 | This is anessay on thedeletion policy. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one ofWikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not beenthoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Sometimes when a new article is created, it's quickly deemed as lackingnotability. So it gets tagged forspeedy deletion. Or maybe it doesn't qualify for speedy deletion, and so it'sproposed for deletion (prod). Or maybe it's 'known' that a proposal for deletion will simply be removed, so, off toArticles for deletion (AfD) it goes!
Right?
Alas, all too often, this happens. An article is seen that, from its title and contents, fits a likely or believed pattern of articles about non-notable subjects, so it's put in theround file - sometimes less than ten minutes after it's created, even while the author is still working on expanding it, and sometimes when a search would show notability, or at least the potential of such. Not everybody works on a page in userspace to get it Wiki-Ready before having it go live; in fact, newcomers to Wikipedia may not even know youcan, and could easily be scared off by having their tender young contributionsbitten in this way.
And this applies to older articles stumbled across, as well. Yeah, that article's been there for years withoutreferences - that doesn't mean itcan't be referenced. And this other article doesn'tassert notability - that doesn't mean its subjectisn't notable.
Soassume good faith,take a look to see if the article's subject could be notable after all, and give a new article a little time before playing atcybermen and shouting "DELETE!". And please, don'tautomatically assume non-notability. After all, when you assume, you make...