Wikipedia:Quick guide to reviewing new articles
 | This is an explanatory essay about WP:New pages patrol. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
This page contains short guides and advice for reviewing various types of articles as part of new pages patrol. Where the main instructions page focuses on a mechanical view of how to process an article, this page summarizes key things to look out for on specific types of articles, as well as resources and likely outcomes.
Summary of outcomes
Accept – articles that comply with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines should be marked as reviewed and thus accepted into the encyclopedia. Articles should be further tagged with WikiProjects, (consider using User:Evad37/rater) and given short descriptions. {{Uncategorized}} or {{Improve categories}} should be added as appropriate, or consider adding categories yourself. Tag any major maintenance issues, and consider notifying relevant noticeboards for original research or fringe theories for significant problems or cases where you are unable to assess the article yourself due to lack of familiarity.
Speedy deletion – for pages egregiously in violation of Wikipedia's policies
BLPPROD – for biographies of living people with no citations to any reliable sources. BLPs with borderline-reliable sources or sources of unclear reliability should not be tagged for BLPPROD
PROD – for uncontroversial deletions of articles. If an article has even one citation with significant coverage in a potentially reliable source, or if you doubt your ability to effectvely search for sources for the subject due to a lack of familiarity, PROD should not be used.
AfD – the standard deletion process for all other articles that fail notability guidelines. Disputes over whether an article should be converted to a redirect are also resolved here. Redirects nominated for deletion are taken to RfD.
Merge – articles that duplicate content or significantly overlap in scope with another article should be merged. If the merge is simple, this can be performed boldly. More complicated merges should be tagged with {{merge}} (or {{merge to}} and {{merge from}}) and discussed. Depending on how urgent the need for the merge is, the page can be marked as reviewed before the merge is carried out.
Redirect – articles that don't meet notability guidelines but are mentioned or discussed in another article, conversion to redirect is a valid alternative to deletion. This can be done as a bold edit without prior discussion, but if disputed should be discussed further and eventually taken to AfD if no consensus can be found. If the article has relevant information cited to reliable sources, it may be appropriate to merge content.
Draftify – sending articles to draftspace is an option that should be used only for suspected conflicts of interest, if you yourself are planning on improving the article, or if the article is for a future event and is likely to eventually be notable. An additional reason to use draftify is if content in the article can be repurposed for a different article about a notable subject (e.g. a non-notable author's biography may have content that could be used for an article about their notable debut novel)
General advice for evaluating sources
The new pages patrol source guide is a useful resource that compiles the results of source reliability discussions. It has a lower standard for inclusion than the perennial sources list, and thus its listings are only as strong as the consensuses of the discussions that they are cited to.
Sources not included in existing source guides can be brought to the reliable sources noticeboard for discussion. However, unless a source is being used for contentious claims, you should try your best to evaluate its reliability yourself.
The Wikipedia Library platform offers access to many useful libraries of sources. Newspapers.com, Rock's Backpages and academic journals are excellent resources to apply for as a new page reviewer.
Subject-specific guides
Geography
For many types of geography articles, primary sources published by governments are often reliable, and can be considered when assessing notability. Articles passed on such a standard should be tagged with {{more citations needed}}
Inhabited places
Distinct inhabited places are virtually always notable per the subject-specific notability guideline, although neighborhoods, suburbs, commercial parks and other divisions without legal recognition are not considered to be automatically notable.
Roads
Major roads in cities and highways are highly likely to meet WP:GNG. Articles about roads are almost never inherently promotional, and it's possible for them to be verifiable and informative even if lacking significant coverage in a secondary source: as such, the only benefit that deletion of a non-notable road brings is that we don't dedicate any further editor-time to it that couldn't be better spent improving a different article. Assess whether sending the article to AfD is actually worth the additional effort required of both you and other editors.
Music
For most music-related subjects, any source with a fully professional editorial board and bylines on its articles can be considered reliable provided that it is not writing obviously promotional coverage. Note that many reliable sources will also run articles that promote an upcoming concert or that hype a recent release without providing much in the way of significant coverage. BLP content in music articles is subject to the usual level of caution surrounding biographies of living people. A valuable additional resource for music articles is the source guide maintained by Wikiproject Albums, and subscriptions to RocksBackPages are available through the Wikipedia Library platform. Music-related articles about subjects that are more than a decade old may also have coverage that can be found on Google Scholar.
Albums
The bread and butter of reliable coverage for albums are album reviews. When assessing notability, be careful to check that the reviews are not paid placements or self-published. The subject-specific notability guide for albums specifies that charting is a likely indicator of notability: in practice, unless there are several reasons to suspect that significant coverage does not exist of an album that has charted, an article about an album that has charted is extremely unlikely to be found not notable at AfD.
Albums that are not notable should be converted to redirects pointing to either the recording artist, or if applicable, a discography page for the recording artist. If the conversion to redirect is contested, AfD is an appropriate forum to resolve the matter.
Science
When evaluating the notability of a scientific concept, the main thing is to check that papers have been published on the subject by scientists working independently of each other: cross check the full authors list of cited papers. Google Scholar is a good place to search for coverage. Many papers will be paywalled, and in some cases you may have to make educated guesses based only on a paper's title and abstract.
Medicine
Medical claims in articles are subject to some of the strictest sourcing requirements, which are detailed at WP:MEDRS.