User:Teratix/Deleting 0.01% of Wikipedia

Wikipedia will soon reach seven million articles. Judging by how we reacted to reaching six million articles, this will be considered a good thing.

I am not so sure this is a good thing. A great deal of these articles are extremely poor quality. Many are a downright embarrassment to the encyclopedia. Some are even outright harmful. Quite a few have been in this sorry state for a long time.

To highlight this, I will delete 0.01% of Wikipedia.

Well, not by myself, and not all at once.

Assuming things continue as projected, we will hit 7,000,000 articles in about a year. 0.01% of 7,000,000 is 700. If I cause two articles to be deleted per day, I will cause about 0.01% of Wikipedia to be deleted by the time we reach seven million.

Safeguards

As a rule, Wikipedia contests and backlog drives do not reward deletion. This is done with good reason: it is all too easy for poor incentives to encourage editors to PROD first and ask questions never, or inadvertently overwhelm volunteers in the deletion processes. I believe the rate I intend to work at is slow enough and my judgement is sound enough to avoid this type of failure, and it goes without saying that all my actions will follow ordinary deletion policy, but I will commit to several more points to make sure I do not inadvertently cause problems.

• The intent of this project is to demonstrate that bad articles are not only created but endure for a long time. I will therefore not include articles created less than two years ago (after 23 April 2022).
• When evaluating articles, I will go beyond the simple Google searches required by WP:BEFORE. I will check for coverage in general databases (e.g. newspaper archives) and any specialist databases where relevant sources would reasonably be expected to appear.
• I will always investigate whether promising sources exist in an older version of the article.
• I will always investigate whether promising sources exist on the article's talk page.
• I will always investigate whether copies of promising dead-linked sources exist on internet archive services.
• I must have grounds to be confident an apparent absence of sources genuinely means the subject lacks notability, not merely that I have failed to look in the right places. If I search online for sources on a non-Anglophone subject active in the pre-internet era and can't find anything, have I really proven a lack of notability or have I just proven the limits of my tools?

Safety valve

If an uninvolved administrator leaves their signature in this section, I commit to immediately stopping the project:

• [insert here]

The 0.01%

1.1% complete

No.	Article	Description	Created	Issues tagged	Deleted	Process
1	LocalSaver.com	Website	—	—	24 Apr 2024	CSD: A7
2	Pingboard	Software company	14 May 2014	31 Oct 2019	29 Apr 2024	PROD
3	Symphonic Source, Inc.	Software company	23 May 2012	9 Jun 2012	30 Apr 2024	PROD
4	Taskfreak	Software	11 Dec 2013	11 Dec 2013	30 Apr 2024	PROD
5	Chris Oliver	Software engineer	9 Feb 2008	4 Jan 2011	1 May 2024	PROD
6	Jo Lambert	Executive	18 Apr 2018	18 Apr 2018		PROD/AfD
7	SkilledUp	Website	15 Apr 2014	16 Apr 2014	3 May 2024	PROD
8	Television school	Website	2 Oct 2017	3 Oct 2017	7 May 2024	PROD
9	CITYpeek	Website	24 Nov 2009	6 Jun 2017		AfD
10	Major Street-basketball Foundation	Sports organisation	—	—	7 May 2024	AfD
11	WeFinance	Website	2 Apr 2016	2 Apr 2016		AfD
12	Stick Soldiers	Videogame	22 Jan 2006	23 Mar 2012		AfD
13	Voxofon	Software company	3 Feb 2009	11 Sep 2015		PROD
14	TalkLocal	Website	27 Apr 2015	30 Apr 2015		AfD
15	Redcort Software	Software company	15 Jun 2009	11 Nov 2011		PROD
16	KeyedIn Solutions	Software company	8 Nov 2012	4 Jan 2013		PROD