Hell of a year, huh? Or, perhaps, hell of a "twelve months that didn't really feel like a year had gone by"? We had one here on the Internet, that's for sure. And nowhere was it wackier than the free encyclopedia that anybody could edit. In 2021, we've spent our days hashing it out over nearly 22,000 individual nominations (around 60 per day). Most of them were not very tumultuous. Notability standards are invoked, disputed and interpreted in much the same way across many similar AfDs — the obscure villages, minor-league athletes, unreleased movies, minor high schools, groundbreaking startups, and tiny stubs start to blur together after a while. But every once in a while, something really special happens, the planets align just right, and a bunch of people type out thousands of words of text in a deletion discussion.
Sometimes it is just a protracted debate about arcane details of little relevance, and sometimes it is the extension of some long-roiling personal dispute between participants, full of sound and fury signifying nothing — but sometimes questions are raised that cut down to the core of what we think Wikipedia is, what we think it isn't, what we think it means, and what we think it should be. Questions that redefine what the largest encyclopedia in the history of human civilization wants to be about, and what role it wants to play in that civilization as a de facto adjudicator of which subjects are noteworthy.
Much money and power is spent in attempts to influence that adjudication — whether through outright paid editing, the volunteered advocacy of earnest believers, or our own beliefs as editors. We live in a society, but that society lives within us as well, and what we choose to cover as an encyclopedia is part of an intricate dance with that society. Love it or hate it, it matters.
Over the years, deletion processes have changed, because notability standards have changed, because Wikipedia has changed, because the Internet has changed, because the world has changed. One wonders, of course, to what extent the reverse order of this causal chain is true — not very, but probably at least a little bit.
So how many times have we brave, strange, monastic defenders of knowledge and freedom undertaken our solemn ritual? According to the database, a little under half a million (482,316 to be precise).
It seems like something that's this big a part of our project ought to have some attention paid to it, and probably more attention than human beings can pay on their own, so earlier this year I wrote some software to help with the task. The Oracle's unblinking electric eye is able to keep watch over all of those AfDs, from 2005 up until today, and from it we can glean some insights into the process which shapes our encyclopedia. So what are they?
From 2005 to 2020, there have been an average of around 28,000 deletion discussions per year; a lot more detail about this (including impressive graphs) can be found at the Oracle's all-time stats page. Suffice it to say, however, that 2006 was the all-time peak (54,606) and since 2014 the yearly average has hovered somewhere around 24,000. This year, there were almost 22,000, slightly fewer than in 2020 (24,000) but considerably more than 2019 (18,000).
As has been the case in every year since 2005, the majority (about 15,600, or 60%) closed as "delete" or "speedy delete". About 5,400 (25%) closed as "keep", "speedy keep" or "no consensus". About 2,700 (13%) closed as "merge" or "redirect". The rest closed as "userfy", "draftify", "withdrawn", or "transwiki". 134 AfDs (0.01%) had a close that my software couldn't parse.
There have been a number of surprising, contentious, unprecedented and downright strange deletion discussions in 2021. In March, we saw an ArbCom case related to mass creation of non-notable "geostubs", and in October Lewis (baseball), a featured article (which had appeared on the Main Page just several months earlier), was merged into 1890 Buffalo Bisons season. Last month, we had the largest AfD in history. Besides that, a lot of individual discussions have proved to be very active: hot-button political topics, detailed analyses of academic publishing trends, hot-button political topics, Internet memes-du-jour, chess tournaments, and hot-button political topics. Let's get to 'em.
Overall statistics
These figures are current as of December 28. More detailed statistics can be seen at the monthly Oracle page for December 2021, including numbers and percentages for all closes in the month.
In December 2021, there have been a total of 1,670 deletion discussions, an average of about 54 per day. 176 were relisted from November, leaving 1494 new nominations this month. 498 are currently open, and 1,172 have been closed.
Of the AfDs closed in December:
758 (65%) were "delete" or "speedy delete".
267 (23%) were "keep", "speedy keep", or "no consensus".
122 (10%) were "merge" or "redirect".
7 (0.59%) were closed as "draftify" or "userfy".
7 (0.59%) were withdrawn.
9 (0.76%) had close summaries that could not be processed by the Oracle.
Greatest hits of 2021
I guarantee this is the only time in your life you're going to see a collage with these images in it
For each month in 2021, I've tracked down the largest AfD (by page size) and the most active AfD (by !vote count).
Ever heard of freakin' politics? Jake Angeli, best known for being "that dude with the horned fur headdress" at the the US Capitol building on January 6, certainly has. His article, created as a single-sentence stub the day after, was nominated for deletion four hours later by Andise1, who said that "being a QAnon believer and part of the group that stormed the Capitol is not enough to warrant notability/an article". Many agreed! Many disagreed, too. In fact, any article related to the sordid events of January 6 seemed to be a center of controversy. There were many such cases – the top 20 !voted-on AfDs of January included ten of them,[1] with a total of 549 !votes resulting in nine being deleted. Sad!
Over the course of a week, over two hundred !voters would pile into this discussion. Some said that he was a BLP1E, some said that he met WP:GNG. Some said he was a terrorist (as justification to delete), some said he was a terrorist (as justification to keep), some said he was just some guy. In the end, this amounted to 180 !votes, after "discounting votes of a couple of blocked socks and a couple of votes which are not policy-based". Ymblanter, closing it as "weak keep" on January 15, said:
If I look at the arguments, both sides have valid arguments. Those who argue for keeping say that the article meets WP:GNG since it has several dozens of high-quality sources. Those who argue for deletion cite WP:ONEEVENT, however, they get an objection that media have written about the subject of the article even before the attack for which he is mainly (in)famous. The objection to this reasoning was that media coverage prior to the event was much weaker and possibly would not meet WP:GNG - however, I do not see arguments of one of the sides convincingly refuted. As votes split 1:2, it means two-thirds of the users who participated in the discussion (and these are mostly good-faith users) believe that the GNG argument is stronger than ONEEVENT, and I can not close this as no consensus (which I would have probably done for an even split).
February brought us another contentious AFD for a political activist revolving around BLP1E. This time it was Disha Ravi, an Indian youth climate change activist, who was arrested on February 13 for her "alleged involvement with an online toolkit related to Greta Thunberg and the 2020–2021 Indian farmers' protests". Nominator Wareon said that "being of the few who have been arrested does not establish notability". During the discussion, the article was moved to Arrest of Disha Ravi and back to its original title. Delete !voters said that the arrest amounted to ONEEVENT, and that sources did not meet WP:SIGCOV. Keep !voters pointed to the fact that the article had existed since November 2020, and to the additional news coverage in the wake of Ravi's arrest. Ultimately, closer BD2412 said in a "no consensus" close that "after extended time for discussion, there is a clear absence of consensus and a well-supported argument that the subject was already notable in terms of coverage prior to the arrest that serves as the basis of the WP:BLP1E assertion". BD2412 declined to relist the discussion, saying that "given the volume and divided nature of participation, it does not appear that further relisting will yield a clearer resolution".
This discussion is certainly an outlier, managing to be the largest discussion of the month with just seven !votes and twelve editors. It concerned the article of Elsa D'Silva, a former airline employee from Mumbai who founded an NGO and runs an "online platform ... which tracks and maps incidents of public sexual violence and harassment in India", and was nominated by M4DU7. Initial "keep" !votes pointed out that D'Silva's article appeared to have several reliable sources, including New York magazine, ABC News, The Guardian, and The Times of India. Later, accusations of canvassing were prompted by what appeared to be a job posting on the website Freelancer offering people money to !vote "keep" in the discussion. However, a detailed analysis of the sources (which accounted for most of the AfD's length) were unable to provide compelling evidence of notability. It was closed "delete" by Spartaz, whose close note affirmed this by saying "fundamentally the source analysis shows this does not meet our inclusion standard and none of the keep votes deliver a compelling refutation to this".
On March 30, 2021, The New York Times published a story about a Department of Justice investigation into alleged sex trafficking involving FloridarepresentativeMatt Gaetz. Within several hours of the story breaking, the brief but tumultuous history of this Wikipedia article had begun. It was created at Matt Gaetz child sexual exploitation scandal, moved to Matt Gaetz child sex scandal, redirected to Matt Gaetz, restored from redirect, and nominated for deletion in its first day of existence. The next day it was moved for a third time, to Matt Gaetz sexual misconduct allegations, with the AfD being itself moved to fit the new title. The main contention, made by nominator Possibly and echoed by many "delete" !voters, was that the article (created less than twelve hours after the story broke) was a prime example of WP:TOOSOON, with none of the allegations having been confirmed, and constituted an egregious WP:BLP violation. "Keep" !voters responded that, far from being the product of a hatchet job, the allegations were being made in accordance with a formal legal investigation. Curiously, both sides invoked WP:SNOW with regularity, and called for it to be speedily kept or speedily deleted. Ultimately, the discussion was closed on April 7, with the page being redirected to a subsection of Gaetz's article. Closer Sandstein said:
Numerically, opinions are roughly evenly split between delete, merge and keep. There are sensible arguments for all three outcomes, but in the end it is a matter of our collective editorial judgment to what extent we want to cover these allegations; as such I cannot determine on my own whose arguments are stronger. I can, however, determine that rough consensus is against deleting this article but also against keeping it as a separate article at this time. This makes "merge" the most consensual outcome of this discussion.
Disclosure: Yours truly made a comment on this one, in favor of keeping it.
On April 21, 2020, an Arizonan named Josh Swain posted a joke about gathering all Josh Swains together for a massive fight. Precisely one year later, several hundred Joshes traveled to a field near Nebraska and slapped each other around with pool noodles, somehow raising tens of thousands of dollars for charity in the process. Three days after that, a stub was created about the meme event by Ganesha811, which was nominated for deletion the next day. Nominator Schazjmd invoked WP:NOTNEWS, describing the battle of Joshes as "a single incident that fits in the category of transient 'odd-but-true' entertainment-style 'news' that has no encyclopedic or historical value", while saying to its creator that "my nomination has nothing to do with the quality of the article or sources [...] I think you wrote a good neutral article". As often happens with memes, many !votes quickly poured in from various corners of the WWW. "Keep" !voters pointed to an abundance of sources covering the event, while "delete" !voters cited the lack of persisting notability. When all was said and done, a long close from Barkeep49 declared "no consensus", suggesting a "minimum wait of 6–12 months to give enough time for more evidence of lasting notability".
Nike Dattani is a scientist best known for "breaking the world-record for largest number factored on a quantum device ... co-inventing the Morse/Long-range potential energy function, and for inventing several novel methods for quadratization of high-degree discrete optimization problems into quadratic problems". But can he see why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Can he survive an AfD? Just eight !votes were cast in the deletion discussion for this article, which had previously existed at Nikesh S. Dattani (deleted after a 2014 AfD). The nominator, TheLawGiverOfDFT, was accused of being a SPA (as creating this AfD was their very first edit); later, in July, they were blocked as a sockpuppet. Meanwhile, TheLawGiverOfDFT accused Dr. Universe (the article's primary author) of a conflict of interest. An extremely arcane and detailed argument about academic publishing, citation count, impact factor, and author order ensued. Participants were even getting into whether the "the coherent HEOM calculation and the incoherent Foerster calculation are getting the exciton to the reaction center at the same time". All this science, I don't understand — it's just my job five days a week. Anyway, it was closed by Missvain a little over a week later as "delete".
Three very different articles were tied for the most active deletion discussions of May 2021. The first was a disputed territory involved in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the second was a Klingon from Star Trek, and the third was a component of the 2021 NBA playoffs. All concerned the broad subject of men in fierce competition for victory; this competitive spirit was mirrored in the hallowed pages of AfD. After a series of discussions, which were just as likely to revolve around the subject itself as they were to invoke Ps and Gs, the closes were made by Joe Roe, Mazca and Missvain respectively. The first two (Zangezur and Martok) were closed as "keep", whereas the third (the NBA tournament) was redirected to a section of a larger article.
Twenty-seven !votes were cast in a discussion about the encyclopedic merits of "quantized inertia"; I'm not enough of a physicist to tell whether the papers are credible, but an overwhelming majority of participants were bearish on the concept. This AfD has more {{hat}}s than a rodeo, and the main editor opposing deletion seems to be indefinitely blocked. Closer Star Mississippi said that, while moving to draftspace was a potential option, there didn't exist "reliable source-based evidence to establish notability required for this hypothesis".
This is an interesting AfD to make it onto the list – it had sixty-nine !votes, but only six !voters. How could this be? Well, it was a batch nomination for sixteen nearly-identical articles: all but five of those sixty-nine were accounted for by four people who left nearly-identical !votes on each. This might seem silly, but it's hard to imagine a lot of substantial differences between the merits of including or deleting the 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021 editions of the awards (or, indeed, the "Artist of the Year", "Male Artist of the Year", "Female Artist of the Year", "Group/Duo of the year", et cetera). Ultimately, it was closed by Barkeep49 as "redirect"; all of the sub-articles now point to a single article about the K-Love Fan Awards as a whole.
Disclosure: Yours truly made a comment on this one, in favor of keeping it.
Again, I am forced to ask the question: y'all ever heard about freakin' politics? I don't know if there's anything left to be said about the COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis that hasn't already been said on cable news, talk radio, press releases, White House press conferences, Twitter, and your uncle's Facebook page. On Wikipedia, we heard a lot about it in userspace essays, MfDs for userspace essays, talk pages, draft talk pages, drafts, MfDs for drafts... oh, have I mentioned the noticeboards? There was an arbitration request too. The gift that kept on giving came to a head on July 18, when ProcrastinatingReader made a procedural nomination of the page, saying:
Since there has been a dispute over whether this topic is notable (it is claimed this subject does not "warrant its own article"), and since nobody else wants to make their points at AfD, I figure I'll open an AfD to get a conclusive answer to whether an article may exist at this title.
Anyway, fifty-four !voters hashed it out for almost a hundred kilobytes of discusison, and it was closed as "keep" on July 25, with closer Daniel saying there was "clearly no consensus for delete, and while there is some support to merge the article, not close to sufficient to close as 'merge' [...] if there is still appetite to merge this, it should go via the talk page, as it may address some of the procedural opposition that existed and assist with forming a consensus either way."
Disclosure: Yours truly made a comment on this one, in favor of redirecting it.
In general, discussions about articles about articles (about discussions about articles?) tend to be fairly Byzantine, and this one was no exception. While there were only twenty-four !votes, there were almost a hundred kilobytes of talk. Some said that it was clearly original research, others said that it clearly wasn't. Some pointed to sources constituting obvious SIGCOV from RS researchers, and others pointed to those same sources as obvious TRIVIALMENTIONs from COI researchers. In the end, it turned out to be less clear and less obvious than we all thought, with a three-paragraph "no consensus" close from Barkeep49 coming some eight days later.
Disclosure: Yours truly made a comment on this one, in favor of keeping it (in addition to having written the article itself).
Oh boy. If I can't be proud of writing a decent article that got kept at its AfD, I guess I should try to be proud of writing an article that had the most well-attended AfD of the month. Or maybe I shouldn't. Let this be a lesson to everyone who rushes to be the first to clack out a BLP about some guy who's in the news due to his central role in an ongoing media circus: it might end up being YOU whose involvement in a single event is substantial and well-documented!
This article, written by Anne, was about a British "well-connected figure" who lived from 1780 to 1854, best known for her "long-term relationships with two senior British Army officers, General Robert Manners, who was Equerry to King George III, and General Sir Charles Asgill, Equerry to Frederick, Duke of York". The discussion was edited by sixteen people, casting a total of eleven !votes; disagreements mainly revolved around whether certain sources were primary or secondary, and whether Landedfamilies (a website written by former National Archives historian Nick Kingsley) was a reliable source or an unreliable blog. Ultimately, the debate was closed as "delete".
This list article has shown up at AfD a number of times; it was previously nominated in June 2014 (closed "no consensus"), February 2017 (closed "snow keep"), and September 2018 (closed "keep"). This time, nominator Dronebogus said: "Notability is not temporary. Back when Wikipedia was founded there were quite a few surviving WW1 veterans, but now there are none. A 'list of oldest living...' article is only useful for groups that are not finite in number, like 'list of living centenarians'". Delete !voters said that the list was a trivial cross-categorization, had unmaintainably broad criteria, would require constant updating in order to be useful, and was almost certainly destined to shrink to nothing over the next couple decades. Keep !voters, meanwhile, said that the core issue, the topic's notability for a Wikipedia list, was met by it being discussed in depth by enough reliable sources. At the time of nomination, it had nearly six hundred entries. One proposed alternative outcome was redirecting the page to List of last surviving veterans of World War II (which at the time had only 16 entries, but now has around 80). Ultimately, it was closed as "delete" by Joe Roe, who said that "with a few exceptions, those in favour of keep failed to either refute the argument for deletion, or put forward their own policy-based reason for keeping the article".
For some reason, lists at AfD seem to stir strong emotions. Perhaps it's because WP:LISTN is so easy to interpret in different ways. Perhaps it's because the format of a list activates deep-seated instincts in the Wikipedian mind (whether to nurture or to destroy). Nominator RandomCanadian said the article was a "textbook example of a trivial cross-categorisation of two entirely unrelated characteristics". Many agreed, and many disagreed. While the AfD was huge, only 23 !votes were cast; about 75% of the discussion's total size came from just four participants (and before you ask, no – they represented opposite sides of the argument). Ultimately, closer Sandstein said:
Because reasonable people can disagree on WP:SYNTH questions, it is not for me to say whose arguments are stronger in this regard (even if I wanted to, I couldn't reliably do so because of the walls of text). But what I can say is that among the editors who addressed the reason for deletion, those supporting "keep" are greatly in the minority. Accordingly, policy-based rough consensus is to delete the articles in their current state. They can be recreated if this can be done in a non-OR manner.
The United States is a country known for its love of free expression; Americans take great pride in the storied tradition of directing all manner of profane insults toward our own elected leaders. But is it notable? I mean, yes, but is this specific insult notable? Who knows. A September AfD for "Fuck Joe Biden" (which people apparently chanted at sports events sometimes) was closed as snowball delete after 15 !votes, barely scraping into the top twenty for that month. But the next month, it would return with a vengeance: on October 19, Draft:Let's Go Brandon! was created, nominated for speedy deletion as a recreation of the original deleted page, had its CSD template removed, had its CSD template re-added, re-removed, and was finally brought to MfD, with the nomination withdrawn a few hours later. By the time it was submitted to AfC on the 22nd, it somehow had 19 sources; it was declined then, but submitted again (and accepted) on the 26th, and nominated at AfD on the 27th by Beccanyr. Wowie zowie! It was closed a few days later as "keep". Non-admin closerSuperastig said:
There's a strong consensus for keeping the article, with several editors citing WP:GNG and some citing that it has a lasting effect. However, the article needs some clean-up as indicated below. Since the event has been on a roll for days, it would be best for this to be reviewed again in a year or so.
This closure was challenged at a DRV the same day by Beccanyr. It was closed by Scottywong, who endorsed the closure; he said that while some had wanted to trout Superastig for the NAC, and others had wanted to trout Beccanyr for opening the DRV, the best option was to "put this episode to bed fully, accept the result of the AfD, and move on with our lives". We even managed to do so, for the most part – although there was another nomination on November 13 (which was procedurally non-admin-closed as "speedy keep" prior to a single !vote being cast).
But still, it was a pretty big deal. Since last month's deletion report, there have been a couple new developments. Apparently, it wasn't enough for us to break one record — after the AfD itself was fully protected to allow a four-admin panel to draft a closing statement, the kerfluffle meandered over to the talk page, where it swelled to a titanic 194 kilobytes, making it the largest talk page for any AfD in history. It was itself fully-protected for two weeks (from December 3 to December 17). Good grief.
Nominator MaxBrowne2 contended that articles for individual chess games were quite unusual, and there was nothing to suggest that this was independently notable (like, say, the Game of the Century). Delete !voters said it was too soon to tell whether the game would have lasting historical significance, and that extensive press coverage was of a routine nature. Keep !voters said that it was the "longest (and arguably most complex/highest level) game in World Championship history" and cited an unusual amount of press coverage for this game in particular. When all was said and done, the discussion was closed as "keep" by Daniel; the article now sits at a comfy 31 references.
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a less terribleanother Southern author to borrow from, jeez. In case there's any doubt...I'm not entirely serious. Except in my antipathy for Faulkner. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 23:36, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]