Your third task is participation in an article deletion debate (AfD). AfD’s are important because they keep Wikipedia free of crufty, useless, information. There are several other methods of article deletion (Proposed deletion and Speedy Deletion), but AfD is the one in which community input is sought the most. You may want to read the deletion policy to get an overview of the entire process. Here is what you need to do:
- Go to the AfD main page, on the right hand side of the page you will see a link “Deletion Today” Click that link, and all of the AfD’s nominated today, will appear. Each AfD contains the article heading, a “nom” (a description by the user who created the AfD about why they think it should be deleted), and then space for the community to build consensus on the deletion (or non deletion) of the article.
- Scroll through the list, until you find an AfD about an article that you think you know something about, or could speak about with some expertise. While this won’t be necessary later on, it’s good now to speak in areas where you are confident about what you say.
- When you’ve found an AfD on a topic that interests you, open the article in a new window/tab. Read the nomination, so that you have some idea of what to look for (for example, if the nomination says the article isn’t notable, then you’ll need to check if that’s true), and then decide what should be done about the article.
- Before you vote on the article’s future, make sure you have a notability guideline with which you can back up your arguments. For example, if the article is about a garage band that’s never sold a record, then you’ll need to cite something like WP:MUSIC. If it’s about a non notable person, WP:BIO will suffice. It’s also a good idea to read the general notability page at WP:N so that you can discuss notability on the whole, as well as in specifics. Here are links to some of the more useful notability guidelines for your reference.
- During your review of the article if you feel that the subject is indeed notable feel free to add additional content and especially references to reliable sources in the article using what you learned in lesson 1. Adding references is sometimes all that is needed to save an article from being deleted. If you do add references to the article make sure you mention that fact when you enter your opinion later. Then other editors you previously voted will know to review the changes you made and may change their opinion.
- Some editors just prefer to list any reliable sources that they find to support a Keep vote in the WP:AFD discussion and let other editors actually update the article. There is no requirement to update the article, you can just list your sources to support a Keep vote.
- Having decided on the fate on the article, and with a policy in hand to back up your arguments, click the edit link next to the article name. Type an asterix (*), and then your opinion (keep, delete, merge, redirect, etc.) in bold. Follow this with a brief summary of your reasons for your opinion (eg. “passes WP:MUSIC, artist has released two albums with major labels.”). Try to avoid comments such as “per nom”, state your reason to keep or delete based upon specifics in the notability guidelines.
- Make sure to sign your message using ~~~~, then insert an edit summary which contains your opinion (keep, delete, etc.). You might want to preview the page before saving.
- When you’ve saved the page, the page that loads won’t be the page you left - it won’t contain all of today’s AfD discussions, but only the one you just voted in. To return to the main page, you can click the “Articles for deletion” link under the page title, or type WP:AFD into the search box. Before doing this, get a diff for the AfD comment you just made, and bring it to your adoption page. Good luck!
Related topic - Deletion Sorting If you have a specific topic that is of interest you may want to check out the Deletion Sorting. Most editors when putting an article through the AfD process will add the AfD discussion to a page which lists deletion discussion for a particular topic. You can then watch that page and when a new article within that topic is added it will appear on your watch list and you can go and review it and add your opinion. It's very useful for keeping track of articles within a particular topic. This deletion sorting process allows you to keep track of articles within an area that interests you so you can perhaps improve those articles and save them from being deleted.