Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion

The "speedy deletion" policy governs the limited cases where administrators may delete Wikipedia pages or media "on sight" without further debate. Non-admins can request deletion of such a page by adding an appropriate template (see below). The word "speedy" in this context refers to the simple decision-making process, not the length of time since the article was created.

Before nominating an article for speedy deletion, consider whether an article could be improved or reduced to a stub; speedy deletion is for cases where an article does not contain useful content. Note that some Wikipedians create articles in multiple saves, so try to avoid deleting a page too soon after its initial creation. Users nominating a page for speedy deletion should specify which criteria the page meets; it would also be considerate to notify the original author.

These criteria are worded narrowly and such that reasonable editors should agree what does or does not fall under a given criterion. Where reasonable doubt exists, discussion using another method under the deletion policy should usually occur instead. Note that global sandboxes are exempt from deletion.

This page contains the criteria for speedy deletion and a list of helpful templates that can be used to tag a candidate for speedy deletion. Articles that do not meet the speedy criteria may be nominated for the alternative deletion processes Wikipedia:Proposed deletion and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion.

The list of current candidates for speedy deletion is at Category:Candidates for speedy deletion.

Criteria

Abbreviations are sometimes used to refer to these criteria. For example, "A7" refers to criterion 7 under articles (notability) and "G12" refers to criterion 12 under general (copyright infringement). For the sake of clarity, these abbreviations are not recommended.

A table listing the template(s) for each of these criteria is provided below.

General criteria

Patent nonsense and gibberish, an unsalvageably incoherent page with no meaningful content. This does not include: poor writing, partisan screeds, obscene remarks, vandalism, fictional material, material not in English, badly translated material, implausible theories, or hoaxes.
Test pages (e.g., "Can I really create a page here?").
Pure vandalism, including redirects created during cleanup of page move vandalism.
Recreation of deleted material. A copy, by any title, of a page that was deleted via Articles for deletion or another XfD process, provided that the copy is substantially identical to the deleted version and that any revisions made clearly do not address the reasons for which the page was deleted. This clause does not apply to content that has been "userfied", to content undeleted per undeletion policy, or if the prior deletions were proposed or speedy deletions, although in this last case, the previous speedy criterion, or other speedy deletion criteria, may apply.
Banned user. Pages created by banned users while they were banned.
Housekeeping. Non-controversial maintenance tasks such as temporarily deleting a page in order to merge page histories, performing a non-controversial page move like reversing a redirect, or removing a disambiguation page that only points to a single article.
Author requests deletion. Any page for which deletion is requested by the original author in good faith, provided the page's only substantial content was added by its author. If the author blanks the page, this can be taken as a deletion request.
Talk pages whose corresponding article does not exist, unless:
- It contains deletion discussion that is not logged elsewhere;
- It is a User Talk page;
- It is the Talk page for an image uploaded on the Wikimedia Commons;
- It is a Talk subpage (such as archived Talk pages) whose corresponding top-level article does exist.
Office Actions. The Wikimedia Foundation office reserves the right to speedily delete a page temporarily in cases of exceptional controversy. Deletions of this type should not be reversed without permission from the Foundation.
Attack pages. Pages that serve no purpose but to disparage their subject or some other entity (e.g., "John Q. Doe is an imbecile"). This includes a biography of a living person that is negative in tone and unsourced, where there is no NPOV version in the history to revert to.
Blatant advertising. Pages which exclusively promote a company, product, group, service, or person and which would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become encyclopedic. Note that simply having a company, product, group, service, or person as its subject does not qualify an article for this criterion; an article that is blatant advertising should have inappropriate content as well. If a page has previously gone through a deletion process and was not deleted, it should not be speedily deleted under this criterion.
Blatant copyright infringement which meets these parameters:
- Material was copied from another website which does not have a license compatible with Wikipedia;
- There is no non-infringing content in the page history worth saving.
- The infringement was introduced at once by a single person rather than created organically on wiki and then copied by another website such as one of the many Wikipedia mirrors.
- Uploader does not assert permission (for images: no assertion aside from tags) or fair use, or the assertion is questionable;
When tagging a page for deletion under this criterion, a user should notify the page's creator using {{Nothanks-sd}} or a similar message. If the deleting administrator is notified of a plausible error, they should restore the content and, if a confirmation e-mail has not been received, follow the Wikipedia:Copyright problems procedure, blanking the article with the {{copyvio}} template. Some suspected copyright infringements that need to be dealt with are listed at Wikipedia:Suspected copyright violations. If another criterion applies also, it should be specified in the deletion summary as another reason for deletion.

Articles

For any articles that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Articles for deletion or Wikipedia:Proposed deletion.

Very short articles providing little or no context (e.g., "He is a funny man that has created Factory and the Hacienda. And, by the way, his wife is great."). Limited content is not in itself a reason to delete if there is enough context for the article to qualify as a valid stub.
Foreign language articles that exist on another Wikimedia project. If the article in question does not exist on another project, the template {{notenglish}} should be used instead.
No content whatsoever. Any article consisting only of links elsewhere (including hyperlinks, category tags and "see also" sections), a rephrasing of the title, and/or attempts to correspond with the person or group named by its title. This does not include disambiguation pages.
(This criterion has been merged into A3 and is kept to preserve numbering.)
Transwikied articles. Any article that has been discussed at Articles for Deletion (et al), where the outcome was to transwiki, and where the transwikification has been properly performed and the author information recorded. Alternately, any article that consists of only a dictionary definition, where the transwikification has been properly performed and the author information recorded.
(This criterion has been superseded by G10 and is kept to preserve numbering.)
Unremarkable people, groups, companies and web content. An article about a real person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content that does not assert the importance or significance of its subject. If controversial, or if there has been a previous AfD, the article should be nominated for AfD instead.
(This criterion has been superseded by G12 and is kept to preserve numbering.)

Redirects

For any redirects that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion. In some cases it may be possible to make a useful redirect by changing the target instead of deleting it.

Redirects to non-existent pages.
Redirects to the Talk:, User: or User talk: namespace from the article space (the article space does not include the Wikipedia shortcut pseudo-namespaces). If this was the result of a page move, consider waiting a day or two before deleting the redirect.
Redirects as a result of an implausible typo that were recently created. However, redirects from common misspellings or misnomers are generally useful, as are redirects in other languages.

Images/media

For any images and other media that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion.

Please remove images and media from any pages they are used in before marking them for speedy deletion. With respect to fair use disputes, if a fair use rationale is provided, use WP:IFD instead.

Redundant. Any image that is a redundant copy, in the same image file format and same or lower resolution, of something else on Wikipedia. Likewise, other media that is a redundant copy, in the same format and of the same or lower quality. This does not apply to images duplicated on Wikimedia Commons, because of licence issues; these should be tagged with Templeeti:Tlps or {{subst:ncd}} instead.
Corrupt or empty image. Before deleting this type of image, verify that the MediaWiki engine cannot read it by previewing a resized thumbnail of it. This also includes empty (i.e., no content) image description pages for Commons images.
Improper license. Images licensed as "for non-commercial use only", "non-derivative use" or "used with permission" that were uploaded on or after May 19, 2005, and for which no assertion of fair use is provided. [1] This includes images licensed under a "Non-commercial Creative Commons License".[2] Such images uploaded before May 19, 2005 may also be speedily deleted if they are not used in any articles.
Lack of licensing information. Images in category "Images with unknown source", "Images with unknown copyright status", or "Images with no copyright tag" that have been tagged with a template that places them in the category for more than seven days, regardless of when uploaded. Note, users sometimes specify their source in the upload summary, so be sure to check the circumstances of the image.
Unused unfree copyrighted images. Images and other media that are not under a free license or in the public domain that are not used in any article and that have been tagged with a template that places them in a dated subcategory of Category:Orphaned fairuse images for more than seven days. Reasonable exceptions may be made for images uploaded for an upcoming article. Use {{subst:orfud}} to tag images for forthcoming deletion.
Missing fair-use rationale. Any image or media without a fair use rationale may be deleted seven days after it is uploaded. Boilerplate fair use templates do not constitute a fair use rationale. Images and other media uploaded before May 4, 2006 should not be deleted immediately; instead, the uploader should be notified that a fair-use rationale is needed. Images or other media uploaded after May 4, 2006 can be tagged with {{subst:nrd}}, and the uploader notified with {{subst:missing rationale|Image:image name}}. Such images can be found in the dated subcategories of Category:Images with no fair use rationale.
Invalid fair-use claim. Any image or media with a clearly invalid fair-use tag (such as a {{logo}} tag on a photograph of a mascot) may be deleted at any time. Media that fail any part of the fair use criteria and were uploaded after 13 July 2006 may be deleted forty-eight hours after notification of the uploader. For media uploaded before 13 July 2006 or tagged with the {{Replaceable fair use}} template, the uploader will be given seven days to comply with this policy after being notified.
Images available as bit-for-bit identical copies on the Wikimedia Commons, provided the following conditions are met:
- The image's license and source status is beyond reasonable doubt, and the license is undoubtedly accepted at Commons.
  - All image revisions that meet the first condition have been transferred to Commons as revisions of the Commons copy and properly marked as such.
- All information on the image description page is present on the Commons image description page. That includes the complete upload history with links to the uploader's local user pages.
  - If there is any information not relevant to any other project on the image description page (like {{FeaturedPicture}}), the image description page must be undeleted after the file deletion.
- The image is not protected, and the image description page does not contain a request not to move it to Commons.
- The image has been marked with Template:NowCommons for at least one week. Waiting one week is not necessary if it was the uploader who moved the image and marked it.
- If the image is available on Commons under a different name than locally, it must not be used on any local page whatsoever.
- For {{c-uploaded}} images: They may be speedily deleted as soon as they are off the Main Page.

User pages

For any user pages that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion.

User request. Personal subpages, upon request by their user. In some rare cases there may be administrative need to retain the page. Also, sometimes, main user pages may be deleted as well. See Wikipedia:User page for full instructions and guidelines.
Nonexistent user. User pages of users that do not exist. (Check Special:Listusers.)
Fair use galleries. Galleries in the user space which consist mostly of fair use images.

Templates

For any templates that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Templates for deletion. When nominating a template for speedy deletion, surround the speedy deletion tag with <noinclude></noinclude>, so that pages that use the nominated template do not themselves get listed as candidates for speedy deletion.

Templates that are divisive and inflammatory.

Portals

For any portals that are not speedy deletion candidates, use Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion.

Any topic that would be subject to speedy deletion as an article.
Underpopulated portal. Any Portal based on a topic for which there is not a non-stub header article, and at least three non-stub articles detailing subject matter that would be appropriate to discuss under the title of that Portal.

Non-criteria

Sometimes speedy deletion criteria are applied to articles that they do not and were not intended to apply to; also, rules that are not speedy deletion rules are often mistakenly used to justify speedy deletion. This section aims to clarify some of the frequently used "non-criteria" that are commonly cited but are not sufficient, by themselves, to justify speedy deletion. These are not rules and intended only to be commonly-understood interpretations of the criteria above.

Reasons derived from Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not: "Wikipedia is not a dictionary", "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information" and "Wikipedia is not a crystal ball" are not part of the speedy deletion criteria. However, these reasons can be given at AfD nominations.
Hoaxes: Articles that present unverifiable and probably false ideas, theories, or subjects. Occasionally these can be deleted as vandalism if the article is obviously ridiculous, but remotely plausible articles should be subjected to further scrutiny in a wider forum.
Original research: Although we have a policy against material that offers novel theories or interpretations on Wikipedia, this is not a basis for speedy deletion. The reason for this is that it's not always easy to tell whether an article is original research, or simply uncited.
Neologisms: As with hoaxes, unless the article is obviously ridiculous, a wider forum is necessary to evaluate the currency of specialized terminology.
Non-notable subjects with their importance asserted: Articles that have obviously non-notable subjects are still not eligible for speedy deletion unless the article "does not assert the importance or significance of its subject". If the article gives a claim that might be construed as making the subject notable, it should be taken to a wider forum. However, articles with only a statement like "This guy was like so friggin' notable!" can be deleted per CSD A1 because it gives no context about the subject.
Author deletion requests made in bad faith: Sometimes an author will ask to have content removed because they feel frustrated with the project and resent it profiting from their work. However, they licensed their work to be used in this way and they have no legal basis for asking for its removal. The article must be "mistakenly created"; for example, the author created it unwittingly by misspelling a name. Of course, anyone may request deletion of pages in their userspace.
Author deletion requests made when others have contributed substantially: If other editors have substantially edited an article (e.g. more than just grammatical corrections or maintenance tagging), deleting it would delete not only the contributions of the original author, so they can no longer claim a right to delete it as the author.
Very short articles: As explained above, some very short articles can be speedily deleted, but if they have content and offer sufficient context to qualify as stubs, they cannot be.
"Copyright violations" whose sources copied Wikipedia: Our content is extensively used without credit, sometimes with modifications. With G12, you must be reasonably sure that the content belonged to the source site first.
PNGs/GIFs replaced by JPEGs: Even if an image is a photograph or other continuous-tone image, JPEG encoding discards a variety of information that could be important for further editing. Do not delete the original PNG/GIF files.
Finally, good faith edits are never vandalism. If you cannot be reasonably sure an article was written in bad faith, G3 does not apply.

Make sure to specify the deletion reason in the deletion summary. Also, in some cases the article's creator should be notified.

Before deleting a page, check the page history to assess whether it would instead be possible to revert and salvage a previous version. Also:

The initial edit summary may have information about the source of or reason for the article.
The talk page may refer to previous deletion discussions, or have ongoing discussion relevant to including the article.
The page log may have information about previous deletions that could warrant SALTing the article or keeping it on good reason.
'What links here' may show that the subject of the article is an oft-referred part of the encyclopedia, or may show other similar pages that warrant deletion. For articles that should not be re-created, incoming links in other articles should be removed.

Archived delete debates | Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense | Policy consensus discussions