User talk:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up/Guidelines

Should we ask editors to record the articles they reviewed, and the outcome (e.g. deleted, redirected, saved)? I would rather not make the job any more complicated than it has to be. On the other hand, some editors may like to have a public record of the effort they have made. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:37, 8 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Lugnuts and Aymatth2: and others, the bot task has been approved, but the first ~9,000 edits are being done at a limited rate. The first 2,000 (around 666 pages) have been moved, and you can start reviewing those. I have updated the bot to keep track of what pages it has already moved, so if you happen to move any pages back to the mainspace, the bot won't process them again. So in summary, the task should be completed in full within the next 48-60 hours. Best — MusikAnimal ^talk 14:16, 19 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

That is excellent work - thanks once again. Once the moves (or the bulk of them have been done), I'll notify the main projects. And 48hrs ties in nicely with the weekend, after some of the more important cricket fixtures have finished! :D Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 14:25, 19 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Please keep us up to date with progress ... projects have been informed, but it looks as though only a small fraction of articles are available to us in draft-space. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:24, 21 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Lugnuts and Tagishsimon: The bot task is now complete! Sorry it took so long, turns out even at full speed synchronous moving and editing of 16,000+ pages takes quite some time :) I also naturally had to put a little bit of delay in there. The only issues I encountered were due to connectivity, and this maybe caused the bot to miss 10 or so pages. Unfortunately I the code wasn't there to keep track of them, so I don't have a list :/ Still, that's about .000625% of all the pages, so not bad =P Finally there's La Shondra David Mosaʻati which apparently triggers the title blacklist. I could move it because I'm an admin, but you'd need an admin to move it back to the mainspace, so perhaps you'd rather take care of that one where it is now. Cheers — MusikAnimal ^talk 23:30, 24 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Good work, MusikAnimal, thank you. Now we get to start rolling the ball back up the hill again :) --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:33, 24 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I checked over the article on Mosa'ati, and it looks fine. Now to get working on all the other ones... TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 00:47, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I just worked on my first article from the list and have a few questions. First, is http://www.sports-reference.com/ a site we can use? Not as a sole reference but for some of the extra bits?

• Sports Reference obtains much of its data from Gracenote, a subsidiary of Tribune Media, which in turn gets its data from the sports leagues. A Wikipedia article would be better citing the league directly, if possible. To establish notability, it would be best to cite news articles or other sources that discuss the subject in some depth. But I see no reason to doubt the reliability or independence of Sports Reference, so would say it can be used. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:04, 22 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Next, how do we mark the ones that are completed? At User:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up/Olympic competitors I just struck through the one I did, following the earlier example. Is that all we do? Are we supposed to use a hashtag thing in the edit summary?

• You should move any article you have completed to mainspace. Click the "Move" tab at the top of the page. In the window that opens, under "Move page ... New title:" you will see "Draft". Change it to "(Article)", enter a reason like "all statements checked", and click on "Move Page". There is no need to do anything else. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:04, 22 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The problem I am seeing is that the pages still stay on the Draft list after they are moved. Lugnuts did delete the ones that were struck through on the Olympic page. But I did several Water polo players and they remain on that separate draft list. Will the draft space articles that are redirects (see Draft:Ahmed Badr for example) be deleted at some point? I'm thinking that is the best option so that we will see completed ones as redlinks and the undone ones as blue. Thanks again! and thank you for your previous answers! --Tbennert (talk) 18:38, 22 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• If you install User:Anomie/linkclassifier, a useful tool anyway, the redirect pages will show as green in the list. But the best solution is, as you say, to delete the draft space redirects. We will look for a way to make that happen automatically. But the priority right now is to get all the articles moved to draft space, and that is taking longer than expected. Aymatth2 (talk) 19:21, 22 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

And lastly, most of the links are red. If we work on the main article, will it not ever be moved to draft space? Or have they not all been moved, so it is best to focus on the ones that have been? Thanks! --Tbennert (talk) 01:57, 22 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Tbennert: - thanks for your hard work in working on some of this. It is appreciated. There will be some overlap across the lists, but I doubt there will be many editors spending time on looking at these articles. If you're working on a list in an area of interest to you, then continue to do so, and do what you feel is best with the master list for that subject area. As I work through cyclists, I'll remove the ones that are done. I'll check the other lists to clean them up as I go (from time to time) to help make it easier. Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 19:15, 22 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm overly optimistic and pretending that hundreds of people will be working on the lists. In my imagination we are clicking through the to-do articles and finding they are already done. At this point, not really a big worry. But maybe, hopefully, it will become an issue :) And will do on the tool install suggested by Aymatth2. That will be faster than doing the strike-through. After I get a batch done I'll delete them out. --Tbennert (talk) 01:56, 23 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• The process of moving articles from mainspace to draft space is still not complete. The red links are to articles that have yet to be moved. If you work on a mainspace article, it will be moved to draft space, and you will have to later move it back to mainspace. Best to just work on the ones that are already in draft space. The moves to draft should be finished in a few days. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:04, 22 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• You can see the process here (Special:Log/MusikBot). He is allowed to delete 2000, then 12 hour hold, 2000 deletion, 12 hour hold, 5000 deletion, 12 hour hold, and then "rest of job" (Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/MusikBot_10). Christian75 (talk) 18:17, 23 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like everything is now in draft space. Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 08:00, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Could we please get a template that we insert once the article is back in mainspace, for a bot to come along to reactivate the categories? I'm guessing that there will be loads of my articles now in draft space, and I don't fancy having to delete hundreds of colons manually. Schwede66 04:33, 24 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This should probably a script and not a bot task. The AfC script does it (I think), but we don't have one for general draft to mainspace page moves, so such a script could be useful beyond the scope of the SvG cleanup. I can look into this soon — MusikAnimal ^talk 17:15, 24 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Schwede66: Relax. You don't need to do that at all. Nor do you need to get any template. RscsprinterBot does this automatically. Psss... 103.6.159.89 (talk) 13:41, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

someone please move Ashlee Savona back to the draft space Joeykai (talk) 22:58, 24 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Done and left a note for the user who had (in good faith) moved it back to article space. Joseph2302 (talk) 23:15, 24 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Somebody please look at Geit Prants. Some people seem to think that surviving an AfD automatically makes an article okay. By now it was twice moved out of draft space with that AfD-excuse. The Banner talk 00:35, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Do we have a process in place for deleting articles that have particularly egregious verifiability issues but aren't libelous or anything else that would justify immediate speedy deletion under G10? Since I'm an admin I could probably just delete them outright, but since that's not an option for the non-admins I figured I should open a discussion to figure this out. (In theory we could leave these in draft space to see if someone else can find sources, but in the case that prompted this post I'm not even sure if anything in the article is true, possibly up to and including the subject's existence.)

For the sake of not being vague: while trying to fix Draft:Aayat Murtada (the first footballer alphabetically), I noticed that both of the "sources" don't include team rosters (one's not even about the Egyptian team, but the correct link wouldn't have helped), and when I looked through some of the other sources at Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Links I couldn't find an Egyptian women's team roster either. I was curious how SvG found player statistics when I couldn't even find a roster, so I looked at the history of Egypt women's national football team, and found this and this; back in 2014, an IP had pasted in the roster from the men's team at the time and changed the player names but not the statistics. That roster mostly stayed unchanged until I removed it a few minutes ago, and given that it has the exact same stats, it's pretty clear that SvG just sourced Aayat Murtada's article (and possibly others on the women's team) from the incorrect stats given in the table. So we have a draft where not only are all the statistics and vital info demonstrably wrong, but even the fact that the subject is a real person who played for the Egyptian women's football team is sourced to something an IP editor said three years ago. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 04:34, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

We need some sort of speedy deletion, I don't want to take every draft to MfD. Would it be acceptable to for instance tag with speedy deletion tag, with custom rationale "SvG article that is not supported by sources"? It's not technically one of the usual CSD criteria, but we need some speedy solution. Joseph2302 (talk) 07:24, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I had yesterday the same issue with Draft:Altangereliin Enkhtuyaa - the only ref could not be verified, but formally it does not fall under any CSD criteria (it is unlikely to be a hoax, and I would definitely not speedy delete it myself as a hoax). Soulds to me like a topic of discussion for WP:AN.--Ymblanter (talk) 07:54, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with this. I took a look at some football articles last week (not my area of knowledge TBH), and I could not find anything in the sources in the article that backed up that X player had played for the national team stated in the article. Something along the line of a speedy delete for Neelix redirects for the next 90 days would be helpful. Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 07:59, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

AN discussion started. Joseph2302 (talk) 09:46, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@JJMC89 and MusikAnimal: A bunch of redirects to SvG articles are in the New Page Patrol queue, and being nominated for speedy deletion (eg Demir Elmaagacli, Liberman Agamez). Is there a way to protect the redirects (also move to Draft space?) until the status of SvG articles has been finalised? It seems like a bit of a loss to lose useful redirects where articles are kept, particularly if any of the redirects are themselves used (eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Nicoleta_Tolisteanu). ^~Hydronium^~Hydroxide^~(Talk)~ 07:42, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

That, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the redirects have duplicates in their history. I just saved Mathlynn Sasser from being speedily deleted as a redirect to a redlinked page; I created it a few days before SvG created Mattie Sasser without checking for a duplicate, someone else later merged my article into SvG's, and the redirect almost got deleted before I caught it on my watchlist and reverted it back to being an article. (Sure was an easy way to fix an SvG article, though!) TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 02:17, 26 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, I made a list of the moved articles which have at least 5,000 characters. (Most of them have more than just one editors and some "cleaners"... (It just 90 articles) Christian75 (talk) 09:46, 25 January 2017 (UTC) [reply]

I see that a number of articles, e.g. Draft:Astrid Schop, were moved to the article space but then moved back to the draft space by MusicBot. Any way we can avoid this in the future?--Ymblanter (talk) 11:25, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hm, I asked MusikAnimal yesterday and they said it should be fine to move back, and it shouldn't mess with the bot. Joseph2302 (talk) 11:27, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

What is then the best course of action? To wait until the bot moves everything to the draft and then move it back?--Ymblanter (talk) 11:33, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

My understanding is that it should be fine to move them back to article space. Joseph2302 (talk) 12:05, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

But this is exactly what happened to the article I linked to above. It was moved to the article space after check and then the bot moved it back to the draft space.--Ymblanter (talk) 12:08, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the bot has finished moving everything to draft, so there shouldn't be anymore instances of this. Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 15:19, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Correct. The above page was first moved during the initial trial, before I added the code to keep track of what had already been moved (as opposed to going off of the SQL query). There will likely be several more of these, but rest assured you can move them back to the mainspace now. The bot task isn't running anymore. Apologies for the inconvenience! Over the course of this project I've refined the logic and made it portable, so that I can do any sort of "mass moving of pages" again in the future and not run into issues like this. Best — MusikAnimal ^talk 16:52, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot for helping with the move.--Ymblanter (talk) 16:57, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Whoever started this SvG clean-up, thank you very much. After a lot of concern and explanation he was not eager to understand the stub creation must have limits. Thanks again, --Osplace 15:37, 26 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There's a number of cases where moves have been reverted (eg: Norsuriani Mazli, Anton Muzychkin) without much weight being given to the bot edit comment, apparently by editors with pages watchlisted. For future draftification -- and possibly the remaining articles in this one -- it would be helpful if an advisory template were added to the top of all draftified articles to make it more obvious for those who are unfamiliar with the related ANI/RFC, and improve the chances of them verifying/fixing the draft rather than moving them back to mainspace reflexively. Any articles in mainspace with the template left in can be assumed to not have been fixed. ^~Hydronium^~Hydroxide^~(Talk)~ 06:50, 27 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This effort is adding a lot of articles to the new page patrol backlog that probably don't need to be there (since you've already checked them). Please see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers#Large number of articles by Sander.v.Ginkel being added to the new pages feed. – Joe (talk) 13:51, 30 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wouldn't making people Autopatrolled solve this? I guess most of us meet the criteria (although I'm Autopatrolled anyway). Joseph2302 (talk) 14:16, 30 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Joseph2302: I think so, but I'm not sure if moves to mainspace are autopatrolled like page creations. Could I ask you to be a guinea pig and move one of these drafts to mainspace to find out? – Joe (talk) 14:32, 30 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

JJMC89 has confirmed that if the user that moves the article from draft to mainspace has the autopatrolled right, they will not show up in the new pages queue. So if anyone intending to move a lot of these could apply for the right at WP:PERM/A beforehand, to lessen the burden on new page patrollers, it would be much appreciated. And perhaps something to that effect could be added to the guidelines? Thanks. – Joe (talk) 22:58, 30 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Whilst cleaning up Ahmed Fayez Al-Dosari I noticed that several redirects were deleted in the move to draft space. Is there any way we can identify the old redirects that need restoring? I was only able to restore the ones already linked out from the article itself but I won't be able to easily find ones that may have been present otherwise. SFB 21:43, 3 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I've been re-creating them manually once I've moved page, certainly for the obvious ones. I'm sure there can be some sort of list of them created based on the date/time of the moves to draft space. Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 20:43, 5 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hey there. I recently participated in the Africa Destubathon. Several people went through and expanded stubs to start class articles. The rules were a little stricter than a typical start class article, requiring more referencing than a standard start class. I went through today and saw several red-linked articles that all appear to be because of this project. We could probably just move those back into the main space because they were checked as a part of that contest, but if you all do not feel comfortable with that, perhaps the folks that improved them could make sure they are good. I'll ping them.

@Miyagawa, Iantheimp, and Yellow Dingo: Feel free to check the articles you improved during the destubathon that are now redlinked, they should be pretty good to go already. Thanks! Kees08 (talk) 02:41, 12 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I've moved the half dozen or so of mine back into article space and restored the categories. Miyagawa (talk) 12:17, 12 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, if they were destubbed by someone other than SvG, then they're just collateral damage from his mess. So it's fine to just move them back. Joseph2302 (talk) 12:28, 12 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good, I moved the remainder back. Kees08 (talk) 19:07, 12 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

So many articles getting moved back to the main space with the categories still deactivated... that kind of sloppiness is why SvG got banned in the first place Joeykai (talk) 00:06, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. I guess there's a bot that can fix that, but it is lazy. Only takes a second to reactivate the categories. Hopefully the articles have been checked too! Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 20:27, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It looks to me, that editor Beatley is restoring earlier removed articles. But that happens in a rather hidden way. Can someone have a good look at this? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Beatley. The Banner talk 19:58, 17 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• @The Banner: Based on the number and speed of edits, it looks like user:Beatley is simply moving all SvG articles on Olympic competitors from draft to mainspace without checking them for accuracy. If there are a significant number of errors in these articles, the audit will pick them up, and we will revert to Plan A. That is, one week's notice will be given for userfication, and then all the SvG BLPs, whether in draft or mainspace, will be deleted. A pity, because most of the work done so far on this cleanup will be lost, but those are the rules defined before the cleanup began. User:Lugnuts may care to comment. Aymatth2 (talk) 15:18, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  If this is indeed what happens that everything which user:Beatley moved to the mainspace must be moved back, and the user must be topic-banned from the cleanup.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:38, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

on the contrary, i am checking each and every reference.

here are the references i fixed: [1]; [2]; [3]; [4]; [5]; [6]; [7]; [8]; [9]; [10]; [11]; [12]; [13]; [14]; [15]; [16]

i see that some are moving back to draft space articles where the reference checks out - [17]; [18]; [19]; [20]; [21]; [22]; [23]; [24]; [25]; [26]; [27]; [28]; [29]; [30]; [31]; [32]; [33]; [34]

i find the lack of AGF troubling. you are going to undo the work of people rather than work with them? Beatley (talk) 17:43, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I find the argument "Based on the number and speed of edits" uncompelling: as if it is not possible to check a set of articles, and then move the set. So I agree, there's an AGF fail. --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:05, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I apologise to user:Beatley. I should not have assumed without checking that a series of rapid-fire moves to mainspace of unchanged articles indicated any problem. We will audit the results as a whole. If it turns out that a significant number of the articles moved back to mainspace still have problems, for whatever reason, the approach documented in the guidelines has not worked. We do not have time to recheck every move that has been made. Instead we will revert to the original decision, give a 1-week grace period for userfication and then wipe out the rest of the draft and mainspace versions of the articles. Obviously the editors who introduced the errors and thus aborted the process and caused a lot of wasted effort will not be invited to participate. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:01, 24 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

you see, you lost me at "Carefully compare the article to the reliable source(s) and remove any original research, unsourced or poorly sourced information. Do not assume good faith" there is a fundamental difference between a good faith error prone editor, and a vandal. if you do not understand that go ask user:EpochFail, he has the evidence. you seem to prefer mass deleting 10000 articles rather than fixing 1000 references. threatening the former to "motivate" the latter is an abdication of responsibility. you do not have a policy rationale to delete 9000 articles with good references because 1000 have bad ones. and you should expect to be challenged on that. Beatley (talk) 18:17, 24 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Beatley: You can see the whole discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive941#User:Fram, where the decision was to mass delete 16,000 articles because a few of them had serious BLP violations. Losing a few thousand stubs is unimportant compared to doing irreparable damage to the reputation and career of one living person. Even an apparently minor error such as saying "she was born in 1956" when in fact she was born in 1965 can cause real harm, which is why we must be so careful with biographies of living people. SvG was not careful. In some cases there were even bogus citations, citing sources that did not mention the subject, so it is wrong to assume good faith with the citations that cannot be checked online. "Looks o.k." is not good enough.

You can see the follow-up discussion at User:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up where we agreed to try a less drastic approach, allowing more time to review and correct the articles. If you may have accidentally restored some of the errors made by SvG, I ask that you go back over the articles you restored and carefully review and correct them. Nobody wants to revert to mass deletion after the effort that has been made to recover the articles. But if the audit shows that significant numbers of articles in mainspace perpetuate the SvG errors, we will have no choice. User:Fram may care to comment. Aymatth2 (talk) 22:05, 24 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

thank you, i read that. i would ask that you provide specific examples of articles you want corrected. non-specific statements are not actionable, and are unhelpful. Beatley (talk) 17:04, 25 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Beatley: The process depends on each editor taking responsibility for carefully checking the articles they restore. You must decide for yourself how many articles you want to double-check, if any. The audit will review a random sample of all articles moved to mainspace, from which we will extrapolate overall quality. If there are too many problems we must revert to plan A: one week for userfication, then mass delete. Aymatth2 (talk) 23:47, 25 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Where does "MUST" come from? Why the urgency to delete anything? This is restricted from mainspace, so your BLP problem is solved. There should be no time limit on this artificially created workload you have placed on a limited number of editors. While SvG's work might have been rushed, sloppy and the resulting articles limited in detail, at least he did the legwork to start articles that deserved to be here. There has been little wrong with his work that I have seen though I have chosen to expand upon and add sources to the articles I have restored. This was a gross overreaction to a non-disaster. You've created a bunch of embarrassing red links unnecessarily. We're fixing it. You can make it into an actual disaster by mass deleting this huge volume of content and multiplying the amount of work it will take other editors to restore this content in the future. Trackinfo (talk) 00:05, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Trackinfo: There was a huge discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive941#User:Fram. That discussion is over. A few gross errors were found that could be hugely damaging to the lives of innocent people, and "minor" errors were found that could also cause harm. Presumably there are many more. We have moved the articles to draft and are carefully checking them before restoring to mainspace. If the audit shows a significant number of restored articles still have BLP violations, there is no choice but to delete them all. The process is not working and we cannot let libels linger in mainspace. Even leaving them in draft is questionable. The life of any one of the athletes matters more than all the stubs. Aymatth2 (talk) 01:13, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I was not involved in that discussion until a decision was rendered. Holding it in private on a user page with no notice on affected articles does not help to get broad based input. I had to stumble my way here by discovering missing articles I knew were once there. That said, the deed has been done. You have hidden thousands of articles in draft space. PROBLEM SOLVED. Wikipedia is not displaying potential BLP violations to the public. STOP Beyond that, there is no need to delete the content that has not yet been reviewed. Any time limit is artificial and destructive. By this overreaction, you have placed a great workload on a few editors. The articles in my area of expertise have been replaced because we have a lot of helpers. I can't say that about other areas where I am not as well equipped to help. Just because they have fewer experts to jump in at your whim and check articles does not mean their content deserves to be deleted. I have not seen any evidence of fraud or copyvio. What we have here is some sloppy work at best. There is nothing destructive in keeping it hidden in draftspace until somebody can read it. Trackinfo (talk)

@Trackinfo: The discussion at the Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard was one of the longest and most public discussions of its type ever. There are now 2,385 of the SvG articles back in mainspace. They should all be squeaky clean. If the audit shows they are not, we have an unknown number of mainspace BLP violations and a process that is steadily feeding more violations from draft into mainspace. Aymatth2 (talk) 02:48, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The trouble with mass-deleting everything after a month's worth of a major cleanup effort is that for the people who followed the rules, this is going to have been a massive waste of their time. Either they have to userfy a months' worth of work in a week, which is doable but is going to be a lot more work depending on how many articles they fixed, or their work will get thrown out entirely. If the bad articles are coming from a handful of problematic editors, would it make more sense to just delete the articles they moved back instead of everything that got moved back? TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 03:34, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@TheCatalyst31: That seems reasonable. The audit will show which rogue editors, if any, moved a lot of articles without checking. Deleting only the articles restored by those editors is much better than deleting all the articles. Good point. Aymatth2 (talk) 04:04, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You keep using the word delete. Delete causes information to disappear. Permanently, unless per chance someone notices and goes through heroic efforts to rescue the information. Stick it in draft space until someone makes it worthy. Get off this idea of putting up a time limit. Information does not lose its validity over time. I have found ancient junk left in draft space that proved the core and provided guidance on valid articles. The only stuff we should be deleting is stuff that wouldn't pass AfD, bogus, inflammatory, NOPV content. I haven't seen anything like that from SvG. He wasn't posting controversial content or telling backroom lies about people. He was just sloppy with writing details at worst. And many of his sources that were timely when he wrote the articles have dried up because the websites have shut down, not due to his neglegence. Come to think of it, the most inflammatory things that have been said surrounding this content is the accusations by you against him. Trackinfo (talk) 04:24, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

If there is a group of questionable moves, can the OP show the diffs for further investigation? Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 19:20, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

yes, if you give me an article, you have a problem with, let me know, and i will fix it. but a vague "significant number" is not reasonable. Beatley (talk) 18:17, 24 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

A lot of the articles in the lists have been moved back to mainspace already, but because the articles are shown in multiple lists users (myself included) did not remove them from every list. To show progress better (and maybe be a little motivating?), is there any way to automatically update the lists via a bot task? Otherwise I'll just keep removing them as I find them. Kees08 (talk) 07:38, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I was going to request this at the weekend, which would tie in with the 1 month mark since the articles were moved to draft. Certainly be interesting to see how the master list is progressing. Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 19:21, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Aymatth2:, @MusikAnimal:, one month in (give or take), would it be possible to update the raw list of the articles still in draft? I'm happy to work on the sub-lists if the master list can be done. Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 14:24, 25 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe a simpler way would be to delete the redirects left behind in draft space when the articles are moved to mainspace. That way the articles would show as redlinks in the draft lists, meaning they have been cleared from draft. @MusikAnimal: Would there be a simple, routine way to do this? I cannot see any value in the draft redirects. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:51, 25 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good. If it's a major headache to update, not to worry. Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 15:16, 25 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I would recommend installing the User:Anomie/linkclassifier script, which will make links to redirects green. Deleting redirects is a bit tricky, we'd need to make sure they aren't linked elsewhere for instance. So if the script solution works for you I think that might be best, and you'll likely find it useful beyond the SvG cleanup project — MusikAnimal ^talk 02:11, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I can give you a list of the SvG articles that are still in the draft space, though. That is easy, see quarry:query/16788 — MusikAnimal ^talk 02:16, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

That's exactly what I was after - thanks MA. Hmmmm, 13,742 still in draft (from a starting point of 16,096). Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 19:27, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, i checked/sourced the two remaining entries in User:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up/Tanzanian people. Could someone make the moves? Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.6.159.83 (talk) 13:48, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

 Done I've moved them back to article space. Joseph2302 (talk) 13:59, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I saw that the page for notability of sports people does not have guidelines for volleyball. Before I do a bunch of work on those, can we establish some preliminary guidelines? Looks like historically it may have been generally: on the national team or on an Olympic team. Thoughts? Kees08 (talk) 05:31, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Any sports person is considered notable if they meet the General Notability Guideline (GNG). Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)#Frequently asked questions (FAQ) makes it clear that the specific guidelines are not intended to override the GNG:

• Q5: I want to create a new sports-specific notability guideline or revise an existing one. What approach should I take?
• A5: Consider what criteria that, if met, nearly 100% guarantees the sports figure will have significant, independent, non-routine, non-promotional secondary coverage from reliable sources...

I would guess that being on the national team would guarantee enough coverage to meet GNG, since volleyball is a very popular sport, but a quick search for sources on the athlete takes very little effort and would confirm notability. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:21, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed this today. Clearly these have been done at such a rate (up to 3 per minute) that they almost certainly haven't been checked. So the question is - is procyclingstats.com a good enough source for a BLP? Especially as many of these people appear not to have won anything, only participated in a professional event. GNG isn't met, as far as I can see. Black Kite (talk) 19:46, 17 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• In fact, some of them aren't even sourced to that. Wu Chaomei for example, is sourced only to the website of the company that makes the timing equipment for the race. Black Kite (talk) 19:49, 17 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• And Olena Starikova appeared to be only sourced to a website that contains user-generated content - a wiki, in effect. Black Kite (talk) 19:55, 17 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• @Black Kite:, @XyZAn: The audit will be done at the end of this phase. It should spot cases where an editor has restored a significant number of problem articles. We will simply delete all the articles restored by that editor. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:34, 17 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Noted. Just to note that I think some of the articles restored by XyZAn are actually OK but there are quite a few that clearly aren't. Black Kite (talk) 23:59, 17 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yawn @Black Kite:, good to see you doing some creeping. Haven't we already gone through this same thing earlier in the process, an article being checked doesn't necessarily get moved straight away. I'd rather do a batch, than one by one. @Aymatth2: please see the below, i'm guessing Black Kite never actually looked at the source at Wu Chaomei or into the backstory of any of the above claims, they'd clearly just rather throw things around than actually do some research.

1. These cyclists meet WP:NCYC - therefore meet notability
2. Black Kite whilst you are correct, Tissot is the timing equipment manufacturer, the source indicates the riders name, nationality, birthday and their representation at the specified games. More than enough to back up the BLP info.
3. Black Kite, PCS and Cyclingarchives are reliable sources for cycling information (@Lugnuts: can confirm), so your point around Olena Starikova is also unnecessary. Again, if you did some research you'd actually know that PCS isn't user generated but the data comes directly from the UCI, the teams themselves and the results are generated from data from race/event organisers. XyZAn (talk) 09:44, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Well, that's good to know. However, Tissot Timing is not good enough. And to be honest, all of those BLPs need extra sourcing. Meeting NCYC is a guideline to notability, but the articles still need to meet GNG standards. Oh, and "good to see you do some creeping"? Such a brave man on the Internet. Pathetic. Black Kite (talk) 11:48, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tissot Timing is the offical timing for the races held. They at least show that x cyclist competed in y event, the latter of which would be used to confirm their notability. I'm not going to get dragged into the rest of disagreement, however, if you feel a cyclist isn't notable, please take that page to AfD. There could well be some that have slipped through the net, or ones that just scrape through, which an AfD will help to establish better sources. Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 12:19, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I know that, it simply irks me that people think mass-creating these sub-standard articles with the minimum of sourcing is actually a good use of Wikipedia, especially when someone else has to go round cleaning them up. I mean, what actual use is an article that says "Fred Smith is a cyclist"? A waste of everyone's time. Black Kite (talk) 13:20, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Why not - its accurately backs up the information in the article, I completely agree that if there was background information on that athletes life/interests/family it would not be enough and that material must be removed, up back up with another source - but for the statements made, it is. WP:NSPORTS does state, however, that The article must provide reliable sources showing that the subject meets the general notability guideline or the sport specific criteria set forth below - this meets the latter. You're the one that appears to have the problem with me, you didn't even ping me here, Aymatth2 had to!! XyZAn (talk) 12:09, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, Cycling Archives and PCS are the best two sources for cycling stats. Pretty much the standard starting points for any cycling biography. Lugnuts ^{Precious bodily fluids} 09:57, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cheers Lugnuts XyZAn (talk) 12:09, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• I wonder if the article on Wu Chaomei is accurate. It says she "is a Chinese female track cyclist, and part of the national team." But is she still on the team? The cited source does not mention her at all. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:00, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

With all this discussion, I can't believe somebody didn't use google to see if there are additional sources. There are plenty of sources available. And if you have a problem with the time delineation of, use those sources to be more specific. Trackinfo (talk) 06:17, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Trackinfo: The Wu Chaomei article has been restored to mainspace with an unsubstantiated claim that she is on the national team and a citation to a source that does not mention her at all. It clearly has not been checked. The real concern is whether a large number of articles have been restored to mainspace without being checked, forcing us to abort the whole process and revert to the original mass delete decision. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:43, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I added sources establishing her participation on the national team and changed the context to be time specific. The problem is that all of these editors above me for several days have been complaining about these problems without lifting a finger to LOOK AT GOOGLE or to use their experienced editing capabilities to FIX THE PROBLEM. If I hadn't seen this overt laziness occur in the past I would be shocked. I simply do not understand why we have so much discussion about a "problem" that can be fixed by the basic tools we have here, to research and edit. Trackinfo (talk) 16:48, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Trackinfo: I agree that it is easy to check and correct the SvG stubs. The concern is that some editors have not checked, but have taken the trouble to move stubs with errors back to mainspace. Why they would do that is beyond me. Now we have 3,000+ restored articles to audit. If spot checks show too many editors have restored too many BLP violations, we just have to delete them all. Not an outcome anyone wants. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:38, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

We have a wikipedia wide problem with the tense of our statements; "is" "was" "is a retired" etc etc. To blame an instance of this on non-native English speaking SvG or to say that XyZAn is a bad editor for letting the tense of the line pass when moving this to mainspace (granted, in a hurry) is incredibly anal. My point was, the information from the initial article was factually correct and a little research could prove it. In the territory I roam, there are literally thousands of such poorly worded articles. They all need attention but work is slow--one article at a time. You keep putting this entire SvG situation into an all or nothing decision. I still have not seen an instance where SvG did anything dastardly with his edits, he was just sloppy and simplistic. I haven't seen false information. But because of this adventure, wikipedia readers have been deprived of 16000+ articles of information and that information elsewhere has been threatened with permanent deletion--a nuclear solution to a small problem. We are trying to fix this issue with the quality of SvGs editing with, in the same way all articles are written, different levels of quality from a variety of editors. Trackinfo (talk) 19:04, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It was originally decided to delete all the SvG stubs because spot checks found false allegations of lying about age and nationality, doping etc. with bogus citations. Those that were found have been deleted, but we must assume there are others. Even "minor" errors about a living person can cause serious damage. The loss of 16,000 stubs is a small price to avoid wrecking one innocent person's life. We have been allowed to postpone mass deletion and move the articles to draft for careful review and correction over a 90-day period. Abusing that and restoring unchecked articles is utterly irresponsible. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:17, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There is a long distance between the time tense over the long term and a false allegation. Wu Chaomei was the cited example. If this is the most egregious thing you can show for either editor's work, we do not have nearly the problem this entire clean up is jumping through hoops to solve. Trackinfo (talk) 20:36, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

If there were only a few, I would agree. But Wu Chaomei appeared in the first THREE that I looked at ... so what about the other 15,997? Black Kite (talk) 20:38, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

16,000 stubs about placenames in (insert country here)? No problem, we've got time to do that. 16,000 BLPs? No. Also, "16,000 articles of information" is clearly not the case, the vast majority simply assert that "X is a cyclist". That's not useful information. If they were expanded (which I'm sure a lot could be) then fair enough, but again we don't have time to check 16,000 of them. Black Kite (talk) 20:32, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The "is/was" problem is minor, but XyZAn claimed in his edit summary "sources correct" when in fact the cited source did not mention the subject, but was about a men's event. Clearly XyZAn did not check the article. I looked at some more. See User:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up/Audit/XyZAn. 7 out of 10 had problems, showing both the importance of checking and the lack of checking. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:56, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• @Black Kite:, @XyZAn:, @Lugnuts: I started some notes on the audit process, still a few weeks away, at User:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up/Audit notes. It is a balancing act. Any comments welcome, Aymatth2 (talk) 02:50, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

[copied from Talk:Roline Tatchou Nyoyo ]

I see that this article was moved to Draft space "per User:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up/Guidelines" by MusikBot on January 24, 2017. It was moved back to article space today by Beatley but the article has not been improved. Should this be in article or draft space or should have been deleted if it wasn't fixed?–CaroleHenson (talk) 22:45, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

MusikBot and Beatley, Same with Lora Kitipova, Lucia Crisanti, Chiara Di Iulio, Roseline Odhiambo, Loice Tarus.–CaroleHenson (talk) 22:51, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Aymatth2, I have added your name to this since it seems to affect a number of articles and you seemed to be leading a clean-up effort.–CaroleHenson (talk) 22:56, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@CaroleHenson: If there is nothing wrong with a draft article it may be moved back to mainspace unchanged. Around 24 April 2017 all remaining drafts will be deleted and an audit (spot checks) will start to check for articles moved back that still have problems. If a given user has been moving back articles without checking them, we will delete all the articles that user moved. If there are problems caused by many users, we may have to scrap the whole process and delete all the articles that were restored. Editors other then the ones that caused the problems will be given the opportunity to first "userfy" articles they fixed up and restore them later. Aymatth2 (talk) 01:01, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Aymatth2, perfect! There are some more that I saw in the NewPagesFeed after this, but it sounds like you have a plan - my favorite 4 letter word! Thanks for the update!–CaroleHenson (talk) 01:08, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Taking one article from that list, Lucia Crisanti, I see that it still claims that she is retired (she is only 31 and the source gives no indication that she retired), and is has the "Italy squad – 2009 Women's European Volleyball Championship (2nd Title)" template at the bottom, but no source for this. So no actual cleanup was done here. Lora Kitipova has a long unsourced list of previous clubs, and claims that in 2014-15 she played for Baku and in 2015-2016 for Obiettivo, even though the 2014 source claims she played then already for Obiettivo. Again, no actual cleanup seems to have been done here. Roseline Odhiambo again is indicated as "retired" (no osurce, 36 years old). A number of people are doing good work on the cleanup, but I fear that this isn't really one of them. Fram (talk) 08:18, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• I don't want to pre-judge the audit – there may be a flurry of last-minute clean-up – but from the above small sample it looks as if the 1,400+ articles restored by Beatley will all get deleted. They are just short stubs, so no great loss, but it seems like a huge waste of time. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:25, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

when they have a statement of notability and a reference, i will challenge you at AfD, and we can discuss each and every one. i have plenty of time. see also Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons. --Beatley (talk) 20:18, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The original decision was to delete all the SvG stubs, given the many BLP problems. This was revised to moving them to draft so they could be carefully reviewed, corrected and restored. If the audit shows an editor has abused that license, that editor's batch of restored articles will be deleted en masse. Aymatth2 (talk) 22:18, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

And considering that I just had to move Gabrielle Marchi back to draft space (only thing sourced was "she competed at the Paralympics", but no source for perosnal info or club info), and that none of the problems with earlier moves by Beatley, which I noted at their user talk page, have been corrected, it may be time to indeed move all their SvG "cleanups" back to draft space. Fram (talk) 06:36, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Now moved Gisselinet Raposo back as well. One source which lists her name a part of a national team, nothing more (date of birth, teams, ...), and where it is even dubious whether it is a reliable site (it isn't available for me at the moment, but I seem to recall that this was a one-man porject of love, not an official site). Fram (talk) 10:25, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• @Fram: I fixed the link to http://www.todor66.com/ prepared and maintained by Todor Krastev (todor1966@yahoo.com). Not exactly a reliable source. But I suggest we hold off until April 24, the cut-off date for the clean up. Then (see User:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up/Audit notes),

• Ask user:JJMC89 to re-run his breakdown of editor activity
• Create sub-lists for the most active editors (I can do that)
• Ask user:MusikBot to delete all the remaining drafts (this would include articles and redirects)
• Spot-check article moved by the most active users. I can do some and assume you will do some. 10 per user is probably enough.
• Where a user has obviously been moving articles en masse without checking them, ask another user to confirm, then delete all the mainspace articles moved by that user
• Spot-check the remaining articles, fixing if needed. 100 is probably enough, although more would be better.
• Decide whether results seem acceptable, or we should revert to plan A and just wipe them all out anyway after a 7-day userfication grace period

In retrospect, it might have been better to have just followed plan A, the original decision, in the first place. Most of the stubs are fairly worthless, saying only that person X participated in sporting event Y. We would have lost a few good articles, but saved a huge amount of work. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:18, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• As a side note, on the problem of "is an athlete" vs. "was an athlete", I would prefer to avoid using either, but think "is" is acceptable, even if the subject is quite old. They may be proudly competing in some local Masters event. Even if they are wheelchair-bound and living in a nursing home, "is" will not give offense. "Was" should only be used when a source says they have formally retired. Otherwise it may be inaccurate and harmful. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:18, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"Is" is best, "was" is worse unless we are certain, but it still is better then "is a retired athlete" when we have no evidence at all they have actually retired. "Was" can be read as "we know that they competed in the past", "is retired" means "we know for fact that they no longer play". This shouldn't be used on any of these articles unless we are very certain... Fram (talk) 12:39, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

For example Shotivat Tivsuwan, a "retired" player with a current club... Fram (talk) 13:18, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• I think we are violently agreeing, but there are shades of gray. The clean-up guidelines explicitly say to avoid the issue by just saying what they did, e.g. "competed as a cyclist in the 1967 Tour de France". "Is" may be inaccurate but is acceptable. "Was" with no sourcing is bad. I could see the subject being pissed off at seeing that in their article when they are still active in the sport, perhaps at a senior level. "Is a former/retired" with no sourcing is BAD. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:02, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I had to open an ANI discussion, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#User:Beatley and SvG articles salvation effort, please comment there. It concerns very recent moves, which I found reviewing new pages.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:09, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

What's the status of this project? Hmlarson (talk) 19:53, 1 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• It seems to have gone into limbo. I was sort of hoping users Fram and Lugnuts (hint, HINT!) would help with the audit. Or anyone else who is interested in confirming that the mass-movers checked the articles carefully before restoring to mainspace. A simple but tedious job of looking at maybe 10 articles for each mass mover and making sure they say what the cited sources say and nothing else. I think User:Ymblanter has volunteered to mass-delete articles restored by mass-movers who are shown to have consistently restored articles that do not say only what the sources say. I may get inspired again, but right now am sick of it. We should have just deleted all the articles, as originally decided, then recreated the ones on notable athletes from scratch. It would have been a lot easier. Now that editors have put work into checking and fixing articles, that is no longer an option. A mess. Aymatth2 (talk) 22:20, 1 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Opposing viewpoint, in your haste you thoughtlessly rushed to delete over 16,000 articles, most of which had no problem at all. Trackinfo (talk) 06:00, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. Looking at this, there was a wave of new, recent articles that caused some issue, but the vast majority were good stubs. Certainly no worse than some of the new articles coming through by other editors each and every day. I've done my bit in saving the critical ones I care about. I don't care about the rest of this now. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 06:40, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"Thoughtlessly rushed" as in have a long community discussion agreeing on instant deletion, and instead spending 3 months on saving many articles and finding that many, many others are indeed problematic? Right... Fram (talk) 06:43, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Your grand discussion got maybe 30 editors to comment. That is incredibly good as discussions go here, but is microscopic compared to the number of readers or even editors of wikipedia. I'm very active but I didn't notice this discussion (which started off looking like a dispute between you and SVG, so who would want to get their feet wet in that?) until you turned literally thousands of links in articles I watch, red. Yes, I and others fixed the articles attached to the links in subjects I know and care about, but other subjects may not have people like me around. Now that content is gone. I say thoughtlessly because nobody, not you or any other user, put any thought into those deleted articles. I looked at a lot of these articles. They might have been hastily and poorly done, most leaving room for improvement, but like a lot of wikipedia, it was a start. It gave a place for other users to build. A lot of legwork, layout and formatting was done. What I corrected was minor information; details. And I added sources THAT BACKED UP THE ACCURACY OF WHAT WAS ALREADY IN THESE ARTICLES. I didn't find any BLP attacks on these people, or fraud. Fram, you vehemently attacked this content as though it was a blatant violation of WP:BLP. You drove that discussion, arguing with virtually every opposing voice. You got your result, but it was not just. There was absolutely no reason for a deadline. It was your artificial invention and followed your enforcement to achieve a result. You won, you got your 16,000 articles removed. I hope you and your deletionist brownie points are happy. You must be in the overall points lead now. But this is a giant black spot in helping to build an encyclopedia. Who knows how long it will take for this content to be rebuilt, how many man hours it will take to rebuild the work that SVG had already done for us. Trackinfo (talk) 07:37, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Trackinfo: - if there are/were some high-profile names on your watchlist that are now red, and you think they should be restored, you can log them at WP:REFUND. For transparency, probably link back to this page, but get an uninvolved admin to do the necessary. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 12:48, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Oh no, you caught me out, I indeed did not look at any articles and all my comments about problems with sourcing and contents were built on nothing. I did this in the countless examples I provided on his user talk page, at the general discussion, and when I reviewed moves made by others. I thought I had good arguments, but yours is in all caps so it must be stronger. Still, like you said, I got my brownie points, yippee! Fram (talk) 07:46, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It is not the point of rebuilding the info. It is a point of having realistic articles with proper sources that describe an athlete and the human behind it. Not just a remark of the type "took part in this championship" without any further info. The Banner talk 08:04, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

On a related note of editors moving draft, unsourced BLPs back into the mainspace, users may want to look at this thread at ANI. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 07:12, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Let's not lose sight of what happened here. SvG would get a 5-page list of competitors in some event, one line per athlete, and use it create 300 stubs. He made a skeleton article for an athlete in that event, then for each entry in the list pasted the name, age, country etc. into the skeleton and saved. It took a minute or two per athlete. And he was incredibly sloppy, making many mistakes. These athletes are not units in some sort of game, but real living people. Even "trivial" errors can be very damaging to the people they describe. We obtained three months to recover articles on the more notable people. Some editors abused that license, just moving back articles that "look o.k." without checking them at all. Those articles have to go. This cannot drag out forever. These trivial little articles can easily be rebuilt any time, but that should be done carefully, and preferably be a bit more than "John Doe (born 1 May 1998) is a former weightlifter who represented Ruritania in the 2008 European championships". Aymatth2 (talk) 12:25, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe I give SVG too much credit for the work, maybe it was other users who built upon what he started. Wikipedia works that way, you know. Yes there were a lot of stubs like that. But there were many that had tables laying out 6 years of results, linking back to the events. Somebody built that. They had a place to build it because SVG made the article, or maybe SVG actually did do that legwork. I didn't go in to track each edit on each article I looked at. Without looking at each article, none of you have any idea what useful contributions were contained within. But its guilt by association. SVG started the article, so it had to be bad. There was significant progress by a lot of editors to check those pages, but it wasn't fast enough for your artificial time limit. So the obvious solution is to destroy all that they had not fixed yet. Trackinfo (talk) 19:50, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The SvG stubs were riddled with errors. Some editors took the time to check and fix the articles, but most of the restored articles were just moved back without checking. We assumed good faith in extending the original deadline to 3 months. In retrospect, that was a mistake. Most of the moves back were in bad faith. Extending the deadline would have just allowed more unchecked moves. Now we have to clean up the mess. Yes, some good stuff may get deleted. Blame the bad faith restorers. Aymatth2 (talk) 23:20, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Question: is there any opposition here for editors to request userfication of some articles that were deleted for expansion and re-publishing? Hmlarson (talk) 21:09, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I see no problem at all. The uncertainty is about the future of the mass-restored articles, not the deleted ones. But it might be easier to just restart from scratch. I say that from experience on translating unsourced articles from other wikis, then fixing them up to match sources. The translation usually just gets in the way. Aymatth2 (talk) 22:50, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I have lost track of the project to sort out the articles written by user:Sander.v.Ginkel. About a year ago, user:MFriedman moved a lot of Van Ginkel-drafts back to main space, what is a bit strange. On the 9th of February, I got alarmed by some edits of MFriedman on the Dutch Wikipedia. After an hiatus of 4.5 years, he suddenly pleaded to keep an article written by Sander.v.Ginkel. So I filed there a sockpuppet investigation and the result was positive: MFriedman is a sockpuppet of Sander.v.Ginkel. So Sander clearly circumvented the project to clean up his mess by using a sockpuppet to restore his articles.

What should be the next step? The Banner talk 01:27, 11 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I feel responsible for not finishing the last step, the audit. See User:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up/Audit notes, MFriedman was in the list of high-volume restorers. I should have checked his moves. I wonder if some of the other high-volume restorers were SvG socks? That could be worth checking. The problem is that a) most of the restored articles probably did not have serious errors and b) many of them will have now had minor or major improvements by other editors. @Fram: @Lugnuts: Any views on what if anything to do next? Aymatth2 (talk) 02:08, 11 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Aymatth2. Looks like some of the articles I (and others) helped review have suddenly been deleted a year on without warning. That outcome is profoundly unsatisfactory as it's not only a waste of editor time and will, but also represents removal of articles that were not problematic. Can you advise what's going on here? I would advise restoration of all articles and highlighting ones reviewed by SvG so we can actually confirm there is no issue. I actually considered this a low risk case now closed without issue, especially compared to the difficulties of the similar one of Darius Dhlomo where extensive copyright violation was found. SFB 01:33, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Sillyfolkboy: I know nothing about any recent deletions. If someone has decided to just wipe out all the articles SvG started, as originally agreed, I would support their decision. You may be able to find an admin who is willing to restore specific articles. Aymatth2 (talk) 01:56, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I brought this up to SFB. It is User:JzG doing the deleting. SFB and I and certainly other editors spent months checking articles. Speaking personally, if they passed my check, they were suitable for mainspace, where I put them and after that I DON'T CARE WHO STARTED THEM. That is now MY WORK you are destroying. I said it then, I can confirm it now. The work SVG did was good. He hung out a lot of stubs for people who passed WP:N, which served as a place for other editors to hang better work. There were a few improprieties other people found, I found next to nothing; little adjustments based on the source. That is water under the bridge. We rescued a lot of appropriate athletics articles a year ago. To spend all that effort and to find it deleted in a vindictive move against SVG, after we have improved upon his initial efforts is reprehensible. All of OUR WORK should be restored immediately. Trackinfo (talk) 02:16, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If it turns out that MFriedman and other mass restorers were SvG socks it is reasonable to delete what they restored even if good additions were made afterwards. We cannot condone bad faith edits that may propagate inaccurate information about living people. The original decision after a huge debate was to delete all the articles SvG started. It would have been simpler to have just stuck with that decision. Aymatth2 (talk) 02:33, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You are so focused on punishing SVG that you have forgotten, we are making content in an encyclopedia for the public to use. You have destroyed hundreds, probably thousands of legitimate articles in your search for vindictiveness. Return them to draft space and tell us where they are or usurfy them to my space. In the lists I provided User talk:JzG there are a couple thousand red links from draft space articles. I assume that means the mainspace article is gone, it was on the ones I checked. I want them back, every single one of them. Trackinfo (talk) 05:27, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It's not vindictiveness, it's a violation of site policies and not rewarding deception. Most of the articles were very short, virtually none had any edits at all other than SvG, his sockpuppet, and bots / wikignoming (categories and so on). All were moved to Draft as part of the SvG cleanup, all were moved back from Draft by the sockpuppet and would have qualified for G13 had they had the same amount of editing but remained in Draft.

Over 22,000 of the articles SvG started, have been deleted, a lot of them through G13 while in Draft. These are a small proportion of them. That number is unprecedented in my experience. It is very clear that we cannot trust SvG and we certainly cannot trust his deceitful sockpuppet. If they were moved back to Draft I have every confidence that another sock would be along tomorrow.

As I said, you are absolutely welcome to clean-start these articles. That is the best way to restore the integrity of the project after SvG's abuse. Guy (Help!) 08:15, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@JzG: Should we ask for sockpuppet checks on the other high-volume restorers at User:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up/Audit notes#High volume editor moves? They look o.k. to me apart from User:Beatley, a sock of user:Slowking4. Maybe his restores should be wiped out too. What a mess! Aymatth2 (talk) 13:51, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Beatley was moving articles to the main space without any quality control, and this is why I indefblocked him. To be on the safe side, I would suggest to delete the articles they moved (if there are still any left).--Ymblanter (talk) 15:00, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@JzG: I agree with User:Ymblanter's suggestions. May I ask you to mass-delete all the SvG articles moved by User:Beatley? The list is at User:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up/Audit notes/Beatley moves. As with the MFriedman moves, most of these articles have probably not been substantially improved since being started. We may lose some enhancements, but at least the job of recovering from the SvG damage will be done. I am confident that the other mass-movers were acting in good faith and did check/correct the articles. Thanks, Aymatth2 (talk) 16:35, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Shortening the list to athletes first [35] and the part I supplemented [36] Some of that list contains work I edited, I checked and I approved. I want those back where I can restore the legitimate content. Drafts or my userspace. You have already caused me a lot more work and some of it is duplicating work I have already done. Trackinfo (talk) 18:23, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Checking the history, I think most of the athletics biographies have been retained in any case. @JzG: any chance you can restore the following athletics bios that were deleted? Aisha Praught, Alejandra Ortega, Alex Rose (athlete), Cisiane Lopes. Trackinfo and I will take responsibility for clean-up and expansion of those articles (I don't really have the knowledge set to assess the non-athletics ones so personally fine to leave those as deleted). Thanks SFB 18:49, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

To be honest, I think Trackinfo is one of the main victims of this nasty game of deceit. The Banner talk 19:10, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Likely so. It does very much look as if SvG preyed on his enthusiasm and good nature. Guy (Help!) 20:00, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

And his frustration with the deletion process (see his userpage) The Banner talk 20:25, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]