18 December 2014

184 Carex articles

Just under two weeks ago, I created 184 stub articles about species of monocotyledonous graminoid flowering plants (sedges). As identified species, the notability of each is not in question. In the past I have created several thousand stub articles about identified species, and on numerous occasions these stubs have subsequently been expanded significantly by other editors.

An administrator, User:Stemonitis, came to my talk page expressing concerns about these particular stub articles, apparently because he monitors a category to which I added them. Although he did mention that he felt it would be better not to create stub articles about such species at all, he also mentioned a list of ways in which he felt the stub articles created were problematic.

I then in good faith proceeded to address all of the concerns Stemonitis raised. I was able to fix all but one of the issues he raised, and in doing so I also added additional sourced information to every one of the stub articles (specifically, the date each species was described). This took me many hours.

Stemonitis then went quiet, but on 6 December he then proceeded first to turn all of the stub articles into redirects to a page listing sedges, and then to delete all of these redirects himself as being redirects under item 10 of WP:R#DELETE.

Quite aside from the obvious gaming of the system to obtain a rather narrow-minded preferred outcome, these deletions were inappropriate as the pages deleted quite clearly do not fall under any speedy deletion criterion. These pages should be restored, and Stemonitis can then recommend their deletion at WP:MfD if he is able to present a convincing rationale. Thine Antique Pen (talk) 18:19, 18 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That is quite a biased view of the exchange, and is rather misleading. Every one of the pages was, as I have repeatedly explained, worthless. They added no new information to the encyclopaedia (it all being effectively copied piecemeal from the existing list of Carex species), but actually made existing information harder for readers to find. (In some cases, falsehoods were added.) The encyclopaedia did not improve at all, but did deteriorate noticeably, as a result. It was perfectly reasonable to merge the pages in question back into the list (WP:MERGE: "a page is very short and is unlikely to be expanded within a reasonable amount of time"; such substubs are almost never expanded), and perfectly reasonable to later delete the redirects thus created (WP:R#DELETE, as indicated above). I even left a seemly pause of 24 hr between the two activities, in case – as seemed possible – TAP wished to kick up a fuss about it. --Stemonitis (talk) 19:06, 18 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Stemonitis' reply here speaks to the difficulty of communicating with him. As I already indicated above, the stub articles most definitely did not simply repeat the information already present in the list article; they also added the date of description of each species. None of this information was merged back into the list article when Stemonitis performed his 184 WP:IAR deletions, and thus this cannot be claimed to be a merger of any sort.

"Such substubs are almost never expanded" is also misleading. Megachile rubi is an example of a stub species article (about a bee) I created that was later substantially expanded by another editor. The world contains a great many species of sedge and bee; so the vast majority of the stub articles about those species have not yet been expanded. But that does not mean that they cannot be expanded, nor that they are not being expanded within a reasonable amount of time. After all, some of these sedges and bees have been around a very long time already. Wikipedia only arrived quite recently.

"The encyclopaedia did not improve at all, but did deteriorate noticeably, as a result" seems to give away Stemonitis' problem here - this is a WP:IDONTLIKEIT thing, and an administrator should most definitely not be speedily deleting articles on that basis. Especially when the articles do not meet any speedy deletion criterion. Thine Antique Pen (talk) 19:47, 18 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Overturn, and WP:TROUT Stemonitis. The deletions were clearly not within process. The speedy deletion criteria are limited to those at WP:SPEEDY, and merely meeting a criteria at WP:R#DELETE does not permit something to be speedy deleted. The criteria at WP:R#DELETE are arguments that can be made at WP:RFD (where those same criteria are listed). Deletion using those criteria require a discussion and a consensus. Admins simply aren't allowed to delete something merely because they feel it is bad content, without it meeting a speedy deletion criteria or having been subject of a prod or XFD discussion. Furthermore, the idea that articles should be redirected because the subjects are better covered in the list, but redirects to the list should be deleted because articles could be written on the subjects, seems absurd to me. Calathan (talk) 20:06, 18 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

[ec] Megachile is an interesting example. Of the more than 1500 Megachile substubs created, only 3 (Megachile melanophaea, Megachile rubi and Megachile texana) have since been expanded. Would those articles have been written anyway? Quite probably. Or, if not those articles, would the editors responsible have written other, equally valid articles? Almost certainly. Biologically minded editors are not short of potential articles to work on, so this really isn't a field in which the lack of a pre-existing page is any impediment to a potential article creator. There is, therefore, a small probability that TAP's efforts helped in some small way to produce 3 articles. What is definite, however, is that 1500 other articles were (and remain) improperly sourced to a self-published/crowd-sourced website; they required immediate cleanup, and had talk pages that needed tagging for the relevant WikiProject, and that already adds up to 3000 edits of someone else's time. There is again no direct benefit to the reader, probably also no indirect benefit to the reader, and a lot of cleanup work for other people, even before we get on to the possibility that there might be errors, which is very likely indeed. The argument that such pages help article creation is very flimsy; the argument that they detract from the encyclopaedia seems to me to be rather strong – if anything, I would say from experience that a pre-existing substub is more likely to put someone off writing a new article, rather than encouraging them to expand it. If Megachile is the best analogy, then I see no reason why I should have any qualms about deleting 184 Carex pages; at least 3 decent Carex articles have since been created from red links, demonstrating that red links help Wikipedia. But all this is beside the point; WP:R lays out good reasons for deleting redirects, and those reasons were satisfied; this, too, has already been explained to TAP. --Stemonitis (talk) 20:41, 18 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Calathan, this is clearly a situation in which WP:IAR can be applied. The pages created have literally no value, and are indeed harmful (errors were quickly found). Requiring these pages to be recreated solely so that their deletion can be requested is surely a waste of time. What is the benefit of such an action, other than that it follows process more rigidly? --Stemonitis (talk) 20:41, 18 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Stemonitis, this is clearly not a situation where WP:IAR should be applied. You were free to redirect the articles if you didn't think they should exist, and then start an RFD to have them deleted, or free to leave the articles in place and start an AFD. If the articles had errors, you could correct them. There were clear ways to fix any concerns you had within the policy, so there was no need to turn to IAR. Furthermore, this was basically a content dispute, and using your admin tools to end a content dispute with another user is not acceptable. I also personally think that if you took either the articles to AFD, or the redirects to RFD, both locations would vote to keep them, so I don't think you are saving time by deleting them out of process. Calathan (talk) 21:09, 18 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As a policy, WP:IAR pretty much always applies. "If the articles had errors, you could correct them" is not a reasonable point of view to take. It takes time to properly research an article. In the case of TPA's Carex pages, I started alphabetically and the very first one I found, Carex acicularis, turned out to be – contrary to the cited source – generally treated as a synonym by the relevant authorities. Biology can be messy like that, and can require considerable expertise to make sense of (for instance, I had in the past considered writing an article on Carex × abitibiana, but found it such a nebulous concept that I couldn't make anything worthwhile out of it). Fixing that first article, now at Carex archeri, took me at least 40 mins, judging from my edit history. There is simply no way that any one person, or even a dedicated team of people, could do that for all the substubs TPA created in that one 45-minute bout, let alone any others that could have been created (it is a large and poorly-understood genus). Attempting to place the blame for inevitable errors onto other editors is simply unacceptable. I don't blame you for not fixing TPA's errors, and nor should you blame me. If everyone who wanted these substubs restored would promise to properly research their fair share, then it might be a different matter, but I'm fairly confident that that's not going to happen, leaving instead an mass of misinformation and non-information for someone else to sort out at a later date (which will probably never happen in most cases). Restoring such articles is a procedure guaranteed to reduce the quality of Wikipedia, and I for one condemn that. I am repeatedly amazed at how little emphasis is often placed on content in Wikipedia discussions. The content and the readers are what matters; we have to consider things from their point of view, and neither is well served by restoring TPA's Carex pages. --Stemonitis (talk) 22:18, 18 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you to Stemonitis for pointing out that several Megachile stubs, not just one, have been expanded by other editors. Anyway, this is pretty clear cut; the deleting administrator is clearly unable to accept well-meant advice from other editors, as has been seen here. What the deleting administrator has accepted, though, is that they carried out these 184 deletions under WP:IAR. There is therefore no obstacle to the deleted articles being reinstated so that Stemonitis can put forward his rationale at a proper AfD. Thine Antique Pen (talk) 21:13, 18 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]