Wikipedia:Drafts are not checked for notability or sanity

Miscellany for deletion is a small and somewhat eccentric place with different norms to its big brother. People pattern-matching AfD norms to MfD sometimes encounter drafts that, while not eligible for a speedy deletion criterion, would be deleted with prejudice in the mainspace. When they send those drafts to MfD, they're often surprised to run into a snow keep. What they're missing is that drafts are not checked for notability or sanity.

Notability

Notability standards do not apply to draftspace; indeed, the weaker significance standards involved in the A7 mainspace speedy deletion criterion don't apply, either. They are not necessary as drafts are not indexed by web search engines, Wikipedia's majority source of traffic.

The archetypal "12 year old's Minecraft YouTube channel" draft is, if it's harming no one, entirely unproblematic. In fact, the biting effect of going out of one's way to try to delete such drafts (rather than just letting them disappear in six months) can leave someone with a long-term bitterness towards Wikipedia that persists at a life stage where they might otherwise be a productive editor.

Unproblematic non-notable drafts can happily sit for six months, and nominating them for deletion only makes them problematic. By nominating a draft for deletion, and by extension editing it, you reset the clock on G13. In cases where a draft is nominated late in its lifecycle, this can extend its life to nearly a year. It's far more valuable to extend the life of promising drafts than useless ones.

Sanity

Article speedy deletion criteria do not apply to drafts. Most such criteria don't check notability – they check sanity.

The corollary of this is that matters such as "could never conceivably be an article", "obviously made up in one day", or "not in English" are of much less concern in draftspace. This is not to say they have no value in MfD discussions – certainly the same draft has much less of a shot in Albanian than it does in English. (Be careful, however, that the Albanian draft isn't actually a notable topic needing translation!) However, there's no urgent need to nominate them either. The same caution above about the issue of leaving a lasting negative impression holds.

This may seem bizarre, but there's a method to the madness. The purpose of speedy deletion is to chunk out the most going-down-in-flames obvious cases, the matters for which it is unambiguous and inescapable that the topic is inappropriate for Wikipedia. Drafts are almost never unambiguously and inescapably inappropriate, particularly on the matters of their content. There is very little a draft can do to cause harm to its subjects; draftspace is an unindexed "storage bin" that's only accessible if you know what you're looking for and actively look for it. Letting the garbage collectors get it in six months solves everyone bureaucracy and frustration, rather than causing it.

Userspace drafts

All these considerations hold even truer for userspace drafts. "But userspace isn't self-cleaning!", you say. Yes, and it isn't meant to be. Userspace is a scratch pad for the person who has it. Unless a page (of any kind) in userspace is either an attack or blatant advertising, there's not much reason to mess with it.

Speedy deletion

The General speedy deletion criteria apply to drafts. Drafts may be deleted if they are any of the following:

• WP:G1 "Patent nonsense", which refers to gibberish of the "fuurger8t8eg9grgnwe7e8rwnieaioad8" keysmash kind and absolutely nothing else
• WP:G2 "Test pages" ("Can I really make an article here?"); note that, per the consensus found in a 2021 RfC, this criterion does not apply to drafts that if in mainspace would be deletable under A1/A3
• WP:G3. Vandalism and blatant hoaxes
• WP:G4. Pages entirely identical to those previously deleted under AfD or MfD
• WP:G5 Creations by banned or blocked users after their block or ban, e.g. by sockpuppets
• WP:G6 Uncontroversial maintenance
• WP:G7 Requested deletions by a sole contributor
• WP:G10 Attack pages, and WP:BLP private identifying information
• WP:G11 Unambiguous advertising
• WP:G12 Unambiguous copyvio

Consider the repetition of 'unambiguous' and similar insistence on clarity. The key for CSD is "do you have literally any doubt that the criterion applies?". If so, assume it does not.

So when is MfD appropriate?

It's possible, though rare, for a draft that isn't a speedy candidate to require deletion pre-G13. The biggest cases of this are when someone's manipulating the system. There are two big ways drafts can be problematic and require MfD:

1. A draft is being tendentiously resubmitted without approval, especially if combined with a deleted mainspace article
2. The G13 clock is being reset through minor edits near the end of the six-month window, without substantial improvement

Both of these will generally be uncontroversial MfDs, and are the major indicated use case for draft deletion discussions.

A more controversial indication for MfD can be a draft that's harmless but clearly inappropriate well past "not checked for notability or sanity", usually involving WP:NOT violations. These are generally deleted when they come up, but going out of your way to find them is discouraged; it's uncommon to happen across such drafts, and MfD regulars generally prefer not to be flooded with pages no one was going to see or interact with in the first place.

Serious BLP violations may be appropriate for MfD, but strongly consider whether the draft is eligible for a G3 or G10 speedy deletion first. MfD can be appropriate to discuss drafts where a tagging editor and a CSD-handling admin disagree that the page is G3- or G10-eligible.

See also

• Wikipedia:Drafts § Miscellany for deletion
• Wikipedia:Ragpicking
• User:Ivanvector/Drafts are cheap