as taken by Teratix, and by myself with Alfred Grace, which is now quite a decent article. --Dweller (talk) Old fashioned is the new thing! 11:59, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose The collateral damage would make the site worse than the benefit provided in saving people work. The remedy for what Lugnuts did was to catch him earlier; not to indiscriminately remove from coverage a large number of articles that have a reasonable possibility of passing the notability criteria. Jack4576 (talk) 13:43, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

  He was "caught" earlier. There was multiple person-years of time spent actually dealing with it, and in that period he created 100,000 articles, mostly unexpandable stubs. Valereee (talk) 17:21, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

  Basically this. What Lugnuts was doing was ALWAYS against policy. That a project also supported this against-policy activity and was able to prevent any sanction against Lugnuts until the community over-rided them doesn't change that. FOARP (talk) 07:36, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Alternative proposal (mass-draftification of cricket articles)

1. Most of these substubs would be quite acceptable content if merged into an existing article which already meets general notability.
2. The existing database references are adequate for mention in an already accepted topic. I.e. the information itself, while minimal, is encyclopedic, verifiable, neutral and non-trivial. Someone may even find it useful educational or interesting. It is within scope for Wikipedia.
3. Most of the articles already give enough information to find a suitable article or list to merge them into.
4. A category for all these articles can be divided into subcategories based on the category of article which they could be merged into without dispute. This would make it quicker to find merge targets
5. A few new articles and lists might be needed for the outliers. This should not be a problem in most cases.
6. Merging one of them into a list and leaving a redirect would be about the same amount of work as commenting meaningfully and usefully on AfD for that article, and would be constructive and almost always non-controversial. Far less a waste of time than this RfC, because all of the work and time expended would actually be fixing the problem and building the encyclopedia.
7. Some of the substubs might be found unusable, AfD them.

Looks like a no-brainer, what have I missed? Cheers · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 13:22, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

• We're a bit short of lists in some parts of the world. Yesterday morning I created List of Sikkim cricketers which is a quick one to do. There are others that will be harder to do and that *I* won't have time to anytime soon. The majority of the easy to access source information that would be most useful to use is behind a slightly annoying paywall as well. Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:20, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  Perhaps the WMF could be persuaded to put some of the donors' money into access to that paywalled stuff, though it might be a bit of a shock to the donors to see their money going towards expanding content. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 17:06, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

• The BOLD redirecting of such articles seems a simple solution, as a simple revert brings it back if someone wants to improve it. It's something I was for in the last RFC, unfortunately it didn't get much support. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:26, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, me too. For some reason hardly anyone sees it as obviously logical. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 17:06, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

  Merging the articles into one master list or a series of lists is a significantly better proposal and wouldn't require an RFC at all if the content and sources were largely preserved. Steven Walling • talk 01:59, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  And we would end up where this whole farce should have started, with encyclopedic information preserved where it best fits. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 16:59, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

  So given that it's within policy, why don't we just do it? We can propose a list grouping scheme to WikiProject Cricket. Steven Walling • talk 00:21, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

  In the past such changes have been reverted so some caution is suggest, but you could always give it a go. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 15:11, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

Merge work is pretty tedious. I don't have an objection to merging, but what I've often seen after merge discussions end with consensus to merge is that no one actually wants to do that work. Valereee (talk) 18:15, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

Sorting the stubs into categories would be a good start, as a large part of the work would be finding a suitable destination article. For a job this big, maybe some skilled hacker could write us a script for the actual merge and redirect work, as it would be fairly repetetive. Perhaps some of those who are so keen to get rid of the stubs would put in a bit of constructive work, and perhaps some of those who are keen to not lose the content would help. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 05:55, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Also, though tedious, it is actively constructive, which puts it ahead of tedious and unconstructive debate, and much less tedious than AfD first, then merging. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:21, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Also far less pointy than AfD or mass draftifying. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:24, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

BlueSquareThing and I have been discussing ways to do this. If there is a consensus for this proposal we are likely to take a WP:BOLD action to merge and redirect many of these in line with If this proposal is successful #5. BilledMammal (talk) 10:36, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

Merging and redirecting to lists eliminates any objection centered on this violating deletion policy, per WP:ATD-M. Any particular article that editors want to expand with additional sources can be unmerged later, but in the meantime that route preserves the minimal current content and reader ability to access it. The main thing remaining is to get a mapping of which stubs would go to which lists, but the obvious framework seems to be country of origin and year they played. Steven Walling • talk 02:23, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Regarding the years they played in, some of the difficulty is that these stubs don't include that information; for example, Dean Mazhawidza. Indeed, this is part of the issue with Lugnut's mass creations; if we really wanted these mass created we should have written a bot to do it; it would have taken considerably less work, would have permitted the inclusion of considerably more information, and would have prevented the inaccuracies - whether deliberate or accidental - that we see in many of Lugnut's creations.

When I have the initial draft of the plan for merging and redirecting I'll ping you to it, as I believe you'll have useful insights on what can be added or changed. BilledMammal (talk) 07:41, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Improved articles

Editors who have improved any of the articles on this list please add them to User:BilledMammal/Improved cricketers, so that I can ensure they are not draftified with the rest at the end of the discussion. While I should catch any that have been improved I may miss some, and adding them to that page will ensure I don't miss yours. Pinging James500, who I know has improved some. BilledMammal (talk) 10:35, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

I have anything I've worked on watchlisted, so I'll pick anything up that way. Tbh I've been working on lots of articles, only some of which might be on this list, so I think we'll catch any that way - I assume that a bold revert would be entirely appropriate in these circumstances! I'll try and get to some of the other things above when I have time, but I've missed quite a bit of this. Blue Square Thing (talk) 07:51, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Just noting I've added the ones I've improved so far and will continue to do so. – Teratix ₵ 21:27, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Structural observation for closer(s)

The actual question of the rfc (bolding added) is "Should the following 1,182 biographical microstubs, which were mass-created by Lugnuts and cover cricketers, be moved out of article space? Much of the discussion does not directly answer that question but instead discusses several different particular ways of moving them out of article space. IMO the close still needs to respond on the actual RFC question. It's possible there there could be a consensus to move out of article space but no consensus on any particular way to do that in which case a second RFC might be required. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:35, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

I think most of the oppose votes see the various means of removing from article space without direct deletion as de facto or "backdoor" deletion, since once removed from mainspace that is where they will likely end up anyway even if consensus to delete doesnt exist. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 04:34, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

The question at the top of the thread is not the proposal the community has been asked to discuss. The section Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Details (mass draftification of cricket articles) says "If this proposal is successful: All articles on the list will be draftified, subject to the provisions below". That statement is the proposal the community has been asked to discuss. James500 (talk) 08:04, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

@James500: I don't agree with your conclusion but you made/ pointed out a good point there. The stuff that you pointed out is actually different that the lead question of the RFC. I don't envy the closer(s) Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 13:28, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

Can we not create new sections just to bias the whole discussion? Yes, if you only look at the support !votes, this is the framing. I thought about creating yet another subsection to clarify that "The actual question of the rfc (bolding added) is 'Should we disregard the deletion policy in order to remove 1,182 articles out of process, based only on the size, current sourcing, and name of the creator?' Much of the discussion does not directly answer the question about the deletion policy but instead focuses on the manner of creation or guesses as to notability of the group." ... but creating new subsections just to skew things towards a position that I happen to agree with is...not ideal. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 13:23, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

As with the first discussion, the fact this is happening at VPP and the nature of the question is inherently that this will be an exception to the normal process. I would hope that no-one was unsure about that. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:07, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't understand what you mean by "an exception to the normal process"? The proposal is to take actions contrary to the normal process regarding over a thousand articles, but the discussion about it should follow the normal processes of discussions - including those regarding canvassing, determining consensus and attempting to bias the closer. Thryduulf (talk) 21:22, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

I think we're getting cross-wired. My point was that I believe editors knew this was meant as an exception to the normal process. Not anything about 'canvassing, determining consensus' etc. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:40, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

• Comment - Here's as good a place to post this as any: I count 66 support !votes versus 44 oppose !votes. That's 60% support, and growing. Of course WP:NOTAVOTE, but then the oppose !votes are overwhelmingly based on slippery-slope/IAR/deletion-by-backdoor arguments that were already rejected in WP:LUGSTUBS and - crucially - have not been born out by what happened after WP:LUGSTUBS. There has been no "slippery slope" as a result of WP:LUGSTUBS so how could there be one on this practically-identical issue? We have not open a new route that allows deletion to happen undiscussed - far from it! There can be no justifying keeping articles that don't meet WP:NSPORTS, least of all under IAR. The weight of the arguments is very much in favour of the support !voters. FOARP (talk) 10:29, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

  This is an incredibly biassed summary. Most of the oppose !votes are not actually based on slippery slope arguments, but a great many support !votes are based on "IDOTLIKEIT" and IAR arguments and have not even attempted to address the legitimate arguments in opposition (and some that do just handwave them away). LUGSTUBS is not precedent-generating, but even if it were it has been explained in detail somewhere above how this is sufficiently different that it would not be reliable to regard it as such for this discussion. Thryduulf (talk) 10:36, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

  Failing notability is not "I don't like it", and every one of these I've reviewed fails notability. In contrast every one of the ones I've seen "rescued" merely had passing mentions in team rosters added. FOARP (talk) 07:47, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Notifications (mass draftification of cricket articles)

The following people/pages will be notified:

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket:

   Done (link) BilledMammal (talk) 06:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Those who commented in the previous RfC:

  @Abzeronow, ActivelyDisinterested, AirshipJungleman29, Ajpolino, Anarchyte, Aquillion, Avilich, Barnards.tar.gz, BeanieFan11, BhamBoi, BillHPike, BilledMammal, Bilorv, Blue Square Thing, BluePenguin18, Bluerasberry, BogLogs, Bradv, Buidhe, Casualdejekyll, Cbl62, Chipmunkdavis, Chris troutman, Curbon7, DFlhb, David Eppstein, David Fuchs, Donald Albury, Dr. Blofeld, Dr vulpes, Dweller, Ealdgyth, EdwardUK, Enos733, FOARP, Femke, Folly Mox, Freedom4U, Fyunck(click), GRuban, Galobtter, Gnomingstuff, Gonnym, GoodDay, Highway 89, Hobit, HouseBlaster, Hydronium Hydroxide, Iffy, and Indy beetle: BilledMammal (talk) 06:39, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Isaacl, Ixtal, J947, JMWt, Jayron32, JeffUK, JoelleJay, Jogurney, Joseph2302, JuxtaposedJacob, KatoKungLee, Kevin McE, Kingsif, Kusma, Lepricavark, Levivich, Ljleppan, Loopy30, Moabdave, Mr.weedle, Mx. Granger, Nerd1a4i, Nononsense101, North8000, Nosferattus, Oaktree b, Occidental Phantasmagoria, Ortizesp, Paradise Chronicle, Pawnkingthree, Pelmeen10, PerfectSoundWhatever, Phil Bridger, Pppery, ProcrastinatingReader, QuicoleJR, Randy Kryn, Red-tailed hawk, Redfiona99, Renata3, Reywas92, Rlendog, Rschen7754, S Marshall, SMcCandlish, SWinxy, Schierbecker, Schwede66, Sennecaster, and Silver seren: BilledMammal (talk) 06:40, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  @SmokeyJoe, SnowFire, Sojourner in the earth, Soni, Starship.paint, Steven Walling, SunDawn, Suriname0, Terasail, Therapyisgood, Thryduulf, Tim O'Doherty, Toa Nidhiki05, Tvx1, Valereee, Visviva, WhatamIdoing, XAM2175, Zaathras, Lettherebedarklight, and Scope creep: BilledMammal (talk) 06:40, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

   Done BilledMammal (talk) 06:41, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Please list any other groups of editors you notify here. BilledMammal (talk) 06:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Noting that JoelleJay seems to be WP:CANVASSING by notifiying the new page patrol of this discussion. I'm not seeing how they're relevant at all to this discussion - this looks like an attempt to try to get more to vote "support." BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:19, 1 September 2023 (UTC) @BeanieFan11 and JoelleJay: Moved here from #Arbitrary break 2: Survey (mass draftification of cricket articles); it's an obscure section in a huge discussion and I can see why you both missed it, but I believe it is the best location for this discussion.BilledMammal (talk) 07:57, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  There are ongoing discussions on the impact of, in particular, mass-produced articles from autopatrolled editors, as well proposed changes to draftification procedures. Why wouldn't editors there be interested in this discussion, especially the 5-year draftification option? And why would NPP be expected to have any bias on whether and where the articles should remain? Sure, the content being "cricketer stubs" isn't relevant to NPP, but the proposed alternative to 6-month draftification and the conversations here surrounding draftifying in general are apropos. JoelleJay (talk) 20:01, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  But why notify them now, over a month after the start of the discussion and at a time when there's borderline no consensus for the proposal (i.e. a time when there's a need for more support to pass)? And NPP has historically been known for being more harsh towards sports articles so many of the members would be more likely to support than not. If Wikipedia:Article Rescue Squadron was still active, would you be alright with me notifying them, too? BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:17, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  Because I only became aware of their current discussions on autopatrol and draftification/redirect suppression after they leaked into other venues a few days ago, and I thought those were adjacent enough topics that NPPers would be interested in this RfC as well. This discussion would benefit from fresh participants who are already familiar with notability guidelines and draftification policy. What evidence is there that they are especially biased against sports articles? And I think there's a sizable difference between a group accorded special user rights by admins to review new articles and a wikiproject dedicated to preventing article deletions... JoelleJay (talk) 21:03, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

  While I generally support restrictions on notifying partisan groups of formal discussions, I find it odd that you are objecting to this notification given that in WP:LUGSTUBS you considered it appropriate to notify 24 sports-related WikiProjects, including seven that were unrelated to the articles being discussed. I also agree with JoelleJay that this conversation is pertinent to NPP, and find it hard to believe that they are collectively partisan (although if you are interested, I have thought of a few methods to identify partisan WikiProjects that we could also apply to assess whether NPP is partisan; feel free to open a discussion on my talk page).

  Finally, I disagree that this is borderline no consensus; given the size of the majority in support of the proposal, and the fact that the strength of argument on each side is roughly equal, it appears to my WP:INVOLVED eyes that there is a consensus. BilledMammal (talk) 07:57, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  Based on the strength of the arguments it appears to my INVOLVED eyes that there is nothing approaching a consensus - sure there are more people making the same arguments in favour of the proposal, but almost none of them engage with the strong arguments in opposition whereas the clear majority of those opposed do directly relate to the supporting arguments. No new objective arguments supporting the proposal have been made since an uninvolved editor determined there was no consensus. Thryduulf (talk) 09:41, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  I don't think we're going to agree on which side has the strongest arguments so I won't argue that further, but I will point out that the close in which an uninvolved editor determined there was no consensus was overturned. BilledMammal (talk) 09:58, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  Since you agree that the arguments on both sides are equally strong, and since they are diametrically opposed, the only proper close would be No Consensus; Consensus is not a vote, and is determined by weight of arguments. This isnt a WP:1AM situation that numbers would be relevant.

  The vacating of the close was not based on the belief that there was consensus; The vacate was based on insufficient rationale and WP:INVOLVED. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 11:24, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  To clarify, I see the arguments as equally strong, as viewed through the lens of Wikipedia Policy, as policy is silent on this question.

  When policy is silent we aren't deadlocked into doing nothing; this would result in absurdities, like not being able to change a policy because aside from the policy under discussion policy is silent on the issue. Instead, we assess if there is clear support for a position among the community, and if there is we see a consensus (a few exceptions apply, such as when core policies are involved, but no exceptions are relevant here).

  This is also the case when policy is not silent, but instead are conflicting or provide multiple options. Again, the arguments are equally strong, but rather than resulting in deadlock we instead ascertain consensus by seeing which position, in the specific instance under discussion, has the most support among the community; see WP:POLCON, which says Editors must use their best judgement to decide which advice is most appropriate and relevant to the specific situation at hand. BilledMammal (talk) 12:03, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  A closer should pick the best of the supported options despite none of them getting consensus only when there is a clear consensus against the status quo. Given that a large proportion of the votes in opposition to this proposal are arguing in favour of the status quo (i.e. the articles should remain in article space, at least for now) a closer doing that here would be completely inappropriate. The most appropriate thing to do here is to stop beating a dead horse, acknowledge there is no consensus to do anything to these articles en mass and move on in a way that consensus agrees will not harm the encyclopaedia. Thryduulf (talk) 12:31, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  @BeanieFan11, notifying a related project isn't canvassing. The notification was neutrally worded, the timing is completely reasonable given that this discussion was closed once already, and that talk has nearly 400 watchers. Neither the notification nor the timing are evidence of nefarious intent, and this discussion is contentious enough without making accusations of bad faith about people we're in disagreement with. Valereee (talk) 12:14, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  @Valereee: Eh, it just doesn't seem that relevant a project to this to me... not to mention that I was brought to ANI twice for the same issue when I notified actually relevant projects (e.g. the NFL for discussions about the NFL), and a significant number of those in support of this proposal (i.e. Joelle, BilledMammal, etc.) suggested that I should be warned and eventually sanctioned if I were to continue. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:58, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  I agree that the advertisement done here was unusual (and done at a noticeboard likely to draw a certain types of votes), but best to WP:AGF and let it be. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 16:01, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  I understand, its just annoying how it doesn't work that way for me... BeanieFan11 (talk) 16:03, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  @BeanieFan11, so, two things. First, without links or diffs I can't really assess the situation and whether it worked for you or not. For instance, did you get warned or sanctioned after leaving an announcement everyone agreed was neutral on a noticeboard many agreed could reasonably be considered relevant? Second, this kind of sounds almost like something between snark and retaliation, neither of which would be great strategies in a contentious discussion. :)

  Look, I get that this is an extremely annoying and frustrating discussion for a ton of people. That's why it's so important to AGF the hell out of things, even if you have to grit your teeth or walk away from the keyboard to do it. When you don't AGF in discussions like this, the person you're making look bad is yourself. Valereee (talk) 16:27, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  @Valereee: You can spend the next two hours of your time reading them here and here if you'd like - I was not sanctioned, but still did find it really annoying that I was called things like "a net negative and community time sink" and "incompetent," among other things (despite my enormous contributions to this website), partly for doing exactly what Joelle has done here. But anyway, I'm going to take your advice and walk away - at least from this discussion. BeanieFan11 (talk) 16:55, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

  So, the first of the discussions linked above was the ANI where Beanie was reported for being uncivil and almost all discussion focused on that. I really hope the message Beanie took away from that discussion wasn't "the people who reported me and/or !voted for a warning suck" rather than what it should have been which was "maybe you shouldn't swear at people on Wikipedia". FOARP (talk) 12:44, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Notes (mass draftification of cricket articles)