This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.
This is an archive of past discussions on Wikipedia:Article Incubator. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
I ginned up a set of transclusions of the first seven talk pages above and associated them with closeout dates. You'll see many issues, but the page as a whole is live. Unscintillating (talk) 04:48, 28 May 2013 (UTC)
Update After I got things set up and rolling at the Greenhouse, I asked User talk:Illia Connell#58 MfD nominations, "Please agree to withdraw your 58 nominations", but Illia has not responded. The first Greenhouse closeout day of 2013-06-02 is approaching, but the 58 MfDs continue and are scheduled to begin closing tomorrow. Unscintillating (talk) 19:57, 1 June 2013 (UTC)
Update The large majority of the 58 MfD listings are being ignored. But so are the greenhouse plans to manage those 58 articles. Unscintillating (talk) 15:23, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
Turns out it was 57 and not 58 MfD listings, but after 7 excruciating weeks, the entire set is now closed. I went through the remaining articles in the incubator and found two that were more than a year old that Illia had missed, and one that has gone past a year since May 26. I have used those three to re-open the Greenhouse. Please take a few minutes to Google for sources and add sources to the ==Further reading== sections. Thanks, Unscintillating (talk) 03:26, 22 July 2013 (UTC)
{{Portal|Article Incubator}}
A portal now exists. I think the main thing that readers attracted from mainspace will want to see is the incubated article, so I put a simplified version of the introduction and concluded with a list of articles currently in the incubator. Unscintillating (talk) 12:17, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
No consensus to mark as inactive While I debated adding a comment to this, I think that, in the end, additional comments aren't going to significantly change things--the current discussion is much too balanced in terms of retain/historicize. So while I personally support the closing of this project for many of the reasons outlined, it is clear to me that there is no consensus. While in many cases Admins are required to weigh !votes against policy and guidelines when measuring consensus, this discussion is about how we manage our backroom inventory, and, as such, there really isn't anything to go on other than a vote count (since I note that each person who voted did give a clear rationale). The current count is 12 in favor of closing, 9 in favor of retaining. That's a majority for closing, but not one that I find large enough to justify the deprecation of a project that at least a couple of people care about. Individual admins are still free to use their own discretion when closing future AfDs about whether to delete/userfy/incubate. One thing I do see from reading the discussion is that part of what may be pushing people to an opposing side is the question of what would happen to the remaining articles in the incubator. Perhaps if that matter could be worked out first, then perhaps a clearer consensus could be reached on the overall question of future use. Qwyrxian (talk) 08:56, 24 August 2013 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Let's get real here, this was a good idea that just did not work out. I've just checked the history of ten randomly selected articles from Category:Articles in the Article Incubator. The average age was about six months, although I found things added as recently as this week and as long ago as two years. Most of them had not been edited in any substantive way since being moved here. I found only one that had been edited to address sourcing issues, which is pretty much the whole point of this process. If you can even count that as a success this suggests based on that random sample that the success rate here is 10% or less. There is very little interest or involvement in this process except for one user who keeps expanding it, apparently unaware that the rest of us have admitted the obvious: this well intentioned idea simply did not work out the way it was supposed to. Expanding it into portals and so forth is not going to change that. Several previous discussions indicate that consensus actually already exists to close this up and mark it inactive/historical/whatever, but interest is so low nobody even bothered to do that.
Therefore I propose that:
All project pages be marked as either {{inactive}} or {{historical}}, doesn't really matter which.
User be invited to userfy any articles they are personally interested in improving via some sort of central announcement.
At the end of say, two weeks, all other articles still in the incubator be deleted or, if they have actually been improved while here, kicked out into mainspace.
This will depopulate the incubator category which should then be deleted as well.
Addendum, all previous commenter please note and re-evaluate your response as needed I tried to modify the above proposal to accommodate some of the concerns raised below, noting the change with a new timestamp, but I have been reverted because one user felt this was unfair or something. So, I would like to retract the part about automatic deleting as I now feel it was a bit over-reaching and it has not really been supported. So, if you could just imagine that part as being struck through since I am apparently not allowed to do that, and instead it is proposed that each item be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and that no further articles should be added to the incubator and no new areas of the incubator should be created without first establishing a consensus to do so, that would be great. Beeblebrox (talk) 05:09, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
I don't hate this project, I can't imagine why anyone would, it just did not work out and it is time to admit it and stop wasting time and getting users hopes up for no good reason. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:40, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
Let's try to follow the logic here, because there is now a portal for the incubator to attract readers from mainspace to read articles in the incubator, this is a reason to use out of process deletions to delete every article in the incubator in two weeks? Unscintillating (talk) 01:52, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
If someone were to ask me for two examples of things on Wikipedia that were well intended but just didn't work I could easily see my response being the incubator and the portal system. There is no evidence that this portal has or will have some sort of magical effect on participation here. The articles that were sent here were sent here because it was agreed that they don't belong in mainspace and this was the only alternative to deletion. The process has already been respected, and we are now having another process right here and now so that argument seems a bit thin to me on all counts. Beeblebrox (talk) 02:15, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
And, for the record, the proposal is not to automatically delete everything two weeks from today. The idea is to close the incubator, barring the adding of any new pages, and then allow a period of time (possibly two weeks but we could make it a month if that seems better) for users to look at what is currently in the category and see if they see anything that they could hope to salvage. Anyone would be free to userfy any page they like or even to improve it during this period and return it to mainspace. When that period ended and the community had had ample opportunity to review what was there the remaining articles, which logically should be the most hopeless cases, would be deleted along with incubator content categories, finalizing the formal closure of this failed project.
Alternately I suppose we could MFD each one at the end of that period, with re-incubating explicitly off the table as an option. Letting them sit in limbo unimproved forever isn't doing any good, and sending things here is in almost all cases a wasted effort. It's unfortunate but that seems to be how this wound up. Beeblebrox (talk) 02:27, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
(edit conflict) And yet isn't that why we are here because there has been activity recently in the incubator and articles are being worked, and your goal is to prevent the possibility that that continues? Unscintillating (talk) 02:49, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
Actually what drew my attention this way was the large number of incubated pages that were recently deleted via MFD. That contributed to a significant backlog there and a lot of people at those MFDs commented on how ineffective this project has been, that they were surprised it still existed, etc. This was supposed to be a way to save articles, but instead it just became a way to delay deletion and require two discussions instead of one. That's not a good thing. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:46, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
First of all, you say, "a lot of people at those MFDs commented on how ineffective this project has been". I've only found two such edits, both made by you, and both using closures protected from opposing opinions to foment umbrage against the incubator:
So saying "a lot of people at those MFDs commented on how ineffective this project has been" is unsupported by the evidence. The statement "that [a lot of people] were surprised it still existed" was claimed neither by you nor by anyone else and is again unsupported by the evidence. Unscintillating (talk) 05:29, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
Then there is the idea that the "significant backlog" was created by "the large number of incubated pages that were recently deleted". No, those 58 MfD discussions were created by one editor who immediately disappeared from Wikipedia. That editor to this day has not explained why given the stated plan on May 10 to be taking articles to MfD at the rate of 10 at a time, on May 27 and 28 created 58 MfD discussions in a two-day span. Had the editor instead agreed to withdraw the nominations in order to put each of the articles through the WP:Article Incubator/Greenhouse, those articles would have reappeared at MfD at no faster than one per day up until the end of July. Thus the "significant backlog" is not a function of any problem in the incubator, and does not explain why you started this RfC. Unscintillating (talk) 05:29, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
You impl;ied I was here for a particular reason, and I explained that you were mistaken about thet. Now you seem to imply there is some sinister reason for opening this RFC. There is not, and this is not about me or you so this is the last reply I will be making as I believe we've both already more than had our say: I opened this because this project has obviously failed and it is time to admit it and move on. That's it. Whether you or some other person is the last one to believe in it makes no difference to me and I can't imagine it makes any difference to any of the other users who have commented here either. This project is dead. It has failed to accomplish its primary goal and the community has lost faith in it. It is time to close it. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:25, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
If your explanation makes sense, why are there no diffs of people actually saying the things that you thought that they did during the MfDs? The fact that you think this project has failed is a reason for you to volunteer to improve it; but as a cheerleader for it to fail, your presence is neither welcome nor appreciated. Unscintillating (talk) 04:33, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I never understood the point of the Incubator to begin with because the majority of the articles never had any of the problems fixed. Editors are perfectly capable to copy what their working on to their user space. There is activity, but very little activity. It is rare for anyone to vote for incubation in AfDs. The project is, for the most part, a collection of trash articles. SL93 (talk) 06:25, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
It is perfectly clear that the article incubator is not working. It is also clear that when almost any failing project is under discussion as a possibility to get rid of it, some editors will rapidly start doing something, but after a while it will be forgotten again. The fact that someone has come up with a way of calling attention to this project, which has attracted a small amount of activity over a short time period, does not substantially detract from the fact that it is a failing project. If there really is enough interest from a sufficient number of editors to work on clearing up the existing backlog of pages, then by all means let them do so. However, there is no reason why that should prevent us from closing the project to new pages. I support Beeblebrox's suggestion, with one proviso. Let's allow more than the two weeks that Beeblebrox suggested, so that if there really are plenty of editors willing to work on this task they have a chance to do so: say three months. (My guess is that whether we allow two days or five years, the vast majority of the pages will never be made suitable to be articles, but I am willing to give people a chance to prove me wrong.) Incidentally, when someone proposes a process for dealing with a problem, and that process includes a procedure for deletion, it seems to me odd to refer to it as "out of process deletions". JamesBWatson (talk) 08:57, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
The deletion function is tightly regulated because it is so damaging. We already have numerous deletion processes which cover all scenarios. Adding another one would be redundant and confusing per WP:CREEP. Warden (talk) 10:31, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
I don't believe anyone is suggesting the opening of an entirely new forum for deletion discussions, but it is in fact possible for the community to decide to delete things without going through MFD or AFD. However, if that ends up being objected to by a significant percentage of participants here we can do away with that part of the proposal, it just seemed simpler than flooding MFD when it is pretty much a forgone conclusion that nearly all of these pages would be deleted per WP:STALEDRAFT if brought there. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:40, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
Mark as historical seems fine to me as I never liked the idea - the proper place to develop articles is mainspace, where everyone can see them. I oppose bulk deletion of the current slush pile though. Individual page deletion should go through the standard process of MfD. Warden (talk) 10:26, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
Oppose Weak oppose because the outcome of this proposal is so easy to predict. The result of closing the incubator won't be that we start to delete stale drafts. All that will happen is that articles that would previously have been incubated, will thenceforth be kept in userspace instead. In other words, we won't have fewer stale drafts, we'll just have stale drafts that are harder to find. Closing the incubator is solving the wrong problem.—S MarshallT/C12:00, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
That's an interesting point, but I see at least one flaw in your logic: the community has, by an large already stopped using this as an alternative to deletion so those stale drafts are already out there. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:36, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
That's true. I'm (very) conscious of the various drafts in my userspace which are there for what I think of as good reasons... What I don't understand is how the existence of these unsatisfactory articles in userspace in any way invalidates what I'm saying, so could you elaborate on that please?—S MarshallT/C20:58, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
I guess my point is that this is not an attempt to solve any wider problems with the hundreds (thousands? millions?) of other stale drafts out there, it is only an effort to acknowledge the reality that this project has failed. I don't mean to suggest that that is not a discussion worth having, just that it is not really the purpose of this discussion, which is aimed at the much simpler matter of just marking this project as inactive and dealing with whatever items are left. At the time of this writing there are only 56 items in the incubator, most of them easily qualifying for deletion as stale drafts. There may be one or two exceptions, hopefully the users who have been working on those will be able to get them back into mainspace in the near future. Beeblebrox (talk) 22:31, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
Hm. I'll amend my earlier position to "weak oppose". I don't strongly object to closing the incubator: I never used it much and don't envisage using it much in the future. I have consistently recommended it at AfD or DRV where I saw it as a realistic alternative to straight-up deletion, particularly where I was concerned about BITE issues, but that doesn't really constitute using it. I don't recall ever working on anything that had been incubated. I viewed it as a holding pen for unencyclopaedic material that might have something salvageable in it somewhere. I didn't realise the extent to which it's become a ghost town.
What I will say is that I've resisted the urge to bluelink NOEFFORT and DEADLINE in response to the remarks above. This view that material not worked on should be deleted doesn't seem very Wikipedian to me. And it seems to me that a viable alternative to removing our only organised register of stale drafts, is to use it more. I can see advantages in using a bot to populate the incubator with drafts from the userspace of people who haven't edited in over a year.—S MarshallT/C23:12, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
Support I never much saw the point, honestly. If an article isn't perfect but could be improved by general community editing, it should be in mainspace like every other article. If an article is unsuitable for mainspace but one or more editors are dedicated to significantly improving it, it belongs in userspace. If an article has no realistic chance of being mainspace-worthy in the forseeable future, it should be deleted. That leaves very little, if anything, left over for the incubator, and that seems to be supported by the stagnant trash heap it appears to have become. Untouched stale drafts are a serious problem throughout Wikipedia, as they provide a vector for spam & libel with very little scrutiny. Closing the incubator would get rid of a lot of sstale drafts at once. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind23:38, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
One area where I've found the Article Incubator to be clearly worth having is with emerging technologies that because of their novelty haven't attracted "mainstream media" attention... but none the less have a fairly substantial and active fanbase who is interested in writing up an encyclopedia article on the topic. An excellent example of this is the Bitcoin article, which suffered not just an AfD but several deletion reviews. It survived in the incubator until it was eventually moved back into the main namespace and now is solidly a part of Wikipedia (even a bit contentious as a target of vandalism and routine protection by admins). I don't know if this is something that perhaps should cause a review of AfD policies, but it also provides a counter example for those who claimed in the AfD that it would never amount to anything as well. I know it is hard to identify what might become the next technology to explode into popular culture before it happens, but there are several examples of stuff like this being created on Wikipedia and then deleted only to be created again later. BTW, the Bitcoin article was even salted because of numerous attempts to create the article. This is precisely the kind of twilight status that the incubator was supposed to deal with. --Robert Horning (talk) 07:11, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
The related Wikipedia:WikiProject Abandoned Drafts seems... abandoned as well. However, before anything definitive is being done, I'd like to point out my proposal for a draft namespace. There, we could put together WP:AFC created pages, incubated articles and abandoned userspace drafts, where they would have a (time-limited) opportunity for development. This would provide the advantage of pooling resources, since whenever a draft is deemed ready for mainspace, whether from AFC, incubated or ex-user draft, it would be handled by 'reviewers'. I still haven't written a detailed proposal, but I give more details there. Cenarium (talk) 18:01, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
Support. I originally worked on the creation of the Incubator, and I see no evidence it lived up to expectations. I have noted that WP:Articles for creation gets a lot of business from the same sort of user that get shunted here, and AFC has a lot more active editors. Abductive (reasoning)06:17, 29 June 2013 (UTC)
Support. I'm aware that a very few pages get un-incubated and turned into good articles, but the benefits of the incubator seem largely to outweigh the advantages. Robert Horning's comments on Bitcoin demonstrate that we need to be ready to do something, but the idea of vaguely merging this with AFC per Cenarium appears to be much more solid. Nyttend (talk) 18:18, 30 June 2013 (UTC)
Oppose Any mass deletion of anything. Articles that are problematic in the Incubator should be deleted under G10, 11, or 12. All other articles should be allowed to languish outside of mainspace indefinitely--storage space is cheap. There is no good reason to delete non-problematic content once it's outside of mainspace. A junkyard of unused content that non-admins can see and improve as the fancy strikes them is far more useful that that same pile of unused content languishing as deleted entries in the database where only admins can see it. Jclemens (talk) 07:52, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
Support marking as historical. The incubator was a good idea when it started, but it just isn't working out. —/Mendaliv/2¢/Δ's/ 14:40, 9 July 2013 (UTC)
Oppose Given that the incubator is an active project, what is the purpose of this discussion? Is the purpose here to empower JamesBWatson and Beeblebrox to block continued volunteerism in the incubator? Is the goal here to remove mention of the incubator in WP:Deletion policy? Oh, policy, let's not mention making backdoor changes to policy on a non-policy page. Are the admins going to sow the incubator with salt to make sure that nothing grows here? If you read what Gigs said, you might be able to move the incubator to a different location, but you can't really kill it.
It doesn't matter that the incubator hasn't had the success that its founders envisioned, the need for the incubator as an institution at Wikipedia remains. Nor does the need for the institution go away with snivels about stale drafts, a failed mass-deletion attempt at MfD partially rescued by admins using soft deletes, hiding the edit histories of the currently-incubated articles from any but the admin-class of editor, and using or threatening to use admin tools against incubator volunteers and their workpages. Adamah is an example of an article on Wikipedia that is here because of the incubator. As far as the stale drafts, I personally volunteered to work on 58 articles using the Greenhouse. The reason the Greenhouse can attract additional volunteers is because it calls for the same skill sets acquired while improving articles at AfD. Unscintillating (talk) 04:33, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I don't know why you feel the need to attack me and make up imaginary motivations for this RFC.
Let me tell you about a similar situation from my real life: I own and operate a small business. Some years back I developed a discount program for our regular customers. all they had to do was get a card punched every time they made a purchase. Once the card was "punched out" they could redeem it for a discount on their next purchase. I designed and printed the cards, bought specialized hole punches, put up little signs to let our regulars know about it, etc. So many people said what a great idea it was and happily took the cards. But, for reasons that were never entirely clear, the program failed. Only two of our regulars actually used it, everyone else gave up. We were never able to figure out why, all they had to do was keep a card in their wallet and present it to be punched when we asked if they had one. After a few months I suspended the program and informed the two people who used it that they could cash in the cards they had as though they were full and that would be the end of it. It was a big disappointment for me and my staff, as well as the two guys who actually used it, but there just came a point where ti obviously was not working and it was time to get real and admit it.
And that is exactly what we have here, nothing more complicated than that. If you would like to personally userfy every single item left in the incubator so you can work on fixing them, be my guest. that would be great. But leaving this hanging around, giving false hope that there is some team that will swoop in and fix it is dishonest and unhelpful when we all know that by and large this is just a dumping ground that is almost always a dead end. It should have worked, I wish it had and I'm not sure why it never caught on but it didn't. One or two users are not enough to maintain a project like this, it needs dozens of users to be effective and they just aren't stepping up. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:05, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
So volunteering in the incubator is now described by the OP as "attack", on those trying to stop the volunteering. How would you know that it takes dozens of editors to work in this project, have you ever done anything for the articles here other than to soft delete them? Unscintillating (talk) 02:05, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
The proof is in the pudding. As you can see, nearly everyone else, regardless of their opinion of the intial idea of having an incubator, has acknowledged the reality that it just didn't work out the way it was supposed to. Marking this failed project as historical will not stop you or anyone else from improving content, and creating more areas of the project has clearly failed to revive it even a little bit.
As for attacking, I should think it would be obvious to anyone what I am referring to and, but since you apparently can't see it, it isn't your edits to incubated articles that I am referring to, it is the post you made directly above mine, where you theorize a set of sinister motivations that you imagine I have for doing this. I can see that you are determined to be willingly blind to the reality of the failure ofd this project and will say or do anything rather than just accept that the project failed and move on, so I think I will not be repl;ying to any further remarks by you on this subject. Beeblebrox (talk) 02:37, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
If this were a matter of marking the project historical, you could have done so and waited to see if anyone reverted you. No, you are here to empower the use of admin tools. In using or trying to use the tools against the incubated articles, you are here to hide from non-admins exactly what incubation exists to protect, the work of Wikipedia editors. Beyond that, after I revealed that this RfC is using a non-policy page to make a backdoor change to a policy page, you have remained silent. WP:Deletion policy states, "This page documents an English Wikipedia policy, a widely accepted standard that all editors should normally follow. Changes made to it should reflect consensus." Your argument that userfy is the equal of incubate is not a WP:Deletion policy#Incubation policy-based position. We need our admins to support policy. Unscintillating (talk) 01:06, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
In regards to your continued and escalatory use of charged language including "sinister", "attacking", and "willingly blind", what I said was that you used the color of office in closing two MfD discussions to foment umbrage against the incubator. I've also noted more than once that you have been unable to provide diffs to where "a lot of people at those MFDs commented" about the incubator. I provided you a transclusion at Wikipedia talk:Article Incubator/2013 June mass MfD with each of the MfDs so that you could easily review "those MFDs" and thereby enable you to withdraw your comments. But you have not withdrawn your comments. Does this mean that you still think that "a lot of people at those MfDs commented" about the incubator? This is not a rhetorical question. Unscintillating (talk) 01:06, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Administrator conduct Administrators are expected to lead by example and to behave in a respectful, civil manner in their interactions with others. Administrators are expected to follow Wikipedia policies and to perform their duties to the best of their abilities. Occasional mistakes are entirely compatible with adminship; administrators are not expected to be perfect. However, sustained or serious disruption of Wikipedia is incompatible with the status of administrator, and consistently or egregiously poor judgment may result in the removal of administrator status. Administrators should strive to model appropriate standards of courtesy and civility to other editors and to one another.[2][3][4][5]
Administrators should bear in mind that they have hundreds of colleagues. Therefore, if an administrator finds that he or she cannot adhere to site policies and remain civil (even toward users exhibiting problematic behavior) while addressing a given issue, then the administrator should bring the issue to a noticeboard or refer it to another administrator to address, rather than potentially compound the problem by poor conduct.
Support The incubator always seemed superfluous; a much more likely way to get knowledgable editors to work an a draft article is to create it as a stub in article space with appropriate templates in the talk page labeling it as a stub class article of the Wiki-projects to which it is related. I hope noone will take offense to the comment that knowledgeable assistance is more likely to come from editors associated with topical wikiprojects than from editors associated with a generic incubator. Specialized knowledge is the key to an encyclopedia.
As to a specific procedure to implement the change, I would suggest moving all viable articles to article space and marking them as stubs. Then the project can be shut down. SteveMcCluskey (talk) 19:56, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
To quote from the project page, "Incubation is for material or articles that have already been through the deletion process and it has been decided that while, at the time of the decision, the material did not meet our inclusion criteria, there was justifiable reason to believe the material/article could be made to meet the inclusion criteria given enough time..." Unscintillating (talk) 21:06, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
If you are aware of viable articles in the incubator, you can move them to mainspace, and then request that the remaining redirect be deleted. Unscintillating (talk) 21:06, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
As far as using the wikiprojects, this is part of the Greenhouse design for dealing with stale and possibly abandoned drafts in the incubator. Articles listed in the Greenhouse are given an outprocessing date for when the article is to be listed at MfD. One of the steps is to notify wikiprojects of articles in the Greenhouse, and tell them the outprocessing date. This gives the project a chance to intervene before the article goes to MfD, and provides a path directly back to mainspace if the article is improved. This doesn't stop the option for the project to intervene once the article has gone to MfD. Unscintillating (talk) 21:06, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
You've just gotten done berating me on my talk page for being inflexible, and when I pointed out that I had tried to be flexible here, you undo it? Am I allowed to suggest it down here or is that also against... uh...er...what rule was that again? Is there a rule that says nobody is allowed to change their mind and if they try you must revert them? Where is that exactly? Beeblebrox (talk) 05:03, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
By changing the proposal after people had !voted, you were potentially putting words in people's mouths, as well as creating confusion for the closer. Unscintillating (talk) 02:59, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Whatever you think of my comments on your talk page, why are they a reason to refuse to discuss them there, but a reason to re-open the discussion here? The answer seems to be that you are again escalating. Likewise, the words "berate" and "inflexible" are charged and escalatory. Unscintillating (talk) 02:59, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
My neutral comments on your talk page are there for the purpose of building consensus. WP:CONSENSUS is a Wikipedia policy, and is a standard that all editors should normally follow. Unscintillating (talk) 02:59, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
It is not necessary to come up with modified proposals intended to prevent new solutions to issues in the incubator. The main thing you've done since you came here is to grouse...that the incubator is dead, about what a shame it is that the incubator didn't work out, and about how expectations have been violated that editors put their articles here and there was no team in place rolling out improved articles. Your only solution is to either hide the incubated articles from the non-admins or userfy them, so you don't really have any solutions. The sum of what your overall proposal accomplishes, just as in the specific proposal that was just reverted, is to ensure that there is no improvement in the incubator. The answer lies in our policy, that the incubator is preferred to userfication, and so we need to improve support improvement in the incubator, not prevent improvement in the incubator. Unscintillating (talk) 02:59, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Once upon a time all of Wikipedia was an article incubator and the community focused on building and improving our content. Sadly, those days are gone and we find ourselves doing everything but improving content. The incubator is a valid and important part of Wikipedia, though it is not our place to force people to use it. We can only suggest that they do so. As for marking the project historical, anybody is allowed to do that, just as anybody is allowed to revive an inactive project. As for deleting the articles, the few that I checked were about notable subjects, though several of them did not explictly show that notability in the article itself. Should somebody improve these articles and move them to mainspace? Yes. Will anybody do that? I don't know. It seems a shame to delete something that has already had hours of work put in to it. I do know this, it's easier to point-and-click to delete than it is to improve an article. Will people take the easy way out? It seems likely. 64.40.54.109 (talk) 01:17, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Have you considered logging in, creating a user account, and saving a draft of the incubated article into your user space... then you can work on it at your own pace (getting it "ready for prime time" as they say) without fear that it will be deleted. Blueboar (talk) 14:41, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
You can copy and paste content into your user space. I have done this for you. The content can be accessed from your talkpage. SilkTork✔Tea time12:30, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Thanks very kindly, SilkTork. I really appreciate your thoughtfulness and support. I think my being a dynamic IP may have confused things. Sorry about that. I'm a plain-old, regular editor who has been around forever just like everybody else commenting here. Somebody else wrote the Nick Wolven article. I should probably explain. Around the time you were doing all your work on the incubator, I spent a few months and reviewed every article in there. I remembered the Nick Wolven article becuase I was curious about the author and I left them a message after I had found they had been driven away by a serial sock puppeteer. I thought it was more recent, but I guess it's been a couple of years now. Anyhoo, I asked for the article to be moved to AfC because of the attribution requirements of our wmf:Terms of Use, since I wasn't the author. Thanks for taking the time to make a copy in my userspace, but it isn't mine so I hope you don't mind me marking it CSD G6. Sorry about that. 64.40.54.162 (talk) 05:00, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Support closing the incubator. In my view, it generates unnecessary BLP and vandalism risks and otherwise adds to the maintenance overhead without a clear benefit. All content on Wikipedia should meet minimal stub requirements regarding sourcing and notability, and if content needs to be stored for further development this can happen on individual userspace pages or offwiki. Sandstein 06:16, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Yes... Once upon a time all of Wikipedia was an article incubator and the community focused on building our content. And you know what? Our efforts succeed. Now, our efforts are shifting. Today, our editors are more focused on improving existing articles, and less focused on creating new ones. We have moved from "writing" articles to "editing" articles. This is a natural progression, and one we should have seen coming. The average Wikipedian will only work on articles about topics that interest him/her... and, in many topic areas, those articles already exist. In many topic areas, we are now down to writing articles about more obscure topics... topics that won't attract lots of volunteers because they are more obscure (and will only attract specialists). This isn't to say that we don't have lots of articles yet to write... simply that those remaining articles are not going to attract lots and lots of volunteers to work on them. That's why the incubator is no longer working the way it should... the incubator relies on volunteers, but the article being incubated today are simply not on topics that will attract the necessary volunteers. We need a different approach. Blueboar (talk) 14:41, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Oppose. There was a time when the Incubator was poorly set up and poorly managed, and it was a mess, but it has been cleaned up, and from looking at Category:Articles in the Article Incubator moved back into mainspace, it appears to currently be working successfully enough to keep it going. If there are particular issues with the process, then perhaps those issues could be addressed rather than stopping the entire process. It appears that the main issue is that some articles are nominated for deletion twice. That doesn't appear to me to be a significant issue. There are a good number of articles which don't get incubated which go through multiple deletion nominations. Some survive and some don't, but we don't propose throwing out AfD because it is sometimes not effective enough. If the Incubator is thought of as a "community userfication" - a more accessible and organised version of userfication, then its value can be better assessed. SilkTork✔Tea time13:01, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
How about just moving all good enough articles to mainspace and the rest to AfC, and then leave a notification to all authors of the articles of the same? That way, we don't have any major concerns of the articles being deleted; and this project can be made inactive without any particular problems. The AfC appears to be doing the same tasks. TheOriginalSoni (talk) 07:20, 23 July 2013 (UTC)
Support good idea that didn't work out. User space serves the same purpose, this is just redundant. Now it's just a trash can of articles that for whatever reason are not suitable to be in the mainspace.--Otterathome (talk) 15:14, 28 July 2013 (UTC)
Oppose I'm not seeing the harm here spelled out. I too would rather we develop these in mainspace, but that has become less of an issue over the years. So this is what we've got. That said, I think BOZ's proposal is probably a better way to organize this and would, I think, make everyone happy. We'd have userspace drafts but a central place to track them. Hobit (talk) 21:15, 3 August 2013 (UTC)
Oppose as long as there are active workers on this there is no need to mark historical. My opinion is that this is a bit of a crazy idea and still seems controversial. Moving content to AFC seems like a good idea to me. But it is up to the project participants. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 06:30, 4 August 2013 (UTC)
Support. Userspace serves the same purpose as incubation. There are a lot of people who are unaware of the incubator, which reduces its capability to be useful, and its relevancy. In addition, articles often end up being kept in the incubator for a long time, without ever being worked on. It's a failed project, time to leave it in the past. Lukeno94(tell Luke off here)18:35, 11 August 2013 (UTC)
BOZ's proposal below seems like a good option, and would result in everything being moved out of the incubator except for a Noticeboard; at which point the other pages could be archived as historical. – SJ +21:44, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
Support Userspace incubation is a superior approach. If there are concerns about visibility of those pages, why not create a category for them? --BDD (talk) 22:41, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
Oppose. Given that a number of editors still find it useful, let's keep it and try to deal with the issues it has. It still seems the best option for collaboratively working on drafts. --Michig (talk) 06:51, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
A new proposal
I posted a notice about a proposal the other day that kind of precipitated the discussion above about closing the incubator. Ultimately, consensus was that my idea was generally unworkable due to lack of resources, and to be honest it was probably a bit complicated too. After looking at some of the comments above and reconsidering what I was trying to do with my proposal, I would like to propose an idea that is much more simplified and stripped down, and may help with some of the concerns raised above.
I propose a noticeboard for user space drafts that need work. I think we can do this in three sections. Section 1 would be user-submitted. That is, you have an article draft or soft deleted article in your user space, and you want some help with it, so you add it there. Section 2 would be for user space drafts posted by other users for users that have gone inactive – the community will either work on these, or they can be deleted or used in some other way. We could possibly include stale drafts from active users, although I think the user should be alerted before the page is added to the noticeboard. Section 3 could be for failed Articles for Creation – I have seen pages that were started, but the user working on it did not get it going well enough to get it approved, but with some attention from other users the page could be made viable. Users adding an entry would sign and date it, and new entries would go to the bottom so that the oldest would be on top.
Drafts that are improved enough to be moved to article space would be removed from the noticeboard. User-submitted drafts can be removed by that user at any time. Inherently unencyclopedic pages that should be deleted (hoaxes, patent nonsense, attack pages, copyright violations) or pages never intended to be articles (opinion pieces, lists of things the user finds interesting) should be removed immediately. Everything else should stay on the noticeboard for a specific but limited amount of time (3 months, 6 months?) to give people a chance to work on them, and then removed from the list once the deadline hits. Those pages could be sent to MFD by an user who wishes to do so; I think a provision could be made to MFD something before the deadline, but even then I would advise waiting (one month?) to give users time to work on it. Any page not deleted could be readded to the list, although it might be a good idea to have a waiting time before renominating to keep something from just being on the noticeboard indefinitely.
The remaining Article Incubator pages could be our first test cases.
Without actually commenting on the merits of this proposal, I would suggest you open this discussion at the appropriate village pump page and not tie it to this more or less dead project. Otherwise you run this risk of having your idea go down with this sinking ship. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:35, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
Sounds like Cenarium, above, is thinking along similar lines to what I was thinking. I don't want to step on any toes if he is prepared to take this further than I might. BOZ (talk) 19:14, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
Yes, it is similar with regard to combining these varied processes and pooling resources, though I think a namespace would be more workable than a noticeboard. Cenarium (talk) 00:04, 29 June 2013 (UTC)
Whatever way you think is best to organize it - let me know if you take it to the VP or somewhere else. BOZ (talk) 00:24, 29 June 2013 (UTC)
I guess my different recommendation would just be handling articles with common sense. If the topic is good but the article isn't ideal, leave it in mainspace and tag it. If it's marginal but someone is willing to actively work on it, userfy. If the topic is spammy, promotional, hopeless, copyvio, etc, then delete it. This can all be done without new policies. Wikipedia doesn't need a seperate process for every imaginable scenario. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind00:31, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
The problem with your "solution" is that the AfD process is in need of reformation. The purpose and role of the article incubator was to provide another solution and location for things that weren't ready for "prime time" as defined by those who participate in the AfD process. They want to delete articles, but there are some which are very fuzzy and merit some continued effort... but some who participate in the AfD process feel that they shouldn't remain in the main article namespace. I repeat, there have been success stories from the article incubation process. These are articles which have been through the AfD sausage mill and removed from the main namespace. If you are suggesting that perhaps that process needs to be scaled back a little bit with some topics meriting some "special attention" but otherwise left in the main article namespace.... perhaps you are right.
Keep in mind the incubator was also intended to present a friendly side to Wikipedia instead of telling a potential contributor to get lost and that their contribution isn't wanted. This is precisely the attitude that sometimes is presented in the AfD process as well to new contributors. Note here I'm not suggesting that there is patent nonsense that needs to be kept, but rather that there are some grey areas in the AfD process where offering an alternative to deletion is merited. This is in fact one of the reasons for the user space movement of some articles as a temporary measure, and again the incubator was intended to act as a way to collect these article together in one place instead of scattered across a thousand user pages. It is a "solution" to problems in the AfD process, and any attempt to set up an alternative should try and at least deal with these root causes which created article incubation in the first place. --Robert Horning (talk) 04:59, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
AFD, for all its warts, gets results and has been doing so for over a decade. The incubator, by contrast, has little to show for its existence besides wasted time and has been pretty much entirely rejected by the community. It's been tried, and it failed.
Your second paragraph is so far off the mark that I scarcely know where to start. You think incubation is friendly? Friendly?! This is one of the least friendly things we do, pumping new editors with totally false hope that they can advertise in Wikipedia if they just try harder, after which they'll get frustrated and leave once they see it's not true. Example: Let's say I'm a brand-new editor who just heard about Wikipedia and thinks it sounds really cool. So I sign up and create an article about my cat, or my garage band, or my small local business, or the webcomic I started drawing last week. What, at this point, would be the friendly thing to do? Politely but firmly tell me, preferably with a minimum of fuss and humiliation, that Wikipedia doesn't accept those sorts of articles, welcome me to the community and suggest some other ways I might be able to help instead? OR Tell me my article is awesome but it's going to the special 'incubation' room where it just needs some time to grow (lie!), that lots of other editors can't wait to work on it (lie!), and that it'll be back in mainspace someday (big ol' honkin' LIE!)? At this point, you've led this new editor so far astray that if you were Pinocchio you'd have a hole in your monitor, and the new editor will eventually either leave angry and bitter or just lose interest and forget the whole thing. That's not very friendly in my book. To use a non-Wikipedia example, it's a bit like telling your kid that if they pray hard enough their dog will turn into a dragon: all you'll get is wasted time, disappointment, and one kid who won't ever trust you again. Nobody wins. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 14:23, 2 July 2013
You are correct.... nobody wins because new contributors are thrown under the bus. As I was saying, the incubator was supposed to be for grey areas in the AfD process that seemed perhaps contentious and incubation offered a "3rd way out" of the process instead of a strictly black & white keep or delete. If you are suggesting that every article that comes into that sausage mill should be instantly incubated or kept, you are obviously missing the whole point of the process.
Wikipedia has become a cold and impersonal place. We are losing editors and not getting new ones to take their place. This has been a persistent problem and something raised on the village pump many times, so it shouldn't be a new thing to you either. I do remember a time when "leaders" on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects took for granted that we would have unwashed masses of people coming on and helping with the many projects involved with ever growing numbers and an attitude that new users were only interested in making articles about their local garage band, small business, or pet. No wonder why people are leaving if we have people like you telling them to get lost and never return! --Robert Horning (talk) 22:18, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
Has anyone ever proposed a workflow for articles nominated for assessment? There are currently five articles for which an assessment has been requested. Unscintillating (talk) 04:01, 22 July 2013 (UTC)
An objection was raised in the WP:AN discussion that there was a "total lack of evidence" on this page relevant to a topic ban. Is there anyone else that thinks there is a total lack of evidence on this page? Or even if anyone thinks it would clarify, I can be more detailed. Unscintillating (talk) 20:54, 17 August 2013 (UTC)
It is not surprising that no one has agreed that there is a "total lack of evidence" on this page, because they don't want to see the evidence detailed. Why do the admins do nothing? Unscintillating (talk) 03:17, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
Probably because you are being far more disruptive with your frivolous allegations than anyone else is... If anyone wants a topic ban from the AI, it's you, for OWNership reasons, if nothing else. Lukeno94(tell Luke off here)07:15, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
Don't even see any discussion. Incubator doesn't succeed because new users don't even know it exists. Simple. Thank you, MarioNovi (talk) 07:49, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
I had a similar problem. Although I knew the incubator existed, I didn't know how to participate. This is one of the differences with the new greenhouse workflow...with each discussion, a Wikiproject is notified. Over time this will work to keep the project and newcomers aware of the incubator. We also need to come up with other plans, and there has been some discussion of creating an Incubator Wikiproject if you are interested. Unscintillating (talk) 03:09, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions on Wikipedia:Article Incubator. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
