User:Uncle G/Proposal to expand WP:CSD/Unsourced biographies

At Wikipedia:Proposal to expand WP:CSD/Proposal III (Vanity articles) it was proposed to allow the deletion of "extremely blatant vanity articles", but the proposal failed with only ~44% support, many of the objectors citing the subjectivity of the article metrics used.

Since then, the volume of traffic in VFD has increased. For some time, discussion has been ongoing at Wikipedia:Deletion policy/Reducing VfD load about possible expansions to Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion (WP:CSD) to allow the speedy deletion of articles that currently uniformly garner unanimous consensus to delete, but that are not covered by existing speedy deletion criteria, and thus to reduce the number of articles listed at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion (WP:VFD). Again, the subject of personal vanity articles has come up.

This proposal employs article metrics that differ from the prior proposal, that do not address articles in terms of "blatant vanity" or "importance" but that address articles in terms of the presence of a particular datum in the article and the (content-neutral) adherence of the article to an existing Wikipedia guideline.

Proposal edit

The following case should be added to Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion in the section for Articles:

  • Biographical articles that do not explicitly cite any sources at all; and that are about persons who now are (or now would be, were they still alive) aged 25 or under, or whose age is not given and cannot be inferred from the article to be over 25 now.
    • Citing sources should be interpreted broadly in this context, and include informal citations. An external hyperlink to a web site about the person, a pointer to news coverage of the person, and an ISBN reference to a book written by the person (which is presumed to contain an "author autobiography" of some kind) all count as citing a source of biographical information, for example.
    • Where a date of birth is not given, reasonable inferences should be drawn from what is given in the article. A subject who has been married for 30 years and a subject who was elected to public office 15 years ago both must be over 25, for example.

Case study edit

There is extensive discussion, a formal case study, and a second (informal) further case study ("friends of Avril Lavigne") on this article's talk page.

Notice of poll edit

As indicated on the talk page, and since nobody objected, this proposal has been made part of the Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion/Proposal, which is presently open for voting.