Speedy keep is the process of closing debates at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion and related pages with a result of "speedy keep" before the normal discussion period ends, but without unlisting or deleting the actual discussion. This guideline applies only to "speedy keep" closures; the criteria for speedy deletion cover the circumstances under which pages may be deleted immediately.
Applicability
Reasons for a speedy keep decision are:
- 1 The nominator withdraws the nomination or fails to advance an argument for deletion or redirection - perhaps only proposing an alternative action such as moving or merging, and no one other than the nominator recommends that the page be deleted.
- An example of this includes posting a nomination in response to a proposed deletion but advocating a keep position. (If you dispute the deletion of a prod-ed article, just remove the prod-tag, sometimes nobody will want to pursue deletion of the article via AFD anyway.)
- Exception: If the nominator indicates that the nomination is procedural in nature, then the nomination is ineligible for speedy keep. This includes a "relist" result from deletion review, fixing errors in the nomination process, or if a user stated a page should be deleted on a talk page without actually nominating it.
- 2 The nomination was unquestionably made for the purposes of vandalism or disruption and, since questionable motivations on the part of the nominator do not have a direct bearing on the validity of the nomination, no uninvolved editor has recommended deletion as an outcome of the discussion. For example:
- a obviously frivolous or vexatious nominations (such as recently featured articles or April Fools jokes)
- b nominations which are made solely to provide a forum for disruption, e.g. when a contestant in an edit war nominates an opponent's userpage solely for harassment
- c making nominations of the same article with the same arguments immediately after they were strongly rejected in a recently closed deletion discussion
- d nominations that are clearly an attempt to end an editing dispute through deletion, where dispute resolution is a more appropriate course
- 3 The nomination is so erroneous that it indicates the nominator has not even read the article in question.
- 4 The nominator is banned, so they are not supposed to edit. In that case, the nominated page is speedily kept while the nomination can be removed from the log, tagged with {{db-banned}} and speedily deleted as a banned contribution. However, if subsequent editors added substantive comments in good faith before the nominator's banned status was discovered, the nomination may not be speedily closed (though the nominator's opinion will be discounted in the closure decision).
- 5 The page is a policy or guideline. The deletion processes are not a forum for revoking policy.
- 6 The article is currently linked from the Main Page. In such cases, please wait until the link is no longer on the Main Page before nominating the article. If the problem is urgent, consensus should be gained at WP:ERRORS to remove the link before nominating for deletion.
If a page is nominated for deletion on the wrong forum (for example, a template on AfD or an article on MfD), the misplaced discussion may be procedurally closed and the page renominated on the correct forum, with the original nomination, and any comments made so far, copied over to the new nomination. The closing comment should indicate where the discussion has been moved. This does not strictly count as a speedy keep, since the page still remains nominated for deletion.
Please realize that while you may personally dislike having a deletion tag on your favorite article, the harm it does is minimal, and either the article and/or the tag will be gone in around a week.
What is not a speedy-keep
The "snowball clause" is a valid criterion for an early close, and is not subject to any of the other criteria necessary for a speedy keep, but it is not a speedy keep criterion itself. Specifically, discussions must meet specific criteria to be speedily kept. "Snowball closes" are justified by "Ignore all rules" and "Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy" as opposed to a specific set of guidelines. For that reason, "snow closes" may be controversial and their use is sometimes discouraged. Though the two may seem similar, closes under the snowball clause should never be closed as "speedy keep."
When closing an AfD debate as speedy-keep
When a discussion is closed as a speedy-keep:
- Close the debate as you would a standard close.
- Record the nomination to the talk page of the article using {{oldafdfull|result=speedy keep|votepage=as appropriate|date=date of nomination}}. Be aware (a) that whilst the name of the votepage usually matches that of the article, this is not always the case and (b) the prefix "Wikipedia:Articles for deletion" should not be part of the "votepage" name.
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