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Have you come here because I speedy-deleted your article / Proposed that your article should be deleted / Sent your article to Articles for Deletion? If so, then check your article does not fall into the following categories. If it does, change it so it doesn't (if that's possible), then get back to me.
1) Is your article nonsensical? - Is it written in English of a reasonably literate standard (i.e. not "PBA IT'S A GREAT BASKETBALL LEGUE.", so that I can understand what is being said? If it is not, I will nominate it for speedy deletion as Patent Nonsense, Vandalism, or as a foreign language article. Try a literacy or ESOL course (or paying attention a bit more at school), then try again when you can follow the Manual of Style.
Not quite the same thing, but still in need of deletion, are articles about topics that cannot possibly hope to be suitable for an encyclopedia. Take note of What Wikipedia Is Not for what will fall foul of this, particularly Wikipedia is not Urban Dictionary; Wikipedia is not for stuff you and your friends made up, and Wikipedia is not a crystal ball.
2) Does your article provide any context? - If your article just consists of a title and one line of text, then there's a good chance it will be nominated for speedy-deletion under articles criterion 1, which states that articles must provide enough context to be clear.
A particularly common cause of this deletion type seems to be people who post their articles to the page, a bit at a time. Please don't do this. It annoys New Pages patrollers and will often result in your article being inadvertently speedy-deleted because we don't know if you are going to come back or just leave it like that. Build your article first, keeping in mind that you need to show notability and verifiability, then post it to Wikipedia..
3) Is the subject of your article notable? - If the subject of the article is your high school girlfriend, the blog you've just set up, or yourself or your company, the answer is probably NO, and nothing you can do in Wikipedia will make the subject suddenly suitable for it, or make the article survive the inevitable deletion process. The subject has to pass the Wikipedia Notability Guidelines. If the subject is a BAND, and around half of all of the notability speedy-deletion tags I put on articles are about bands, then read WP:MUSIC. If the subject is a company, read WP:CORP, and if it is a website, read WP:WEB.
4) Have you sourced the article? - If you have asserted that the subject of your article is notable, you also need to provide use with some verification, so we know you are not making it up. It is no good just saying "John is notable because he is really popular" or somesuch thing, you have to provide us with proof. The source of the proof should be independent of the subject of the article. If your article has no sources or citations it will probably fail to get through Articles for Deletion, because it doesn't meet the verification guidelines.
A fairly common cause of inadvertent AFD nominations of articles about subjects that actually pass the notability test is that the author hasn't properly sourced this in the article text. It is no good just saying it on the talk page either.
5) Does your article appear to promote something? - The final category of articles I often find myself nominating for deletion are those that are, to put it bluntly, Spam. There are blatant spam articles that consist solely of "Go to my website, it is great" (these are speedy-deleted), there are self-promoting articles often by small businesses and (strangely) non-profit organisations (these usually go through proposed deletion), and there are articles that could become suitable for the encyclopedia if they were rewritten to a Neutral Point of View. If your article fits in the latter category, read WP:NPOV and WP:MOS and fix the wording of your article, then it won't get deleted.
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