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Presidential judicial nominees automatically notable

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I would like to propose a Wikipedia rule change. Whenever the president of the United Stated nominates somebody to be a federal judge, I propose that person is automatically considered notable & allowed to have a page created. I base this on several reasons;

  1. Federal judges are the heads of one of the three branches of government. There are only approximately 860 judgeships authorized out of a country of over 330 million people. These are the most elite attorneys in the country & nobody will ever be nominated without having a notable career in the first place.
  2. When the president makes an announcement he is nominating federal judges, it is covered in a variety of media outlets all across the country in addition to the local media outlets the judge is being nominated for.
  3. Not allowing judicial nominees to be automatically presumed notable can lead to political reasoning for deletion request. Judges are a very hot topic & this can lead to certain nominees having deletion requested while others don't. To date, I do not believe any of President Trump's 230 federal judges ever had a deletion request put in for them. President Biden has nominated 176 nominees for federal judges yet only a dozen or so have had deletion request put in. This can lead to inconsistencies & unwarranted back & fourths in AFD's that I have personally seen turn ugly.
  4. There is immense interest in the judiciary at this point & time so anytime the president makes nominations, people want to learn more about the nominees. Wikipedia has been a great vehicle to learn about these nominees until recently due to a small number of users putting in deletion request.
  5. Once an attorney is nominated, they will in almost every case become notable. Either they will be confirmed & have a lifetime appointment on the judiciary or they won't be confirmed due to some controversy which certainly will make them notable.
  6. There are many Wikipedia users who often update the pages for judicial nominees. @Snickers2686, @Marquardtika & @Novemberjazz are a few that come to mind. Allowing all judicial nominees to automatically be considered notable will stop users from getting frustrated after putting in so much time & effort to create & update pages, only to have another user put in a deletion request & get the page deleted.
  7. I believe the justification for judicial nominees automatically being notable could fall under WP:Some stuff exists for a reason & WP:COMMON.

MIAJudges (talk) 05:11, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

  • Oppose. Nominees who are rejected by the Senate, withdrawn by the President, or for any other reason do not assume the position are not presumptively notable. Cbl62 (talk) 05:29, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    nobody will ever be nominated without having a notable career in the first place Aileen Cannon, Brett Talley, Justin R. Walker, and Sarah Pitlyk, among others, disprove that assertion. Cbl62 (talk) 05:35, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    WP:USCJN says otherwise: Nominees whose nomination is rejected by the United States Senate are inherently notable, as the rejection of a nominee to such a position is a rare and politically important event. Snickers2686 (talk) 16:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    There's a vast difference between REJECTED and NOT YET CONFIRMED. A Presidential nominee should automatically be considered notable. Once they are confirmed, they obviously remain notable. If they are rejected by the Senate, whether they are notable or not depends on the reasons for the rejection and the politics involved. Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:27, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    WP:USCJN appears to be a project's private notions on notability, with no more authority than any other essay. Ravenswing 22:48, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    To you, is there no useful information in that virtually everyone who actually works on judiciary-related articles opposes the deletion campaign? This is just a fight between one faction asserting that nominations are important and the other asserting that they aren't, neither with any real reasoning, but at least one has experience. Iowalaw2 (talk) 04:33, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    There are certainly a bunch of you who feel like your ox is being gored, but the useful information to keep in mind here is that outside of your cadre (and some anon IPs), this proposal has received near-unanimous opposition, as has the attempt to sanction someone at ANI over this. No one is suggesting that United States judicial nominations are unimportant; they simply are not prima facie evidence of being able to meet the GNG, and your faction has failed to provide the slightest shred of evidence to the contrary. This is exactly why proposed changes to notability guidelines go to the neutral and non-partisan community, rather than being dictated by the self-interest of small factions. Does it truly not get your attention that numerous veteran editors oppose this proposal, and have expounded as to why at length? Ravenswing 14:32, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Let's take these items one by one. For #1, as cbl62 noted, the concept that these are the "best attorneys" in the country is just your opinion and there is no real evidence to back up such a claim. For #2, again, it may be the case that the person in question is covered in some way by the press, but they still need to pass the requisite WP:SIGCOV to pass WP:GNG. Passing mentions and relisting the biography given by the WH does not cut it. As for #3, while this has been tossed around by many with little evidence, this is an example of WP:OTHERTHINGSEXIST which is not a reason for keeping any article. #4 is a clear case of WP:ILIKEIT and WP:FAN which are not reasons for keeping any article. Cbl62 already covered #5. As for #6, articles can be put in the draftspace so that editors can continue to work on them until they meet WP:GNG, like Charnelle Bjelkengren, or get confirmed, when they will meet WP:JUDGE. #7, simply WP:NOCOMMON. Let'srun (talk) 13:24, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose: I don't find the reasoning to amend WP:NPOL and WP:JUDGE compelling. This would also necessarily amend WP:ROUTINE to make an exception merely for judicial nominees regardless of whether they attain a position of notability. The difference here is a matter of weeks or months; given that there's no WP:DEADLINE, I don't find reason to make an end run around our existing guidelines. The OP cites avoiding deletion discussions and wastes of effort; that is what the draft space is for. There's nothing about this that isn't adequately handled already, especially with List of federal judges appointed by Joe Biden, which houses also pending nominations. Courtesy ping to @BD2412: the acknowledged major contributor to this field. I believe a courtesy notification to WP:USCJN is also in order. Iseult Δx parlez moi 17:07, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • I have been thinking about this for a very long time. I think that it is generally uncommon for a person to be nominated to a federal judgeship who can not already be found to meet the WP:GNG, but that raises the question of whether we need a nominee-directed provision if these articles can be sourced and kept without such a provision. BD2412 T 23:23, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    That's where I am: if a person who is nominated for a federal judgeship is inherently notable for some reason, we ought to be able to establish that prior to actual confirmation, not merely through virtue of nomination. I don't see what's wrong with the current criteria. GNG stands. As for nominees rejected by the Senate, we ought to be able to make a difference between stonewalled privately as opposed to, say, the clock running out before the end of the term or session. The latter certainly confers no notability. To make a determination on the former is WP:CRYSTAL. Iseult Δx parlez moi 01:49, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I mostly agree with this, but every nominee is different and just asserting that a judicial nominee is notable without any additional justification seems like opening a can of worms which would lead to every Presidential appointee for every last agency receiving an article, even for the most trivial of roles where only primary coverage about the subject is readily availiable. @MIAJudges in particular seems in his arguments to fail the concept of WP:NOT, in that not everything needs a wikipedia article, and just because WP:ILIKEIT does not justify including articles about non-noteworthy subjects. As Iseult noted, articles can be moved to the draftspace when the person gets the needed GNG coverage as it is, or once they are confirmed, and there is no WP:DEADLINE.
    On another issue, what are your thoughts on the nominees for the D.C. courts such as the Superior Court of the District of Columbia? They receive much less coverage than even federal district court nominees do, in my experience, so I see no reason not to apply the current WP:USCJN district court guidelines there as well. Let'srun (talk) 15:18, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    To the extent that we are speaking of federal judicial appointees who are nominated by the President of the United States, require approval by the United States Senate, and once approved remain in office beyond the term of their appointing president, I don't differentiate at the District Court/specialty court level (there is also a the Court of Federal Claims, the Tax Court, and the Court of International Trade, among others). BD2412 T 23:26, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose. For me, any proposal which includes "automatically notable" is a non-starter. RoySmith (talk) 15:23, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support @RoySmith: the notability standards are full of "automatically notable" provisions, although they are not specifically expressed with those words. Take WP:SPORTSPERSON, for instance: "A sportsperson is presumed to be notable if the person has won a significant honor and so is likely to have received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject. ..." The current proposal could easily be expressed by "A presidential nominee for a Federal judgeship is presumed to be notable if that person has received, before or after their nomination, significant national or local media coverage of their legal or political career in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject..." etc. This amounts to being the equivalent of "automatically notable". Let's not throw out a good idea due to some perhaps faulty wording. Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:59, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose - I think it highly likely that anyone nominated for a federal judgeship will have enough coverage to establish notability under GNG - but that is not the same as being automatically notable.
    What we perhaps need is a discussion about the type of coverage necessary. There may not be news coverage, but there may well be coverage in other types of sources. Blueboar (talk) 11:54, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    I oppose for similar reasons, but the context here is that a couple of editors are trying (partially successfully) to wipe all of the articles for Biden's judicial nominees. I'd encourage those with similar thoughts to express their opposition to this campaign here. Iowalaw2 (talk) 19:53, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support - In the current political climate, a president's nominees are highly likely to be be confirmed and become a part of the judicial branch. The fact that a President is nominating them almost in and of itself means that the lawyer is notable for their previous experience. As another user said, it's similar to a draft pick by a sports team. They haven't played for the new team yet, but it is highly likely that they will and also highly likely that they have previous noteworthy accomplishments. 167.7.37.83 (talk) 15:47, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    WP:CRYSTAL isn't a legitimate reason to have a wikipedia page for any individual. Let'srun (talk) 17:35, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support: Words have meeting. If a person being nominated to a lifetime position in one of the three branches of the Federal government is not "notable" and worthy of a Wikipedia page, but the Loch Ness monster is, then Wikipedia is a joke and the editors don't understand the meaning of "notable." The opposition to this proposal is a partisan attack on Biden's nominees, and taking down these pages reflects badly on Wikipedia and its so-called moderation of content. 2601:582:8502:4BF0:7985:A872:9F7B:4BE4 (talk) 20:02, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose For the above reasons plus a fundamental wording flaw. SNG's are worded to say that something that meets their criteria are presumed notable and that being a temporary presumption that GNG sources exist. In contrast to the categorical wording of this proposal. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:11, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    Why? Has an article on such a judge been deleted or been moved to draft space? Judges also of lesser courts have articles Paradise Chronicle (talk) 20:48, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    A few have; see the related ANI thread. BilledMammal (talk) 21:12, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    My point was not to hypothesize about things like that. It was to point out that the choice of wording (categorically declaring notability vs. "presumed notable") is in conflict with how SNGs are and need to be written. North8000 (talk) 12:53, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Not all judges are nominated because of a notable career, and nominations alone don't always result in the level of coverage required for notability. In other words, being nominated is not a good predictor of notability. BilledMammal (talk) 21:12, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose: Not only has the proposer provided no evidence that judicial nominees by that fact alone generally meet the GNG, but the findings in a majority of the AfDs currently in question are that they do not. Like BD2412, I expect that many such may well do so, but in those cases their articles can stand and fall on that.

    Moreover, this is not the United States Wikipedia. What makes US Presidential nominees presumptively notable, and political nominations from the President of Brazil (or the Philippines, or Russia, or South Africa, or ...) not? There would need to be a very strong argument, and a very strong injustice being done, for there to be such a unique carve-out for the actions of a single head of state, and nothing of the sort has been proffered. (One might think, for instance, that the political nominations of Narendra Modi, the head of government of a nation with a far larger English-speaking population's than America's, would be worthy of at least equal attention.)

    Finally, good grief! Proposing changing the language of notability criteria because there are a handful of users frustrated at the current standards? They are much better off learning to live with those standards. The nature of a consensus-driven environment is that sometimes you're going to be on the wrong side of consensus, in which case it's better to lose gracefully and move on. Ravenswing 22:54, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

    This is a page for proposals. It’s literally what this page is for. So yes, users will come here to make proposals as I have done. It has nothing to do with losing gracefully & moving on. Some of the pages I advocated keeping were kept. But even if every single article had been kept, this proposal is for setting a standard going forward.
    MIAJudges (talk) 23:02, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    (cocks his head) For someone who repeatedly insists he's done talking to me, you seem to respond to my posts an awful lot. That being said, you're misunderstanding. You have every right to make proposals here, to whatever end you think best. But one of the most bizarre reasons possible for changing notability criteria is that there are a handful of editors put out by the existing wording. We propose changes in criteria because they'll better serve the encyclopedia and/or better reflect the GNG, not because there are editors who find following the existing guidelines a hardship. Ravenswing 23:12, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    I am replying to you here because you implied crap about me such as I’m not losing gracefully and moving on. Had you stuck to the actual merit of the argument & not included shots at me personally, I would not have replied at all. So if you have nothing else to say about me or to me I certainly will respond in kind.
    MIAJudges (talk) 23:21, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    (cocks his head) What gives you the impression I was referring to you with that? That comment was directed to those who -- as you said -- were likely to be frustrated because the notability guidelines are not already written to their liking. That's being very quick to take comments personally. Ravenswing 02:31, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    Would it kill you to quit antagonizing MIAJudges? It's obvious what you're doing and it's obnoxious, not clever. Iowalaw2 (talk) 04:31, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    MIAJudges has said repeatedly, and in several venues, that they're Done Engaging With Me. That lasts until the next time, and until the time after that. Would it have killed MIAJudges to not single out my response here to jump on? Ravenswing 05:58, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    For me it's not really obvious what you're doing. For me it just looked like Ravenswing was answering direct responses. The part of Ravenswing's oppose that MIA took personally seems to be to point 6, that There are many Wikipedia users who often update the pages for judicial nominees...Allowing all judicial nominees to automatically be considered notable will stop users from getting frustrated after putting in so much time & effort to create & update pages, only to have another user put in a deletion request & get the page deleted. Ravenswing's point wasn't inappropriate: editors working outside of current policy is not a compelling reason to change that policy. Valereee (talk) 11:17, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose This is a global project and we should be leery of carving out county-specific guidance. Also I oppose with the same reasons as the other people commenting here, including North800, Ravenswing, and BD2412. --Enos733 (talk) 22:57, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support The American people have the right to know about federal judicial nominees. Judges are appointed for life, and many judicial nominees will become judges. Furthermore, people can write to their Senators about whether to support or oppose a judge, but they generally don't do that unless they know a bit about the nominee. Judicial nominees' Wikipedia pages are good places for learning about the nominees. If the judicial nominees' pages are taken down, the judicial nominations process will be less honest and transparent. Fluthy (talk) 05:14, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    I agree that the American people have the right to know about nominees for Federal judgeships… but that does not mean that Wikipedia must be where they can find that information. Blueboar (talk) 12:49, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose The small group of editors who have pushed this topic area have done an absolutely piss-poor job of reflecting long-notable historical figures. Why should we give them ammunition to further the notion that Wikipedia is a current events or news site and that press releases signify notability simply because of where they emanate from? That's exactly what I see occurring whenever I see these articles appear. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 05:47, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose per North8000 and Ravenswing. Plus, we cannot assume nominees have significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. starship.paint (exalt) 06:02, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support: The American people deserve to know who nominees for federal judgeships are, just like with major party candidates, no matter if you support the current president or not. From seeing the conduct of "Let'srun here, it is obvious that they have a bias which is blind to what makes someone truly notable. Someone above said that they were uncomfortable with carving out an exception to just the United States, and I would say why not have pages for judicial nominees in other countries? 137.99.94.240 (talk) 11:15, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    I would say why not have pages for judicial nominees in other countries? - that’s because whether we have pages on any person is based on WP:GNG (significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject), and not whether any nationality of people deserves to know them. starship.paint (exalt) 12:13, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support: Anyone who was ever considered for a lifetime appointment is notable. Not all nominees that fail are for lifetime appointments but judicial nominees are lifetime appointments EPMen (talk) 01:39, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Let me save you some time - On the English Wikipedia in 2023, any proposal to grant "automatic notability" to a subject is going to fail. It doesn't matter what the subject is. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 01:47, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Waste of time - automatic notability is only really of use if we either think a) for the nature of this, we reduce the notability standards of GNG (GEOLAND is the main example of this) or b) we are confident there are sources, but they'll be tricky to get at (a few of the more niche NMUSIC criteria (not quite automatic, I know), but very rare these days with most sourcing online). If it's just "because they all have sources readily available", then, well, why not just add the sources? As a final addendum, a country-specific notability policy is an absolute no-go, and disturbingly america-centric by the creator. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:01, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Note for closer This seems like headed for a clear no, but do note that there has been off wiki canvassing of this thread. — Preceding unsigned comment added by CapnJackSp (talk • contribs) 05:49, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
    Why am I not surprised, especially with the raft of anon IPs and other contributors with suspiciously low edit counts coming in to support. Ravenswing 06:28, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Tɛmplet:Archive bottom

RfC on draftifying a subset of mass-created Cricketer microstubs

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Tɛmplet:Rfc Should the following 1,182 biographical microstubs, which were mass-created by Lugnuts and cover cricketers, be moved out of article space? 06:17, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Tɛmplet:Cot

ArticleInitial sizeCurrent sizeGrowthDate created# of extant articles created
by Lugnuts on same day
A Aravinddaraj1963196742019/12/0953
Aadil Rashid16181692742021/02/2773
Aakarshit Gomel164724117642020/02/1229
Aakash Choudhary166117851242018/12/0645
Aamer Ishaq17381789512016/06/165
Aamir Aziz135322038502015/10/1161
Aaqib Khan164824007522020/01/1133
Aaquib Nazir163517511162017/11/0938
Aaron Bradley1572157972020/11/0128
Abdul Ameer134014831432015/11/1245
Abdul Aziz (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa cricketer)17361788522016/10/1848
Abdul Kayium21322224922019/04/0124
Abdul Mannan (cricketer)175618591032016/11/2313
Abdul Masood14591493342016/03/299
Abdul Naseri166021124522018/05/027
Abdul Rahman (Afghan cricketer)163421304962017/12/1015
Abdul Rauf (cricketer)166321054422018/10/1644
Abdul Razzak Rajib16991747482017/06/0228
Abdul Wahab Dar16911754632016/11/2045
Abdullah Jan135215111592015/11/1432
Abdullah Mukaddam16751766912016/11/1334
Abdur Rahman (Bangladeshi cricketer)14361520842016/09/2539
Abdur Rehman (cricketer, born 1989)13781403252016/10/0331
Abhay Joshi16361675392019/01/0730
Abhijeet Garg166920313622018/12/0645
Abhijeet Saket165824017432018/12/3068
Abhijeet Saranath16521733812018/12/0645
Abhijit Chakraborty161621405242018/01/0841
Abhijit Karambelkar16561710542017/01/3022
Abhijit Salvi163521264912017/02/2546
Abhijit Sarkar (cricketer)134822038552015/10/1161
Abhik Mitra14521487352016/03/299
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Abhishek Kaushik (cricketer, born 1994)16151674592019/03/0822
Abhishek Tamrakar165420724182016/10/2014
Abhishek Tanwar165023707202016/11/2045
Abhishek Thakuri165424197652017/11/2531
Abhishek Yadav (cricketer)159320524592016/11/0635
Abid Hasan (cricketer)135417533992015/12/2123
Abinash Saha162417661422016/11/1334
Abraham de Swardt1503150852020/12/0245
Abrar Ahmed (Indian cricketer)14681485172016/04/1613
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Abubakar Khan17741834602016/11/227
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Aby John14421507652015/07/1824
Adam Clarke (Cambridge University cricketer)143816612232017/04/1717
Adam Hope (cricketer)17161537-1792015/05/0338
Adam Mather1804180622017/01/0722
Adam Smith (cricketer)15431592492015/12/1228
Adeesha Thilanchana17571848912018/02/2536
Adil Akram17411805642016/10/1047
Adil Nisar13251369442015/11/098
Adil Sheikh14451480352016/04/0229
Aditya Dhumal162324207972016/11/1334
Aditya Jain14351477422016/04/0939
Aditya Kaushik140221597572016/04/0939
Aditya Rout15691616472021/01/1058
Aditya Sethi16841676-82019/09/2517
Aditya Shanware16591681222015/10/0626
Aditya Singhania167224017292018/11/0154
Adjodha Persaud13961443472020/11/2249
Adnan Baig13301411812015/11/2932
Adnan Butt143116091782015/07/1512
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Adnan Raees134415001562015/11/1115
Adnan Sabri15421619772016/10/1848
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Adrian Grant (cricketer)14961495-12020/11/1444
Afaq Ahmed (cricketer)142616852592016/10/0239
Afaq Shahid158920054162018/09/2861
Afsar Nawaz13391384452015/11/1010
Aftab Alam (Pakistani cricketer)133618705342015/11/0843
Afzaal Saeed16551732772017/02/1619
Afzal Zazai16201634142017/12/1015
Agith Rajapaksha17451822772018/12/3068
Agniv Pan163124748432016/10/1341
Agrim Tiwari164723497022020/01/2741
Ahemd Abidul Haque16811330-3512019/11/1228
Ahmar Ashfaq159419733792018/09/0865
Ahmed Asfandyar17841875912016/10/0331
Ahmed Butt (cricketer)13311412812015/11/1245
Ahmed Dar13231380572015/11/277
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Ahmed Hayat133914981592015/11/0843
Ahmed Rafiuddin14881509212016/04/2354
Ahmed Sadequr14101450402016/09/2539
Ahmed Shah (Indian cricketer)165324207672018/12/3068
Ahsan Baig15861665792018/09/0359
Ahsanul Kabir15731591182021/03/0183
Aidan Brooker16481700522016/09/1526
Aidan Olivier14931553602020/12/0540
Aishwary Marya160718662592018/10/0815
Ajay Divecha16321667352016/04/0817
Ajay Kumar (cricketer)162917911622016/11/2045
Ajay Lamabam162123397182019/02/2156
Ajay Pradhan156219884262018/09/2368
Ajay Rana168220914092017/02/0218
Ajay Sarkar161917201012017/02/2546
Ajit Bhatia15721612402016/04/0720
Ajit Das Gupta15271562352016/04/0617
Ajith Kumara (cricketer)17271774472021/04/2221
Ajmal Khan (cricketer)164120694282017/08/1361
Ajoy Das13951446512016/03/2732
Akash Choudhary163623527162019/02/2156
Akash Malhotra14551490352016/04/0939
Akash Senaratne173823065682017/03/1714
Akash Sharma158917311422018/11/1239
Akavi Yeptho15901648582021/02/2773
Akbar Badshah13641408442015/11/2416
Akeel Inham162818282002017/04/0519
Akhilesh Sahani159723417442018/09/1981
Akhona Kula159317291362016/09/1526
Akhtar Shah163119753442020/10/1538
Akila Isanka179619111152017/03/1330
Akila Jayasundera176119381772017/03/1411
Akila Lakshan160918122032017/04/0415
Akoijam Tenyson Singh164120844432019/01/0730
Akshat Pandey166120844232015/12/1319
Akshay Brahmbhatt16381686482016/11/2118
Akshay Chauhan13861422362015/10/2318
Akshay Jain158223257432018/10/0447
Akshay Kolhar13471395482015/10/1724
Akshaykumar Singh158620444582018/09/1981
Al-Imran (cricketer)16551712572018/02/0934
Al Bashid Muhammed165223496972019/10/0546
Alagh Prathiban16531686332020/02/0436
Alan Cripps14781532542017/11/0334
Alan Cuff16581691332016/03/0519
Alan Davidson (cricketer, born 1897)16481714662015/11/2124
Alan Devlin (cricketer)1515152052020/10/1648
Alan Favell14881530422018/12/1125
Alan Finlayson (cricketer)25022131-3712013/08/073
Alan Jacobson15431635922016/03/1331
Alan Matthews (cricketer)23812191-1902013/08/0421
Alan McInnes16261564-622015/11/2248
Alan Reid (cricketer)14881540522020/10/0760
Alan Tarr1501150322020/12/1541
Alan Wyatt16841702182017/02/0811
Albert Bates (cricketer)17491791422020/10/1429
Albert Bowden18011729-722016/12/2330
Albert Brown (Australian cricketer)16541692382015/11/1815
Albert Dakin16641707432020/10/1648
Albert Drew158717161292017/08/2225
Albert Fox (cricketer)16051671662015/07/2712
Albert Freeman (cricketer, born 1844)15661642762017/03/1245
Albert Frost (cricketer)16981737392016/01/1720
Albert Harding14261484582020/11/2934
Albert Hassell (cricketer)14571456-12020/11/1444
Albert Heffer14621497352016/05/319
Albert Hewitt15311563322020/10/0433
Albert Lansdown165917671082015/11/2016
Albert McGinn15591573142020/10/0548
Albert Philpott16391730912015/07/2623
Albert Putt17601663-972016/06/1934
Albert Rigby152516271022017/09/2624
Albert Scanes17851710-752017/01/3121
Albert Shugg16301695652016/03/019
Albert Sims15571611542020/10/0760
Albert Weeks15231569462020/09/3024
Albert Whiting17741865912017/02/0811
Albert Wilkins15651553-122020/12/1636
Alcon Bowman164317671242015/07/2623
Alec Clarke1544154732020/12/0740
Alec Douglas15341588542016/04/1312
Alec Kerr150818143062016/06/1312
Alec Marks17801686-942017/01/0722
Alec Parker (cricketer)14551499442020/10/0760
Alec Riddolls15681567-12020/10/2839
Alex Cooke14661528622015/07/165
Alex Weir (cricketer)1508150802020/09/3024
Alexander Addison (cricketer)165417931392016/01/1720
Alexander Barras162917381092017/10/1938
Alexander Cox (cricketer)15241559352017/04/2816
Alexander Fisher (cricketer)15701663932020/10/0344
Alexander Garbis14621503412016/03/2732
Alexander Littlejohn167317831102020/10/2629
Alexander Mavhiko16891744552017/02/2427
Alexander Meston23122121-1912013/07/2123
Alexander Morgan (cricketer)15031498-52020/11/0831
Alexander Morrison (cricketer)1551155982016/06/1934
Alexander Robinson (cricketer, born 1924)16171649322017/07/1416
Alexander Slight153916741352020/09/2645
Alexander Webster (cricketer)16111668572017/09/2624
Alfred Bashford15401624842017/03/1615
Alfred Black (cricketer)16281574-542015/05/0218
Alfred Bourne (cricketer)152616321062017/04/1015
Alfred Britton15351567322020/12/1940
Alfred Browne (cricketer)15581647892020/11/1242
Alfred Burchett17571624-1332015/05/0218
Alfred Carlton16541748942015/07/2623
Alfred Clarke (Surrey cricketer)15751641662017/03/1245
Alfred Dearlove17091537-1722014/03/3050
Alfred Douglas (cricketer)16911682-92016/01/1620
Alfred Eneberg15091462-472018/11/2728
Alfred Geary17571748-92016/12/2822
Alfred Grace17781596-1822014/04/0117
Alfred Hasell16921763712020/10/1750
Alfred Low15481616682020/11/2934
Alfred Motta15431538-52020/11/0831
Alfred Noyes (cricketer)17631630-1332015/05/0338
Alfred Park (cricketer)17781684-942017/01/148
Alfred Patfield160917161072017/07/1416
Alfred Pickett161217301182016/01/1720
Alfred Randell16191594-252017/07/1416
Alfred Scott (New Zealand cricketer)17651668-972016/06/2018
Alfred Sloman15831627442016/06/2118
Alfred Sullivan17931715-782017/02/0218
Alfred Thomson (cricketer)17611626-1352015/01/2910
Alfred Waterman23102137-1732013/07/2014
Alfred White (Australian cricketer)17711758-132017/02/069
Alfred Wilkes17031688-152016/03/0712
Alfred Wilkinson (cricketer)15551601462020/09/3024
Algernon Findlay17111702-92016/01/2310
Ali Ahmad (cricketer)15791555-242019/08/0156
Ali Ahmed (cricketer)16431702592017/11/2927
Ali Arman171021614512016/12/1318
Ali Azmat (cricketer)13261351252015/11/1010
Ali Haider (cricketer)13371418812015/11/1245
Ali Hasnain15831662792018/10/2448
Ali Khan (Pakistani cricketer)132815021742015/11/1245
Ali Mustafa (cricketer)159220354432017/12/1660
Ali Raza (cricketer, born 1974)14871549622016/04/0720
Ali Raza (cricketer, born 1977)132314371142015/11/1245
Ali Salman (cricketer)160720224152018/09/2760
Alison White (cricketer)16921445-2472014/03/2910
Alistair Applethwaite14591500412020/11/1952
Allan Anderson (cricketer)17281634-942016/12/2227
Allan Cooper17761867912016/12/2516
Allan Jemmott15361575392020/11/1444
Allan Jinks16501695452015/11/2248
Allan Outridge15161514-22020/11/2249
Allan Silvera14831478-52020/11/1030
Allen Collier15181562442020/11/0128
Allen Edwards (cricketer)15721526-462018/10/3124
Allen Kerr (cricketer)154817111632016/06/1312
Allen Limb16521748962016/01/2440
Allen Roberts146516571922016/03/249
Allen Thatcher18051711-942017/02/0319
Allister Majola16571703462017/11/2339
Allman Agard1407140812020/11/2635
Almas Shaukat168821464582015/10/1044
Alois Tichana17931844512017/02/2427
Alok Chandra Sahoo135714661092015/10/0626
Alok Sharma (cricketer)13921455632016/04/0720
Aloka Amarasiri181219171052016/12/0419
Aloke Mazumdar14661501352016/03/299
Alokendu Lahiri14681503352016/04/0321
Alshaaz Pathan16551672172015/12/1319
Altaf Ahmed138115281472015/12/2123
Altemont Wellington13941453592017/04/1120
Alton Beckford1643164632020/11/0542
Alwis Nanayakkara16681733652019/01/2762
Alwyn Curnick14821533512020/12/0740
Amal Athulathmudali135915271682016/01/3015
Aman Deep15851393-1922014/04/0528
Aman Kumar19542027732019/12/0953
Amar Naeem159418682742014/04/0528
Ambikeshwar Mishra163221214892017/03/0427
Ameer Hamza153123498182015/06/2313
Ameer Saiyed21802209292019/08/1964
Ameet Sampat158617511652016/02/0819
Amherst Hammond15071563562016/04/0617
Amila Gunawardene15361601652017/11/1038
Amila Madusanka168221314492018/02/2432
Amir Ali (Indian cricketer)152617161902016/04/1613
Amir Zazai174922164672018/05/027
Amit Ali157422807062021/02/2476
Amit Banerjee142617473212016/03/2546
Amit Das (Odisha cricketer)16341695612015/12/1228
Amit Das (Tripura cricketer)131714531362015/10/0626
Amit Hore14291464352016/03/2832
Amit Kumar (Arunachal Pradesh cricketer)169818431452019/10/0135
Amit Kumar (Himachal Pradesh cricketer)166618621962017/01/2942
Amit Suman155617231672016/04/1116
Amitava Chakraborty14911526352016/03/2619
Amitava Das14251487622016/03/2732
Amitava Roy (cricketer)14521490382016/04/0124
Amith Eranda163321425092017/04/0315
Amitha Kaushalya194624044582019/03/1243
Amjad Qureshi17691685-842013/07/1522
Amjad Waqas136615221562015/11/0843
Amlanjyoti Das163324338002019/10/0741
Amod Yadav161922676482020/01/2741
Amoda Widanapathirana20702117472020/01/0412
Amogh Sunil Desai135015261762015/10/1044
Amol Jungade13491394452015/10/1724
Amol Ubarhande13511396452015/10/0626
Amos Rai154223117692018/09/2065
Anand Bais135015181682015/10/1819
Anand Bhatia15811626452016/04/0720
Anand Swaroop15181585672016/04/1116
Andawaththa Tyronne18131906932017/03/1714
Andre Dwyer1457146252020/11/0643
Andrew Benke14481484362017/04/0924
Andrew Brewster180919261172017/03/3019
Andrew Cadle15681660922020/12/2032
Andrew Cyster14921552602020/12/0245
Andrew Dewar1530153002020/12/0844
Andrew Dewhurst14831545622015/07/165
Andrew Durham17181744262016/12/1516
Andrew Eime15271570432018/10/3124
Andrew Hammelmann1462146312020/10/0433
Andrew Hutchinson (cricketer)14801469-112016/05/2119
Andrew Jones (Australian cricketer)17001658-422017/01/0215
Andrew Lawson (cricketer)15041576722020/12/1144
Andrew Meek155716691122017/07/1416
Andrew Morey17121711-12020/10/2746
Andrew Sainsbury16751666-92017/01/257
Andrew Vanlalhruaia166923256562019/01/0730
Andrew Wildsmith15841654702015/12/0621
Andrew Wilkins14051459542020/12/1636
Angadu Narayanan160819853772018/11/1239
Angus Dahl17201816962019/03/2631
Angus Learmond1557156362020/11/2158
Angus Marshall15331621882020/10/0548
Anil Bhardwaj (cricketer)16351672372016/04/0720
Anil Bhattacharjee14871526392016/03/2546
Anil Das Gupta15571592352016/04/0617
Anil Dutt14211462412016/03/2732
Anil Jain (cricketer)14381473352016/04/0939
Anil Mathur17391776372016/04/0939
Anil Subba16201690702019/11/1431
Anilkumar Khanna14621497352016/04/0939
Anirban Chatterjee14761544682016/03/2619
Aniruddha Roy14441516722016/04/0124
Anirudh Kanwar168823376492019/09/2517
Anis-ur-Rehman17631818552015/11/277
Anis Siddiqi17301753232015/11/1245
Anish Charak15831674912021/01/1177
Anjana de Silva163821805422018/03/1012
Anjula Perera173919392002021/04/2221
Ankit Dabas19662025592016/01/1018
Ankit Dane168024497692015/11/0216
Ankit Lamba133514581232015/10/0626
Ankit Maini161420234092019/02/2226
Ankit Tiwari (cricketer)16541675212017/02/2023
Ankitkar Jaiswal15921641492021/01/1274
Ankur Julka14411500592016/04/0939
Ankur Vasishta20171775-2422014/11/2825
Ankush Bedi140121867852015/10/2318
Ankush Singh24167216482015/10/2318
Anmol Malhotra162921545252017/01/2942
Ansar Javed13091357482015/11/1432
Anshul Tripathi162019903702018/01/1228
Anshuman Singh (cricketer)165517671122017/03/0622
Ansley Jansze17161781652017/11/2035
Anthony Amalfi15591629702015/12/1014
Anthony Andrews (cricketer)1524152732020/11/0542
Anthony Atkins14761498222020/11/1242
Anthony Bendel1492149972020/12/1940
Anthony Brown (cricketer)14641514502020/10/0136
Anthony Campbell (cricketer)15191514-52020/11/0542
Anthony Chubb1571157102020/12/0740
Anthony Clark (cricketer)17381644-942016/12/2418
Anthony Evans (cricketer)16901742522016/11/1027
Anthony Kershler17431649-942017/01/037
Anthony Lyons (cricketer)14771550732020/12/1144
Anthony Moor15901633432019/03/1137
Anthony Small (cricketer)1516152152020/10/3136
Anthony Spillane15711637662016/03/1515
Anthony Walters (cricketer)151616341182016/03/1515
Anthony de Kock1492149202020/12/0844
Anton Subikshan1608161792021/02/2173
Antonio Whybrew15741572-22020/11/2322
Antony Dhas16191704852017/03/2522
Antony Edwards154716621152016/04/0817
Anuj Raj155720284712021/01/1599
Anuj Tiwary16651610-552018/12/2230
Anuk Fernando166219202582015/06/2741
Anuk de Alwis181319131002019/01/0552
Anup Das14401475352016/03/2732
Anupam Sanklecha136615111452015/10/1161
Anupam Toppo16221673512016/11/1334
Anurag Tiwari162219833612015/12/1228
Anurudda Rajapakse16811736552020/07/1324
Anushka Perera17001747472020/07/3042
Anushka Polonowita135718484912016/01/3015
Anuththara Madawa16461711652018/03/1425
Anwesh Sharma159019613712021/02/2173
Aosashi Longchar168824597712019/09/2435
Apurva Anand15881552-362021/02/2692
Aqeel Anjum14531425-282021/03/2798
Aqib Javed20962131352018/09/1358
Aqib Shah135322358822015/12/2123
Aravind Singh135416793252015/12/1228
Aravinda Bandara16441691472019/12/1533
Aravinda Premaratne174319632202017/03/1411
Archibald Bell (cricketer)14881539512020/11/1952
Archibald Dean16441713692015/11/197
Archibald Hardie156116691082017/07/177
Archibald Rigg16231665422020/10/2839
Ariful Hasan17931833402019/02/2515
Arifur Rahman Rabin17051753482017/06/0228
Arijit Basu14391451122016/04/0321
Arindam Sarkar14611496352016/04/0229
Arjun Azad16711635-362019/09/2517
Arjun Debnath164120974562017/02/0319
Arkaprabha Sinha164523236782019/10/093
Armaghan Elahi13591422632015/11/1245
Arnab Nandi13051400952015/10/1161
Arnell Horton164417521082016/03/0519
Arnold Read23562169-1872013/07/237
Arosh Janoda179119691782016/12/1141
Arosha Perera191624195032017/12/1834
Arpit Gaud15921633412021/01/1177
Arpit Guleria166222615992018/11/2837
Arpit Pannu166024307702018/11/0154
Arrie Schoeman15221513-92020/12/1434
Arsalan Arshad16391724852018/10/0815
Arshad Junaid153116371062016/04/0321
Arshad Nawaz17181758402016/10/1848
Arthur Aldersley1611161652020/10/2337
Arthur Allsopp167019342642015/11/2248
Arthur Barber21921982-2102013/07/2123
Arthur Barrow (cricketer)17681522-2462014/03/279
Arthur Batchelar152716391122017/03/1245
Arthur Bauer15281614862020/12/0635
Arthur Bethell13951435402017/04/1120
Arthur Bonitto15441539-52020/11/0542
Arthur Braithwaite161217451332016/01/1910
Arthur Cant15781620422020/10/1538
Arthur Carracher153316341012018/05/2137
Arthur Crowder163517951602016/01/228
Arthur Daer23111984-3272013/07/2123
Arthur Dare15311578472020/11/2046
Arthur Davis (Australian cricketer)16861650-362016/01/2440
Arthur Dean (cricketer)15641610462015/12/0216
Arthur Duff (cricketer)1478148132020/11/0643
Arthur Duncan (New Zealand cricketer)18251917922020/10/2446
Arthur Evans (cricketer)15841494-902018/11/2728
Arthur Fagan (cricketer)16661676102016/12/2822
Arthur Fisher (Australian cricketer)18241730-942016/12/2822
Arthur Furness17911697-942016/12/2822
Arthur George (cricketer)16921741492020/10/2446
Arthur Gregory17971749-482016/12/3032
Arthur Hawthorne16371669322020/10/2534
Arthur Hayes (cricketer)15441640962020/12/1035
Arthur Howard (New Zealand cricketer)1818182022020/10/2534
Arthur Jackson (cricketer)15461642962017/07/1329
Arthur Johnston (cricketer)25002285-2152013/07/2716
Arthur Kenny16451732872015/11/1532
Arthur Lewis (Australian cricketer)17481541-2072015/02/1316
Arthur Lovett167717971202016/03/0712
Arthur Maingot16311679482020/11/2934
Arthur McBeath18731799-742017/01/0722
Arthur McKenzie (cricketer)14861481-52020/11/0831
Arthur Muhl15361552162020/10/0548
Arthur Munn17641670-942017/01/0918
Arthur Murrell155317191662020/12/1242
Arthur Newnham17821705-772014/03/3050
Arthur Nichols (cricketer)17631669-942017/01/1111
Arthur Nott17401605-1352014/03/3050
Arthur Pattison16041614102021/03/2694
Arthur Pellew15331551182020/09/1945
Arthur Peters (South African cricketer)1438144132020/12/1332
Arthur Pickering16641525-1392014/03/3050
Arthur Roper18041553-2512014/03/2611
Arthur Serjeant17101509-2012014/04/0117
Arthur Shingler15711562-92020/12/1434
Arthur Simmons18071713-942017/02/0112
Arthur Sprenger15721563-92020/12/1541
Arthur Tarilton16721621-512020/11/1030
Arthur Thomas (Australian cricketer)15231569462020/09/2822
Arthur Thomlinson15531625722016/01/228
Arthur Trebilcock16471722752016/03/0629
Arthur Trestrail14931558652016/04/056
Arthur Triffitt16451711662016/03/099
Arthur Washer15301570402020/10/2235
Arthur Watt17331757242016/01/228
Arthur Weakley14401513732020/12/1636
Arthur Wells (Australian cricketer)17961735-612017/02/069
Arthur Williams (cricketer)16061662562016/06/2622
Artie Combes163418201862016/03/0629
Arun Bamal162223016792017/10/0627
Arun Chaprana156720124452018/09/2148
Arun Chauhan157719794022018/10/0235
Arun Khurana14481508602016/04/0939
Arun Lal (Pakistani cricketer)13221367452015/11/1245
Arun Singla14741458-162016/04/0229
Aruna Dharmasena167617891132017/04/0924
Aruna Priyantha17421789472021/04/208
Aruna de Silva134115201792016/02/1812
Arup Bhattacharya14761489132016/03/2546
Arya Sethi156022997392018/09/2652
Aryan Bora164219743322020/02/1229
Asad Khan (cricketer)1582158202019/08/0156
Asad Zarar13441370262015/11/1245
Asadullah (Afghan cricketer)163820263882018/04/0421
Asadullah (Pakistani cricketer)169918531542016/12/1917
Asanga Jayasooriya136519866212015/08/053
Asantha Singappuli164621675212019/02/1530
Asel Kulathunga16241717932019/03/0623
Asela Aluthge182719481212017/04/0519
Asela Jayasinghe144816622142016/01/3015
Asela Wewalwala17591806472021/04/2116
Asfan Khan16031698952019/02/2226
Ashan Ranasinghe16951794992020/05/3152
Ashay Palkar157623477712018/09/2368
Ashby Mutumbami207721951182017/01/177
Ashen Kavinda162320664432018/02/2432
Ashen Maleesha16891736472020/07/1324
Ashen Mendis171024857752020/07/1443
Ashikuzzaman16421685432017/09/1529
Ashiqul Islam16661749832016/09/2823
Ashish Chaudhary (cricketer)17021665-372019/09/2517
Ashish Hooda133619305942015/10/0431
Ashish Kumar (cricketer)163719122752016/10/1430
Ashish Malhotra14541483292016/04/0939
Ashish Thapa155223958432018/09/2065
Ashith Rajiv159423767822018/09/1981
Ashley Gilbert158217221402015/12/1228
Ashley Hammond1470147662020/08/0644
Ashley Hart (cricketer)1555155612020/10/1750
Ashley Robertson (cricketer)15841630462015/12/1228
Ashok Bhudania16461695492017/02/2546
Ashok Puna1591159872020/11/0237
Ashok Sandhu161219863742016/10/0648
Ashraf Ali (Karachi cricketer)13281385572015/11/0843
Ashraf Ali (cricketer, born 1979)13341410762015/11/0843
Ashraful Hossain16941734402016/09/2823
Ashutosh Das15901682922019/03/0222
Ashutosh Sharma (cricketer)162721605332018/01/1228
Ashwani Kumar (cricketer)165220463942019/12/0953
Ashwin Das16441569-752016/10/2731
Ashwini Kapoor15091568592016/04/0939
Asif Ali (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa cricketer)174619451992017/01/0823
Asif Ashfaq13351416812015/11/2932
Asif Fawad16971788912016/10/0931
Asif Hossain16711725542016/12/2012
Asif Khan (Indian cricketer)15861621352018/10/0118
Asif Manzoor159617531572021/03/0183
Asif Raza133014461162015/11/1245
Asim Iqbal13381367292015/11/0843
Asir Intesar16571676192018/03/2946
Asiri Bandara16291719902017/04/0723
Asiri de Silva16541719652018/03/0251
Aslam Hossain170321354322019/02/2812
Aslam Sattar139115361452015/11/1245
Aston Powe14621457-52020/11/0925
Ata-ur-Rehman (Balochistan cricketer)17751812372021/03/2798
Athi Mafazwe16061652462018/09/1486
Athol Hagemann1540154002020/12/0931
Athol Shephard16891755662016/03/0813
Atif Ali136614901242015/12/1811
Atif Ashraf133614591232015/11/0843
Atif Attarwala163719282912019/11/1127
Atif Jabbar136218745122016/10/0331
Atiq-ur-Rehman14701514442015/12/2123
Atiq Ahmed (cricketer)17251809842021/03/2798
Attaullah (Afghan cricketer)16321646142017/11/2817
Atul Mohindra14491484352016/04/0939
Atul Singh Surwar165420283742018/02/0541
Aubrey Bishop14601458-22020/11/1952
Aubrey Ferreira166323887252017/10/1226
Aubrey Johnston17791684-952017/01/0118
Aubrey Ritchie16041481-1232016/06/2018
Augustus Hewitt-Fox1741174432021/03/1780
Augustus Hotham17741629-1452015/02/1316
Augustus Page16771700232020/10/2034
Austin Dummett15391537-22020/11/2046
Avdhoot Dandekar165320173642019/10/0741
Avijit Paul14381473352016/04/0124
Avijit Singha Roy156517431782018/10/0915
Avik Chowdhury14551490352016/03/2619
Avinash Yadav135420066522015/10/247
Avishek Mitra142020105902016/09/2539
Avishka Chenuka16031693902019/03/0433
Avishka Fernando (Kilinochchi District cricketer)16411731902017/04/0519
Avneesh Sudha163624468102019/01/1512
Avnish Dhaliwal167221024302016/11/1334
Awais Iqbal16091687782018/09/3059
Ayan Bhattacharjee161024598492016/10/2229
Ayantha de Silva160124548532019/02/1632
Ayaz Jilani17381804662016/10/1848
Ayush Jamwal167121024312018/02/0541
Azam Hussain138814991112015/11/0142
Azam Jan21152115002015/02/2828
Azaruddin Bloch13501395452015/10/1161
Azhar Hasan15951484-1112014/05/196
Azhar Sheikh137714771002016/11/2426
Azhar Sultan17851821362017/02/1619
Azlan Samsudeen16651712472020/01/0612
Azmath Ali14551494392016/04/1613
Azmatullah Nazeer145416521982015/07/1713
Babar Ali (cricketer)13301411812015/11/1432
Babar Khan (cricketer)14051456512015/12/166
Babar Rehman13521417652015/11/2416
Babashafi Pathan135218464942015/10/1044
Babloo Passah158519333482018/10/0447
Babubhai Patel (cricketer)15291558292016/04/2354
Badaruddin Malik15721599272016/04/0720
Baden Sharman15661632662016/03/1331
Bajina Ramprasad14511505542016/04/0124
Bakhtarullah Atal166221244622017/08/1635
Bal Krishna (cricketer)158620324462021/01/16101
Balaji Rao (Indian cricketer)15801608282016/04/1024
Baldev Dua14451480352016/04/0817
Balwinder Sandhu (cricketer, born 1987)13511364132015/10/1044
Bantu Dandala16921750582017/02/1243
Barakatullah Kadada16781693152018/05/027
Barney McCoy17511779282017/01/0823
Barney Russell17951701-942017/01/257
Barrie Bennett14891552632017/04/0924
Barry Bates16921601-912016/12/2227
Barry Beard16451711662016/03/148
Barry Causby14911538472018/05/2137
Barry Curtin16311524-1072018/06/0622
Barry Stevens (cricketer)15751621462015/12/0314
Bartholomew Grant15941664702015/11/1532
Bashir Ahmad (Afghan cricketer)16691646-232019/05/0243
Bashir Ahmed (cricketer)14431468252016/06/1010
Basil Bradfield1792179972020/12/1940
Basil Crews15791630512020/12/0740
Basil Totman152116321112016/06/2514
Basir Rahman163920974582019/11/1228
Basit Ali (Karachi cricketer)167017811112016/10/2413
Batin Shah161824928742017/09/1115
Bawantha Udangamuwa161320534402019/02/1818
Bede McCauley17911697-942017/01/0722
Behram Khan (cricketer)13171342252016/10/0239
Bekezela Moyo16221648262017/02/2427
Belal Hossen16751732572017/01/0215
Ben Beecroft168718631762018/01/0343
Ben Higgins (cricketer)15031602992020/08/0843
Ben Seabrook173119071762018/04/0845
Ben Stoyanoff1638163802019/11/0842
Benjamin Collins (Cambridge University cricketer)147216581862017/04/187
Benjamin Hart (cricketer)15061578722016/05/1321
Benjamin Katsande13601385252016/10/0331
Benjamin Salmon17881749-392017/01/3121
Benjamin Wilson (New Zealand cricketer)1579158342020/10/2942
Benoy Upreti16231707842019/11/0945
Benson Mwita14711535642015/07/1941
Bentley Wimble179919981992016/10/0648
Bernard Colreavy18111719-922016/12/2516
Bernard Cook15431624812020/10/0223
Bernard Meakin17721788162014/03/3050
Bernie Thomas15411539-22020/11/2322
Berry Webb15281543152020/10/0843
Bert Shortland17631669-942017/02/0112
Bert Wright (cricketer)16571702452015/12/0216
Bertie Grounds18221728-942016/12/3032
Bertie Verley15421575332020/11/1030
Bertie Watson17431739-42017/02/059
Bertram Watkins24342243-1912013/08/0421
Beverley Esterhuizen15411532-92020/12/0844
Bevon Brown14931488-52020/11/0542
Bhagya Ediriweera16881735472021/03/2864
Bhanu Pania156819383702021/01/1058
Bharat Awasthy14801540602016/04/0720
Bharat Khanna17071749422016/04/1725
Bharat Veer14151474592016/04/1214
Bhaskar Gupta14381480422016/03/2832
Bhaskar Mazumbar14991534352016/04/0617
Bhavik Patel16151700852019/02/2710
Bhavik Thaker13501431812015/10/1724
Bhiguraj Pathania16221635132019/03/0222
Bhima Rao164818642162015/11/0216
Bhushan Chauhan13541422682015/10/1724
Bhushan Subba155723838262018/09/2065
Bibek Diyali157223227502018/10/0235
Bijay Subba154921195702018/09/2652
Bijon Dey164721124652018/12/2026
Bikas Pati13321429972015/10/1724
Bikash Chowdhury (cricketer)14631528652016/03/2619
Bikash Pradhan159017491592018/09/2065
Bikramjit Debnath16071669622018/09/1981
Bikramkumar Das163923547152017/02/2546
Bilal Anwar158319683852018/09/0964
Bilal Hussain135416002462015/10/2524
Bilal Shah174722485012016/12/1917
Bill Beath17941814202016/12/2227
Bill Bryant (cricketer)16021569-332017/09/2624
Bill Burton (cricketer)1747174702020/10/2337
Bill Donaldson (cricketer)18151721-942016/12/2628
Bill Tallon155416651112020/10/0843
Bimal Mitra (cricketer)14691413-562016/03/3017
Bimol Singh165320834302018/11/2837
Binod Gupta155216701182018/09/2148
Biplab Saikia16541687332018/12/2230
Bishan Mendis158219894072021/03/0455
Bishawnath Halder146717062392016/09/2539
Bishwash Singh16451719742020/02/1229
Blessing Juspen16471677302017/02/2427
Bob Homani17821837552016/12/1215
Bob Masefield1481148872020/10/1835
Bobby Fernando17941884902018/12/1662
Bobby Madden (cricketer)17911697-942017/01/0612
Bobby Zahiruddin15551576212016/04/2433
Bobby Zothansanga166724367692018/12/1451
Bodapati Sumanth13811391102015/10/0715
Bodavarapu Sudhakar13801411312015/10/0715
Boddupalli Amit143620265902016/03/249
Bohoto Yeptho16421719772019/12/0953
Bokang Mosena15671612452015/09/0635
Bonaparte Mujuru13881421332016/10/0331
Bongani Mahlangu (cricketer)16801749692016/10/1430
Bonny Chingangbam160323627592018/09/1981
Bothwell Chapungu164618742282016/09/0750
Brad Dolley159719473502015/09/0321
Brad Inwood1542154312020/10/0433
Brad Ipson1442144312020/10/0962
Brad Wigney15091505-42020/09/3024
Bradley Mauer164120143732018/03/2512
Bradley Nielsen15371567302016/06/1934
Bradley Staddon13691394252016/10/0331
Bradley Williams (cricketer)171421274132017/01/0823
Bradley de Villiers171023706602018/02/0341
Brandon Scullard15981677792015/09/0635
Brendan Creevey15121562502020/10/0223
Brendan Ricci15751645702015/12/1228
Brendan Ward1573158072020/11/0319
Brendon Oxenham161217481362016/06/1934
Brendon Reddy17551810552016/12/1318
Brent Kops17361791552016/12/1318
Brent Lodding15551625702015/12/1228
Brent Robey15541576222021/03/3065
Brett Hood1550155772020/11/0237
Brett van Deinsen17621792302017/02/059
Brian Barnard15801632522016/09/2138
Brian Bath14661514482016/04/056
Brian Buchanan (cricketer)1498150132020/11/0542
Brian Carney (cricketer)15941627332016/03/125
Brian Cartledge165617661102016/03/1331
Brian Clayton15191529102020/12/2032
Brian Dold1597160032020/12/2142
Brian Ford (cricketer)14611522612020/10/1648
Brian Foulds1532153972020/11/0128
Brian Gill (cricketer)1507151472020/11/0128
Brian Grace1462146312020/10/0344
Brian Grove15371515-222020/08/0644
Brian Harbridge15841627432020/10/1750
Brian Hopkins (cricketer)14871567802020/10/2534
Brian Illman15371551142020/08/0938
Brian Mallinson14741523492020/12/1242
Brian Ndzundzu14821473-92020/12/1332
Brian Patoir152916871582020/11/2249
Brian Patterson (cricketer)16171643262016/03/1113
Brian Porter (cricketer)15511598472015/12/0531
Brian Sheen1603160412016/03/125
Brian Sorenson17761679-972016/06/2118
Brian Spragg1560156772020/11/0237
Brian Warner (cricketer)17061613-932016/06/2622
Brighton Mugochi16621688262017/02/2427
Broderick Warner13971393-42020/12/0118
Brook Hatwell18151844292016/12/1318
Bruce Baldwin (cricketer)1666167482020/10/2942
Bruce Eligon15771622452016/11/1424
Bruce Friderichs15671558-92020/12/2142
Bruce Gordon (cricketer)14321389-432020/12/0931
Bruce Groves15131547342016/05/1614
Bruce Hodgetts157116791082016/03/1331
Bruce John16011634332016/03/1331
Bruce Kerr159320014082016/09/2138
Bruce Livingston17651671-942017/01/0511
Bruce Long14821536542020/12/1144
Bruce Moir154716901432015/12/0621
Bruce Sibanda13481377292016/10/0331
Bruce Such14821504222020/10/0843
Bruce Taylor (Australian cricketer)152716611342020/10/0843
Bruce Tembo16211647262017/02/2238
Bruce Vawser16131683702015/12/0216
Bruce Wardlaw17051731262016/03/0629
Bruno Broughton16961729332017/04/0315
Bryan Bayley1644165062020/10/1429
Bryan Doyle (cricketer)15691639702015/12/1014
Bryan Higgins (cricketer)1593160072020/11/0237
Bryan Lones14651418-472020/12/1144
Bryan McGan17691528-2412015/05/0338
Bryce Cooper17731679-942016/12/2516
Bryce Postles17741677-972016/06/1934
Buddhadeb Mitra14531397-562016/03/3017
Buddika Hasaranga16931783902018/02/2432
Buddika Janith17101796862017/04/0824
Buddika Madushan167022635932018/03/0251
Buddika Prasad161720644472019/02/1741
Buddika Sanjeewa168118661852017/03/1714
Bunti Roy160517431382016/11/1334
Burton Forbes1413141522020/12/0844
Buxton Peters1543154522020/11/3050
Byron Drury (cricketer)15171607902020/11/0643
Byron Hyland15711650792016/03/106
C. R. Mohite16131516-972014/05/2620
C Lalrinsanga19561981252019/10/0331
Caleb Gaylard1529153012020/10/3052
Callum Guest18101873632017/03/2929
Calvin Moore14251521962020/11/2158
Capel Baines15231574512020/12/0635
Carey Cawood17721823512020/12/2032
Carey Smith15461616702015/12/099
Carl André (cricketer)15521546-62020/12/0635
Carl Boy16231618-52020/11/0542
Carl Furlonge13941463692016/03/225
Carl Gouveia14631461-22020/11/2046
Carl Mellors14761534582020/12/0435
Carlos Maynard16451682372018/01/3153
Carlton Gordon1465146832020/11/0643
Carlton Hay17231802792016/06/119
Carlton Reece15551553-22020/11/2249
Carvick Thompson17641670-942017/02/0319
Castell Folkes14681463-52020/11/0643
Cecil Booth (cricketer)15261618922017/04/1015
Cecil Bryce15871603162020/10/0136
Cecil Colman1603160632020/12/2032
Cecil De Cordova15161511-52020/11/0643
Cecil Gosling22182117-1012013/07/2014
Cecil Gray (cricketer)15481563152020/08/0644
Cecil Hanify15331550172020/10/0433
Cecil Kirton14951483-122020/12/1144
Cecil McCallum14251471462020/12/1242
Cecil McKew18081840322017/01/0823
Cecil Oakes16691695262016/03/0712
Cecil Perry17541744-102016/01/0710
Cecil Shearman15431553102020/12/1434
Cecil Thomas (cricketer)15531565122020/11/2322
Cecil Warner1497150032020/12/1636
Cecil Wood (Australian cricketer)16121678662016/03/0519
Celso de Freitas15681566-22020/11/2046
Chaamikara Hewage170319001972018/03/1012
Chad Baxter18061860542016/12/1318
Chalana de Silva178920212322017/01/0410
Chalanaka Weerasinghe16631762992017/04/0924
Chamal Perera171721083912020/07/1443
Chamara Fernando207124984272020/01/0412
Chamara Lasantha16891760712016/12/1318
Chamara de Soysa166117691082016/04/0321
Chamath Perera176819762082021/04/2221
Chameera Dissanayake168921364472018/03/0251
Chaminda Boteju17711818472020/01/1733
Chaminda Gamage17301802722017/11/1038
Chaminda Handunnettige20682163952018/03/1625
Chaminda Hathurusingha21622244822016/12/1410
Chaminda Pathirana17171816992020/06/1340
Chamindu Wickramasinghe16261720942021/03/0455
Chamod Silva169118071162017/04/0519
Chamod Wickramasuriya16941741472020/01/1512
Champa Sugathadasa16171713962016/10/2640
Chanaka Wijesinghe163922275882017/01/2218
Chandan Ray (Tripura cricketer)15721632602021/01/1058
Chandana Aravinda199321161232017/10/2730
Chandi Wickramasinghe177920452662014/04/1231
Chandimanthu Rodrigo168622155292017/04/065
Chandranath Chatterjee15451580352016/03/2619
Chandrapal Singh (cricketer)165318982452017/01/2942
Chandrashekhar Atram17051756512016/12/1318
Chandula Weeraratne17061753472020/07/1324
Channa Fernando16351725902018/03/1625
Chanuk Dilshan231524571422019/02/1934
Chanuka Bandara (cricketer, born 1998)16251672472020/01/149
Charanjit Singh (cricketer)14621524622016/03/2619
Charith Keerthisinghe18941984902017/12/0430
Charith Mendis164921014522018/02/2724
Charith Rajapakshe16821777952018/03/0131
Charith Sudaraka17341815812017/01/0612
Charith Tissera18101857472021/04/2221
Charitha Kumarasinghe173821814432018/02/2724
Charles Aldridge154118483072020/10/1329
Charles Allcock155717852282017/04/0131
Charles Allee16311701702015/06/0632
Charles Allison (cricketer)16421628-142020/12/1715
Charles Alsop163817801422015/07/2623
Charles Baldwin (cricketer)158916891002017/03/1245
Charles Bannister (cricketer)148616711852017/04/0824
Charles Barker (cricketer)16841728442020/10/1429
Charles Basson17401827872020/12/1940
Charles Blades15621628662020/11/1242
Charles Brereton (cricketer)150417512472017/04/1015
Charles Britton15351567322020/12/1940
Charles Burls154717532062017/03/1245
Charles Calvert (Cambridge University cricketer)153816661282017/04/1513
Charles Chandler (cricketer)1560156332020/11/0542
Charles Chapman (cricketer, born 1860)15141553392017/04/1717
Charles Clark (Canterbury cricketer)16961725292016/06/0513
Charles Delbridge17181772542020/12/2032
Charles Delgado14621460-22020/11/0643
Charles Dick (cricketer)1562156532020/12/0844
Charles Drew (cricketer)15641607432018/10/3124
Charles Edwards (English cricketer)18001551-2492014/03/2910
Charles Fearon15671605382020/10/1648
Charles Foot163017441142015/07/2312
Charles Gardner (Australian cricketer)16461716702015/11/2248
Charles Gingell15891646572020/12/2220
Charles Greenway (cricketer)16651455-2102014/03/3050
Charles Gregory (cricketer, born 1847)18031836332016/12/3032
Charles Griffith (Australian cricketer)16081644362020/10/0344
Charles Guiney15861617312020/10/1750
Charles Hammond (Australian cricketer)17051734292016/01/1620
Charles Hendrie15801646662015/11/1621
Charles Hendrikse15551608532020/12/0338
Charles Hurditch153816591212020/11/0724
Charles Inder147315981252016/03/2832
Charles Kellick18041833292017/01/0215
Charles Lawes (cricketer)173518681332017/01/0410
Charles Letcher16511721702015/07/2519
Charles Lownds1745174502020/12/1144
Charles McAlister1605160832020/12/1242
Charles McAllen168518121272016/01/148
Charles McCalgan15031546432020/12/1242
Charles Mengel1455145612020/10/0548
Charles Miles (cricketer, born 1850)17501762122020/10/2746
Charles Morgan (Surrey cricketer)15731656832017/03/1330
Charles Morgan (Victoria cricketer)16351698632015/11/2124
Charles Munro (cricketer)15811645642017/07/1329
Charles Nicholls18421916742017/01/1111
Charles O'Brien (cricketer)17831812292017/01/129
Charles Osmond17211750292016/06/1934
Charles Packer15851641562020/11/1629
Charles Patrick18811962812017/01/148
Charles Payne (Australian cricketer)16811719382016/01/1910
Charles Restieaux16011673722016/06/2018
Charles Rix1717172582020/10/2034
Charles Robinson (Australian cricketer)186420031392016/01/228
Charles Ross (Australian cricketer)16281667392015/07/2519
Charles Round23292070-2592013/07/2123
Charles Russen (cricketer)16851724392016/01/2012
Charles Rutherfoord18381898602016/10/0648
Charles Snyman1582158202020/12/1541
Charles Stafford (cricketer)16161643272016/06/2212
Charles Stone (New Zealand cricketer)17091744352016/06/2212
Charles Sumption14851547622016/04/0321
Charles Turnbull (cricketer)17921547-2452014/04/0413
Charles Valencia15251519-62020/11/1030
Charles Vautin16601703432016/01/148
Charles Wakefield (cricketer)1754175952020/12/1636
Charles Warner (Trinidadian cricketer)14491485362020/12/0118
Charles Weir15791563-162020/12/1636
Charuka Tharindu19762023472021/03/2864
Charuka Wijelath165621074512019/02/1530
Chase Young (cricketer)1485148502020/12/1636
Chathupama Gunasinghe176218631012017/01/2942
Chathura Lakshan163121625312018/02/2432
Chathura Milan164421114672018/03/0251
Chathura Peiris130715842772016/01/3015
Chathuranga Dikkumbura164421184742019/02/1632
Chathuranga Jayathilake16631710472021/03/0584
Chathuranga Silva17001747472020/08/1045
Chatterpaul Persaud16331632-12020/11/2249
Chaturan Sanjeewa179624706742019/03/0623
Chelluri Jaikumar15061544382016/04/1725
Chengalpet Gnaneshwar173420753412018/12/1746
Chengkam Sangma157923177382018/09/2065
Chenutha Wickramasinghe169421474532018/03/0131
Chetan Bist133820076692015/10/1819
Chingakham Ranjan160617111052021/02/2773
Chinta Gandhi15751613382021/01/1058
Chintan Gaja163124998682016/10/2731
Chinthaka Edirimanne13651459942016/02/1020
Chinthaka Perera201721511342017/12/1834
Chiranjivi Kumar16461678322019/10/1629
Chitiz Tamang164321765332018/11/0154
Chongtham Mehul158019183382021/03/0183
Chopise Hopongkyu163123757442020/01/1942
Chris Beatty (cricketer)17421771292016/12/2227
Chris Brent1477147702020/12/0740
Chris Cruikshank15371536-12020/10/3052
Chris Davies (New Zealand cricketer)15021531292016/05/0837
Chris Killen (cricketer)15021555532020/08/1233
Chris Lee (cricketer)15531600472016/06/1510
Chris Owen (cricketer)14661453-132020/09/1829
Chris Smart1537153812020/10/0760
Christiaan Snyman17101572-1382015/01/2116
Christopher Davies (South African cricketer)1639163902020/12/0844
Christopher Dwyer (cricketer)15881675872015/11/1621
Christopher Janik18161643-1732014/10/2429
Christopher Marrow161220734612016/09/1329
Christopher Simpson (cricketer)14471480332020/11/2249
Christopher Webb (cricketer)15641603392020/10/3136
Clare Baker15761482-942017/03/1615
Clarence Driscoll16401735952016/03/019
Clarence Lee (cricketer)16321698662016/03/019
Clarence McCoombe15511619682020/10/0548
Clarence Worme1561156432020/11/1825
Claude Mandy1488149462020/12/1242
Clement Bengough17691540-2292014/04/0117
Clement Browne (cricketer)15571596392020/11/1242
Clement Bryce15511535-162020/12/0740
Clement Gaskin15431541-22020/11/2046
Clement Hill (cricketer, born 1904)175318741212016/12/3117
Clement McFarlane15671586192020/10/0548
Clement Wellington15811644632017/07/1329
Cleveland Bailey15751555-202020/11/0542
Cleveland Davidson1535153832020/11/0643
Clifford Kuhn1563156302020/12/1144
Clifton Cawley1542154642020/11/0542
Clifton Folkes1534153952020/11/0643
Clifton Hurburgh16811707262016/03/099
Clifton Jeffery17061732262016/03/0629
Clifton Satherley1625163272020/11/0237
Clint Auty15151471-442017/11/1038
Clinton Reed1542154532020/11/1629
Clive Campbell (cricketer)14601455-52020/11/0542
Clive Kolbe16901570-1202016/11/1027
Clive Page1564157062020/10/0760
Clive White (cricketer)1533153632020/12/1636
Clyde Lucas (cricketer)16351707722016/01/2440
Cobus Pienaar18911941502016/10/2924
Cody Andrews175121083572016/03/216
Col Costorphin16521722702015/12/0531
Col Westaway15081576682016/03/236
Colin Arnold155116621112016/03/148
Colin Bloomfield (cricketer)17461741-52020/11/0542
Colin Fletcher (cricketer)15071502-52020/11/0643
Colin Fraser-Grant15031596932020/12/0931
Colin Kretzmann1505150502020/12/1144
Colin Maritz15891575-142021/03/2116
Colin McCallum (cricketer)14761542662020/12/1242
Colin Richardson (cricketer)16951721262016/03/0813
Colin Stibe15691598292020/10/0843
Colin Thwaites15881658702015/12/0531
Colin Watts14531480272016/05/2714
Collette McGuiness198520861012016/10/2640
Collin Kelbrick15311585542021/03/1780
Conrad Lotz1609160902020/12/0435
Courtenay Daley14711466-52020/11/0643
Courtney O'Connor15181513-52020/11/0925
Coventry Tainton1590159332020/12/1541
Craig Abrahams15181572542020/12/0118
Craig Ballantyne14631536732020/12/0635
Craig Bartlett (cricketer)1550155112020/10/2942
Craig Brown (cricketer)1600160222016/03/148
Craig Coulson15601512-482017/11/1038
Craig Glassock17631794312016/12/3032
Craig Howard (cricketer)15671637702015/12/1014
Craig Kirsten15871675882015/09/0635
Craig Lowe (cricketer)14231478552020/12/0435
Craig Marais (cricketer)1428142802020/12/0435
Craig Ross (Canterbury cricketer)15101571612020/10/2034
Craig Ross (Northern Districts cricketer)1558156572020/11/0237
Craig Wilson (cricketer)14481502542020/12/0635
Curtley Louw160323057022017/09/1529
Cyprian Bloomfield15391534-52020/11/0542
Cyril Solomon18201849292017/02/0218
Cyril Tyler23332169-1642013/08/038
D'Arcy Galt14541473192020/11/2841
D. T. Chandrasekar16831755722015/10/1044
Dale Ellcock14921491-12020/11/1349
Dale O'Halloran156316731102016/03/1515
Dale Womersley22932070-2232013/07/2211
Dalen Mmako162520243992018/01/2036
Daljit Singh (cricketer, born 1935)14801527472016/04/056
Daljit Singh (cricketer, born 1937)15331571382016/04/056
Damidu Ashan166018431832017/04/0824
Damien Nadarajah137914981192016/02/1020
Daminda Kolugala141215311192016/02/1111
Daminda Ranawaka181719171002016/12/1516
Damith Gunatilleke18561903472021/04/2221
Damith Indika18201915952016/12/1516
Damith Perera169121504592017/04/0723
Damith Priyadharshana17981888902017/12/1834
Damitha Hunukumbura135419265722016/01/3015
Dammika Perera203721411042017/12/1834
Dammika Rajapakse161321225092021/03/0789
Dan Horsley16891706172017/01/0118
Danal Hemananda16331685522021/03/06107
Dananja Madushanka16221688662017/04/0519
Danico Philmon15281582542020/12/0540
Daniel Archer (cricketer)16271637102016/03/1331
Daniel Coleborn14961455-412020/10/0962
Daniel Cotton (cricketer)146315721092017/04/2816
Daniel Cullen (New South Wales cricketer)17741803292016/12/2516
Daniel During14871523362016/03/2546
Daniel Erasmus (cricketer)14851511262017/02/2238
Daniel Gee17691798292016/12/2822
Daniel McLeod16371707702015/07/2623
Daniel Noonan (cricketer)16381702642015/08/1616
Daniel Sincuba157717091322015/09/0635
Daniel Stephen14671458-92020/12/1541
Daniel Zvidzai160519203152020/02/0436
Danniel Ruyange18101640-1702015/01/2413
Danuka Prabath16581676182018/03/1831
Danush Peiris17071776692017/03/1819
Danushka Bandara17021798962018/02/2536
Darrell Jackman16941720262016/03/0813
Darremsanga196123093482019/10/0331
Darren Chyer14681515472018/05/2538
Darren Tucker16681632-362017/02/049
Darren Walker (cricketer)153816401022015/12/099
Darryl Brown (South African cricketer)15811675942015/09/0128
Darryl Hendricks16341655212018/01/1339
Dasari Chaitanya16441685412017/02/2546
Dastagir Khan165920363772017/11/0938
Dasun Senevirathna168420753912017/12/0958
Dattatreya Mukherjee14951530352016/03/3017
Dave Chardon17341765312016/12/2418
Davendra Sharma14831529462016/04/1024
David Airey1491149212020/10/2337
David Alers14741451-232020/12/0635
David Ashworth (cricketer)142316322092017/03/1819
David Beaumont (cricketer)147115791082017/04/0924
David Blake (New Zealand cricketer)1579158672020/10/2942
David Boyle (cricketer)153217051732020/10/1429
David Clarke (Australian cricketer)14841532482018/05/2538
David Cooper (Indian cricketer)13471410632016/04/048
David Cooper (New Zealand cricketer)14611472112016/04/048
David Cowper (cricketer)15981640422015/12/0531
David Daly (cricketer)1674167732020/12/2032
David Dempsey (cricketer)15351573382020/10/1648
David Eaton (cricketer)14821512302016/06/2118
David Ellis (Australian cricketer)1477147812020/10/0344
David Emerson (cricketer)15711641702015/12/0621
David Emslie15591569102020/12/2142
David Gray (cricketer)24792186-2932013/07/1924
David Harris (Victoria cricketer)15681613452015/12/099
David Hosking (cricketer)14921491-12020/10/2534
David Jacobs (cricketer, born 1989)17141773592017/01/2117
David Johnston (New South Wales cricketer)177019231532017/01/0118
David Kerr (cricketer)16331703702015/11/2932
David King (cricketer)16691722532016/09/2823
David Kivell154918322832020/10/3052
David Lumsden (cricketer)15931567-262021/03/1780
David Mailer16401734942015/07/2712
David Martins1461146762020/11/2158
David Masterson164720544072019/03/2321
David McGuire (cricketer)16931719262016/03/1113
David McMeeking (cricketer)14841524402016/06/1010
David Mogotlane17021731292016/10/2731
David Mullett15521641892016/03/1515
David Noonan (cricketer)17481777292017/01/1111
David Ogilvy (cricketer)17601789292017/01/129
David Partridge (cricketer)26412367-2742013/07/307
David Pryor (cricketer)174518831382017/01/1522
David Scott (cricketer)17691824552017/03/3019
David Shepard (cricketer)155721646072015/12/1228
David Strudwick147516101352016/03/299
David Sultan1432143312020/11/3050
David Sutherland (cricketer)16421688462015/07/2712
David Tarrant154416451012020/10/3136
David Taylor (Australian cricketer)16941723292017/02/0319
David Weston (cricketer)15791605262016/06/2622
David Whitefield15101544342016/05/1717
Dawlat Khan15811624432017/09/1755
Dawson Ritchie15851615302016/06/2018
Dean Mazhawidza13711396252016/09/0750
Dean Morgan (cricketer)1502150532020/11/0831
Dean Potter (cricketer)17961833372016/06/1934
Debabrata Pradhan161924007812017/03/0622
Debasis Chakraborty14781513352016/03/2619
Debendra Roy14391474352016/04/0124
Debu Majumdar14481483352016/03/299
Deendyal Upadhyay166524477822018/12/1451
Deepak Behera13371421842015/10/0626
Deepak Dogra167821654872017/02/0319
Deepak Manhas16871778912015/10/2524
Deepak Sharma (cricketer, born 1984)14051440352016/04/1024
Deepak Shetty16411651102019/12/2528
Deependra Pandey168020413612017/02/0319
Dega Nischal164021174772017/11/0133
Delroy Morgan14901485-52020/11/0831
Demitri Hayidakis1606160602020/12/1035
Denham Price14771565882016/06/0211
Denis Cotter (cricketer)15931614212015/07/2519
Denis Rampersad14351493582020/11/3050
Denish Das156820214532021/01/1058
Dennis Blair (cricketer)155616741182016/03/1113
Dennis Hewitt15061587812020/11/2158
Dennis Hollard16911727362020/12/1035
Dennis Thorbourne1519152232020/11/1030
Denuwan Fernando16481684362016/09/2823
Denville McKenzie1535153832020/11/0831
Denzil Whitfield14281474462020/12/1636
Derek Mitchell (cricketer)16911749582016/11/0635
Derek Scott (cricketer)15521582302016/06/2018
Derek Tate1423142412020/10/0962
Derek Woodhead16191571-482017/11/0334
Derreck Calvert16651731662016/03/0813
Derrick Townshend14811506252016/06/037
Des Hansen15411619782020/10/0433
|}

Details (mass draftification of cricket articles)

Selection criteria: Generated using a Quarry query, these 1,200 articles are a subset of the articles that meet the following criteria:

  1. Articles are created by Lugnuts
  2. Articles are on cricketers
  3. Articles are smaller than 2,500 bytes[lower-alpha 1]
  4. Referenced only to CricketArchive or ESPNcricinfo[lower-alpha 2]
  5. No significant contributions from editors other than Lugnuts[lower-alpha 3]

If this proposal is successful: All articles on the list will be draftified, subject to the provisions below:

  1. Draftified articles will be autodeleted after 5 years (instead of the usual 6 months)
  2. Any editor may userfy any draft (which will prevent autodeletion)
  3. Any WikiProject may move a draft to their WikiProject space (which will also prevent autodeletion)
  4. Any draft (whether in draftspace, userspace, or WikiProject space) can be returned to mainspace when it contains sources that plausibly meet WP:GNG[lower-alpha 4]
  5. Editors may return drafts to mainspace for the sole purpose of redirecting/merging them to an appropriate article, if they believe that doing so is in the best interest of the encyclopedia[lower-alpha 5]

Background (mass draftification of cricket articles)

In the 2022 Deletion ArbCom case, ArbCom found (Finding #6) that User:Lugnuts had created over 93,000 articles, "the most articles of any editor ... Most of these were stubs, and relatively few have been expanded to longer articles", which led to sanctions from the community and to Lugnuts being indefinitely sitebanned by Arbcom.

Arbcom also mandated an RfC on mass deletion. A mass creation RfC took place but the mass deletion RfC did not, and the RFC mandate was rescinded, leaving the question of how to handle mass-created microstubs such as these unresolved. In March a proposal was made to draftify approximately 1000 articles on Olympians as a possible resolution to this. The proposal was successful and this proposal continues that process.

Survey (mass draftification of cricket articles)

  • Support The alternative to continuing to address such mass creations through this process is bringing hundreds or thousands of articles through AfD each month[lower-alpha 6] and that alternative is not practical. These are articles that took minutes, sometimes seconds, to create; each AfD consumes hours of community time and it would be a waste to spend more collective time assessing each of them individually than was spent on their creation. Further, editors who support keeping these articles object on the grounds that the workload is too high; that it is impossible to search for sources with the diligence required in the time available and as a consequence articles on notable topics are deleted.
    This proposal resolves both of those issues; editors will have time to search for sources and considerable amounts of our most limited resource, editor time, will be saved.
    We also cannot leave the articles as are; we have a responsibility to curate the encyclopedia, to remove articles that do not belong on it due to failing to meet our notability criteria or due to violating our policies on what Wikipedia is not. Failing to meet this responsibility is harmful to the project; it reinforces the perception among the public that Wikipedia is mostly empty around the edges and that anything is notable, and it reinforces the perception among editors that creating large numbers of microstubs that do not inform the reader is as good or better than creating smaller numbers of informative articles.
    These are articles that all violate the fifth basic sports notability criteria, on topics that usually lack notability, that no one edits, that almost no one looks at, and that are so bereft of information that they are of no benefit to the reader. Removing the group will improve the quality of the encyclopedia, and by doing it in this manner we provide the best hope of the articles on notable topics being identified, improved, and returned to mainspace. BilledMammal (talk) 06:17, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per proposer. My feeling is that this is a good way to deal with the low-quality and WP:SPORTCRIT-failing microstubs with enough leeway for any editor who wants to keep any of the articles to do the needed research to expand the article. starship.paint (exalt) 06:46, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose. The Olympics draftification has not resulted in any objective improvement to the encyclopaedia and this is just more of the same. Thryduulf (talk) 07:10, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. Having a massive number of microstubs is detrimental to cleanup efforts and maintenance. If anything, this proposal is quite generous for articles that never should have been created in the first place. A good compromise overall, and it gives several options for anyone that might take an interest in one or more of these articles. I also support carrying this out for all other articles that meet the listed criteria. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 07:29, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support, except for "If this proposal is successful" point no. 3: wikiprojects have no business holding onto drafts; it's just not normal, and it encourages the extremely bad habit of wikiprojects behaving like walled gardens and flexing in a WP:GANG + WP:OWN manner toward content they claim is within their scope. Draftspacing and userifying are entirely sufficient options. Aside from that, I wholeheartedly agree with draftifying (one way or another) these miserable micro-stubs, most of which have no hope of ever becoming proper encyclopedia articles. We have far too many half-assed pseudo-articles on minor figures in sport, acting, and other pop-culture subjects.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:53, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support Their deletion would disencourage masscreation of microstubs based on databases. It would save a lot of time for the potentual participants in AfDs. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 07:59, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Found this 3 rationales cited by Cbl62 further down in support of draftication pretty much convincing and would like to reproduce them here again.
    (1) Mass creation. The articles at issue were the product of Lugnuts' well-documented mass process in which thousands of articles were created, often at the rate of approximately a minute per article.
    (2) Lack of substance. The articles are microstubs that contain very limited narrative text, simply reciting that the person was a cricket player who appeared in X number of games for X team. If the articles are ultimately deleted, nothing of real substance is lost. If SIGCOV is later uncovered and brought forth, and given the fact that only a minute or so was devoted to the original effort, the articles can be re-created without any meaningful loss of prior effort.
    (3) Violation of SPORTBASIC. The articles violate prong 5 of WP:SPORTBASIC which provides: "Sports biographies must include at least one reference to a source providing significant coverage of the subject, excluding database sources." The articles here are sourced only to database sources and do not include SIGCOV.
    For transparency I must admit there was a fourth one, but that one I do not support the same way.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 10:54, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
    Paradise Chronicle - WP:NORUSH. The rush to mass create these articles and the rush to mass delete them seem like two sides of the same coin. Getting it right is more important than speed.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:10, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    “Two sides of the same coin” implies comparable effect - but that is not the case. One is essentially vandalism, the other is just respiring the situation as it would have been had the vandalism not taken place. FOARP (talk)| FOARP (talk) 21:09, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    @FOARP - The idea is the same - it would take too long to do the research for each individual article and we need to do this NOW so we can move onto the next article despite WP:NORUSH. Lugnuts followed the rules when he created the articles. The rules have since changed. Those same rules may change again tomorrow.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:48, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment - I think we need more granular detail on the people concerned. Personally I think someone who played more than 20 First Class matches in any country recognised by the ICC is notable. Someone who played 10 is possibly debatable, someone who played less than 5 probably isn't. For me there are extreme edge cases (for example some who appears to only have played one match in 1890) which can be redirected to a list. There are a bigger group where the sourcing is bad but could likely be improved (in my example maybe someone who played regularly for a first class team) and an intermediate group which could/should be draftified until such time as more information is found. Of course this requires buy-in from WikiProjects being prepared to engage in improvement; failing that I agree that we might as well just draft with a high likelihood that nobody will work on them and they'll be deleted. JMWt (talk) 08:12, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    In terms of granular detail, BilledMammal was kind enough to sort out a query for me that included the team categories. I've got a version of this at User:Blue Square Thing/sandbox6 - it includes was more than just the 1,200 listed here. It doesn't get into the number of appearances because that wouldn't be categorised so it's not possible to pull that off. But it may be of some use.
    From cutting that list down, I think the 1,200 here are probably split up as:
    Indian - 283 (24%)
    Australian - 262 (22%)
    South African - 137 (11%)
    Sri Lankan - 122 (10%)
    New Zealand - 94 (8%)
    Pakistani - 83 (7%)
    English* - 70 (6%)
    Others - about 13% - Bangledishi, Afghan, Zimbabwean, West Indian and a few others.
    I would think most of the Australians, New Zealanders and English* will be on the redirect list eventually. Means we lose a lot of south Asian and African articles (list are less well developed in these cases). Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Caveat there are some issues regarding the redirect list that I need to get to, but if those are resolved then with the caveat that articles to be draftified should be tagged for a period of 7 days before that occurs I might be able to get to a position where I could think about being more supportive of this. There are simply too many articles here for anyone to check through, but individual editors may have them on watchlists and might be able to step in and deal with them in such a period (there are a number of cricket editors with an interest in and sources dealing with specific teams). A number of articles have already been removed from the initial lists produced, but there are simply too many here to check through.
    This is complicated somewhat by the inclusion of articles in this list where there are already prose sources in the article rather than simple database entries. This is a complicated issue, but essentially the CricInfo articles will sometimes contain prose, occasionally prose that originated from The Cricketer or Wisden - both clearly excellent reliable sources. CricketArchive occasionally also does this. It's difficult to know for sure how many, partly because there's just so many articles here. Again, tagging for a short period would allow editors with an interest in individual articles to check and ensure there there's no people included who already meet the source that could plausibly... condition. This would include people like Brett Matthews (cricketer) (where there's already a prose source which contributes in the article - this is the only one of the 250 or so articles I've checked which are still on the list to be on it in error in my view), Brett van Deinsen, Brendan Creevey, Brad Oldroyd for example. These are snapshots, but each has something that makes me feel that WP:NEXIST means that if we were to dig more that we'd easily find more on them. Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Brett Matthews shouldn't be on the list, per the note attached to selection criteria #4 due to the presence of this reference. The reason it is on the list is because that reference is linked in an extremely unusual way; I've manually removed him from the list and am currently working to determine whether the problem applies to any other members of the list. BilledMammal (talk) 08:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Thanks for that. Things like this are part of the reason I'd rather tag for a period so that things can be checked. I suspect there may be a handful of others. Blue Square Thing (talk) 09:36, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Fixed. Six articles were on the list incorrectly and have now been removed. If I can work out how to have the template display a different message in main space than it does in draft space I don't mind leaving the articles in main space for a week after adding the template before moving them to draft space. BilledMammal (talk) 10:16, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support Extraordinary situations require extraordinary solutions. This 1,200 is only a mere subset of Lugnuts' work, and certainly among the least developed. Put them in draft space where they can either be incubated or ultimately removed. -Indy beetle (talk) 08:44, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support, per Indy beetle.—S Marshall T/C 09:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose any thinking that begins with an artificial sense of urgency, or claims that We also cannot leave the articles as are (we absolutely can; you just don't want us to), so we must do something right now. Don't just stand there, do something! (Except for genuinely trying to expand and source any of the articles yourself. People might discover that it was possible, and we can't have that, because it would interfere with our deletion goals.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 11:20, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    A very good point this, thanks for bringing it up. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:15, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Since posting this, I asked a website for a random number (3 out of 10), went 30% of the way down the hidden list above, and found Anwell Newman. I don't know anything about cricket, and I've never heard of this person, but in a little more than an hour, I'd turned the article into a decent start that cites half a dozen recent news sources and learned something about the apartheid era in cricket and discovered that veterans leagues are a thing, even though we don't have an article about Veterans cricket.
    I've obviously got no way to know whether this is just randomly the only one in the entire list that could be expanded, but I doubt it, because it was a randomly selected article that I know absolutely nothing about. This confirms my feeling that the "problem" here is Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions#Nobody's working on it (or impatience with improvement) rather than an actual problem with the article (which was 100% accurate, BTW). IMO m:Immediatism is a more honorable philosophy when you're willing to roll up your sleeves and do the work, rather than hiding accurate information from readers because nobody else WP:VOLUNTEERed to do the work on your schedule. WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:45, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    People might discover that it was possible, and we can't have that, because it would interfere with our deletion goals. That is a bizarre statement. Of course it is possible; if it wasn't we would be proposing deletion, rather than draftification. The issue is distinguishing between the minority that it is possible to expand from the majority that aren't, and handling said majority in a way that doesn't consume a disproportionate amount of the communities time. BilledMammal (talk) 13:00, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Keep or Delete Draftifying this many articles is like stuffing your mess inside a closet —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:14, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    No it isn't, it is making order in the main space and leaving what possibly still needs grow in draft space. The articles will likely only get expanded them if they are threatened in some way either by drafitifcation or deletion. They didn't get expanded until now, yet they (I believe mostly) exist since years. And if they get nominated one by one, the vast majority gets deleted or redirected in my experience.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 16:30, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    I doubt they will get touched at all in draftspace. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 13:00, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support, reluctantly - I just tried to rescue seven articles at random using relatively basic internet searches and went 0-for-7. I'm sure we're going to overlook at least one actually notable cricketer, but those articles can be re-created. SportingFlyer T·C 12:29, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    @SportingFlyer, I'm 1-for-1, with a randomly selected article. Would you like to post the names of the seven you looked at? Maybe someone else would like to have a go at them (or to make sure that they're looking at different ones). WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:52, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    @WhatamIdoing: I searched for Aaqib Khan, Akoijam Tenyson Singh, Alfred Browne (cricketer), Alexander Robinson (cricketer, born 1924), Alexander Slight, Alfred Carlton, and Brian Murphy (Jamaican cricketer), and I just now searched for Dennis Thorbourne. I would send them all to AfD if this is opposed. SportingFlyer T·C 17:35, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    I should also note my WP:BEFORE was cursory enough - two searches per person - but the only hits I could find were for database sources, or for other people with the same name, with the exception of Alfred Browne who is related to another, more famous cricketer. SportingFlyer T·C 17:36, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    I had no luck with regular web searches, as the top hits were all duplicative databases. I had better luck with news-specific searches. For your first, I see a description of him as a 17-year-old right-arm medium-pacer and another called him a young right-arm seamer (I don't know what that means, but I assume it means something. I also don't know what it means if someone pulled medium-pacer Aaqib Khan to deep fine-leg – the jargon here is deep). He was included in a list of youngest players, and I'm pretty sure that this gives his recent salary, or at least something like it. He's Muslim.
    But it turned out that what we really needed was the Hindi-language newspapers. The transliteration of his name is आकिब खान, and with that, you can ask your favorite search engine to look for non-English sources. For example, in the third-biggest daily newspaper in the largest country in the world, there are three sources that handle SIGCOV issues pretty nicely: https://www.livehindustan.com/uttar-pradesh/saharanpur/story-aaqib-khan-of-saharanpur-selected-in-under-19-india-team-2870012.html looks like a couple hundred words about his childhood and becoming a professional cricketer. https://www.livehindustan.com/uttar-pradesh/saharanpur/story-aaqib-of-saharanpur-is-ready-to-play-against-afghanistan-2871651.html is even longer and gives his parents names and professions and says he's the first from his town to be chosen for the Under-19's team. https://www-livehindustan-com.translate.goog/uttar-pradesh/saharanpur/story-aaqib-khan-selected-for-practice-bowler-in-mumbai-indians-3935545.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp announces him being selected as (what machine translation calls) a "practice bowler" with (what I'm guessing is) a professional team.
    Machine translation isn't great for Hindi, but I don't think we need a perfect translation to discover that these three news articles alone count as that ideal for the GNG, "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:27, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    @WhatamIdoing - I've been in way too many AfD discussions where someone searches up the romanized version of someone's name and says "there's no coverage on this person". Then, when you search their name in their native language, a lot more results start popping up. It's a major problem on this website and I do hope something is done about it in the future. It'd be like searching Tom Brady in Bhojpuri and claiming he's not notable because no results pop-up.KatoKungLee (talk) 15:29, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Off topic, but I think it is worth considering adding a transliteration tool to Template:Find sources AFD, at least for articles with Category:AfD debates (Biographical). The issue is that editors don't think to search for their native name, particularily when it isn't included in the article; including such a tool in that template might provide the subtle hint necessary to boost the rate of searches for that name. If you open a discussion about that somewhere, please ping me; I would be interested in participating. BilledMammal (talk) 15:41, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    @KatoKungLee, it would probably help if the articles consistently provided the local/original spelling for people's names. Most of us can copy/paste into a search engine, but fewer can figure out the relevant languages and make the transliteration. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:57, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I'd support that, @BilledMammal, but it could be extended to a lot more than BLPs. A very common issue I encounter is with foods/dishes. I've seen foods that were considered national or regional dishes not show up in romanized searches and have had to resort to using google translate to convert the English rendering back into the native language, which is also iffy. It's particularly a concern for places like India, where most regional dishes will have renderings in at least two languages. Valereee (talk) 13:32, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    The first and third articles are routine transactional news that mostly contain reports of what people affiliated with him said/thought, not independent commentary. The second piece seems to be an expansion on the first piece, despite being published before. It's also under the stricter provisions of YOUNGATH and so unlikely to count towards notability at all. JoelleJay (talk) 23:14, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support largely per my comment at the last RfC. If someone spends a few moments doing something mildly disruptive we should not be afraid to undue it – even if it's a page creation, even if they did it 1200 times. If someone finds a cache of sources and wants to create a well-sourced article on any of these cricketers, the existing articles would be of no help whatsoever. Ajpolino (talk) 12:46, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    I just expanded one, and that was not my experience. I specifically found three bits of information to be useful: the team he played for, his birth date (because Cricket World Cup is "50-over" tournament, and I spent a long time trying to figure out whether the "Over-50's Cricket World Cup" was the same thing or if it referred to the age of the players), and the year that he started playing first-class matches (so I could make sure that an article about his second career was the same person). WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Removed Anwell Newman, thank you for expanding it. That information is easily available in database sources; us mirroring said sources doesn't make it easier to write articles. BilledMammal (talk) 12:57, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Generally, when someone says that they found ______ easier than the alternatives, you should probably believe them. I personally found that it was easier for me to expand the article when that information was right there in front of me than if I had to do the extra work of looking it up on a different website.
    More generally, if you genuinely believe that you know more about my personal experience than I do, then the world needs you to consider a different hobby. Mindreading comes to mind; you might be the first person in history to actually be able to do it. Otherwise, please don't tell me that I don't know what was easier for me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:44, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    I picked three arbitrarily: David Mailer, Craig Marais (cricketer), and Chengkam Sangma. I personally did not find the existing articles helpful as they restate what's available at ESPNCricInfo, which is also the first Google hit when I search them. I used Google and TWL's Gale and EBSCO subscriptions with a handful of keywords (team name, approximate dates, etc.) and couldn't find any real coverage. I did find Mailer's obit which doesn't give much more to go off of. Just snippets of routine match coverage for the others (both of whom are still alive, best I can tell). Now I don't have the deepest confidence in my ability to dig up source material on cricketers, but my poking around plus the criteria for the article selection make me think these articles are mirrors of database content on topics that don't meet GNG. As for dealing with them en masse, my thoughts align with GreenC's below. Ajpolino (talk) 16:22, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Looking at your first in TWL's NewspaperArchive.com, I find 159 records for David Mailer from 1874–1937 in Australia. I'm having trouble reading the fine print, but it's possible that there is something useful in there. The obit, which looks written by the newspaper rather than a paid advertisement, would support a sentence about a post-cricket career of grazier, and to say that he was married but had no offspring. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:15, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Noting I've conducted my own search on Mailer and I found decent sources on Trove, a free Australian newspaper archive. Most coverage was under "Dave" rather than "David". – Teratix ₵ 05:56, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per my general support for reducing the number of short stubs unlikely to ever be significantly expanded. - Donald Albury 12:55, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose - "Lugnuts didn't take his time creating these, so why should we" is an entirely valid feeling. I found Lugnuts frustrating, too, and nobody is going to be forced to improve these articles or spend any time on them. It does not, however, create any urgency to [not just ignore but] delete them. None of these articles have been evaluated for notability. None of these articles have been evaluated for quality. It's use of draftspace to circumvent the deletion process (see WP:DRAFTIFY), and based entirely on metadata rather than anything to do with article subjects. I would support mass deletion of any stubs created after consensus formed that it's not ok to mass create articles based on databases. No need for draftification there. For articles created before that, though, it just seems vindictive. The articles aren't policy violations; there's no emergency that demands they be dealt with. If you're still feeling resentment towards Lugnuts, perhaps take comfort in the knowledge that he can no longer create articles at all, and then find something totally different to work on. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 13:03, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Problem is, there are still getting created numerous articles on autopatrolled only sourced to dependent databases. There needs to be some solution for that, and draftifying such articles seems an acceptable one for me.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 16:36, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose - For several reasons:
    1) The Olympian draftifcation had multiple articles on there that were drafted erroneously like Addin Tyldesley and we already have spotted articles that don't belong there with this one. How many errors are going to be in this list? Nobody knows or cares. Why does getting articles drafted supercede drafting articles correctly? WP:NORUSH. Mass-creating and mass-drafting articles seems to be two sides of the same coin.
    2) Deleting large batches of articles is obviously not encyclopedia building behavior. These articles do no harm to anyone by being here and many of them may be able to be expanded and improved. Drafting them makes them less likely to be improved.
    3) WP:BIAS and WP:SBEXT plays a role here. We do not have access to the informational resources of various countries in the Middle East and Oceania, which limits research. Even if we did, being able to read other languages is yet another hurdle. We also know the English speaking media has generally little interest in non-political topics from these places.
    4) Lugnuts does not WP:OWN any articles, yet he keeps being mentioned. He has nothing to do with this and should not be mentioned. Articles with limited information or sources is a collective failure.
    5) The wikipedia notability rules were followed at the time of the creation of these articles. The notability rules were then changed and likely will be changed again in the future due to situations like this. It is asking a lot of articles to not only follow current rules, but follow future rules that do not currently exist and/or may only temporarily exist.KatoKungLee (talk) 13:44, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support For the same reason I supported the olympian draftification. To the contrary of the poster above, an article failing current notability rules is an excellent reason to delete it. Old articles are not exempted from the current notability rules. (t · c) buidhe 14:09, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    • an article failing current notability rules - Do these? This is a list based on article creator + size + current sourcing, not notability. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 14:35, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
      @Rhododendrites: I think most of these fail WP:GNG, and all of them fail WP:GNG "on their face." They did not fail the guideline at the time because it was not tailored to GNG. The alternative is going through and searching for sources for every single one of these to see if they can be expanded, which is frustrating, given how little effort was put into their creation. SportingFlyer T·C 17:39, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Alternative, First put them all in a maintenance category, if not already in one, so they can easily be found and identified. Merge and redirect wherever reasonably practicable. Most can probably find a home in a list or other article where they should have been in the first place. Apart from saving information, this might show people that it is better to put the information into an existing article if it is so sparse, and split it out when there is enough to be worth the trouble. Any that are unsuitable for a merge and redirect should probably be deleted. Any that are still not merged or improved can be relisted after a year or so. Maybe someone can write a script for doing this quickly. If anyone wants to make a real article from any of them they can do it any time. Hiding them in draft space without an action plan is unlikely to save anything in the long run. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 14:12, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    I would say this is feasible but the absolute lack of progress on almost every maintenance project means that the burden falls on a very very small subset of editors, who frankly have dwindling patience to clean up other people's messes. Sennecaster (Chat) Sennecaster (Chat) 15:47, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Pbsouthwood: See this discussion that I just opened at BOTN; note that it doesn't just cover articles that this process would apply to as I didn't see the need to limit the application of maintenance tags in that way - in other words, just because an article is on that list doesn't mean it would ever be proposed to be draftified under this process. BilledMammal (talk) 17:51, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support but I think the idea Peter Southwood presents may be a good step 1: tag all those proposed into a maintenance cat, and then re-notify the appropriate projects that these will be draftified in, say, 6 months unless there is significant improvement on them, and then follow the steps above. This should allow those that are easily proven notable to be taken out of the cat, or catch errors, so that there is far less bemoaning when the draftication happens. --Masem (t) 14:20, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    I think this is a better idea. Maybe give it a year and put up a notification on each categorised page. SportingFlyer T·C 17:40, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose. This is such a terrible, terrible, really bad idea. To start, I want to let anyone thinking of voting here know that if this passes, BilledMammal will continue with several others every few months, until we've backdoor-deleted tens-to-hundreds of thousands of historical athletes and wasted enormous quantities of editor time. Is that really what makes the encyclopedia better? Now, for my reasons to oppose: many of my previous points at the Olympian discussion also apply here:
    • Mass draftification is not the right approach for potentially non-notable articles. For one, it actually violates policy; WP:DRAFTIFY specifically states "Older articles should not be draftified. As a rule of thumb, articles older than 90 days should not be draftified without prior consensus at AfD." These articles are much older than 90 days, and this is not AfD. And it also states that it is not intended as a backdoor to deletion: this is effectively what this proposal is. Additionally, there are many more appropriate and more beneficial to the encyclopedia ways that these could be dealt with—for example, BilledMammal (the proposer) made the template Template:No significant coverage (sports) for the sole reason that articles would not have to be mass deleted (–BilledMammal: "I've created Template:No significant coverage (sports) to give editors an alternative to immediately [removing from mainspace] articles lacking significant coverage.") You could nominate the articles for deletion at AfD, PROD them, redirect them, or, my favorite, expand them.
    • Many of these are notable and can be expanded. I admit that, unlike the Olympian discussion, I know nothing of cricket and am not great and finding sources for such articles, but I've seen users like Blue Squared Thing doing expansion after expansion after expansion to these articles before and after the discussion started. That clearly shows these are often notable and have the potential to be expanded.
    • There is no wrong in keeping these. Unlike the deletionists seem to argue, the encyclopedia is not harmed in any way by the inclusion of stub articles. It is harmed, however, in my opinion by discussions like these which waste enormous quantities of editor time and result in the mass backdoor-deletion (specifically against policy) of enormous amounts of potentially notable articles. Explain in what way is Wikipedia made better by getting rid of notable articles (even if those articles are stubs)—would you rather have short articles on people you're interested in, or nothing at all?
  • I could argue more but I am too tired to. BeanieFan11 (talk) 14:56, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    For one, it actually violates policy; WP:DRAFTIFY specifically states... WP:DRAFTIFY is an essay, not policy. Further, the section you are referring to, WP:DRAFTIFY#During new page review, isn't discussing draftification generally, but draftification during new page review. BilledMammal (talk) 15:19, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    The section is irrelevant—it still states that. But if you want a policy, see here: Incubation must not be used as a "backdoor to deletion". BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:22, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    It isn't being used as a backdoor to deletion; above, KatoKungLee gave an example of a Olympian from the previous RfC who has been improved and returned to mainspace, and you improved and restored Gyula Iványi - I see I made a few small edits to that one as well.
    It is being used to incubate the articles, so that those that are improvable can be improved and returned to mainspace. BilledMammal (talk) 15:43, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    It isn't being used as a backdoor to deletion; above, KatoKungLee gave an example of a Olympian from the previous RfC who has been improved and returned to mainspace, and you improved and restored Gyula Iványi - I see I made a few small edits to that one as well. – You're avoiding the 1,000 others that have not been improved... not to mention when I improved Gyula you and S Marshall tried really hard to delete it BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:49, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    You're avoiding the 1,000 others that have not been improved... We have five years to improve those articles. Of course, many can't be and in time will be deleted, but that is the purpose of this proposal; it is to give us time to sift through these microstubs that were dumped on the encyclopedia and improve the ones that are suitable and delete the ones that aren't without overloading processes like AfD. The fact that some have already been improved and restored to mainspace is proof that this isn't a backdoor to deletion.
    not to mention when I improved Gyula you and S Marshall tried really hard to delete it At an AfD where after you and I collaborated to find a reliable source I !voted keep, a position that S Marshall concurred with BilledMammal (talk) 16:20, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    The fact that some have already been improved and restored to mainspace is proof that this isn't a backdoor to deletion. Er... no. The fact that 2/1000 (0.2%) of the articles (of which, a much, much larger proportion are notable) were saved is not. at. all. proof that this isn't a backdoor to deletion. At an AfD where after you and I collaborated to find a reliable source I !voted keep, a position that S Marshall concurred with – Of course, after you initially voted delete and over an hour and a half of arguing about whether the sources were good enough switched to "keep" BeanieFan11 (talk) 16:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Bringing articles to AfD is incredibly time-consuming. Multiple editors have to weigh in and do their due diligence in searching for sources to argue for or against notability (or whatever grounds the article is nominated for). Then there are debates which can just be so energy-draining. And hundreds of articles are sent to AfD a week. If notability were to be challenged on every single one here, that would take time and energy away from other deletion discussions. Doing it in bulk like this, while takes a month and a hundred-plus editors, takes far less time and editors' hours overall. SWinxy (talk) 01:03, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Where did I say AfD is the only option? BeanieFan11 (talk) 01:06, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support - Best route to go. GoodDay (talk) 15:06, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose per WhatAmIDoing.  Spy-cicle💥  Talk? 15:08, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support It is clear that microstubs with insiginificant database sources are unacceptable. If you think some of these are notable and can be expanded, then no one's stopping you. But the interpretation that playing a single game of sport means you are automatically notable here and exempt from sourcing requirements is wrong and outdated. Bulk draftification is absolutely an appropriate response to recognizing that these articles are simply not ready for mainspace, and I believe the impossiblity of sorting though Lugnuts's mass-creation individually justifies an extension of the rule of thumb regarding article age. Reywas92Talk 15:15, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose I thank BilledMammal for the courtesy ping. I don't like the idea of hiding the intent to mass delete these articles. Delaying a mass deletion by 5 years is still a mass deletion, I think we're be better off with a more honest proposal to massively delete them on a more immediate time scale. I also am concerned that these files affected would be disproportionately be of Indian, South African, and Sri Lankan athletes where Wikipedia already has an Anglo-American skew, and this proposal would have the disparate impact of making that issue worse. I also don't like that this proposal seems to be a punitive one aimed at Lugnuts. I admit that I personally don't like that Lugnuts took no care in creating or maintaining the articles that they created. I also definitely sympathize with those who do the work of curating Wikipedia and the kind of mess that we've inherited from Lugnuts's negligence. Abzeronow (talk) 15:33, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose I am opposing this for the reasons I opposed the Olympic one, although this one is even easier to expand the articles on because some are actually around recently enough to have digital coverage! QuicoleJR (talk) 15:45, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Upon further inspection, many of these are not notable, and I have struggled to find sources online. I still do not feel comfortable supporting, but I am moving to Neutral. QuicoleJR (talk) 17:28, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support - As I commented in the original WP:LUGSTUBS RFC: It's clear that some kind of cleanup is required, and increasing AfD workload by something like half for literal years simply cannot be the only solution. The proposed extremely extended draftification seems like a suitably conservative approach (to the point that I'm not sure five years is truly required), giving editors plenty of time rescue any articles that warrant rescuing while ensuring that (most of) those which do not warrant retaining are eventually (even if after an extensive wait) removed. -Ljleppan (talk) 16:06, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose as an obvious backdoor to deletion. And quite frankly, anyone who doesn't think that mass draftification won't hit their editing area of choice sooner or later is naive. --Rschen7754 16:07, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    If my area of editing had a mess like this, I would be ashamed of it and first in line to get it cleaned out. This philosophy of "everything related to my area of editing should automatically warrant its own article without regard for high quality sources" just creates a mess that other users then have to clean up, and I'm glad to see that it's getting shot down more and more frequently. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:08, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    You seem to forget that we are all volunteers with other things to do besides Wikipedia, and as others have commented re the last RFC, "improving" an articles is often not sufficient to get it to be kept. Rschen7754 01:55, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Rschen7754. Obvious backdoor to deletion. Where does it end? LEPRICAVARK (talk) 16:30, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose - Thanks for the notification; my stance has not changed. I oppose the mass deletion of articles whether it is explicit or via a backdoor, and whether it is done immediately or boiling frog-style. The latter is more insidious, though; per David Eppstein's comment from the original proposal: (I oppose this) not so much because I care about these Olympian sub-stubs, but because I do care about WP:CREEP and about not expanding the already-problematic process of using draftification as a way of getting rid of articles for which there is no immediate prospect of active improvement and resubmission. Regardless of whether the gotten-rid-of-articles are deleted from draftspace or just left there to molder forever, they have been eliminated out-of-process as Wikipedia content, debasing both our proper deletion processes and our proper use of draftspace to foster drafts. I also oppose -- as strongly as it is possible to oppose something -- the continued personal insults toward Lugnuts that seem to crop up in every single one of these things. WP:CIVIL is a policy. Gnomingstuff (talk) 16:33, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose: Other editors have addressed several cogent policy concerns, and @WhatamIdoing has demonstrated that at least one of the cricketers listed meets WP:GNG or WP:ATHLETE. My concern is more procedural. Rather than having deletion discussions every few months to deal with Lugnut's work, time might be better spent organizing with the relevant WikiProjects to systematically review articles for notability and only then nominating verified non-notable articles for mass deletion (or PRODing individual articles as articles are evaluated). There's no reason to give other editors five years to fix things; the community should start that work now. voorts (talk/contributions) 17:11, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    These have already been around for years, clearly no one really cares to systematically review them and it seems disingenuous to think someone will actually get through tens of thousands of these. If people do in fact care to sift through all of them, they can from draftspace as well. Reywas92Talk 19:47, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • 'Oppose per Rschen7754 and also... they aren't great, but it isn't really a crisis, is it? Let them simmer in the big pot of mainspace a while, the flavour will probably improve; no need to kick them back onto the cutting board (draftspace). Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 17:23, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Edward-Woodrow I don't have an opinion on this proposal, but I've found that the attitude of Tɛmplet:Tquote tends to end up with poor quality articles not being improved at all. They tend to be improved when there's a time limit. This is why people who participate at AfD discussions tend to be sensitive about AfD being used as a method of improving articles articles instead of exploring whether or not articles need to be deleted. Tɛmplet:Sbb I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 18:14, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    @I dream of horses: The thing is when someone proposes so. many. articles. to be draftifed, and after that, so. many. more. articles, to the point that there's tens of thousands of articles in draftspace that will soon be deleted, there's gonna be a whole lot of improvable articles being removed through the backdoor. BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:23, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    @BeanieFan11 Unfortunately, mass-direct-deletion will cause more controversy, to such a degree that it's not going to happen. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 20:11, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Tɛmplet:Tqqi Exactly. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 17:21, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Most of these have already been simmering for many years...there's a reason they haven't been expanded already and a reason it only took mass-creation to write them, these simply are not notable people needing articles. Reywas92Talk 19:35, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support the solution to mass-X is mass-Y. Nothing wrong with this method it's a measured response to a previous action. Slippery slope fear mongering presented by Rschen7754 is a logical fallacy aka appeal to fear ("mass draftification won't hit their editing area of choice sooner or later is naive"). -- GreenC 17:47, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    For the record, BilledMammal has not left the option of expanding this to other articles off the table, albeit admitting: If we ever go down that path we'll need a tool more powerful than Quarry to build the list.. While this is a hypothetical, they have stated as a concrete idea: While I don't plan to include creations by multiple editors in the same group, consideration has been given to creating groups of mass created cricketers made by other editors, such as BlackJack. You can read the full discussion here, although it's understandable you weren't aware of it since it wasn't made public in this RfC. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:27, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    He does seem to want to go after others, see his comment there: However, I do want to use this group to stretch the boundaries of what the process can be used for; in it I want to do at least some of the following: Change the article selection criteria, to avoid the specific values of the first group becoming a standard part of the process; Nominate articles created by editors other than Lugnuts, to avoid the process becoming a "Lugnuts cleanup process"; Nominate articles on topics outside the sports topic area - or at least the Olympics topic area - to avoid the process becoming a "sports cleanup process"; [and] Nominate a larger number of articles, to avoid the process being limited to ~1000 article batches BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Yes; I have considered other groups of mass created articles, such as those created by Tɛmplet:Noping. I would agree that there isn't a slippery slope here though, as it will only ever apply to groups of mass created articles that don't include any significant coverage. BilledMammal (talk) 18:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    You go look at User talk:BilledMammal/Mass Creation Draftification - where one proposal said Nominate articles on topics outside the sports topic area - or at least the Olympics topic area - to avoid the process becoming a "sports cleanup process". Please tell me how it is supposed to only apply to sports. --Rschen7754 20:43, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support We've long since discussed this repeatedly at this point and it relates back to many other discussions the community has already had, including making NSPORT explicitly clear that all sports related biographies must meet the GNG when challenged. The alternative to draftification here is outright deleting all of these articles, which I would also support, because the vast, vast majority of them are non-notable athletes who should have never had pages made on them in the first place. And any who are notable can very easily be recreated, considering the existing micro-stubs pinned only to database entries are tantamount to not having an article at all in the first place with how useless they are. Any sports Wikiproject editors above should probably focus on actually having good properly referenced articles on athletes in the first place, rather than complaining after the fact. The former should have been your requirement from the get-go and y'all should have challenged Lugnuts on their mass creation right when it started. Then we wouldn't have a mess to clean up at all. SilverserenC 17:59, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    • And any who are notable can very easily be recreated ... Any sports Wikiproject editors above should probably focus on actually having good properly referenced articles on athletes in the first place – Silver seren, do you know how difficult it is to write a properly referenced decent-sized article on a historical athlete? To find the sources, read them all, rephrase them and write them in the article - to add the references, do all the formatting, etc.? It often takes me hours to do that and in some cases (e.g. Draft:C. O. Brocato, my current project) days. You think us "sports Wikiproject editors" can "very easily" do that to tens of thousands of articles, with the consequence mass deletion if we do not? BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:41, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
      • Not what I said at all. I said the Wikiproject should have prevented the mass creation done in the first place (and should be actively preventing any such creation going on right now without proper referencing). Draftification is a very minor consequence, compared to deletion, of this mass creation of improperly made articles that should have been dealt with years ago. SilverserenC 18:48, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
        Draftification results in deletion, so it is exactly the same consequence as deletion. The proposal here is not materially different from saying "I'm going to delete this unless you do a lot of work on my timeline". The timeline might sound generous to some editors – the proposal is ultimately to require the clean up of an average of two articles about cricketers every day for the next five years (plus one article about early Olympiads, plus who knows how many others will be proposed in the coming weeks), but it is still a proposal to delete them if people don't do the work on his timeline. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
        Is it better to send cricketer after cricketer to AfD individually, though? SportingFlyer T·C 21:40, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
        @SportingFlyer - Mass drafting articles is no different than mass creating articles. In both cases, the person behind it didn't feel like putting in the time (despite WP:NORUSH existing) to research the article due to time concerns.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:19, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
        Yes, but most of these wouldn't survive an AfD, and the alternative - if this fails - is to AfD them one by one. SportingFlyer T·C 18:41, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
        We don't know that most of these wouldn't survive an AfD. We have editors asserting their preferences with no proof.
        So far, I've looked into three of the players proposed for deletion-via-draft, and I've found newspaper articles (articles entirely and specifically focused on each individual, not just a sentence in an article that's really about a game they played in or a list of team members) for all three of them. For two out of the three, a bit more than an hour's work (each) showed that the subjects are clearly notable, and for the third, 10 minutes' work showed that it was at least possible that he's notable.
        Where's your evidence that what's true for these three would not also be true for the next three, or for the next 300? WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:08, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support Such sloppy articles written by a condemnable fan don't deserve space on this wiki. Either an editor performs research and writes about notable subjects or they can leave this website. I, for one, enjoy seeing the political winds turn as we become more exclusionist. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:03, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    And here's those violations of WP:CIVIL I mentioned above. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose, all I have to say has been summed up pretty well by BeanieFan11: if this passes, BilledMammal will continue with several others every few months, until we've backdoor-deleted tens-to-hundreds of thousands of historical athletes and wasted enormous quantities of editor time. LilianaUwU (talk / contributions) 18:47, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Okay, so let's clear out more of Lugnuts's junk all at once. Reywas92Talk 19:36, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per Silver seren and others, but 5 years is way too long for them to sit in Draft space before deletion. I would prefer 1 year. Nosferattus (talk) 19:08, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. Not convinced by the oppose arguments. There's no slippery slope that'll come for your WikiProject next. These were mass-creations straight from databases. When a user (DG) had systemic reliability issues in GAs, the presumption was to delete-by-default and rescue on a case-by-case basis. This one is about a user with systemic issues re: notability, and the logical response is the same as for DG. If this were a WikiProject I'm a member of and have to deal with the maintenance burden of, I'd have opposed these mass-creations from the start, and I'd now be screaming on rooftops for them to be draftified. What exactly are we here to do, except build good, minimum-medium-length articles on notable topics? Microstubs aren't fine to keep around indefinitely, they're an anomaly to be eventually eliminated; they don't provide encyclopedic coverage and go against the first pillar and WP:NOT. Non-notable articles must eventually be deleted, so to keep them around is to require editors to eventually go through each and decide whether to merge, redirect, or delete. We're talking many thousands of articles, and this unequivocally creates a huge maintenance burden, for articles that no one is reading. When someone created them with only minutes of effort, and even claiming that he inserted false statements into the microstube, that's disruption, and the best response is to mass-draftify. Not just these, but every single Lugnuts microstub sourced exclusively to databases. That's what we should have decided back when Lugnuts was banned, and it's really too bad we're now seeing "RfC fatigue" on this issue.
    By the way, are we supposed to completely disregard WP:SPORTBASIC #5, which was added after strong agreement at a well-attended RfC? The real "back door" is stealth-overriding that RfC outcome, not back-door deletionism. These articles must cite a non-database SIGCOV source inline; "the sources exist" is irrelevant. DFlhb (talk) 19:16, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose We thankfully have very guidelines guidelines for Cricket player notability. It states that "cricketers who have played at the highest domestic level, or in the lower levels of international cricket,[a] may have sufficient coverage about them to justify an article". I examined a random subset of these articles, and they are clearly articles that by and large fall within this gray area of potentially notable depending on source material. Just because the stub uses 1-2 sources today doesn't mean they don't exist, we have to take each article on its own and edit it. Given that there is no deadline, mass draft-fying these is basically backdoor deletion, which is against deletion policy. Steven Walling • talk 19:31, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Scroll up a bit on that page, which says "In addition, the subjects of standalone articles should meet the general notability guideline." as well as "Trivial coverage of a subject by secondary sources may be used to support content in an article, but it is not sufficient to establish notability. This includes listings in database sources with low, wide-sweeping generic standards of inclusion, such as Sports Reference's college football and basketball databases." and "Sports biographies must include at least one reference to a source providing significant coverage of the subject, excluding database sources. Meeting this requirement alone does not indicate notability, but it does indicate that there are likely sufficient sources to merit a stand-alone article." These pages do not meet this standard and should be out of mainspace if they aren't shown to do so with significant coverage. "May have sufficient coverage" does not mean "must have an article". Reywas92Talk 19:41, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    The fundamental problem with this proposal is that it's trying to impose a WP:DEADLINE on improving them. Other people must meet my deadline because I don't like the current state of these articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:16, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    Any editor can challenge the notability of articles and sent them to AfD without improving them, whenever he wishes. If a rule prohibiting "deadlines" existed, it would be impossible to delete non-notable articles altogether. Avilich (talk) 21:19, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    This isn't AFD though, it's a proposal to generate a backdoor to deletion which is explicitly against our deletion policy.
    BilledMammal is doing this because they know that mass AFDs would never pass, but they can pretend each draft will get considered before being eventually deleted. (struck per my comment elsewhere) The policy is against draftifying older articles because everyone knows it means putting them in a graveyard no one will ever see. Steven Walling • talk 01:54, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    BilledMammal is doing this because they know that mass AFDs would never pass, but they can pretend each draft will get considered before being eventually deleted. That's an WP:AGF violation. Please strike it.
    The policy is against draftifying older articles because everyone knows it means putting them in a graveyard no one will ever see. Policy is against draftifying older articles without consensus. This is an extremely prominent discussion; the notion that we are quietly slipping them into a graveyard without anyone seeing is bizarre. Further, if there is a consensus for this I will be providing lists of articles to the relevant Wikiprojects. BilledMammal (talk) 10:31, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Steven Walling, I have to agree, you should strike that. Valereee (talk) 10:35, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    I'm not striking anything. "This guideline does not require that editors continue to assume good faith in the presence of obvious evidence to the contrary".
    The last RFC close clearly noted that there were many members of the community that objected to using a Village Pump survey to circumvent normal deletion processes and policy. Ignoring this objection and presuming that the first RFC close creates a precedent as if it were an approved policy or guideline is an obvious pattern of behavior, and BilledMammal has numerous user pages (like User:BilledMammal/Sander.v.Ginkel Olympian stubs) that show an intent to keep trying to use this polling tactic to remove stubs from mainspace as a form of backdoor deletion for which there is no support in policy. Steven Walling • talk 22:09, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Steven Walling, please indicate what constitutes obvious evidence. What you've described is opinion. Valereee (talk) 22:46, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    Here's the problem: is doing this because they know that mass AFDs would never pass, but they can pretend each draft will get considered before being eventually deleted is assuming bad faith. You are discussing motivations rather than edits. That's a problem. Valereee (talk) 22:55, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    BilledMammal has a long history of nominating sports bios at AFD. Here is just a sample. One time they nominated dozens of footballers in one day, which resulted in an ANI thread where at the end of it they explicitly declared they were going to go around trying to stop people from creating large numbers of stubs. This notion was discussed and roundly rejected at an ArbCom-mandated RFC. So next they proposed WP:LUGSTUBS and all the potential next polls they want to run. I'm sure they think they're trying to improve the encyclopedia, but don't tell me it's not obvious they don't want these stubs deleted, because they've done so directly in the past. Steven Walling • talk 00:44, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    Dozens of editors have a "long history of nominating sports bios at AfD". This is because there have been tens of thousands of sports bios that do not meet GNG. BilledMammal has also redirected a very large number of sportsperson articles that objectively fail SPORTSCRIT, rather than trying to get them deleted. And a non-trivial number of the articles he successfully AfD'd were only taken there after his redirects were reverted without the page being improved. So no it is not "obvious" he or anyone else supporting this proposal wants the stubs deleted as opposed to simply moved out of mainspace until they comply with guideline requirements. JoelleJay (talk) 01:12, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Steven Walling, In the link you provided Billed Mammal says, To prevent the problem of mass created articles from expanding I have also been looking at editors currently engaged in mass creations and asking them to determine if there is a community consensus for the actions. In some cases, this may be forthcoming; in others it might not.
    Today, one of these editors was kind enough to do so, and has opened a discussion at the bots noticeboard. Interested editors may contribute to this test case there. Note that this discussion should focus solely on content, not conduct; the editor is clearly acting in good faith and has done nothing wrong, even if there isn't a consensus for this mass creation. There, BilledMammal seems to simply object to mass creations that don't have consensus; nothing there that provides evidence of nefarious motivations. The ANI you're linking to found that All WP:MASSCREATEd articles (except those not required to meet GNG) must be cited to at least one source which would plausibly contribute to GNG: that is, which constitutes significant coverage in an independent reliable secondary source. Again there is nothing that provides evidence of Billed Mammal's motivations. I feel a little uncomfortable having to explain to an admin the difference between discussing edits and discussing bad-faith motivations, especially when that admin keeps doubling down. You got it right when you said I'm sure they think they're trying to improve the encyclopedia, but you got it wrong when you said is doing this because they know that mass AFDs would never pass, but they can pretend each draft will get considered before being eventually deleted, and if you can't tell the difference, there's a problem. Valereee (talk) 09:58, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    So @Steven Walling, this is a no? Valereee (talk) 22:30, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    Valereee: I'm not going to argue in circles with you about this. It's painfully obvious from BilledMammal's actions that they're on a mission to remove mass numbers of stubs from Wikipedia in any way they can. If you can't see that something is a duck when it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I can't help you. Steven Walling • talk 05:02, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support For at least 10 years the instructions at WP:NSPORT have been that "The topic-specific notability guidelines described on this page do not replace the general notability guideline" and "the article must still eventually provide sources indicating that the subject meets the general notability guideline". The bulk of the articles nominated here were clearly created in violation of that. There is no evidence that this is a "backdoor to deletion", since this RfC is being broadcasted through the front door in a community forum, and the whole argument just sounds like obstructionism and stonewalling. Avilich (talk) 20:37, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment - the established, consensus position when top-level cricketer articles which can't be improved come to AfD is that redirection to a suitable list is the preferred alternative. Sometimes lists don't exist so we delete (or some mug goes and creates the list). Sometimes people have created articles on cricketers that have not played at the top-level and we delete those.
    There are something like 573 articles listed below that BilledMammal is prepared to redirect to straight away - these were the easy ones to identify. They provided me with a list of 625 other articles (which, annoyingly, is two short of 1,200). I've been through those. I think something like 306 have suitable redirect targets. That would leave 319 to send to draft (list at User:Blue Square Thing/sandbox7 - where there will be some notes about this eventually because the geography is interesting).
    Honestly, that seems about right. **If** we're redirecting the 573+306, then I'm not that unhappy about drafting the others. To be honest, I could probably identify 15 or so that should be flat out deletes. I'm sure we'll have ended up missing some we'd want to keep - but people can work those up anyway if they want to.
    I think the first thing to do is to confirm that we're looking at redirecting almost 75% of these. If that's OK, then I could probably get on board with this despite my general reservations Blue Square Thing (talk) 21:04, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Comment - this is going to sound really lame but I'll end up supporting whatever @Blue Square Thing decides. I don't think I've ever made a statement like this at an RfC or RfA. I know Blue Square Thing's been looking at this issue for weeks now and they've done a lot of detailed analysis. He/she is a prolific cricket editor but also supportive of purging unsuitable articles. A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 01:37, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Some additional explanation. The initial planning for this was done at User talk:BilledMammal/Mass Creation Draftification. This caused some concern among some other editors and discussion ensued at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cricket#Heads up. Since then, Blue Square Thing has been involved in looking at this from the cricket content aspect.
    I believe mass-deletion, properly done, is a good way to fix the problem of insufficiently referenced stubs.
    Each BLP represents a serious obligation by all of us to the person who's the subject of the article to keep their article correct and prevent it being subverted for libelous attacks. We have over 6 million articles to watch now. With BLPs, if in doubt as to notability and the availability of good refs, I believe we should err on the side of deleting or draftifying marginal articles.
    -- A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 03:01, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Yikes! I just saw the comment below about Lugnuts admitting that he introduced deliberate errors to BLPs. If in doubt about a group of these BLPs, we definitely need to get them out of article space. A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 11:47, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Fwiw I've yet to come across an article about a sports person where I consider Lugnuts has introduced deliberate errors. There are errors, of coure - we all do that. But nothing that I can even begin to imagine is in any way deliberate. And I've looked at, well, a "few" of their article creations over the years... The outgoing message you linked to was clearly a "fuck you all" response by someone who clearly felt hard done by at that point. It's a shame, because it will presumably prejudice any appeal they might want to make, but it's not the first time someone's responded like that and it won't be the last. I should say, btw, that I appreciate the sentiment above. Thanks. Blue Square Thing (talk) 13:21, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I think the first thing to do is to confirm that we're looking at redirecting almost 75% of these. Yes; as long as no reasonable objections are raised to the redirect targets then that is what we are looking at doing as a WP:BOLD action permitted by If this proposal is successful #5. The only question is whether you would prefer the articles to be moved to draft space and a new redirect created in their place, or a redirect created over the existing article? I am satisfied with either option. BilledMammal (talk) 07:06, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I think we have to redirect the article as it stands now. There are a number that have been developed from stubs that Lugnuts created (Alfred Hollings for example) and if we add a new redirect and have a draft then I don't see how people would find the draft? It also preserves the page history, sources, images where they exist (like the one mentioned below) etc... I appreciate that there may be people who would like to see articles like these just removed, but a really substantial subset of them have potential for development - unfortunately it's difficult to be certain which ones do without digging quite hard.
    The targets can be changed if they need to be - there are ones I added to the list at my sandbox where I was choosing one of a number of possible redirects quickly, but that's easy to change at any point Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:12, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Personally, I see benefits of both approaches. Creating the redirect over the existing article makes it easier to find the underlying content, prevents it from even being deleted, and makes it easier to restore if improved. Meanwhile, having a new redirect, and thus allowing the article to be put in draft space, makes it easier for editors to work on the draft.
    I would say that for the second option I would create a R from draftified template, that would include a link to the draftified article and thus make it easier for interested editors to find the draft.
    Overall, I don't have a preference; I want whatever option works best for the editors invested in the topic area, and if there is anything I can during the process of redirecting/draftifying that can make it easier for those editors I am happy to do so. BilledMammal (talk) 15:18, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support I've had concerns about these articles for awhile. The very early entries will have been hand written by umpires at a time when spelling was option, later collated into stat books, and so onto an online database. Where there are no other sources to prove existence, there's nothing to say any particular article isn't just someone elses details written down wrong or fudged during the multiple format shifts. I've been few several, both after this RFC started and when I originally became aware of the issue, and haven't been able to find any additional sources. The solution to all this is to create properly sourced articles, something only longterm editors seem to be able to get away with ignoring. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:05, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per WP:LUGSTUBS. Lugnuts at the very least was excessively careless when creating articles and, if his parting message is to be believed, purposefully put errors into his articles (yes I know many think he wasn’t serious about this).The response to mass-creation of failing articles has to also be something of mass-effect, otherwise the problem is unsolvable. Clicking on five at random I found five short, single-reference articles about 19th-century/early 20th century cricketers with limited numbers of appearances. If articles do not match this profile, then bring them back to main space. FOARP (talk) 21:06, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose First, I see above a great point - Mass-creating and mass-drafting articles seems to be two sides of the same coin. Second, I see above the repetition of a not-great point, that the creation of these articles took little effort so why put effort into expanding them... if that's anyone's actual view, I don't know what they think Wikipedia is. Why it's being repeated as an argument is greatly confusing. Third, most importantly, there are users like myself who are interested in expanding such articles, but the Olympian mass draftification was so recent that there's no attention span left as well for these. The speedy mass-draftification of many more articles was a major concern introduced in the Olympian discussion, and I'm sad to see that it has proved true. WP:NORUSH. Kingsif (talk) 21:23, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per above. Therapyisgood (talk) 21:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Noting that I chose one random person on the list - Clement Bengough - and despite knowing barely anything on where to look for sources on cricketers, was able to quickly locate a full-page article on him from a major newspaper — 38 years after his death. BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:03, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    With all due respect, I'm not quite sure that article shows what you're hoping for it to show, i.e. that these articles can be easily sourced - you've managed to pick one person at random who received a full-length story on him in an American paper not because he was a cricketer, but because he was a local interest story for being a foreigner and "social outcast" who moved to the area. His cricket career is but a sentence in that story and doesn't even mention the games he is supposedly notable for. SportingFlyer T·C 22:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    "you've managed to pick one person at random who received a full-length story on him in an American paper not because he was a cricketer, but because he was a local interest story for being a foreigner and "social outcast" who moved to the area" - LOL. I don't want to be mean to Beaniefan but when I saw his description I was expecting a full bio from the NYT. Instead it's a "Here's this weird old English dude that used to live here" local interest story from a small town newspaper. And this really was the issue with a lot of the LUGSTUBS: even when they were notable, they weren't notable for the thing Lugnuts wrote the article about. It's like the time I checked a cricketers's article and they turned out to have been an RAF Air Marshal. In this case, cricket barely features and the story is entirely about what an outcast this person was - it's a nice piece but I'd hesitate to say it shows anything towards notability. FOARP (talk) 21:07, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Whatamidoing. Ideally these articles should probably be merged into lists, but as it stands there's nothing too wrong with the status quo. J947 † edits 23:05, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. I made a lot of arguments at the prior RfC that are applicable here, so I won't repeat them. JoelleJay (talk) 23:13, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Strongly Oppose Mass draftification of this many articles without scrutiny is reckless and irresponsible. This also bypasses and usurps the existing AfD process. A quality check by users needs to be implemented before even suggesting these articles be purged. As I've stated twice before already, this is Wikipedia equivalent to the Beeching Axe. This action would also set a bad precedent for future actions toward other projects and articles on Wikipedia. This could be seen as the website purging articles to fulfill a political or social agenda by parties outside the website. Use the AfD process, not mass purge. Otherwise, content that meets notability guidelines in a mass purge could be easily removed and deleted, much like how crucial rail lines were destroyed during the Beeching Axe, creating logistical and public transportation-related nightmares for the United Kingdom which still plague the country today. The same scrutiny which was used to remove railway lines during the Beeching Axe is being demonstrated in this proposal. I refuse to support "The Great Purge" or a repeat of the Beeching Axe.— MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 00:20, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    What a strange concept to compare elimination of physical infrastructure that people rode in their daily lives to the removal of single-line descriptions of sportspeople with brief careers only appearing in databases..... Reywas92Talk 04:58, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    That still doesn't change the fact the mentality of this proposal mirrors the reckless behavior done during Beeching Axe. I also don't appreciate the attempt to undermine my point with a passive aggressive sarcasm, as that is very unprofessional. And it's also the precedent this sets, as well as the fact AfD is being entirely bypassed and usurped. If I remember correctly, there are hundreds of articles tied into this. Do you know for a fact if all of them are not notable? Have you evaluated every single one? Can you say for certain wiping out over 300 articles at a time without scrutinizing every single one of them first through the AfD process isn't potentially reckless? — MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 08:03, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    User:MatthewAnderson707, how familiar are you with the background of this proposal? Were you at WP:LUGSTUBS? It feels like you're just finding out about all this today. Folly Mox (talk) 08:18, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Again, it's the dangerous precedent this could set for other projects and articles beyond the ones related to WP:LUGSTUBS. Purging hundreds of articles at a time without properly checking the content? Can you not see how that could get out of hand should this be allowed? At the very least, use a more careful approach and ensure if EVERY article being deleted isn't notable.— MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 08:26, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    The entire point of an RfC is to gather input from people who were previously uninvolved in the discussion. Literally the first sentence of WP:RFC. Requests for comment (RfC) is a process for requesting outside input concerning disputes, policies, guidelines or article content. (bolding mine) Gnomingstuff (talk) 14:22, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    What was reckless was creating one stub per minute without assessing if they were notable BEFORE they were created and then expecting thousands of man-hours to be spent debating them individually at AFD, what a joke. I find it sad that people can put zero effort into making pages but them expect others to scrutinize if scraping them from databases was appropriate (hint: it was determined long ago at WP:MASSCREATE and elsewhere that it's not). Reywas92Talk 14:33, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    And I find it sad people support a reckless mass deletion of hundreds of articles without any proper checks or balances first, to ensure they're not all mass created stubs. So we should just take one person's word for it and done without questioning it? What's to stop an individual using this proposed process from going too far with this and getting articles they don't like, abusing this power? Suppose one article happens to meet guidelines ends up in the list of articles to be mass drafted? This also doesn't excuse the fact this is a blatant back door usurpation of AfD. This may seem like a good idea at first and may work out to the benefit of an actual problem, but there is every way this could snowball out of control later and cause massive damage and abuse of power, going from bypassing a bureaucracy to get something done to deleting something "because I said so". Better to try and kill this before it starts than deal with cleaning up a recklessly created mess later. — MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 04:49, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    First, this isn't coming through the backdoor. It's coming through the front door, with a Tɛmplet:Diff2. In theory, it could have been proposed at AfD, at it is appropriate to propose draftification at that venue, but I think, and I hope you would agree, that it is better for these proposals to be done in a more visible location.
    Second, you don't need to take my word for it. You are welcome to check the query that produced the list. Further, if an article that does happen to meet the criteria above ends up in the list of articles to be mass drafted then it can be restored by any editor to mainspace. Given that the process is highly scrutinized and operates only by consensus it cannot be abused in the way you fear. BilledMammal (talk) 05:11, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    The checks and balances are the five extra years the articles are protected from deletion plus the greater attention and prioritization they will receive from wikiprojects. JoelleJay (talk) 00:52, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. I am generally opposed to mass actions of this type. Despite my reservations, and as with the prior Olympics RfC, I support this proposal given its narrow focus. My support is based on the following:
(1) Mass creation. The articles at issue were the product of Lugnuts' well-documented mass process in which thousands of articles were created, often at the rate of approximately a minute per article.
(2) Lack of substance. The articles are microstubs that contain very limited narrative text, simply reciting that the person was a cricket player who appeared in X number of games for X team. If the articles are ultimately deleted, nothing of real substance is lost. If SIGCOV is later uncovered and brought forth, and given the fact that only a minute or so was devoted to the original effort, the articles can be re-created without any meaningful loss of prior effort.
(3) Violation of SPORTBASIC. The articles violate prong 5 of WP:SPORTBASIC which provides: "Sports biographies must include at least one reference to a source providing significant coverage of the subject, excluding database sources." The articles here are sourced only to database sources and do not include SIGCOV.
(4) Cleanup of "deliberate errors". A departure from normal processes is also warranted by the unique case involving Lugnuts' admission in August 2022 (here) that he added "countless deliberate errors on pages that have very few pages views." Draftification of these microstubs allows us to undertake screening for such errors before any such articles are returned to main space.
In sum, I support draftification in this narrow situation. However, this RfC should not be precedent to evade regular order in less egregious circumstances. In such circumstances, normal AfD or redirect procedures should be followed. Cbl62 (talk) 00:35, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
I think the claim of countless deliberate errors is just plain trolling. It is just too much hard work to be plausible. Has anyone detected any of these countless errors? · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 12:41, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per previous RFC on Olympic athletes mass draftification. The fundamental question is if these articles would survive AFD if hypothetically debated in full, and based on the criteria described, they would all be closed "delete" without some compelling discovery of new sources. Even editors who would !vote "keep" in such AFDs can hopefully agree that a hypothetical article with such patchy sources would have a rough time at AFD. Since this is draftification not deletion, if it turns out that there was something valid to use as the basis of a future article, it'll still be there. But given that it's been some years since these were created with no substantial edits from others (per the criteria to build the list), it seems highly likely that most of these articles simply don't pass the notability bar. SnowFire (talk) 04:25, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    They wouldn't all be closed delete. If they were individual AfD we'd probably be looking at something like 20-30% keep based on expansion; 50-60% redirect and 20% delete. That's the way that these sorts of articles have gone at AfD over the last couple of years in general. Blue Square Thing (talk) 06:11, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Blue Square Thing: SportingFlyer says they sampled 7 articles and tried to see if they could be improved with more sources, and went 0/7. I'm not much of a cricket expert so my opinion might not matter, but I just tried 2 of those articles with simple Google searches, and also turned up nothing useful. I think 20-30% "keep by expansion" is a very optimistic estimate, and I'm not torn up about the difference between redirect and draftification/deletion. SnowFire (talk) 16:49, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I'd be interested in knowing what kind of searches @SportingFlyer: performed; a plain google search won't do the trick. Also, @SnowFire: I would trust Blue Square Thing as he seems to be the cricket expert here. Also, FWIW, I went 1/1 and so did WhatamIdoing. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:07, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    @BeanieFan11: Do you mean Clement Bengough for the article you investigated? Because I would absolutely still !vote delete on that article, even if the new mention you found was integrated, and I don't think my !vote would be unusual. I say this as someone who has voted reasonably inclusionist-y on things like D-list actors, so I'm absolutely a gettable keep vote if non-trivial coverage can be found. SnowFire (talk) 18:00, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    You really don't think full-page feature stories from major newspapers improve his case for notability? BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:02, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Full-page feature stories are never bad, but in his case it's a local story about someone who used to live there, completely unrelated to the reason why we claim he's notable (being a cricketer). I'd !vote delete at AfD if that were the only additional source presented since it's a human interest feature story unrelated to cricket. As far as my searches go, I use a couple major search engines with a focus on news and try a couple different search terms, which works well for modern players and horribly for older players, and also check the database sites to see if they have any additional news links. I feel like modern Indian players will be the easiest to save, at least using English language sourcing. SportingFlyer T·C 18:39, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    @SnowFire: possibly, but 36% of the list are Australian, English or New Zealand cricketers and those are the easiest to expand - for example, Alfred Carlton - one of the ones SF looked at (and the only one who falls into any of those nationalities I think) - I could find sources for using Trove (he played for North Melbourne for example and there's a decent amount on him). It might not be a clear-cut keep and perhaps I should have stuck at 20%, which is where I started! If you factor in that a random percentage will have some kind of additional prose or linked article at either CricInfo or CricketArchive (for example, Edwin Mills (cricketer) who's not on this list but will be on the next one, has a detailed prose profile behind CricketArchive's paywall) then it won't be far off 20% at worst - and I'm largely writing off the majority of South Asian cricketers in this as they rarely get kept due to the transliteration problems, but if we could do the sort of thing that WhatamIdoing managed above then 20% starts to look low Blue Square Thing (talk) 17:25, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 1: Survey (mass draftification of cricket articles)

  • Oppose The policy WP:ATD-I says "moving articles to draft space should generally be done only for newly created articles . . . or as the result of a deletion discussion. Older articles should not be draftified without an AfD consensus, with 90 days a rule of thumb". A desire to avoid performing a search for sources does not justify violating the policy WP:ATD-I. If I have to spend many, many, many hours searching for sources with Google (and I do have to do that these days), then there is no good reason why the rest of you should be allowed to avoid doing that. The proposer freely admits that he has not looked at any of these articles, but ran an automated query instead. Automated queries are worse than useless. The proposer's claim that these articles are only referenced to CricketArchive or ESPNcricinfo is false, as some already have other references. For example, Angus Marshall is already referenced to "Marshall Retires", The Telegraph, Brisbane, 1934. The automated query presumably failed to detect this because the reference is not a footnote. James500 (talk) 06:14, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I share this concern, and which is why I requested for the Quarry query below (Link to query). @BilledMammal or whoever constructed the query needs to go back to the drawing board to better catch ALL references, not references that strictly follow a specific format. Soni (talk) 06:28, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Looking at the Angus Marshall example it appears that the article includes a picture which in turn includes a refernece. I doubt even many humans would think to check whether the picture has a reference that the article doesn't; I wouldn't. As for a machine, because the reference isn't even on enwiki but is instead on commons, it is all but impossible to check. I think that such a bizarre outlier is acceptable, and given that the article doesn't include the reference within the criteria set out above. BilledMammal (talk) 07:18, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    A reference is a reference, no matter how it is formatted. Linking to a file on the commons is a widely used form of reference on this site. And Angus Marshall is not an outlier or bizarre. There are similar problems with, in particular, Adam Maher (cricketer), Alan Davidson (cricketer, born 1897), Alan McInnes, Alan Reid (cricketer), Albert Bowden, Albert Brown (Australian cricketer), Albert Lansdown, Albert McGinn, Albert Scanes, Alex Ridley, Alexander Barras, Alexander Fisher (cricketer), Alfred Sullivan, Amit Banerjee, Andrew Lamb (cricketer), Andrew Pringle (cricketer), Aquib Nabi, Archibald Dean, Arthur Allsopp, Arthur Evans (cricketer), Arthur Kenny, Arthur McBeath, Arthur Muhl, Arthur Pellew, Arthur Wells (Australian cricketer), Athenkosi Dyili, Barney McCoy, Barry Rhodes, Bernard Mlambo, Berry Webb, Bill Beath, Bill Tallon, Brad Doody, Brad Oldroyd, Brad Stacey, Brian Murphy (Jamaican cricketer), Bruce Such, Cecil Bryce, Cecil Gray (cricketer), Cecil Hanify, Cecil McKew, Charles Alsop, Charles Griffith (Australian cricketer), Charles Morgan (Victoria cricketer), Charles Patrick, Charles Ross (Australian cricketer), Christopher Dwyer (cricketer), Clarence McCoombe, Clement McFarlane, Colin Stibe, Dale Turner (cricketer), Dane Hutchinson, Daniel Noonan (cricketer), Darren Dempsey, David Mailer, Dean Bartlett and Des Hansen. On the face of it, all of these items should be removed from the list. You could easily have examined all of the articles, and the links in them, manually, and you have done so. James500 (talk) 12:24, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Linking to a file on the commons is a widely used form of reference on this site. If it is then it shouldn't be; WP:CIRCULAR tells us that if we want to reuse a reference from elsewhere, whether that elsewhere is intrawiki or interwiki, we are required to confirm that the reference supports the content and then use it directly. Do you have examples of where this is done outside of Lugnut's mass creation sprees?
    Even when looking at a sampling of the references on commons I am not really seeing SIGCOV; I'm primarily seeing things like game recaps that involve mentions of the player. Of course, if you can find two examples of WP:SIGCOV you are welcome to add them on enwiki and I will be very happy to remove the article from the list.
    I am seeing some articles on your list with single references in the article, but for the most part those were added recently Tɛmplet:Diff2. I think I can be forgiven for not having a crystal ball. With that said I am also seeing some articles, like Brian Murphy (Jamaican cricketer), that should have been excluded based on them not meeting the criteria set out above at the time the query was run. I have corrected the error that resulted in them being included and will update the list when the query returns. BilledMammal (talk) 12:41, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I've updated the list. Note that this means the number is now less than 1200; I don't want to force editors like Blue Square Thing who have done a lot of work with this list to have to redo that work with articles replacing those removed. BilledMammal (talk) 17:43, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    You have not removed the Wikipedia articles that have newspaper coverage in Trove. Would you like me to add footnote references to the Wikipedia articles in question, so that your automated query will actually work?
    For the avoidance of doubt, I am seeing significant coverage (or at least things that are capable of contributing to significant coverage). The following are a few examples already in the articles I listed above: Marshall Retires is significant coverage of Angus Marshall. "Stibe Looks Likely Sheild Batsman" is significant coverage of Colin Stibe. "C H Ross" is significant coverage of Charles Ross (Australian cricketer). "Bryce's Patience as a Batsman Rewarded" is significant coverage of Cecil Bryce. Where a person has one newspaper profile like that, there is likely to be more coverage. Accordingly, a WP:BEFORE search is actually necessary, which is why the policy requires an AfD. So, for example, when I run a search for Angus Marshall in Trove, I find a lot of newspaper articles that are entirely about Angus Marshall. And I find a massive amount of other coverage of Angus Marshall. (For the avoidance of doubt, Marshall played both soccer (including as an intermational for Australia) and cricket, so the soccer articles are about him: ). The conclusion that I reach is that Angus Marshall, an example that I originally chose at random, satisfies GNG, he should be removed from the list, and his article should be rewritten to reflect the fact that his soccer career was important (and possibly more important than his cricket career). James500 (talk) 19:39, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    @BilledMammal Can you please move the list to a separate page and then transclude it back here? Not only is parsing the rest of this page extremely difficult, I cannot doublecheck removed entries or similar without going through Village Pump history instead of reading page history + any talk page comments/diffs. Right now everything feels a bit haphazard Soni (talk) 20:47, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    @BilledMammal or whoever else is maintaining the list: Please remove Alan McInnes, Albert McGinn, Albert Scanes, Archibald Dean, Barney McCoy, Berry Webb, Bill Beath, Bill Tallon, Cecil Bryce, Charles Morgan (Victoria cricketer), Charles Ross (Australian cricketer), Colin Stibe, David Mailer, Angus Marshall and Des Hansen from the list. Each of them now has reference footnotes to full periodical articles (and I could add a lot more), and they clearly do not satisfy the criteria of this proposal. James500 (talk) 02:45, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose as setting a bad precedent (per BeanieFan11 above). Frankly, the "strategy" discussion at User talk:BilledMammal/Mass Creation Draftification is quite alarming to read. It does not express a sincere intent to improve the encyclopedia and is more focussed on achieving a pre-determined course of action, rather than consensus building.
    Whatamidoing's analysis above shows that these articles are quite likely to be notable. – SD0001 (talk) 06:56, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support, but only if pageviews are used as a criterion. I have found that stubs that get more than three pageviews a day are usually on notable subjects, and ten or more a day nearly always are. The nominator said nobody is reading these stubs, so that should be checked beforehand. Abductive (reasoning) 07:29, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    If we could figure out a way to list these by page views, that might be an interesting notability heuristic. SportingFlyer T·C 07:48, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Abductive and SportingFlyer: I previously only did spot checks of this group but I have now done a comprehensive check; see User:BilledMammal/Cricketer page views. Three (0.25%) recieve more than ten page views a day on average; Aaqib Khan, Ali Haider (cricketer), and Aquib Nabi; I expect they will be easy to find references for. 79 (6.5%) recieve more than three page views a day on average. BilledMammal (talk) 08:18, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    My point exactly. The small fraction with pageviews like that should be allowed to remain in Mainspace. Some are probably because a non-cricketeer shares the name, but out of an abundance of caution..... Abductive (reasoning) 08:33, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I've been trying to find sources for Aaqib Khan that would demonstrate notability but I am struggling to do so; even when searching for his name in Hindi I few results and they appear to either be primary or fail to contain significant coverage of him. I'll keep looking; I would prefer not to start excluding articles on the basis of criteria not included above, but if I can find coverage for any of those three I will be happy to pull them on that basis.
    With that said, I would support my proposal with your pageview criterion as a second choice to the base proposal. BilledMammal (talk) 08:50, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I just updated Aquib Nabi's article with a couple additional non-database sources, and there is more there. I already did a search for Aaqib Khan, it looks like he shares most of his name with an actor, there was a game recap but not much else came up for me. Haider Ali (not the listed Ali Haider) is a current notable cricketer. Balwinder Sandhu shares a name with a more famous cricketer. Going down the list, Nabi needs to be removed, Chintan Gaja needs to be removed as there's a photo and Cricinfo game recap on him specifically, Chetan Bist can be easily sourced, Abhinav Sharma is difficult to search for but there's at least a couple results. SportingFlyer T·C 08:52, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Abductive - Pageview counts don't matter. See WP:NOBODYREADSIT.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:26, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    My experience with tens of thousands of articles is that pageviews do matter. For example, one can look at redirect views, and discover redirects that can/should be made into articles. In the case of Importance-assessing for Wikiprojects, if an article gets greater than 30 pageviews a day, and certainly more than 100 pageviews a day, it is always deserving of being Importance-assessed as Mid according to the rules of the Wikiproject, any Wikiproject. Less than 1/day means the topic might fail WP:V or the title is misspelled. It's astounding how much pageviews can be used in decision-making. Abductive (reasoning) 19:05, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose. These need to go to AFD individually. My reasons 1) we're going to be deleting notable cricketers. 2) We're not a printed newspaper and these articles can sit there without causing any overheads. 3) Lugnuts created these articles within policy at the time. It is spurious to say we need to discourage more mass creation of this kind because policy changed and it couldn't happen like this again. 4) There's no rush. Desertarun (talk) 09:51, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    This is untrue: per WP:MASSCREATE, approval has always been required for large-scale page creation, and WP:NSPORT has always said "In addition, standalone articles are required to meet the General Notability Guideline" as well as "Trivial coverage of a subject by secondary sources may be used to support content in an article, but it is not sufficient to establish notability. This includes listings in database sources with low, wide-sweeping generic standards of inclusion, such as the College Football Data Warehouse." Lugnuts just blatantly ignored these. I believe it's poor faith to expect countless pages created in seconds by one person have to be debated for a week each by many, consuming many times more manhours. For the same reason no one wants to have thousands of individualized discussions, no one wanted to research these to create them properly individually either. Reywas92Talk 14:45, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    The articles were not required to meet the general notability guideline at the time; it said before WP:NSPORTS2022 that "The articles should provide reliable sources showing it meets the general notability guideline or the sport-specific criteria below." BeanieFan11 (talk) 14:49, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Oh come on BF, you know that the article providing sources that show it meets GNG or SNG is a wholly different instruction than the requirement that the subject meets GNG. Lugnuts did not ensure that any of these subjects actually did meet GNG. JoelleJay (talk) 23:29, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    Prior to 2022 cricketers were presumed notable if they'd played 1 first class game. All of those added by Lugnuts had done this - so you're retrofitting notability. Desertarun (talk) 15:27, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    We're cherry-picking. NSPORT said in 2021, "This guideline is used to help evaluate whether or not a sports person or sports league/organization (amateur or professional) is likely to meet the general notability guideline, and thus merit an article in Wikipedia." Articles which passed SNGs were still deleted for clearly failing GNG. SportingFlyer T·C 18:48, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Nope. Let me tell you exactly what Nsports used to say about cricket - and I quote policy "A cricket figure is presumed notable if they; 1) Have appeared as a player or umpire in at least one cricket match that is judged by a substantial source to have been played at the highest international or domestic level". One first class match was sufficient to presume notability. There is no wriggle room or ifs and buts. Desertarun (talk) 19:47, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Don't nope me. I quoted very first line from WP:NSPORT from a random date in late 2021 - before all of this happened. Here is the link. First, as a sport guideline, NCRIC had to follow NSPORT, and second, A cricket figure is presumed notable. Presumed is a rebuttable presumption - if an article didn't pass the GNG, it should have been deleted, and often was (each AfD is different, obviously.) SportingFlyer T·C 21:01, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Nope. Ncric did follow Nsport, if you can't see that - this is your problem. Desertarun (talk) 21:09, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I can see that. I've just shown you NSPORT clearly said that GNG had to be met. The sport-specific SNGs were supposed to be aligned to the GNG. Cricket wasn't. SportingFlyer T·C 21:40, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    NSPORT has always required its subjects meet GNG, and as NCRIC is a subset of NSPORT it was not exempt from this requirement. Plenty of AfDs resulted in deletion/redirection of NCRIC-passing cricketers prior to NSPORT2022:
    The result was redirect to Federally Administered Tribal Areas cricket team. The "keep" !votes argue that this person meets NCRIC. However, that is only a guideline designed to be a shortcut to identify persons that are likely notable according to GNG. Once notability is challenged, however, NCRIC is not enough and it has to be established whether or not the subject meets GNG.
    The result was delete. There is by now a relatively broad community consensus that participation in certain sporting events establishes a presumption of notability per the sport-specific notability guidelines, but that this is not enough to establish actual notability if, as here, no sources beyond participation records can be found at AfD.
    Tɛmplet:Tq2
    The result was delete. As pointed out by a number of editors, passing an SNG is irrelevant if an article doesn't pass GNG.
    The result was delete. While there is some consensus that he satisfies the SNG those suggesting that the SNG was met have not provided any sources exist and there is a consensus that he does not pass the GNG.
    The result was delete. Inclusion requires that WP:GNG is met, which requires WP:SIGCOV (significant coverage) from multiple, reliable sources. This means coverage that is more than trivial and mentions more than stats. Whether it is cricket, football, underwater basket weaving, whatever, it doesn't matter. That is the core of what is required to pass the first test for inclusion for any article, regardless of what any other guidelines on notability says, simply because they all derive their authority FROM WP:GNG. Through this lens, weighing the !vote not on their numbers as much as on the strength of their policy based rationale, I see a consensus to delete.
    The result was delete. Subject-specific notability guidelines (SNG) do not override the general notability guideline (GNG). SNGs are simply shortcuts that say, "a topic will probably have enough sources to fulfill GNG if it satisfies the SNG criteria".
    The result was delete. This is a fairly standard NCRIC vs GNG dispute. As NSPORTS specifically requires GNG to also be met, and there isn't a clear IAR exemption case made here, and there is a very clear consensus that GNG is not met, deletion is the appropriate outcome.
    Note that these were closures by 9 different admins. JoelleJay (talk) 23:49, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    At the time, the "presumed" notability functioned as de facto automatic notability (with the exception of one-game soccer players and those without known first names) - also, you're missing the part where it says in bold that to be notable, "The article should provide reliable sources showing that the subject meets the general notability guideline or the sport specific criteria set forth below." BeanieFan11 (talk) 21:04, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    First - the bold part is about making sure sourcing exists in the article to demonstrate either a GNG pass or a SNG pass. And "presumed" was de facto notability, apart when GNG wasn't met - for instance the arguments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Abel Valdez (I did a lot of sleuthing to find an old AfD where it was clear GNG trumped SNG, even though this was no consensus.) It did mean a lot of players which passed the SNG weren't brought to AfD, but the entire reason we're here discussing this now is because that ice got thinner and thinner over time and finally broke. SportingFlyer T·C 21:38, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    As I said, it acted as de facto automatic notability except for soccer players with low amounts of appearances, plus those who we didn't have names for (e.g. the baseball player Smith) - until Pete Vainowski in December 2021 (after these cricket articles were created), which resulted in the destruction of NSPORT (the NSPORTS2022 discussion was due to that), meeting NSPORT functioned basically as automatic notability. BeanieFan11 (talk) 21:42, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    That's true, but Reywas92 is still correct: the phrase In addition, standalone articles must meet the General Notability Guideline. has specifically been a part of WP:NSPORT since 2010, and was incorporated via linking to WP:BIO before that. So they've always been required to meet GNG, but whether we enforced it properly is a different question. SportingFlyer T·C 22:23, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    But then it also said "Subjects that do not meet the sport-specific criteria outlined in this guideline may still be notable if they meet the General Notability Guideline or another subject specific notability guideline," which implies that satisfying the sports criteria was sufficient to have an article; the whole thing was contradictory, but the practice at the time was that it was alright to have stubs and that they were notable if they met the sports criteria (playing top-level cricket games). I don't see why we're arguing about this though, since the criteria have changed, so I'm done discussing this point. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:08, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    That's not what that sentence implied - just that the SNGs were not exclusionary - but it doesn't matter. SportingFlyer T·C 10:18, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose. As noted by many above this comment, this draftication (actually deletion) does nothing to improve the encyclopedia. Let's build an encyclopedia instead. If there is a concern that these articles are introducing content that fails verification, we should act. Ktin (talk) 15:31, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per BilledMammal. I checked ten of these at random and was unable to find significant coverage for any of them. Checking these ten articles took me about an hour; editors should not be required to spend this amount of time establishing the non-notability of these mass-created stubs. My first choice would be outright deletion, but I support draftification as a compromise. The information contained in these articles is readily available online, and none of them took more than a few minutes to create, so any one of them can be easily re-created if better sources are found. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 15:41, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    User:Sojourner in the earth, as a courtesy to avoid possible duplication of work, might you be able to list here the ten articles you spot-checked? Or mention on their respective Talk pages that you were unable to locate sources? Folly Mox (talk) 22:08, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    The articles were Al Bashid Muhammed, Bikash Chowdhury (cricketer), Bakhtarullah Atal, Athi Mafazwe, Ashby Mutumbami, Arthur Dean (cricketer), Anuj Raj, Andrew Durham, Alok Chandra Sahoo, Alfred Black (cricketer). The most promising of these was Alfred Black, who according to this source took part in the Eureka Rebellion, but even with this lead I didn't find anything but passing mentions. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 05:38, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    I'd like to add to my comment, in answer to those who are citing WP:NORUSH, that kicking the can down the road is not a sensible solution. As DFlhb said above: Non-notable articles must eventually be deleted, so to keep them around is to require editors to eventually go through each and decide whether to merge, redirect, or delete. The purpose of this proposal is to save thousands of hours of editor time. The urgency of the problem is not a relevant consideration; the only question is whether one thinks that the possibility of saving some of these articles is worth the massive expenditure of time that it will take to evaluate each one individually. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 05:55, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Neutral Comment I have fewer strong opinions on cricket notability than I do on Olympic notability, nor do I know the Cricket Notability requirements as well. I am generally in agreement with @WhatamIdoing and @Abzeronow's concerns, particularly that this will disproportionately affect Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Sri Lankan cricketers, but am aware that this is an area where I can't really help in expanding stubs so would feel bad giving a full oppose, given @BilledMammal's logic is reasonable. 20:35, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose, largely per Thryduulf and Whatamidoing. In addition, given that the underlying authority for deletion here appears to be the GNG, I would also note that doing mass-anything under a guideline, which is intended to have common-sense exceptions, is somewhat contradictory. (It does not appear to me that these articles fail WP:V#Notability, since the objection is not that they have no reliable sources, but that the source is a database.) Beyond that, I am troubled by the false urgency and the unsubstantiated claims that these articles are somehow hurting the encyclopedia by existing. From where I sit these stubs seem obviously to provide a net benefit to the interested reader, even if they are never expanded. Moreover, content attracts contributors, so mass deleting these articles (which is the only realistic outcome of mass draftification) is only going to aggravate the shortage of contributors who have the knowledge and interest to improve our coverage in the area. In sum, this seems to me to be unambiguously harmful to the project: mass removal of encyclopedic content can only diminish Wikipedia. -- Visviva (talk) 03:50, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Rhododendrites, BeanieFan11, and Rschen7754. There's no rush, and it does seem like this plan violates several policies. GretLomborg (talk) 05:25, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    Could you explain what policies those are, GretLomborg? Because the existence of these articles as they currently are are already a violation of WP:NSPORT and would otherwise result in them immediately all going to AfD for deletion. This draftification alternative, which was already approved of in a previous RfC, is a way to ensure any notable subjects do get articles kept rather than just mass deleting/redirecting them. SilverserenC 05:31, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose as they are less likely to be improved as drafts than as articles. I they are trash, just delete as it may be better to have nothing, and let someone write from scratch if they wish to. I can easily see many of these getting a G13 demise if they are converted to drafts. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 07:13, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    • @Graeme Bartlett: I'm a little confused. A major argument of other opposers is that draftification is a backdoor to deletion and this is bad. If you're okay with deletion, and if these articles are all truly beyond salvaging (which I believe to be largely true), then draftification will eventually accomplish this after 5 years passes. This seems like it should maybe be a "Support but should go even further" vote, but maybe I'm misinterpreting you. SnowFire (talk) 03:40, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
      • Well I will change this to strong oppose to make this clearer. A 5 year in draft space with other drafts having only 6 months is a bad idea. If all drafts have a 5 year delay before G13 it would not be so bad. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:30, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose Individual AfD discussions appears to be the accepted way to delete articles.Harper J. Cole (talk) 09:15, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. Disruptive mass-creation of database-entries masquerading as stub articles can only be effectively remediated by mass action - individual discussions at AFD is not practical with volumes this high. Mass-deletion would be entirely appropriate; however, this proposal is a reasonable compromise that allows interested parties a substantial window to expand these database entries into actual articles (although the percentage where that will be possible is very low) and return to main space. wjematherplease leave a message... 10:07, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support but only with the standard 6-month term, no special 5 year system which is setting up more exceptons for the sake of exceptions. Stifle (talk) 10:20, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I have concerns regarding checks and balances with this proposal. Where does it stop? This could easily snowball to become a backdoor deletion 'policy', lacking community input and consensus. A much more constructive option would be to create a taskforce which methodically goes through each one and expands them; then a decision can be reached, as there will be articles there which can be signficiantly expanded upon. StickyWicket aka AA (talk) 12:38, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    What exactly do you think this is? It's community input and seeking consensus. Please don't make baseless slippery slope arguments. This is so unrealistic to actually think that anyone will be going through so many thousands of articles (a task they can also do in draftspace). Seems you're concerned about your pages like Jack Sterland, who played a mere two games and similarly lacks significant coverage. Reywas92Talk 13:14, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    It's cute you stalk my contributions. I wonder if you have a problem with Francis Lacey, or Milo Talbot, or Erroll Tremlett, or perhaps John Manners? I'm actually more concerned about notable individuals being deleted, who might not appear to be notable. If we can take the time to go through this entire process, then yes, we can find the time to go through each on a case-by-case basis. StickyWicket aka AA (talk) 13:48, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    Of course I don't, they have significant coverage. But we're not deleting them, and there's still time for a case-by-case process for those interested. Reywas92Talk 14:15, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per well reasoned rationale from DFlhb (that everyone should read). Aza24 (talk) 13:24, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support, rather reluctantly, as the best of two bad choices. It seems likely that the great majority of these would be deleted at AfD, and there is definitely harm to the encyclopedia in choosing an option that leads to massive extra work. Editors' labour is a finite resource and that has to be taken into account. And there's no prejudice against recreating any given one of these for which notability can be shown. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:27, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    Adding a note to say that listification is also fine with me. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:07, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. Mass-created articles with minimal amounts of information don't benefit the encyclopedia, and overwhelm our ability to handle them through normal deletion processes. The list of articles to be impacted has been tightly curated, and while any list of this scale is going to be inherently imperfect, it bears remembering that WP:NODEADLINE applies to creation just as much as to deletion: if a subject is notable, I trust that the community at large will eventually identify it and give it a proper article. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 16:26, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose I don't think merely not being notable is a sufficiently serious concern to bypass the usual deletion processes like this, and there don't seem to be any policy-based objections to these articles. Hut 8.5 17:46, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Suggestion - start taking these 10 at a time to AfD now. Don't cherry-pick. Just take 10 in a sequential row. See what happens.
    It may shed greater light on the pros and cons of mass-deletion here. It'll also demonstrate how unwieldy (or wieldy?) the alternative of AfDs is.
    Plus, if this RfC fails, you've at least got a small head-start on cleanup. --A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 18:17, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    P.S., I'm not talking about doing many batches of 10 right now -- just 1 or 2 as an experiment to better inform this discussion. --A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 18:19, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    I might suggest taking the next ten to AfD (although ten is a lot if there's scope for improvement - perhaps with the caveat that if we think they genuinely can be improved that we put a hold on it?) - i.e. the ones that would be next on the list. I've not looked at them but will dig the links out in a minute and add them here with my initial thoughts. Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:25, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Blue Square Thing, thank you for the many dozens of hours of careful thought, analysis and cricket expertise you've put into this initiative. I have a lot of confidence in this project based on your work.
    -- A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 14:04, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    I support this kind of experiment with a small set of articles (and I left a comment to that effect below). Just a note to say that the "next ten" approach is much less informative than a "random ten" approach, as first name is a confounder here. Suriname0 (talk) 15:21, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    Although the random 10 nature means you might easily get 10 one-appearance Sri Lankans, say (which I might also easily have gotten with the next 10 fwiw). If someone wants to generate 25 random numbers between 1 and about 5,000 I'll create a list of articles that people can look at. I'd rather have a few more than 10. Blue Square Thing (talk) 16:29, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    1323, 2344, 4592, 1206, 1387, 1569, 438, 3650, 1452, 2775, 3930, 4888, 313, 2216, 3558, 2524, 1539, 4457, 4776, 1250, 2941, 925, 1904, 666, 2160, according to my phone app that uses brownian motion in its gyroscopes to generate true random numbers. Folly Mox (talk) 16:34, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    I'm not wed to the particulars of my suggestion above. 25 at random, 10 in-a-row, whatever. Mostly, I'm interested in a good experiment to partially prove or disprove many of the assertions made here. Also, something not cherry-picked to produce a certain result. --A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 16:34, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    Understand that, but it might be interesting to try anyway. If anyone can think of a better way I have a spreadsheet with 4,102 names in it... Blue Square Thing (talk) 16:57, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

Tɛmplet:Cot The next ten would be:

  • Deshan Fernando - Sri Lankan so difficult to find sources on, although he's played quite a lot. Would probably redirect to a list, although the list available isn't ideal;
  • Deshan Withanage - Sri Lankan as above but played fewer games longer ago so less chance of finding sources. Redirect possible to List of Galle Cricket Club players but that list is meh;
  • Desmond Crene - New Zealander so we have more chance - we known his school and job for example. Played in the 60s though and PapersPast doesn't cover that period as well, so it's likely a redirect to List of Northern Districts representative cricketers
  • Desmond Daniel - South African who played for Orange Free State so there's no list (and it will be a long list to create). His fairly recent death might turn something up but I doubt it, so this would probably end up as delete because I doubt anyone has the capacity to create that list in a fairly short period of time;
  • Desmond Drummer - South African who played for Western province so exactly the same issues apply
  • Desmond Fitzmaurice - Australian. We'd want a good look here - there's often lots of stuff on Trove about people like this and he played in Comonwealth sides and other stuff so there are hooks. Worst case is a redirect to the Victoria list;
  • Desmond Park - New Zealander so as above. Played a little earlier so we might pick up more coverage and he died in 2019 so that might get coverage as well. Worst case is a redirect;
  • Desmond Whittaker - European name, odd birth and death, played in India in the 50s - instantly I want to look at this one in depth. There's a list if necessary, but I suspect we'd be interested in researching here;
  • Detlev Traut - South African, so these can be tricky. Odd name will help, but there's a redirect if necessary;
  • Devender Lochab - Indian. Has played quite a lot very recently so this will depend on whether someone with access to sources can dig something out. This is the sort of article we could easily lose, but which we clearly shouldn't imo. List of Services cricketers exists (but is meh) if necessary. There might be some transliteration issues here that people could explore.

So, we'd be 2 probable delete based on lists not existing and up to 8 redirect - with my gut feeling between 1 and 3 kept based on expansion, but we might not get any in this set of ten. Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:56, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

|}

Tɛmplet:Cot Based on the list of who I believe are the remaining 4,102 cricketers after the 1,200 above are removed (so 4 of the numbers are out of range - I'm happy to add four more if numbers are generated. I can't promise it's a perfect source list, but it's about right and is based on the mammoth list at User:Blue Square Thing/sandbox6 and filtering out everything apart from national identification from the cats. This list of 21 is also at User:Blue Square Thing/sandbox8. I've not looked at it yet. Blue Square Thing (talk) 16:57, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

|}

  • Oppose I might support a more targeted attempt at mass draftification - the issues with Lugnuts' work are well-documented by now, and I don't think much of the "played two matches in 1905" sorts of stubs - but a lot of these articles are on contemporary players on top-level teams in major South Asian countries. Given how popular cricket is in India, for example, I have a hard time believing that the likes of Chintan Gaja and Agniv Pan didn't generate plenty of coverage playing for state teams. (I know very little about both cricket and the Indian sports media landscape, so I'm the wrong person to investigate, but Gaja at least seems to have plenty of coverage just from a cursory search.) I'm persuaded by the concerns that incubation on this scale is a backdoor route to deletion, and I think removing this many articles on likely notable subjects from South Asia would reinforce Wikipedia's systemic bias. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 20:30, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    Leaving aside the arguments about "backdoor deletion" that have already been addressed by others, using poorly-sourced or unsourced mass-created microstubs as a means of 'addressing' Wikipedia's systemic bias feels to me a lot like tokenism. XAM2175 (T) 10:05, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Strong support A good gentle middle of the road solution for this mess. So anyone who wants an article to stay can adopt it. I also don't like the "backdoor" (to deletion) pejorative characterization of the motive or process. This type of thing doesn't work at AFD. AFD (where it takes 100 times as much volunteer time to delete a microstub as it did to create it) would make this unsolvable. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:44, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose per James500's concerns. I agree with the premise and the need to clean up these articles in a bundled manner. I think the current implementation needs more work, as there's both a lack of sufficient clarity on the overall lists (and which of it got manually rechecked after), as well as James' point about skipping articles with references. Soni (talk) 23:44, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support mostly per ActivelyDisinterested. This measure is unfortunately necessary given how overburdened AfD is. — SamX [talk · contribs] 00:47, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    Addendum: I disagree with those who argue that this is a backdoor to deletion. Yes, unilaterally moving the articles to draftspace one by one would be a backdoor to deletion, and one that I would not support. I agree with Folly Mox—a widely advertised and well-attended RfC is absolutely not a "backdoor" process. This is essentially a mass AfD that's being conducted at an unorthodox venue, with draftification as the desired result rather than imminent deletion. If this were a traditional AfD, I would !vote draftify or redirect. It's been established that Lugnuts failed to exercise due care when verifying that the databases he used to create the stubs were reliable sources. Their sheer volume prevents them from being examined individually, so their continued presence in mainspace is an ongoing threat to Wikipedia's reliability and credibility. To prevent citogenesis and other misfortunes, the articles should be moved to draftspace until they can be thoroughly checked for accuracy and notability. — SamX [talk · contribs] 21:50, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support, like the Olympians they may be notable, but they currently fail to demonstrate this, and to see these being kept because of their presumed, but unproven notability, must be frustrating for new editors when their own submissions are required to be of a much higher quality. The argument that this is backdoor deletion does not work for me. The rapid speed with which editors are finding sources in an effort to oppose this proposal demonstrates that five years in draftspace gives plenty of time for improving these articles, especially with the support of a wikiproject dedicated to the subject area. If this proposal fails will editors continue from the current interest in improving the A-D articles or will the E-Z articles be forgotten about. EdwardUK (talk) 12:56, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose per cogent points by Whatamidoing and BeanieFan11; and above all, as being contrary to policy WP:ATD-I. Draftfication is not to be used as a backdoor to deletion, and, as I expected, the previous exception granted by the Olympians RfC (and all the accompanying drama) has lead to a slippery slope of draftifying more generally useful and harmless articles. There is no deadline. If you want to prevent a similar case of mass-creation in the future, go draft a new appropriate policy, but as it stands, mass deletion draftification of articles just because who their author was flies in the face of pretty much all existing policies. No such user (talk) 13:22, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    I'm not even sure I'm in favour of this proposal, but it's somewhat astonishing to me how many opposers are characterising a CENT-listed Village Pump discussion as a "back door" to anything. The only places more visible are ANI and the Main Page. Sorry to single out your comment, User:No such user, and the reason I've chosen to express my somewhat astonishment here in a reply to you is that you've also characterised the sole reason for draftification as authorship. If any other user had flooded the encyclopaedia with such quantities of barely sourced, possibly notable microstubs, we'd be having the same conversation (and judging from the RFCBEFORE, we will be, with regards to similar articles by users BlackJack and Carlossuarez46). Folly Mox (talk) 13:43, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    The "backdoorness" isn't about it being done in secret, but about circumventing our deletion policy. It's use of draftspace to effectively delete a lot of articles that haven't actually been evaluated for notability, and which themselves do not violate any policies. If this went through proper process for deletion, we'd first ask "do they qualify for CSD?" (perhaps, if any were created after consensus was clear that articles shouldn't be mass created based just on databases, but not for all of these). Then we'd ask "would deletion be controversial" (apparently the answer is yes, so PROD is out). Then we'd go to AfD, where (assuming AfD weren't flooded to the point of being unable to function) they would be evaluated for notability, etc. Nothing in the deletion process says an article qualifies for deletion if it was created by Lugnuts + below a certain size + uses only databases as sources. Would a lot of these be deleted if they went through AfD? Probably, but not all, and at least then we wouldn't be signalling [again] that it's ok to delete things just for being stubs (which, based on comments throughout here, is a broader goal of several supporters). — Rhododendrites talk \\ 14:43, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    That makes more sense, thank you. I'm tryna understand all sides here, and thus far have been confused by some of the opposition. Folly Mox (talk) 14:49, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per North8000. --Tserton (talk) 13:26, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support This seems like an extremely fair compromise on at least one part of an issue that generates a lot more controversy than seems warranted. CarringtonMist (talk) 14:07, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose - this is a notability issue and we have a process for that: tag with {{notability}} to add to the queue, PROD/AFD for more serious cases, or, you know, fix it. Presumably these are BLPs and WP:BLPREMOVE could apply, but what is the contentious information we're compelled to remove? That these individuals play[ed] cricket? I fail to see how that could be considered contentious to a degree warranting mass deletion. There are currently nearly 60,000 articles tagged for notability review, why do these 1,200 warrant special treatment? The answer is that they don't. This proposal fails WP:AFDISNOTCLEANUP and WP:BEFORE. Also, if any of these stubs are demonstrably non-notable, moving them to draft would prevent their deletion per WP:NDRAFT, which could just make the problem the proposal is trying to address worse in the long run, especially with the 5-year carveout from G13 deletion. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 15:20, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    I wonder if BilledMammal can run a query to tell us how many are possible BLPs? Out of interest. The whole set includes a great many dead New Zealanders and (probably) Australians for example Blue Square Thing (talk) 16:32, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    Should be possible, I'll give it a go when I have time. BilledMammal (talk) 00:44, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose. According to our deletion policy, draftification must not be used as a "backdoor to deletion". This is an explicit backdoor to deletion that is being proposed, and I do not find the benefits sufficient to ignore our deletion policy here. — Red-tailed hawk (nest) 00:35, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    Can you explain why you see it as a backdoor to deletion? That certainly isn't the intention; while deletion will be the result for many of these, some can and will be restored to mainspace, as evidenced by that having already happened for some of the articles on Olympians. BilledMammal (talk) 00:44, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    as evidenced by that having already happened for some of the articles on Olympians – that's not evidence at all! Since then, only 2/1000 (0.2%) of the articles (of which, many, many more are notable) have been restored; if anything, that's clear evidence its a backdoor to deletion. BeanieFan11 (talk) 00:59, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    912 were draftified, and so far 7 have been restored; ~0.75%. However, the draftification was only done a month and a half ago, so we are only 2.5% of the way through the period that editors have to restore these articles.
    To me, that is evidence that this is working as intended; editors are given time to discover and improve the ones that are notable, and the ones that are not notable will eventually be deleted without the need to waste disproportionate amounts of the communities time. In other words, it's not a backdoor deletion process. BilledMammal (talk) 01:20, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    And of those seven that were restored, five had been previously improved and never should have been draftified in the first place. That leaves us with Ivanyi and Godfree, so 2/912 - 0.2% - I was correct. And while you say that the draftification was only done a month and a half ago, so we are only 2.5% of the way through the period that editors have to restore these articles, do you not realize that you are at the same time trying to dump tens of thousands more there? We do not have the editor time to go through all of those; many are notable, and thus it will act as a backdoor to deletion as many will never be gotten to in time. BeanieFan11 (talk) 01:28, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    The correct figure of improved articles appears to be five (the extra two were turned into redirects to different people with similar names); Alexander Duncan (athlete), Alfred Keene, Douglas Godfree, Gyula Iványi, Julius Jørgensen. Jørgensen was improved during the draftification process, but I think it is reasonable to count him giving that the improvement reason was Seeing that this was suggested for draftification, expanded with additional refs.
    Of course, if we include all the articles improved during the extended draftification process and as a consequence of the process then the percentage will be even higher and your argument even weaker.
    If you don't think we have the editor time to go through these then what do you propose we do? Take them all through AfD, at a rate of 500 or a 1000 a month, and consume even more editor time? The fact is that this is the way most likely to result in their improvement and restoration; less will be deleted than taking them through AfD and applying the time pressures of that process, and less community time will be wasted as we will be saved from needing to spend hours discussing those that are not notable. This is why it is not a backdoor to deletion, because aside from going through the frontdoor with a Tɛmplet:Diff2 it is going to result in far less deletions than taking these articles through AfD would result in. BilledMammal (talk) 01:56, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    I don't care if its 0.2% or 0.7%, in what absurd world do you live in where 99%+ of articles being deleted through the backdoor is classified as not being backdoor deleted due to "about five of the one thousand being improved"? That is a ludicrous suggestion! If you don't think we have the editor time to go through these then what do you propose we do? Take them all through AfD, at a rate of 500 or a 1000 a month, and consume even more editor time? Doing nothing at all would also be a perfectly acceptable solution, as would tagging them for Template:Notability or Template:No significant coverage (sports), the latter of which you created for the sole purpose of not having to mass remove articles; additionally taking some to AfD, redirecting some (I don't think all that many would be contested, really), PRODDING them, etc. etc. (and my favorite, actually improve the encyclopedia and expand them) would all be much better solutions and would help the encyclopedia better than getting rid of articles with decent chances of notability by the masses. BeanieFan11 (talk) 02:03, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    I don't care if its 0.2% or 0.7%, in what absurd world do you live in where 99%+ of articles being deleted through the backdoor is classified as not being backdoor deleted due to "about five of the one thousand being improved"? As I said before, we are only 2.5% of the way through the time that has been provided to improve the articles - and if you feel longer is needed you are free to move them to your user space, which is further evidence that this is not backdoor deletion.
    Doing nothing at all would also be a perfectly acceptable solution I disagree, because they are WP:NOT violations, and because of the reasons I presented in my !vote. I don't think we are going to agree here, so I'm going to step back from the conversation; I think I have adequately proven that whatever this process is, it is not intended to be nor does it function as a backdoor to deletion. BilledMammal (talk) 02:12, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    And yet the first RfC found sufficient consensus for draftification... How many editors would change their !votes if the draftification time limit was infinite? I doubt many supporters would care (because the intent isn't to get these deleted, it's to get them out of mainspace), but I also doubt it would change the minds of many (any?) opposers. JoelleJay (talk) 00:47, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    If there wasn't a totally arbitrary deadline for deletion, then I'd switch to support moving them to drafts. Like I said in my comment, it's ambiguous if all of these are actually notable per WP:NSPORTS. If this isn't going to produce a backdoor mass deletion in violation of policy, then it's fine to take a batch questionable stubs and move them to drafts. People do that boldly all the time. Steven Walling • talk 00:28, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Steven Walling, all of them objectively fail NSPORTS as they do not meet SPORTCRIT #5. We had very strong consensus that a SIGCOV IRS source must be cited in all athlete bios to remain in mainspace. JoelleJay (talk) 18:36, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
    Where is the consensus that the sources cited by these articles don't constitute reliable significant coverage? Steven Walling • talk 05:51, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    I think it is quite obvious that such database sources don't constitute significant coverage. However, if you need a consensus for this position, see WP:SPORTSCRIT #5 which requires sports biographies to include at least one reference to a source providing significant coverage of the subject, excluding database sources emphasis mine. BilledMammal (talk) 06:45, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    Ok if you believe these are all 100% non-notable according to sports guidelines, then why aren't you filing deletion requests or just boldly mass merging to the existing lists of cricket players?
    This draft proposal isn't worth anyone's time if the articles are known with certainty to not be notable. They should just be deleted. The only conclusion I can draw is that you actually don't know for certain that they lack notability, and therefore the entire proposal to mass draft-ify, merge, or delete them is not valid. These articles need to evaluated and dealt with individually without an arbitrary deadline, like normal on Wikipedia. Steven Walling • talk 20:54, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support Though this discussion should not need to be held, as this was decided already at the gargantuan Olympics. That decision should be a Green Light to just draftify and get it done. Zaathras (talk) 00:51, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    • The Olympics discussion (just barely) reached a decision to draftify only that group of Olympians, not thousands to tens and hundreds of thousands more of other articles... BeanieFan11 (talk) 01:01, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Strongest possible oppose, many of the articles are notable and should be looked at on a case by case basis, even if it takes forever.--Ortizesp (talk) 03:15, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    ... and you should have up to forever, if you wish it, to look at those articles on a case by case basis, from draft space. Ravenswing 18:23, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
    Nope. They get deleted beyond a point :)
    Which is a major issue, and why some people have called it "backdoor deletion". Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 18:12, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support - per my vote at WP:LUGSTUBS. These articles represent a highly unusual pattern of disruptive editing (the former editor carelessly created hundreds of mini-stubs sourced only to a single database daily), and a highly unusual process is necessary to address the well-established need to remove these from mainspace. If anything, our AfD processes are more overloaded in recent weeks with post-WP:NSPORTS2022 notability failures than they were when LUGSTUBS began. We simply cannot use the conventional processes over the next tens of years to clean up Lugnuts' mess. 03:46, 12 July 2023 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jogurney (talk • contribs) 03:46, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support in strongest possible terms per my previous comments; I genuinely believe that the fact that we need to hold even this RFC is already far too much of a barrier to removal (that is to say, I think that someone ought to have been able to draftify them without discussion) - a sweeping, multi-article action that was taken with no discussion, and which has no significant interveining edits or discussions building an implicit consensus for it, should always be reversable without discussion. Lugnuts took a WP:BOLD action, people objected, now it gets reversed until / unless an affirmative consensus is found for it. We shouldn't need to demonstrate a consensus to draftify them - now that there's an objection, anyone who wants to keep them in article space must demonstrate an affirmative consensus to place them there. To do otherwise encourages WP:FAIT actions and further WP:BOLD mass-edits without consensus, as well as encouraging people to simply ignore objections knowing that article creation is so difficult to reverse. People who believe that there is something salveagable here can always examine and restore individual articles, preferably after getting consensus for doing so if they want to restore large numbers (now that doing so is clearly controversial, per the usual principles of WP:BOLD), but per WP:BURDEN, the burden for doing so rests on them - the people above who argue that the responsibility to demonstrate that each individual article is ought to be draftified are turning BURDEN on its head. If you want to retain or create something, you must step up and produce the sourcing necessary to support it; you can't demand that other people somehow prove that they're allowed to undo a plainly WP:BOLD action. --Aquillion (talk) 08:24, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Most of these are properly sourced, and there is a backlog of articles with no sources at all; there are more in the 2007 categories than in this list, and the date in the template is usually when the template was added sometimes several years after an article was created. Quality has been mentioned, and that one or two sentences in a list would be acceptable, but an increase to three or four with an infobox, more than would be included in a list, could never be acceptable quality and would require either an increase to five or more or reduction to one or two in a list, but I disagree, as quality is unrelated to article length. This looks more like a WP:BATTLE against Lugnuts, or against cricket, and not an attempt to improve Wikipedia. Not opposing, as random AFDs leaving gaps in the coverage would be worse. Obviously there should be two (or more) Wikipedias. To make it easier to maintain all would be edited at the same site; there could be one that only displays articles that are longer than stubs. Peter James (talk) 21:08, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support Once draftified, editors can work on those drafts and move them out of draft-space when ready. Also, I would suggest that the draftified articles be auto-deleted after a year instead of the proposed 5 years (5 years is too long). Some1 (talk) 23:07, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Userfy to the userspace of User:Lugnuts, with the same intention, except do not complicate the WP:G13 rule or the processes of draftspace. SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:19, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose Meh. Stubs are not a problem, if you come across one that you find, after proper WP:BEFORE searches, that needs to be dealt with, do so. These kind of mass reactions to harmless stubs are pointless. We don't have to do anything, except the normal process of expanding, editing, merging, deleting, etc. stuff when we come across it. --Jayron32 12:02, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support: If, in all these months after Lugnuts was shut down, the cricket project had felt moved to do the work to source these articles, we would have less of a problem. (If Lugnuts himself had ever felt moved to do the work to source his tens of thousands of sub-stubs, he never would've been sanctioned or banned in the first place.) If the cricket project had been less focused for many years in general obstructionism with respect to sub-stubs and the need for tighter notability guidelines, we not only would have had less of a problem, but the movement to deprecate participation standards sports-wide may never have gotten up a head of steam. I am mortally tired of the time of dozens and hundreds of editors sucked into the deletion and sourcing whirlpool while others piously maintain that there's no real problem here. By all means, let's move to draftify these articles, and let the people who claim that They're! All! Notable! do the sourcing work to prove their claims. The same way we've been doing on the other end: one article at a time.

    And by the bye? This IS the compromise option. This gives people who want to do the work -- as should have been done in the first place -- to source the articles. My preferred option would be to simply take every cricket bio Lugnuts ever created with a current byte size of less than 2,500, mass delete them all, and leave it to those editors who profess to care to do the work to recreate them, one article at a time. I recognize that would never gain consensus, but enough's enough. Ravenswing 14:10, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

  • Comment This is a very technical discussion and proposal, yet, to me, it seems like a case of the Law of triviality. Can anyone say what the benefits would be if all these articles were draftified, or if they were not draftified? Notability was mentioned, as well as What Wikipedia is not. This is actually a discussion about heuristics. In that case, it raises a bigger question, and everything here is moot, aside from serving a case example. Namely, it applies to all articles of the nature outlined in the OP, and it's not limited to just Lugnuts. I assume we have tens of thousands of such articles, maybe in the 100k-200k range. Looking at it through that lens, I don't really know what to say. For whom are we incubating these aticles? The majority of them receive few views anyway, and I assume that enthusiasts don't mind the sparsity as much. This does lead us back to WP:NOT, but then, draftspace is not an indefinite repository, and 5 years is really stretching the limits. Why not just give all the articles 5 more years, and then decide whether mass-deletion is appropriate? This is really a way of 'cleaning up' a blocked user's mistakes. That is an understandable motive. However, it also feels like doing something for the sake of doing something. Dege31 (talk) 15:49, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
    Can anyone say what the benefits would be if all these articles were draftified? Here's one benefit: every article in mainspace carries a maintenance burden that eats away at editor time. There are ~40,000 active editors attempting to curate an encyclopedia that contains over 6,600,000 articles; it's in our best interest to minimize the time we spend working on articles that are going to end up being deleted.
    Take a look at the history of some of these articles. Some of them have had more edits than others, but all the ones I've checked so far have had at least one or two edits from people other than Lugnuts; mostly small things like changing categories or adding short descriptions. For instance, look at Anmol Malhotra. Its categories have been altered twice; its references have been renamed; it has been vandalized by IPs twice; another two IPs have made good-faith but incorrect edits which were reverted; a minor bit of information has been added to the infobox; a wikilink has been removed; and some empty spaces have been added and removed. Each of these edits might have only taken a few seconds; but add to that another few seconds per edit wasted by anyone who has that article on their watchlist, and then multiply that by 94,000 (the number of articles created by Lugnuts), and now you have a major timesink on your hands.
    The amount of time we spend editing and maintaining these articles pales in comparison to the time we could potentially spend discussing them, if we had to AfD them one-by-one, so if we believe that non-notable articles should be removed from Wikipedia, it makes sense to do so en masse where possible – but if anyone says (as you seem to be saying) that non-notable articles should just be left in mainspace, the maintenance burden I described above is one reason why I can't agree with that. There are other reasons (e.g. little-watched articles are more likely to contain errors, which have the potential to proliferate across the internet; the existence of non-notable articles encourages the creation of more), but the timesink factor is one that's easy to overlook. Putting these articles out of the way would just save us a heck of a lot of wasted time, and consequently give us more time to work on the encyclopedia proper. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 21:13, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
    I don't necessarily disagree, since I was not primarily arguing for or against the proposal. My opinion is that this argument is broad, and the selection is arbitrary, since it applies to many more articles than the ones listed. Therefore, I cannot view it in isolation, and I do not think that makes sense. Dege31 (talk) 10:07, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. 5 years is long enough for anyone to fix the issue and bring them to mainspace if the subject is notable enough. Taking all of these to AFD would be tiresome and burdensome. It feels like a tiny little "backdoor to deletion" but our AFD process can't handle this volume of discussions. Draftyfying for a long time is a good middle ground. ✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 17:22, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
    • 5 years is long enough for anyone to fix the issue and bring them to mainspace if the subject is notable enough – for what will be tens of thousands of articles on old athletes, for which sources have always been more difficult to find? I don't think so. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:25, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
      Then they shouldn't have been created in the first place, if that was done with no intention to source them, should they have? And we shouldn't keep them around indefinitely, if those editors who would otherwise want to save them have no intention to work to maintain them, should we? Ravenswing 03:32, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
      @BeanieFan11: It's my understanding that provision #2 of the proposal would allow you to move every one of these articles to your own userspace, if that's what you want to do. Then you could work on them for as long as you like without any threat of deletion hanging over you. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 17:05, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
      Still, there's absolutely no way I can write tens of thousands of articles (its taken me years to do 800 and article creation has been my main contribution) - even if I moved them to my userspace, it may not be deletion, but it in a way functions as that since they will almost assuredly never be mainspace articles again. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:08, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
      If no one cares enough/has time enough to do the work (and surely this proposal neither rises or falls on your personal ability to pick up the slack), then they shouldn't be mainspace articles. Ravenswing 22:07, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
      Would it be better if I were to say that the Wikipedia community as a whole does not have the time to go through the quantity of the articles in the timespan of the proposal, which would thus make many draftified articles that would survive at AfD be deleted through the backdoor, which is explicitly against Wikipedia's deletion policy as the articles do not meet WP:DRAFTIFY's required standard of "obviously unready for mainspace"? BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:05, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
      They are obviously unready for mainspace. They fail SPORTSCRIT #5, so they should not be in mainspace. JoelleJay (talk) 23:10, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
      SPORTCRIT does not say that "all articles failing this must immediately be removed from mainspace"; and also, BilledMammal created Template:No significant coverage (sports) for the sole purpose of not having to mass remove SPORTCRIT-failing articles from mainspace. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:14, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
      SPORTCRIT says Sports biographies must include at least one reference to a source providing significant coverage of the subject, excluding database sources. We also don't say all articles sourced only to a primary source must immediately be removed; that doesn't mean such articles are PAG-compliant and "ready for mainspace", and the existence of the primary sources template does not prevent draftification. JoelleJay (talk) 00:43, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Listify all as first choice. I didn't have a strong opinion about this until today, after I spent several hours fixing miscited page numbers on hundreds of moth substubs, often where the incorrectly cited source was the only one, and in some cases where the article was so short my addition of a citation template now accounts for more than 30% of the byte size. Now I have feelings about maintenance burdens someone mentioned above.
    • Listifying articles retains the entire content, and can be performed with rapid cut-paste manoevres.
    • Listifying leaves redirects for easy expansion when interested editors find additional sourced information.
    • Listifying lowers maintenance burden, since many smol related changes can be made on a single page instead of thirty or two hundred.
    • If a player can be placed into multiple lists, Labeled section transclusion can be used to keep the data in one place for consistency and ease of maintenance.
    • Although some of these subjects pass WP:N, by certain objective measures these are amongst Wikipedia's worst articles, and they degrade the average quality of the encyclopaedia (whether "average quality" is a valuable metric is an open question).
      • Articles like these make WP:N look like a mockery to newcomers. It's tough to explain with just a handwave to WP:OSE that someone's favourite youtuber with thirty million subscribers doesn't qualify for an article because traditional media have not reported on them, but a dead athlete whose professional career spanned all of a half dozen matches is worth holding on to a single sentence standalone article about.
      • People come to the Teahouse with some frequency asking specifically how to exclude sportsperson biographies from Special:RandomPage, because such articles are so numerous it degrades that page's functionality for the user.
    • All this stems from the choice to make the Article the fundamental unit of Wikipedia. There's no fixing that, but User:Iridescent's excellent Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway is the ideal example of what we can do about borderline notable content. Contextualise it, have a smol sourced blurb for everything contextually relevant, with a link to a standalone article if and only if the topic warrants it. This applies in general too: cricketers, moths, and substubs in my own content area of concentration, early China. Some dude was monarch of a polity of a few thousand at some point for an unknown period of time, and all we know about him is his name, predecessor, and successor, but now we have to have an article just for him specifically? All the information present in these articles is more useful in context anyway, as well as easing navigation and reducing cruft.
  • Userfy to User:Lugnuts/* as second choice. Clears up all the problems of leaving the articles in mainspace, and avoids the G13 ticking time bomb. As a bonus, treat parsimoniously. Treat active players with greater leniency. Maybe leave their articles in place while the dead and retired are moved. Active players are more likely to be searched and more likely to attract interested contributors, and as a bonus a greater proportion of them are from outside the Anglosphere, so it would help a little with our systemic bias problem. Folly Mox (talk) 05:20, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose for at least the Australian cricketers. Having sampled some Australians from the list and researching on Trove, an Australian newspaper database, I've been able to expand and source perhaps half the sample, notably David Mailer, David Taylor (Australian cricketer), Daniel Cullen (New South Wales cricketer). (Note I'm not saying every article I could expand is certainly notable, but they would definitely merit a proper AfD discussion if they were up for deletion). I didn't do a particularly thorough job on each and I don't even have any pre-existing experience in researching cricketers – I'm sure someone who knew the quirks of the subject area and spent more time looking would do even better. I'm satisfied that if this proposal passed, it would put an unacceptably large number of notable articles at risk of unjustified deletion. – Teratix ₵ 06:26, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
    If they're truly notable, they can easily be recreated. SportingFlyer T·C 22:26, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
    @SportingFlyer: I've seen this point made repeatedly by those who support this but in reality, no, that's not going to happen; the notable ones will not be "easily recreated." Since NSPORT has been destroyed, people just don't really make many articles on historical athletes (for example, I've been pretty much the main creator of decent biographical articles in American football for a while now). Do you know the difficulty it takes to create articles nowadays on historical athletes, especially the older ones? To dig through tons of newspaper archives, then determine which are useful, then rephrase the text and add it to the article, include the references, the formatting, etc. etc. and hope it passes NPP (though autopatrollers don't have to go through that last step)? In reality, what's going to happen if this passes are a very low number of the actually notable articles here are going to be improved (like the 0.2% of the Olympians) and BilledMammal is then going to propose to get rid of 40,000 more, which will make it even more difficult to go through as we do not have the editor time to work on that many articles with deletion the consequence if we don't! BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:54, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
    User:BeanieFan11, I certainly appreciate your passion for the sportsbio space and all the work you've done in it. I don't even want to draftify these articles (I just opined listify above, and disagree there should be any deadline for improvement if the articles are removed from mainspace), but it seems to me the process you're describing – research, rewriting source material, adding references, and properly formatting – are just the basic steps of article creation. If I didn't know better from your participation here and in the preceding Olympians RFC, I could interpret your statement above as an argument against these articles existing at all, due to the clear lack of diligence and care in their creation. Folly Mox (talk) 23:14, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
    What I am trying to say is this: we've got these articles here currently – many are notable, and they do not meet WP:DRAFTIFY's standard of "obviously unready for mainspace," and on top of that creation of historical athletes has gotten ten times harder than it was in the past. Draftifiying these would result in very few actually being improved/returned, and would only make the deletion of huge quantites of notable articles (not to mention BilledMammal wants to propose getting rid of tens of thousands after this; there is no possible way to get through that many before they're deleted). That does not improve the encyclopedia at all. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:23, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Folly Mox - The issue isn't notability, it's that there's few editors here, limited cricket knowledge and extra hurdles like non-romantic language barriers and overly eager AfD debaters that dissuade people like myself from even beginning to look into these people.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:28, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
    But we have no way of knowing which of these are actually notable or not notable, because no one has bothered to check. That's both why we are here and why NSPORT became deprecated in the first place! Listifying would be fine because it would give potential creators a place to start. SportingFlyer T·C 08:48, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
    I don't care that we don't know which are notable, the fact that we would be deleting large amounts of notable ones is what makes this unacceptable. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:21, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
    I sympathise with the cricket editors here, and I'm in agreement with the opposition in that I don't want the information in these articles removed from the encyclopaedia. I just think the way we're managing the information (thousands of individual tiny articles) is far from ideal. Maybe the farthest from ideal? Folly Mox (talk) 19:25, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
    The fact remains that this proposal will probably mean deleting many articles on notable topics. That shouldn't be acceptable to us. – Teratix ₵ 00:05, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Suuport on the same grounds as my support in the original LUGSTUBS, and per ActivelyDisinterested and Aquillion here. XAM2175 (T) 10:00, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. I have been considering this since my comment below, questioning the much more diverse range of articles here than in the previous RfC. I lean now towards support. All the articles share the same issues that defined the query, being procedurally (and uncaringly, if they have similar effort to the Olympic stubs) generated from databases. The inclusion of WP:BLPs initially concerned me, as they would be much more likely to have so-far unadded coverage (especially South Asian cricketers, whose coverage may not be in English), but conversely, BLPs are where we should be most cautious about these sorts of slapdash efforts. I find the reference to WP:DEADLINE in oppose votes curious. This proposal is being considered now, not in the future. There is no deadline to have some stats in the mainspace, especially not for BLPs. CMD (talk) 07:32, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
    • There's also no deadline for removing these articles out of mainspace - and right now we have these articles. That is what the opposers are arguing. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:21, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
      Thank you for repeating the reference I mentioned. As I said, someone has proposed something we could do now, and that is what I considered for my view. CMD (talk) 07:40, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment - Counting very roughly I make it 47 support 35 oppose at this point, with maybe 2 listify/userfy. That's very roughly that same 60:40 split as at the original LUGSTUBS discussion. FOARP (talk) 09:23, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
    WP:DETCON says "Consensus is ascertained by the quality of the arguments given on the various sides of an issue, as viewed through the lens of Wikipedia policy." The number of !votes is irrelevant. James500 (talk) 02:51, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    The number is not decisive, but nor is it irrelevant. If I'm saying anything at all here, it's that if the final numerical split of the votes is similar, and the arguments are similar, the outcome should also be similar. FOARP (talk) 13:50, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    The policy says that the number of !votes is irrelevant. One of the reasons that the consensus policy does not take into account the number of !votes is because such an approach would encourage sockpuppetry and other forms of vote stacking.
    The arguments are not similar. These articles have far more coverage than the Olympians. James500 (talk) 23:02, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Weak support as long as all the criteria in the nomination are correct, and if any have been expanded since the start of the RFC, then they are excluded from this move. Most of these articles are likely non-notable based on the criteria for their selection, and those that are can always be expanded and then moved back to article space. Joseph2302 (talk) 10:02, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per pervious RfC. This is basically the same situation just on a different subset so all previous rational applies here. I would have preferred a much shorter time period than the 5 years, but the proposal is still better than the current situation. --Gonnym (talk) 17:23, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per the previous RfC and Donald Albury and SMC. Ealdgyth (talk) 17:32, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support some of those stubs are in my watchlist and all I'm going to do is expand them until they surpass 2,500 bytes (I know they're notable). Any notable figure that gets their article deleted will eventually get their article recreated in theory precisely because they're notable. Super Dromaeosaurus (talk) 19:42, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
    • But why would notable articles need to be moved to draftspace and/or deleted for them exist as non-stubs? Why not go through the much more simple process of expanding them in mainspace? And to Any notable figure that gets their article deleted will eventually get their article recreated in theory precisely because they're notable – that's not necessarily the case. Creating notable articles on historical athletes has gotten many times harder since NSPORT was destroyed and there's already enormous quantities of notable athletes that have never been created in 20 years of wikipedia (so using logic, if the articles get much harder to be created and already huge amounts of notable ones that have never been written, how would getting rid of tens of thousands of the notable ones we already have make it likely they'll all be recreated in a better state?) BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:56, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
      In my opinion some of Wikipedia's most problematic articles are those that are right below the threshold of notability. It might take years until someone realises there's not actually that much to say on a given person. I've been on Wikipedia for years and it is still hard for me to judge whether some people are notable or not, and I believe it will always be like that because of the quite abstract nature of the policy.
      Lugnuts has created tons of short articles based on data repositories. Some are definitively not notable. Whether on draftspace or on mainspace, it will take us years to go through all of them. I believe in that case that it is better to keep bad content out of the mainspace and to progressively recover good articles than to keep trash for years here. This is a really exceptional treatment for a really exceptional (once-in-a-Wikipedia so far) case. Super Dromaeosaurus (talk) 20:34, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
      @Super Dromaeosaurus - I think there's maybe only two others whose article-production in the long-term deserves this analysis. I'm not going to put them on blast by naming them here but if you're familiar with Iranian village stubs and bot-created Indian sub-continent geostubs you'll know who I'm talking about. FOARP (talk) 13:48, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    • Also, on a side note, @Super Dromaeosaurus:, you can expect the deletionists to give you hell whenever they can for all the draftified articles you move back to mainspace after expanding (as evidence, when I spent about an hour expanding the draftified Gyula Iványi from the prior discussion, I then had to waste several more hours arguing in several places with multiple users about why he was worth moving to mainspace and only after that did they finally agree he deserved an article - expanding it alone they don't view as sufficient and only block-worthy "gaming the system"; you also have to find SIGCOV which they agree is SIGCOV (very rare) and that they agree is a reliable source and that they agree covers said athlete in the correct context (I've had articles I did significant work on deleted because although they had sufficient SIGCOV, that SIGCOV didn't cover them in the right way) - and usually you need to have multiple pieces of it). BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:03, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
      Deletionist–inclusionist conflicts are going to happen no matter what solution we apply and also outside of this group of articles until the end of Wikipedia. I don't think the same will happen to every single other article.
      For the record: I would define myself as an inclusionist. Super Dromaeosaurus (talk) 20:34, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. It's theft. Summarizing two or more sources is not stealing, that's creating a new work, but simply copying from another website and pasting the contents onto this website is just plain stealing. Scraping another website and copying thousands, or tens of thousands, of its pages and pasting them onto Wikipedia, that's just theft on a large scale. It's highly immoral. It doesn't matter if what's being stolen are "just" statistics; these websites are doing all the work (and investing the money) to gather these statistics, and then Wikipedia comes along and just copies them by the thousands? Not cool. In addition, when I Google "Aadil Rashid" (to take one example), Wikipedia comes up first and ESPNcricinfo comes up second. So not only are we stealing their content, but we're stealing their traffic as well. Is this what we want? When people want to look up a cricketer, we want them to come to Wikipedia instead of some other website, even if all the information we have was simply copied from the other website? No way. This sort of content theft contradicts the ethos of what Wikipedia should be; it's hypocritical of Wikipedia to permit it (nevermind celebrating it), and we should delete all of these articles for no other reason than to deter anyone else from engaging in this sort of immoral mass-copying-and-pasting.

    Nobody has actually read these "articles." Aadil Rashid received less than 0.5 page views per day this year. I do not believe Lugnuts read all the 90,000+ articles he created. The difference between these mass-copied-and-pasted articles and a regular article is that when an editor creates articles one at a time, they actually read the articles they create, so at least one human being has actually read the article before we publish it. Not so with these mass creations, we don't know if even one human being has ever read it. It's irresponsible of Wikipedia to publish something that nobody has read first (nevermind verified). At least some of these articles are WP:BLPs. Publishing unread BLPs is not just irresponsible, it's reckless.

    While I prefer WP:CSDing these immoral and irresponsible if not reckless mass-stolen articles (or at least the BLPs), not everyone is on board with deleting them all at once. There are too many to take them to AFD, even in batches (neither spending years going through this, nor flooding the AFD queue, are reasonable options). This proposal is a good compromise that takes them out of mainspace while still allowing 5 years for interested editors to improve them and bring them back to mainspace as articles or redirects, whichever is better for the particular article, just like the last RFC about Olympians. Levivich (talk) 03:02, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

    • - Levivich - Pageview counts don't matter WP:NOBODYREADSIT.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:25, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    • It's theft. – Are you kiddin' me? That's one of the most nonsensical suggestions I've seen in this entire discussion! If this is stealing, than all of Wikipedia is! Actually, summarizing sources is much more "stealing" than going from a stats website, and creating a one-sentence stub article based on the fact that Beanie Fan played two XI cricket matches for Gloucestershire in 1997 - you claim we're taking their "hard work and money" but there's much more in those databases that Lugnuts wouldn't mention (for example, stats – and ESPNcricinfo (if I remember correctly) also has prose for some of the athletes; if Lugnuts was actually word-for-word copying that, than I would agree they should be deleted; but he wasn't.) You claim that we're also stealing their views; I'd claim the opposite. First, you can click on them as the second result on google or you could read our Wikipedia article, which is very short and contains a link to that website; the fact that its very short would likely incline its readers to click on the link, thus giving them more views actually. And you say that, but right after say that "nobody reads these articles in the first place" (a side note: if no one reads these, how are we stealing other websites' views?) – you point to a link that shows a cricketer getting 0.5 views a day and say that we shouldn't have articles no one reads, but right there that's evidence that over 100 people reading it per year! BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:02, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
      @Levivich@BeanieFan11 - Since IP is my profession, I have given this some thought over the years. Morally I can't disagree that simply going through a database and reproducing the numbers from it as Lugnuts clearly did is cheesy in the extreme. Legally, well, mere facts are not copyright protected. Barring the existence of "trap listings" (e.g., fake listings put into the database just to catch copiers) it is hard to see where the legal case could be. Where it gets murkier is things like database rights where any liability would rest on things that I have little insight into (e.g., to what extent did Lugnuts reproduce the structure of the Cricinfo database and to what extent is that protected?). I don't see any clear case for IP infringement but I don't know everything.
      On the readership point, 100 hits a year almost certainly represents zero actual humans reading the article, as articles will get crawled by bots (e.g., search-engine indexers) about that many times in a year. FOARP (talk) 13:31, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
      The page view statistics count human and non-human views separately. For example Agniv Pan last month received views from 94 users, 64 spiders, and 5 "automated" (i.e. non-spiders non-humans) . While the determination of "user" isn't exactly equal to "human" it is close and typically fewer than 5-10 "user" hits a year can be attributed to non-humans. Thryduulf (talk) 08:04, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 2: Survey (mass draftification of cricket articles)

[mali mi di yibu sheena n-niŋ]
  • Strong Oppose I was leaning support upon initial reading of the discussion. Doubtless, many of these are poor articles that do deserve to be deleted. However, many are not; they are simply articles that have not been improved to the level we expect at Wikipedia. Those would not pass deletion at AfD, and should not pass here. I would encourage a much more thorough list, that looks into vernacular sources, though I acknowledge that it will need much more effort than what has been expended here already. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 04:26, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    This is similar to the spirit of WP:PRESERVE, but what good is PRESERVE for zero-effort, mass-created articles? There's no work to preserve. Another assumption underlying PRESERVE is that articles are more likely to reach X state (e.g. B-class) by a given date, if they exist, than if they need to be remade from scratch. That assumption holds true for articles that are merely bad. Not for barren articles that contain nothing but database info. DFlhb (talk) 12:00, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    For the record, my research suggests it isn't even true for stubs in general, although it is more true for stubs like those than micro-stubs like these. BilledMammal (talk) 12:21, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    By keeping the useful ones in mainspace, we encourage people to add to them. How many casual visitors go and edit drafts vs how many edit mainspace? I support the removal of articles where there is truly no notability, but a mass draftification essentially puts the burden of improvement on a very small number of editors, thus being de-facto deletion. I would support a second list if it came with checks regarding vernacular sources. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 15:07, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    How many casual visitors are we expecting to come across these articles in mainspace and add multiple sources of IRS SIGCOV to produce a PAG-compliant article? No one besides Lugnuts has substantially edited any of these stubs ever over the last 10 years. And I suspect the vast majority of cricket Lugstubs that have been expanded satisfactorily by others have been expanded by the most active members of the cricket wikiproject, all of whom should be aware of this proposal and thus aware that they can visit the list and work on drafts should they wish to. Their being in draftspace won't impede these editors if they happened to come across SIGCOV of some player and want to add it; they'll know to check the list if the name is a redlink. JoelleJay (talk) 01:50, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    The argument that someone who isnt an extremely dedicated Wiki editor wont be able to add SIGCOV is wrong; Even a casual fan might drop by and add the day's news report on the cricketers career. Putting the burden on a small section of editors is essentially backdoor deletion, which I dislike.
    If this is supposed to be an AfD, then it should come with better checks. I am not satisfied with the criteria. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 12:30, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    That just does not happen. You can look at the histories of the articles that didn't meet the draftification criteria to see who has added genuine SIGCOV and when they added it. For example, out of all 48 pages in category:cricketers from Manipur, we have only 2 that have a secondary independent source other than Cricinfo stats. One has a match recap added by Lugnuts, the other has a primary match recap added by another cricket project member. Neither is non-routine/SIGCOV, so wouldn't qualify to get out of draftspace anyway. Out of the 7 additional pages in category:Manipur cricketers, which is a separate category for some reason, one has a routine match recap added by Lugnuts.
    2/12 Lugstubs in category:cricketers from Allahabad have sources besides stats databases: one with some obits added by a highly active sports contributor, the other with a news report added by Lugnuts.
    4/11 Lugstubs in category:cricketers from Lucknow: 1,2,3 with non-stats sources added by Lugnuts, 1 with sources added by a highly active cricket project member.
    3/18 Lugstubs in category:cricketers from Dhaka: 1,2,3 with non-stats sources added by Lugnuts.
    0/9 Lugstubs in category:cricketers from Fremantle with non-stats independent sources.
    5/29 Lugstubs in category:cricketers from Newcastle, New South Wales: 1,2 with non-stats sources added by active project members, 1 with primary, non-independent sources added by a random editor, 1 with an ANYBIO #2 source unrelated to cricket added by an admin, 1 with a non-stats source added by Lugnuts. JoelleJay (talk) 01:00, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Listify, followed by draftify – there's no good answer here, but I think one of listifying or draftifying would be the best solution. Listifying keeps the content in mainspace, while also keeping it all in one place where anyone can pick one and expand it if they meet standalone notability criteria. Draftifying isn't great, and honestly these articles took such little work to create that I don't think deleting them loses much of anything, but outright deleting articles on potentially notable subjects would also be subpar. I don't like the backdoor to deletion possibility, but I think 5 years is enough for anyone who cares to make an edit and postpone G13 in draftspace. I'd also much prefer just looking at the full set rather than a subset, as the result won't change much for the rest of the set. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 19:34, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    I don't know if this is the case, but I suspect that all of these are already in mainspace lists containing much of the same bare data found in the stubs. JoelleJay (talk) 22:36, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    Yeah, there's already lists by team, by country and so-forth. What's the point in listifying? FOARP (talk) 13:33, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    It sounded like we didn't have everything covered in lists (African players, etc.), but if I'm wrong on that front then there is not much point. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 23:41, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
    The current list articles only contain career stats, but not vital dates, birthplaces, or individual citations to their cricinfo entries. My !vote for listification was based on a process whereby all the information in the current articles would make its way into an appropriate list article. Folly Mox (talk) 00:10, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Listify (and then possibly draftify). It was hard to oppose outright, but mass draftification proposal as stated seemed both too complex and still a bit heavy-handed. But I didn't want to oppose only on principle in hopes that we could find a way to improve the encyclopedia. So I'm glad other editors have come up with this solution. It's actually pretty good. —siroχo 19:45, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Siroxo - This same process was already applied in the previous WP:LUGSTUBS case, so, complex or not, it is perfectly do-able. I'll also say, the articles draftified in the previous case haven't exactly been missed. FOARP (talk) 13:35, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    I can appreciate that. Still, I feel that do-able in the moment can lead to complexity after the fact. The 5 year clause is the most clear example of something that will certainly be confusing to some editors in a couple of years. Thus I prefer to keep things more within the realm of standard processes. —siroχo 09:05, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Siroxo: In regards to The 5 year clause is the most clear example of something that will certainly be confusing to some editors in a couple of years, the deletion after six months of drafts is a semi-automated process (admins are given a list of articles that are coming up on a deadline), and the exception for the five years clause has already been incorporated into that process. BilledMammal (talk) 09:08, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
    Complexity is a fickle beast. It's very difficult to reduce complexity without changing requirements, mostly the complexity ends up shifted. I appreciate that people are trying to shift the complexity into an automated system. However, the state machine editors keep in their heads will have another set of states for this particular subset of drafts, due to this, and some editors may not even realize this in a couple years time. —siroχo 09:19, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support Levivich makes some interesting points and BeanieFan's reply seems to me to miss the point. What do these articles add to the body of knowledge on the internet? Sure, a regular article must combine pre-existing information. But that combining and and then presenting it in a different way is the value add of a Wikipedia article. As Levivich demonstrates that's not what's happened with these articles.(Looking at the example Levivich gave, BeanieFan's claim that is not the case is unconvincing) Without these articles nothing is lost - the source it was "stolen" from (in Levivich's terms) provides it just the same. The proposal is a workable compromise. DeCausa (talk) 10:14, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    Comment . I'd support this per Levivich and this report on the way AI machines are poaching massively on wikipedia's articles, hijacking the often arduous reading and writing of volunteer editors. If, as it appears to be the case, editors here are using similar algorithms to sweep the net and mechanically reproduce sporting material without the critical eyes of editors combing independently through the web sources to winnow rubbish and build an article, then they are putting global knowledge in double jeopardy, since the A1 world, which hopes to cannibalize wikipedia's distinctive verifiable knowledge base, will like the proverbial moronic computer that 'thinks' at the speed of light', reproduce massive loads of data here that have been inserted indiscriminantly and indeed by a form of automatic larceny. It would be painful for me, as a cricket addict from infancy, to uncritically support this erasure, despite the cogency of the case for deletion, but whatever the cost we must be accountable, and give warrant for our reliability in verifying, editor by editor, the content here. My reserve relates to WP:Systemic bias, that blanket erasure without close supervision, case by case, will mostly affect non-European cricketers. But articles like those on Afghani cricket (one of the two good things to come out of the devastatingly stupid war, the other being female access to education) show that solid individual work can or does cover thirdworld cricketers who otherwise might have risked neglect in coverage. Automatic erasure, like automatic stub generation, in annuling the human agency that is fundamental for wikipedia, is equally problematic.Nishidani (talk) 10:33, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    These articles (and especially the Australians) are being expanded and improved right now. Moving them into draftspace would prevent expansion and improvement by editors who are not prepared to expand or improve pages while they are in the draftspace.
    It would have been better to have revived Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub improvement and then given the list of stubs to the wikiproject. The wikiproject could have done the search for sources, and the article improvement, that the draftification supporters are unwilling or unable to do, and then reported back a revised list of stubs for which no additional sources are available. James500 (talk) 20:27, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    Editors have had up to ten years in some cases to improve these articles (not just the cricketer ones) in mainspace. They didn't. Many people have also suggested wikiprojectifying these sort of stubs in the past, and that is in fact an option for editors to do for any draftified stub in this proposal. But that suggestion has also been shot down by project members (not necessarily (just) cricket) who have been unwilling to and/or uninterested in expanding these stubs because many they don't believe the stubs are problematic or potentially unencyclopedic in any way. Additionally, these stubs are so lacking in content that the difference in effort between expansion and recreation is essentially a single template and a database source, so it's not like removal from mainspace presents some insurmountable hurdle for anyone trying to add SIGCOV. JoelleJay (talk) 01:34, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    - JoelleJay - See WP:NOEFFORT. The article shouldn't be deleted for its current status only because no one has improved it yet. Such deletion would prevent editors from improving it in the future.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:21, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    This assumes that the articles are improvable, but the truth is that 99% of them or more just aren't, and the remaining ~1% or less need essentially re-writing as new articles. FOARP (talk) 14:33, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    I highly, highly, highly doubt what you're saying is true. There's several different editors above who have found plenty of expandable ones. BeanieFan11 (talk) 14:39, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    BF, you were the most active opponent of the original LUGSTUBS proposal and even you were only able to bring back a hand-full of the articles that were eventually draftified. I'm pretty happy with my 1% estimate to be frank. FOARP (talk) 15:08, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    Because (1) I only have access to old American and Canadian newspapers, and (2) because I've got other things in life I want to do than endlessly expand old Olympian articles. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:10, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    The key fact here is (1), because it means that no sources exist as far as we know. "But there must be sources" is a well-worn fallacy on here. BTW, if it's UK coverage you're looking for the Wikipedia Library has the British newspaper Archive in its collection, also there are free online archives of Welsh and Australian newspapers. FOARP (talk) 15:15, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    FOARP - Multiple articles here have already been improved and taken off the list. But just as a bunch of articles were created without a ton of researching going into them, a bunch of articles are now facing deletion/draftication without a ton of research going into them. Two sides of the same coin. This is despite there being WP:NORUSH.KatoKungLee (talk) 14:42, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    In my commment below I gave the figures for the number from the original LUGSTUBS proposal that were draftified and have since returned to mainspace - it's roughly one-half of one-percent. I'm sorry, but this proposal is just taking out articles that are overwhelmingly notability fails. FOARP (talk) 15:05, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    The fact that 0.5% of the articles have been returned does not show that they are overwhelming notability fails; rather, it shows quite clearly that both proposals are just attempts to backdoor delete (i.e. violate policy to delete) enormous quantities of articles which the proposer does not like. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:08, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    Sorry I don't follow you here: how is the fact that vanishingly few of the articles previous draftified will ever get returned to mainspace evidence that this is back-door deletion? What it is is evidence suggesting that we should just delete and not draftify as nearly all of them are deletion-worthy, but I'm OK with draftification because ultimately the few that hand be saved will be saved and the overwhelming majority that can't will be deleted.
    What if I switch it around: if more articles were being returned to mainspace, would you accept that as evidence that draftifying them was the correct decision? Or would you say it was evidence that they should not have been draftified? Then how is the opposite contention viable - i.e. that very few of them being returned to mainspace means that they should not be draftified but instead should be kept in mainspace? FOARP (talk) 15:22, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    Well lucky for you these articles are being draftified, not deleted, so editors are still able to improve any they consider viable. JoelleJay (talk) 19:00, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    @JoelleJay - 100% agree here. Throwing the problem to a Wikiproject that is itself the source of the problem (via the previous WP:NCRIC guide, and their bitter-end defence of Lugnuts's and his mass-created stubs) is not a viable solution. FOARP (talk) 13:39, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment - I see a lot of people, particularly amongst oppose !voters, commenting as though WP:LUGSTUBS hadn't already happened and we weren't already in a position to assess the outcome of it. WP:LUGSTUBS closed on 11 May 2023, and of the 960 stubs in the originally-proposed list just 18 of them are presently blue-linked. Of those 18 blue-links:
    • 8 were never draftified.
    • 3 were returned to mainspace on the day they were draftified
    • 2 were returned to mainspace within a week of being draftified, and
    • 4 are redirects.
    • Only 1 has been returned to mainspace since the start of June.
  • Even assuming (dubiously in some cases) that every one of the articles returned to mainspace actually belongs here and won't ultimately end up getting deleted/upmerged/redirected, this represents a grand total of roughly one-half of one percent of the total that actually got draftified. Given the lack of any articles being returned to mainspace in the past month, it is very possible that in the end no more than about 1% ever get returned to mainspace during the five years that draftification of these articles is due to last, and those that will return, will return as essentially new articles.
    The mass-slaughter of potentially-expandable articles did not happen. What happened instead was we cleared out hundreds of failing articles in a way that allows time for the vanishingly-small percentage of them that could be an article to come back to mainspace. If anything, the evidence very clearly supports the position of those that preferred straight deletion of the articles. However, I'm still happy to endorse draftification since in the end they'll all go the same way. FOARP (talk) 14:27, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    Cricket is the national sport, or the national summer sport, in some Commonwealth countries. English and Australian cricketers are far more likely to receive coverage than the vast majority of Olympians. In England and Australia, cricket receives an exponentially greater degree of coverage than the vast majority of Olympic sports and disciplines. Any estimate that tries to equate cricketers with Olympians is obviously mistaken because it is based on a false premiss. James500 (talk) 23:06, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
    This is somewhat wild hyperbole. I lived in the UK during the 2005 Ashes and in China during the 2004 Olympics, and it would be hard for me to say which was more hyped. Obviously I was way more interested in the cricket, being British, but the nationalistic fervour with which stuff like pistol-shooting and synchronised diving (or anything with a Chinese competitor in it) were treated in China was something to behold. They were still regularly showing replays of every Chinese medal win on the CCTV channels in China getting on a year after the end of the Athens games.
    But more to the point, there just isn't coverage out there for most late 19th/early-20th century cricketers who played a handful of tests and ar ethe subject of presently-failing stubs. FOARP (talk) 14:04, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    It is not hyperbole. It is a verifiable fact that is verified by a very large number of reliable sources, which say that in express and unambiguous words: .
    Your analysis of English and Australian newspapers is simply mistaken. The sort of sports that are likely to receive coverage in an English newspaper are football (including soccer and rugby), cricket, tennis, horse racing, Formula One, boxing and snooker. In Australia, you can add Australian rules to that list. Those sports (and especially football, cricket and horse racing) receive endless massive coverage every day of every year. The Olympics (and most of their sports and disciplines) get a brief burst of limited coverage once every four years, and they get far less coverage, both in absolute terms, and relative to the number of sportsmen, than county cricket. An Olympian normally only gets coverage in an English newspaper if he is British and he wins a gold medal. That is why Torville and Dean are famous, and most British ice skaters have virtually no coverage at all and languish in total obscurity. Whereas English county cricketers get endless massive coverage, second only to (the winter sport) football today (and second to none in the nineteenth century).
    As far as I can tell, most of the Australian cricketers did not play a handful of matches. The problem is that the numbers in the articles usually only include the inter-state Sheffield Shield games played for Australian states, and do not include grade cricket (ie Premier Cricket) games played below that level. That is like counting the number of games a footballer has played in the British Home Championship and ignoring games played in the Premier League and the Scottish Premiership. As far as I can tell, most of the Australians played games for grade cricket (ie Premier Cricket) clubs as well as for the states. Grade cricket (ie Premier Cricket) is a statewide competition and has plenty of suitable coverage.
    As far as I can tell, there is sufficient coverage out there for most of the late 19th/early-20th century Australian cricketers. I have actually have examined the sources for a large sample of them, and I am satisfied that the coverage actually exists.
    In any event, criteria 4 of this proposal says that it is for articles referenced "only to CricketArchive or ESPNcricinfo". That is what everyone is !voting for. If a cricketer has coverage in Trove or other periodicals, or in a book like The A-Z of Australian Cricketers, he does not satisfy the criteria of this proposal and should not be draftified, because nobody has !voted for that. If you want to start a separate proposal for "articles referenced only to Trove", I cannot stop you, but I can predict with the assurance of a prophet that such a proposal would have WP:SNOW chance of success. James500 (talk) 23:45, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    "The sort of sports that are likely to receive coverage in an English newspaper..." - Thanks for explaining British newspaper coverage to me, a British newspaper-reader. FOARP (talk) 07:57, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
    "WP:LUGSTUBS closed on 11 May 2023" ... and who says that 2 months later is a fair deadline for assessing the proposal? Those drafts will be autodeleted after five years. That's the point at which a fair conclusion can be drawn about whether it was in effect AFD or not. Steven Walling • talk 03:22, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Steven Walling - We're talking about a list of 960 articles. For even 10% of these to returned to mainspace in five years we would expect roughly 2 a month to be returned. Instead none of them are being returned, because they were exactly the overwhelmingly-failing articles that the people who supported the original LUGSTUBS proposal said they were. FOARP (talk) 13:56, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    (edit conflict) none of them are being returned, because they were exactly the overwhelmingly-failing articles that the people who supported the original LUGSTUBS proposal said they were – That is completely false. The actual reason that they are not being returned is not because they're not notable (I've actually identified several other notable ones but haven't gotten to them yet, not to mention BilledMammal et al gave me hell for the ones I did try to improve), but because (1) we don't have many interested editors, (2) its difficult to find sources for them (but with enough work is possible), and (3) because all of those who were interested in improving them are now occupied with this proposal. If you dump a thousand articles in draftspace, a few might be improved, but if you dump a thousand more, and then right after 40,000 more, do you really think we will get to all of them? (contrary to what you say, many are actually notable) The interested editors do not nearly have enough time to do that. There is WP:NODEADLINE to get rid of these articles. BeanieFan11 (talk) 14:53, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    OK BF, you totally have notability for those articles but I wouldn't know them, they go to another school. FOARP (talk) 16:03, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    May I please ask @BeanieFan11 to turn down on the rhetoric a bit. Gave me hell can be understood as a personal attack in a rather large environment and directing that to et al. is not really fair as well. At least I am trying my best to help making wikipedia a more informative encyclopedia with less articles that leave one still wondering about what that actually is after having read them.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 05:18, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
    I understand that you (and BilledMammal, etc.) believe that this proposal will help the encyclopedia; I do not. As for gave me hell, it certainly felt unpleasant spending about an hour of my time expanding an article, then immediately after I return it to mainspace I had to spend three more hours arguing over whether it was notable (which it was), not to mention all the debate it took for me to remove the few that I did during the Olympian discussion (for which one user brought me to ANI for edit-warring, when I had not violated it, and BilledMammal had doubled it). That seemed pretty unfair to me and the stress it caused has made me cease expanding the other Olympians from that list for now. BeanieFan11 (talk) 14:28, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
    The analysis is inherently flawed.
    Indeed, what the data presented shows is that after draftification, the interest in participation drops off substantially with time and the "draftification" becomes de-facto deletion.
    As such, we should hold the articles to the same standard as we do at AfD, which is clearly not met by this proposal. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 12:34, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    @CapnJackSp - Arguing in favour of keeping these articles on the basis that:
    "the interest in participation drops off substantially with time and the "draftification" becomes de-facto deletion"
    is contradictory - either these articles will eventually be improved into viable articles and should be kept, or they overwhelmingly will never be improved (because they can't be) and therefore draftification of them is sensible. It cannot be that they are viable articles BUT ALSO no-one will ever improve them into viable articles. Being in main space or not doesn't really affect this. Few if any of which have any obvious evidence of having been read, much less edited, by human hands since their creation - the number of hits they get is consistent with being visited by webcrawlers only, so no-one is looking at them. FOARP (talk) 13:51, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    Im not arguing for all of these to be kept.
    Im arguing for a better list of articles, which include things like checks against vernacular sources.
    Draftifying drastically reduces visibility, and therefore pushes the burden on a small group of editors to improve the notable ones.
    Assuming that a draft wont be improved only because it cant be improved is essentially assuming these deserve deletion and working backwords. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 16:32, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    "Im not arguing for all of these to be kept" - If you're opposing this measure, this is what you are effectively doing since these articles will never be dealt with in any other way.
    "Draftifying drastically reduces visibility" - But these articles are already not being read by human beings. The number hits per year is consistent with them being crawled by web-crawlers every few days and zero humans reading them.
    "Assuming that a draft wont be improved only because it cant be improved - That's not just an assumption, that's simply the way logic works: if it can't be done then it won't be done. The steel-man version of your argument is that you expect WP:CRIN to come back and WP:NSPORTS2022 to be undone at some point in the future so they won't need to be improved any more? But that's just not going to happen. FOARP (talk) 08:07, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
    If you're opposing this measure, this is what you are effectively doing since these articles will never be dealt with in any other way.
    No.
    These will be dealt with when someone nominates with a better set of checks, even if in a mass format.
    Not in the current format, however.
    But these articles are already not being read by human beings.
    I am admittedly not the expert on web crawlers, but I doubt these generalisations hold for all the articles.
    That's not just an assumption, that's simply the way logic works: if it can't be done then it won't be done.
    Logical fallacy, just because A-->B does not mean B-->A.
    If it wasnt done, does not mean it cannot be done. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 08:59, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
    But these articles are already not being read by human beings. The number hits per year is consistent with them being crawled by web-crawlers every few days and zero humans reading them. as already explained at least once in this discussion this is completely false - human views and webcrawler views are counted separately and when you look at the evidence you will see your claim is utterly false. Here are 7 examples selected at random:
    {| class="wikitable"
    !Article!!User (i.e. human) views (2022)!!Spider views (2022)!!Automated views (2022)
    |-
    |Abdul Naseri||96||235||85
    |-
    |Abinash Saha||120||357||80
    |-
    |Alfred Black (cricketer)||88||292||82
    |-
    |Arthur Bauer||209||398||141
    |-
    |Chingakham Ranjan||56||161||50
    |-
    |Danush Peiris||78||267||86
    |-
    |Derreck Calvert||75||180||71
    |}
    Even the least view of these, Chingakham Ranjan, was viewed by a human on average more than once per week. Thryduulf (talk) 09:32, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
    Two things; first, to identify automated views, I believe the system relies on what the user agent tells the system. That means there are a significant number of false negatives caused by bots and spiders that don't properly identify themselves.
    Second, a significant number of those views will come from humans using Special:Random. I haven't been able to determine exactly how many times that button is clicked per year, but this Wikimedia article suggests it is approximately two billion times per year.
    Due to how Special:Random functions, these page views aren't evenly distributed, but they can easily account for most if not all of the views articles like Chingakham Ranjan receive. BilledMammal (talk) 11:14, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per Avilich and others. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:41, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment. The arguments about this being some form of "illegal" backdoor to deletion strike me as bureaucratic wikilawyering designed to prevent any actual action from ever being taken. What we have here is a ton of stubs that are of questionable notability, low quality, and have essentially no visibility. It is reasonable to have an argument over whether these are valuable to keep around in their current state. What is unreasonable is to oppose this on the grounds that it's not the "right" way to do it, full well knowing that there isn't a standard way of doing this (and WP:LUGSTUBS is the closest we have). A mass AfD would be an obvious WP:TRAINWRECK, 1182 individual AfDs would not be much better, and of course if someone goes through and takes actions on individual articles without an RfC they'll be accused of skirting consensus process. It's fine to think that no action should be taken here, but if an RfC listed in centralized discussion isn't the right way to determine whether action should be taken here, what is? Dylnuge (Talk • Edits) 16:45, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    What is?
    Well, do the exact same thing done here, but put in slightly more effort and check for sources from where these guys play. Quite a few examples have been shown above where the person is notable. I would support a second list if they checked for vernacular sources. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 17:23, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    To clarify, I think your opposition is entirely reasonable and well reasoned. I think many of the oppose !votes are entirely reasonable. I also haven't reviewed these in depth and don't have a strong opinion if this should or shouldn't happen. I just find all the kafkaesuqe "the only valid way to do this is one by one at AfD" arguments silly enough that I felt it was worth saying so. Dylnuge (Talk • Edits) 17:51, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Dylnuge - Right. But this is the argument that is always made about why we can't clear up mass-created articles. Someone creates en-masse tens of thousands of low-quality single-sentence stubs with coverage only in an all-encompassing database, and then a group of editors on a Wikiproject will simply decide that the articles will never be touched even if they obviously know that they fail our policies and guidelines. Any way of dealing with them is stymied by a Kafkaesque merry-go-round of:
    • AFD the articles and you get endless "Keep - obviously notable, what was the nom thinking!? They should be TBAN'd from AFD!" !votes, or at best redirection (but never as the first step).
    • PROD the articles and you get taken to ANI for "abusing" the PROD system.
    • Redirect the articles and you get told you have to AFD them by exactly the same people who abuse you for AFDing them.
    • Propose draftifying and that's deletion-by-the-back-door.
    All from people who regularly say that they are well-aware that these articles fail our standards.
    I'm not even the person who is the target of all this - what I'm describing above is just what I've seen other editors who tried to deal with mass-created articles go through (mostly @BilledMammal and @Dlthewave). Let's not forget that the articles we are talking about ones the creators of which said they purposefully put errors into and which, purposefully or not, regularly included systematic errors. FOARP (talk) 08:41, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. I can somewhat understand the concerns raised by others above about the precedent involved here, but ultimately I find those 'slipper slope' arguments uncompelling in this case. We are talking about a very unique situation created by a problem user whose own actions in mass creating the articles in question was itself out of process and inconsistent with article creation guidelines. I find the proposal very narrowly tailored in its scope and reasonable, all factors considered. It sets five strict criteria (each of which is narrow in its own right and all five of which have to be met for any given article) for creating the pool of articles to be draftified, and it carves out robust rules for permitting whatever small fraction of these articles may meet GNG/have some actual hope of becoming legitimate articles that meet our content guidelines to be rescued by any parties actually willing to do the requisite work. This option feels to me to be more restrained and less disruptive in the long run than the only real alternative under typical process: mass AfD nominations, which are going to run into huge hurdles when it comes to making the case to make immediate final decisions on such a sweeping scale and monolithic/non-specific analysis. Honestly, this feels like a very thoughtfully considered solution, given the circumstances. SnowRise let's rap 21:09, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
    I don't want to bludgeon, so I will strike my comment if this is in violation- but I have not yet seen a compelling explanation as to why this is a unique case. Disregard the current issue and the pro vs contra for a moment: how and why does it make sense to limit the scope, when there are many other articles of the same nature, except that they have a different creator? The "slippery slope" is the contra interpretation, but it's something that inevitably follows. Dege31 (talk) 19:38, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
    Disregard the current issue and the pro vs contra for a moment: how and why does it make sense to limit the scope, when there are many other articles of the same nature, except that they have a different creator? When you are talking about articles with the same issues, are you talking about other mass created articles, or just low-quality articles that were created artisanally?
    The former may well be addressed by this process; for example I have considered applying this process to articles created by Tɛmplet:Noping, although I will need to improve the tools I use first. The second can't be, for many reasons, of which I consider three particularly important:
    • First, problematic mass creations can only be addressed through mass action; our normal processes cannot deal with them. Our normal processes can handle articles that weren't mass-created fine, and so the justification for these extraordinary measures don't exist.
    • Second, mass created articles by a single editor follow an extremely similar pattern that allows us to group them together. When we start looking at articles created by multiple editors that pattern fades and it becomes less appropriate to group them. Even when we only look at mass created articles the pattern fades; for example, BlackJack's mass created cricketers differ significantly from Lugnuts, to the extent that I don't feel grouping them together would be appropriate.
    • Third, mass creation is indiscriminate. The fact that these articles were chosen to be created is no indication that they are possibly notable because all the editor was doing is working down a list and churning them out in the same manner as a bot would. That isn't true for non-mass created articles; if an editor who only created a few articles on cricketers chose to create one on a specific cricketer there is likely to have been prompted by something, even if the article doesn't currently indicate it, and it is worth giving that possibility more consideration than this process affords.
    This process can only be applied to mass created articles that lack significant coverage; it wouldn't work for other articles, such as the ones you create, and that is why approving this group isn't a slippery slope. BilledMammal (talk) 07:32, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I hope I'm putting this in the right place. This runs counter to the basis of our collaboration and will undermine our objectives of breadth of coverage and avoidance of systemic bias. Disregarding notability and sourcing on the basis of disapproval of the editor who created themt imposes a deadline (regardless of deferral, that deadline will eventually arrive) and places the onus on other Wikipedians to improve a whole class of articles in order to save them. "Lugnuts liked to create articles about this topic" does not equal "This is a non-notable topic". Fellow editors should not be compelled in this way to work on a particular class of articles; AfD is bad enough, and at least that leaves a trail for someone who later realizes an article existed but was deleted. Also, while I appreciate the offer of a place to list articles that have already been improved in order to forestall deletion, its being in BilledMammal's user space implies an element of personal control of this process that does not sit well with me. The functional requirement to list an article there also undercuts the basis of this discussion, especially Criterion #5, No significant contributions from editors other than Lugnuts. During the Olympians discussion, I read the list and chose Julius Jørgensen to improve; here's my edit. Nonetheless, almost a month later, along came BilledMammal to escape the categories, and it got draftified. Luckily I'd kept a note of the article title and thought to find that note and check; I then had to waste 5 edits restoring the article, plus one reassessing it on the talk page. Not doing that (I don't like to presume to evaluate my own work) may have been my fatal error; or I may have missed a similar offer to note my effort on some list, whether in BilledMammal's user space or not. But nobody who improves an article should be expected to draw attention to that in order to forestall its being ignored and ultimately deleted. Mass draftification without examination of whether the articles all meet the criteria is ultimately damaging in exactly the same ways as unexamined actioning of speedy deletion nominations, including its potential to turn off editors who happened to arrive at an article and improve it in ignorance that it was under a swinging ax. Moreover, while in the discussion about draftifying Olympics articles, one rationale was that Lugnuts had said he included deliberate inaccuracies, I don't see that rationale being mentioned here. I have seen little evidence that such inaccuracies were found, and in any case not mentioning it here makes the argument here, in my view, fall quite heavily into the IDONTLIKEIT basket. So no. The Olympics round demonstrated that the dangers outweigh the putative advantages, and the advantages being adduced here are not even as great. Yngvadottir (talk) 02:22, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
    These articles all objectively fail NSPORT's requirement that sportsperson articles must cite a SIGCOV source. They're not eligible for mainspace from that alone. And the reasons this group was selected are not dislike of the creator or baseless worries over intentional errors. I've participated in hundreds of sportsperson AfDs including many Lugnuts cricket stubs (and a substantial proportion had more sources cited than what we have here). The strong majority of them have been removed from mainspace because GNG could not be established or even presumed; cricket project members have themselves been responsible for the deletion/redirection of dozens of these articles. If these stubs didn't have such an abysmal track record already, I'm 100% certain @BilledMammal would not have pursued this draftification proposal. JoelleJay (talk) 05:51, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
    Not all.
    Several examples have been found, see above. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 06:21, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
    Can you point those examples out to me? A few examples were found early in the process, but I believe I have updated the query to ensure that neither they nor any like them are included in the proposal; if I have missed any, please say so. (There are some articles that have been improved, but that isn't the same thing). BilledMammal (talk) 06:30, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
    See my survey above - a grand total of 6 articles have been returned to mainspace out of the 960 articles originally listed for draftifying in the WP:LUGSTUBS proposal. That's less than 1%. @Yngvadottir may be irked by that, but this appears to me to be a very good example of why this draftification process was the correct way to go. You probably would see a higher rate of re-creation at AFD than this. FOARP (talk) 08:48, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
    That's one way of seeing it: that very few have been improved and thus saved, so on the whole, they were without merit. It's equally plausible—more so, in my view, since many editors who might have worked on an article will now be unlikely to realize there was such an article—that hiding them away in draft space has inhibited work on them. These discussions, with people arguing in a broad manner that the whole class of topics lack notability, also have a discouraging effect. Plus, I need to point out that there's supposedly a 5-year grace period for the draftified articles in these groups, rather than the usual 6 months. Your argument seems to imply that we can discount the remaining 4.75 years. But I hope you counted Jørgensen. Yngvadottir (talk) 09:20, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
    "many editors who might have worked on an article will now be unlikely to realize there was such an article" - We're going round in circles here, but these articles have been around for years with scarcely anyone even reading them, let alone working on them. The NEWEST stub articles by Lugnuts date to December 2021 (you know, when he was banned from creating any more because he was creating such trash articles...) and many of these are 10+ years old. No-one's coming to rescue these overwhelmingly-failing articles, but if they are any time in the next five years, these articles will still be there in draft space.
    These articles only exist because of the crazily-lax CRIN standard, which has now been abolished. Without that, no new Lugnuts is in the wings to mass-create stuff based just on a database. FOARP (talk) 12:34, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
    "No-one's coming to rescue these overwhelmingly-failing articles" Can we see into the future now? Wikipedia is by its very nature a work in progress and we are not here to make all articles immediately perfect right now. If anyone thinks they can prove that 100% of these 1,000+ articles with sources are not notable, take them to AFD and discuss each one on its merits, like we should be doing when we evaluate articles for notability. That is the way our deletion policy is designed to work for a reason. Steven Walling • talk 02:37, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
    Can we see into the future now? No, but we can see into the past. Lugnuts has created approximately 12,000[lower-alpha 7] articles on Cricketers. Of these 12,000, 93% still have the most significant contributor being Lugnuts. Of the rest, 5% were improved by members of WikiProject Cricket, and 1% was improved by non-members, although I recognized some of those names as being associated with the project. (The final 1% were improved by editors who only improved one article; I did not check those editors for affiliation with the project, although there were a significant number of obvious COI editors such as Tɛmplet:Noping at Mohammad Farrukh and Tɛmplet:Noping at Fahad Shahnawaz)
    Further, of these articles, 70 were improved by editors with less than 1000 edits (including the WP:SPE/WP:COI editors), and an additional 91 were improved by editors with less than 10,000 edits. History proves that these aren't articles that some new editor was going to stumble across and decide to improve; the few that are improved are done so by established editors, and most of those established editors are involved with Wikiproject Cricket and thus will be aware of the draftification.
    Wikipedia is by its very nature a work in progress and we are not here to make all articles immediately perfect right now. That's true; articles don't have to be perfect. However, articles do have to abide by our minimum standards; in the case of sports biographies this means not violating WP:NOT or WP:NSPORT. These articles violate both WP:NOTDATABASE and WP:SPORTSCRIT #5.
    If anyone thinks they can prove that 100% of these 1,000+ articles with sources are not notable, take them to AFD and discuss each one on its merits, like we should be doing when we evaluate articles for notability. And any editor who tried to take these 1000+ articles through AfD in a reasonable timeframe would quickly find themselves hauled off to ANI, even though the result of those AfD's would no doubt demonstrate that the nominations were proper. Would you argue in that editors defence if that happened?
    Further, even if the editor was not dragged to ANI, doing this would make it harder to save the articles; it would mean that editors interested in doing so only have six months or a year to review the entire group, rather than five years. In addition, they would only have a week or two for each article; they wouldn't be able to put one aside becasue they believed there may be SIGCOV in a resource they didn't currently have access to but would have access to at a later date.
    I genuinely believe that there will be less articles incorrectly deleted using this process than would be deleted if we used AfD.
    And these issues are before we get into the exorbitate amount of editor-hours that 1200 AfD's would consume, an amount that would be ludicrously disproprortionate to the time spent creating these articles. BilledMammal (talk) 08:54, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
    The vast majority of editors who would have worked to improve any of these articles are already aware of the draftification. I suspect it is very, very, very rare for random editors not in the cricket project or involved in general sports editing to encounter these stubs at all, let alone add a GNG-contributing source to them. The latter is what is required for these stubs to be in mainspace. JoelleJay (talk) 22:20, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
    The subjects for which a GNG source has been added won't be in the draftification pool. So yes, all of the articles eligible for draftification objectively fail NSPORT. JoelleJay (talk) 22:14, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
    lso, while I appreciate the offer of a place to list articles that have already been improved in order to forestall deletion, its being in BilledMammal's user space implies an element of personal control of this process that does not sit well with me. I placed it there because if there is a consensus for this proposal I am likely to be the one implementing it, and that list (with the right format) will be used to aid in that implementation and then forgotten about as no longer being relevant. However, if you or another would feel more comfortable with it being elsewhere, feel free to move it; perhaps to under Wikiproject Cricket?
    Nonetheless, almost a month later, along came BilledMammal to escape the categories, and it got draftified. Yes, unfortunately I missed that. My initial attempt to findd improved articles involved a less prominent broad request to list articles that had been improved, approaching editors who I knew had been working on them and asking for their lists, and running queries focused on said editors to catch any they forgot to provide.
    I've since improved on that initial approach; I now run a general query to list articles that may have been improved to allow for manual inspection, and hopefully the more prominent broad request will be also be beneficial. The issue should not reoccur this time; part of the benefits of using a standardized approach will allow us to improve it over time, make the system more robust and better at minimizing both false positives and false negatives - although I'll note that due to the extremely conservative nature of the query false negatives are near-zero, and the few that do occur are corrected for by modifying the query. For example, Quarry queries are limited in that they don't allow us to run queries on the text of the article, which is why I am working on script that will do so.
    Moreover, while in the discussion about draftifying Olympics articles, one rationale was that Lugnuts had said he included deliberate inaccuracies, I don't see that rationale being mentioned here. The rationale does exist, and I think a few editors have mentioned it; Lugnut's claim to have introduced deliberate inaccuracies wasn't limited to just his Olympians. The inaccuracies do exist, but I'm not certain they were introduced deliberately; it is reasonable to believe that they were made accidentally due to manual aspects of his semi-automated process and a lack of care over those aspects. BilledMammal (talk) 07:06, 23 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose All our criteria concerning notability, including specific notability criteria, are guidelines, not policies. People are allowed to express their own opinions on deletion and have their views scrutinised and considered. There are no "wrong" opinions. Unless our deletion policy changes for people no longer living, mass deletion and draftification are completely contrary to Wikipedia's principles. Thincat (talk) 15:56, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose I have already commented, but this is now my vote. Ultimately, I think this is the wrong approach for the core of the problem. Dege31 (talk) 19:34, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

Discussion (mass draftification of cricket articles)

[mali mi di yibu sheena n-niŋ]

If there is a consensus for this proposal than I plan to boldly create the following redirects in line with If this proposal is successful #5, unless there are issues with doing so that I have missed. This is in response to a request by members of WikiProject Cricket. Tɛmplet:Cot

ArticleRedirect target
Aaron BradleyList of Northern Districts representative cricketers
Aaron Daley (cricketer, born 1956)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Abdul Mannan (cricketer)List of Attock Group cricketers
Abdul MasoodList of Bengal cricketers
Abdur Rahman (Bangladeshi cricketer)List of Rangpur Division cricketers
Abhik MitraList of Bengal cricketers
Abhisek BanerjeeList of Bengal cricketers
Abhishek ChowdhuryList of Bengal cricketers
Abhishek Das (cricketer)List of Bengal cricketers
Abraham de SwardtList of Boland representative cricketers
Abrar Ahmed (Indian cricketer)List of Hyderabad cricketers
Adam Hope (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Adam Maher (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Adam MatherList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Adam Smith (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Adil SheikhList of Bengal cricketers
Aditya JainList of Delhi cricketers
Aditya KaushikList of Delhi cricketers
Adjodha PersaudList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Adolph LipkeList of Border representative cricketers
Adolphus O'BrienList of Auckland representative cricketers
Adrian Grant (cricketer)List of Barbadian representative cricketers
Afzaal SaeedList of Pakistan National Shipping Corporation cricketers
Ahmed RafiuddinList of Hyderabad cricketers
Ahmed SadequrList of Sylhet Division cricketers
Aidan OlivierList of Boland representative cricketers
Ajay DivechaList of Delhi cricketers
Ajit BhatiaList of Delhi cricketers
Ajit Das GuptaList of Bengal cricketers
Ajoy DasList of Bengal cricketers
Akash MalhotraList of Delhi cricketers
Alan CrippsList of Western Australia first-class cricketers
Alan CuffList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Alan Davidson (cricketer, born 1897)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Alan Devlin (cricketer)List of Canterbury representative cricketers
Alan FavellList of South Australian representative cricketers
Alan JacobsonList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Alan McInnesList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Alan Reid (cricketer)List of Queensland first-class cricketers
Alan TarrList of Border representative cricketers
Alan WyattList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Albert Bates (cricketer)List of Canterbury representative cricketers
Albert BowdenList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Albert Brown (Australian cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Albert DakinList of Canterbury representative cricketers
Albert DrewList of Western Australia first-class cricketers
Albert Fox (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Albert Frost (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Albert HardingList of Trinidadian representative cricketers
Albert Hassell (cricketer)List of Barbadian representative cricketers
Albert HewittList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Albert LansdownList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Albert McGinnList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Albert PhilpottList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Albert PuttList of Auckland representative cricketers
Albert RigbyList of Western Australia first-class cricketers
Albert ScanesList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Albert ShuggList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Albert SimsList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Albert WeeksList of South Australian representative cricketers
Albert WhitingList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Albert WilkinsList of Border representative cricketers
Alcon BowmanList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Alec ClarkeList of Border representative cricketers
Alec KerrList of Auckland representative cricketers
Alec MarksList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Alec Parker (cricketer)List of Queensland first-class cricketers
Alec RiddollsList of Wellington representative cricketers
Alex Weir (cricketer)List of South Australian representative cricketers
Alexander Addison (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Alexander BarrasList of Western Australia first-class cricketers
Alexander Fisher (cricketer)List of Queensland first-class cricketers
Alexander GarbisList of Bengal cricketers
Alexander LittlejohnList of Wellington representative cricketers
Alexander Morgan (cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Alexander Morrison (cricketer)List of Auckland representative cricketers
Alexander SlightList of South Australian representative cricketers
Alexander Webster (cricketer)List of Western Australia first-class cricketers
Alfred Black (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Alfred BrittonList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Alfred Browne (cricketer)List of Barbadian representative cricketers
Alfred BurchettList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Alfred CarltonList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Alfred Douglas (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Alfred EnebergList of South Australian representative cricketers
Alfred GearyList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Alfred HasellList of Canterbury representative cricketers
Alfred LowList of Trinidadian representative cricketers
Alfred MottaList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Alfred Noyes (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Alfred Park (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Alfred PatfieldList of Western Australia first-class cricketers
Alfred PickettList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Alfred Scott (New Zealand cricketer)List of Auckland representative cricketers
Alfred SlomanList of Auckland representative cricketers
Alfred SullivanList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Alfred Thomson (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Alfred White (Australian cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Alfred WilkesList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Alfred Wilkinson (cricketer)List of South Australian representative cricketers
Algernon FindlayList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Alistair ApplethwaiteList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Allan Anderson (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Allan CooperList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Allan JemmottList of Barbadian representative cricketers
Allan JinksList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Allan OutridgeList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Allan SilveraList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Allen CollierList of Northern Districts representative cricketers
Allen Edwards (cricketer)List of South Australian representative cricketers
Allen Kerr (cricketer)List of Auckland representative cricketers
Allen LimbList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Allen RobertsList of Auckland representative cricketers
Allen ThatcherList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Allman AgardList of Trinidadian representative cricketers
Alok Sharma (cricketer)List of Bengal cricketers
Aloke MazumdarList of Bengal cricketers
Alokendu LahiriList of Bengal cricketers
Alton BeckfordList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Ameer SaiyedList of Botswana Twenty20 International cricketers
Amherst HammondList of Bengal cricketers
Amir Ali (Indian cricketer)List of Hyderabad cricketers
Amit BanerjeeList of Bengal cricketers
Amit HoreList of Bengal cricketers
Amit KuilaList of Bengal cricketers
Amit SumanList of Delhi cricketers
Amitava ChakrabortyList of Bengal cricketers
Amitava DasList of Bengal cricketers
Amitava Roy (cricketer)List of Bengal cricketers
Anand BhatiaList of Delhi cricketers
Anand SwaroopList of Delhi cricketers
Andre DwyerList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Andrew CadleList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Andrew CysterList of Boland representative cricketers
Andrew DewarList of Border representative cricketers
Andrew EimeList of South Australian representative cricketers
Andrew HammelmannList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Andrew Jones (Australian cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Andrew MeekList of Western Australia first-class cricketers
Andrew MoreyList of Wellington representative cricketers
Andrew SainsburyList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Andrew WildsmithList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Angus LearmondList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Angus MarshallList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Anil Bhardwaj (cricketer)List of Delhi cricketers
Anil BhattacharjeeList of Bengal cricketers
Anil Das GuptaList of Bengal cricketers
Anil DuttList of Bengal cricketers
Anil Jain (cricketer)List of Delhi cricketers
Anil MathurList of Delhi cricketers
Anilkumar KhannaList of Delhi cricketers
Anirban ChatterjeeList of Bengal cricketers
Aniruddha RoyList of Bengal cricketers
Ankur JulkaList of Delhi cricketers
Ankur VasishtaList of Hong Kong ODI cricketers
Anthony AmalfiList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Anthony Andrews (cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Anthony AtkinsList of Barbadian representative cricketers
Anthony BendelList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Anthony Brown (cricketer)List of Queensland first-class cricketers
Anthony Campbell (cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Anthony ChubbList of Border representative cricketers
Anthony Clark (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Anthony KershlerList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Anthony Lyons (cricketer)List of Border representative cricketers
Anthony Small (cricketer)List of Central Districts representative cricketers
Anthony SpillaneList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Anthony Walters (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Anthony de KockList of Border representative cricketers
Antonio WhybrewList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Antony EdwardsList of Delhi cricketers
Anup DasList of Bengal cricketers
Anwell NewmanList of Boland representative cricketers
Archibald Bell (cricketer)List of Guyanese representative cricketers
Archibald DeanList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Archibald HardieList of Western Australia first-class cricketers
Archibald RiggList of Wellington representative cricketers
Arijit BasuList of Bengal cricketers
Arindam SarkarList of Bengal cricketers
Arnell HortonList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Arrie SchoemanList of Border representative cricketers
Arshad NawazList of Pakistan Automobiles Corporation cricketers
Arthur AldersleyList of Wellington representative cricketers
Arthur BauerList of Border representative cricketers
Arthur BonittoList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Arthur BraithwaiteList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Arthur CantList of Canterbury representative cricketers
Arthur CarracherList of South Australian representative cricketers
Arthur CrowderList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Arthur DareList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Arthur Davis (Australian cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Arthur Dean (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Arthur Duff (cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Arthur Duncan (New Zealand cricketer)List of Wellington representative cricketers
Arthur Evans (cricketer)List of South Australian representative cricketers
Arthur Fagan (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Arthur Fisher (Australian cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Arthur FurnessList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Arthur George (cricketer)List of Wellington representative cricketers
Arthur GregoryList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Arthur HawthorneList of Wellington representative cricketers
Arthur Hayes (cricketer)List of Border representative cricketers
Arthur Howard (New Zealand cricketer)List of Wellington representative cricketers
Arthur Jackson (cricketer)List of Western Australia first-class cricketers
Arthur KennyList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Arthur Lewis (Australian cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Arthur MaingotList of Trinidadian representative cricketers
Arthur McBeathList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Arthur McKenzie (cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Arthur MuhlList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Arthur MunnList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Arthur MurrellList of Border representative cricketers
Arthur Nichols (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Arthur PattisonList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Arthur PellewList of South Australian representative cricketers
Arthur ShinglerList of Border representative cricketers
Arthur SimmonsList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Arthur SprengerList of Border representative cricketers
Arthur TariltonList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Arthur Thomas (Australian cricketer)List of South Australian representative cricketers
Arthur ThomlinsonList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Arthur TrebilcockList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Arthur TriffittList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Arthur WasherList of Canterbury representative cricketers
Arthur WattList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Arthur Wells (Australian cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Arthur Williams (cricketer)List of Auckland representative cricketers
Artie CombesList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Arun KhuranaList of Delhi cricketers
Arup BhattacharyaList of Bengal cricketers
Ashish MalhotraList of Delhi cricketers
Ashley GilbertList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Ashley HammondList of South Australian representative cricketers
Ashley Hart (cricketer)List of Canterbury representative cricketers
Ashley Robertson (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Ashok PunaList of Northern Districts representative cricketers
Ashwini KapoorList of Delhi cricketers
Aston PoweList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Athol HagemannList of Border representative cricketers
Athol ShephardList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Atul MohindraList of Delhi cricketers
Aubrey BishopList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Aubrey JohnstonList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Aubrey RitchieList of Auckland representative cricketers
Augustus Hewitt-FoxList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Augustus HothamList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Augustus PageList of Canterbury representative cricketers
Austin DummettList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Avijit PaulList of Bengal cricketers
Avik ChowdhuryList of Bengal cricketers
Avishek MitraList of Rajshahi Division cricketers
Ayaz JilaniList of Pakistan Automobiles Corporation cricketers
Azhar SultanList of Pakistan National Shipping Corporation cricketers
Azmath AliList of Hyderabad cricketers
Babubhai Patel (cricketer)List of Hyderabad cricketers
Badaruddin MalikList of Delhi cricketers
Baden SharmanList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Balaji Rao (Indian cricketer)List of Delhi cricketers
Baldev DuaList of Delhi cricketers
Barney McCoyList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Barney RussellList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Barry BatesList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Barry BeardList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Barry CausbyList of South Australian representative cricketers
Barry CurtinList of South Australian representative cricketers
Barry RhodesList of Wellington representative cricketers
Barry Stevens (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Bartholomew GrantList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Basil BradfieldList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Basil TotmanList of Auckland representative cricketers
Bede McCauleyList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Ben Higgins (cricketer)List of South Australian representative cricketers
Benjamin Hart (cricketer)List of Otago representative cricketers
Benjamin SalmonList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Benjamin Wilson (New Zealand cricketer)List of Wellington representative cricketers
Bernard ColreavyList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Bernard CookList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Bernie ThomasList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Berry WebbList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Bert ShortlandList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Bert Wright (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Bertie GroundsList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Bertie VerleyList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Bertie WatsonList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Beverley EsterhuizenList of Border representative cricketers
Bevon BrownList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Bharat AwasthyList of Delhi cricketers
Bharat KhannaList of Hyderabad cricketers
Bharat VeerList of Delhi cricketers
Bhaskar GuptaList of Bengal cricketers
Bhaskar MazumbarList of Bengal cricketers
Bill BeathList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Bill Burton (cricketer)List of Wellington representative cricketers
Bill Donaldson (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Bill TallonList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Bimal Mitra (cricketer)List of Bengal cricketers
Bishawnath HalderList of Khulna Division cricketers
Bob MasefieldList of Canterbury representative cricketers
Bobby Madden (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Bobby ZahiruddinList of Hyderabad cricketers
Brad DoodyList of Canterbury representative cricketers
Brad InwoodList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Brad IpsonList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Brad OldroydList of Western Australia first-class cricketers
Brad StaceyList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Brad WigneyList of South Australian representative cricketers
Bradley NielsenList of Auckland representative cricketers
Brendan CreeveyList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Brendan RicciList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Brendan WardList of Northern Districts representative cricketers
Brendon OxenhamList of Auckland representative cricketers
Brent LoddingList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Brent RobeyList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Brett HoodList of Northern Districts representative cricketers
Brett van DeinsenList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Brian Buchanan (cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Brian Carney (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Brian CartledgeList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Brian ClaytonList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Brian DoldList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Brian Ford (cricketer)List of Canterbury representative cricketers
Brian FouldsList of Northern Districts representative cricketers
Brian Gill (cricketer)List of Northern Districts representative cricketers
Brian GraceList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Brian HarbridgeList of Canterbury representative cricketers
Brian Hopkins (cricketer)List of Wellington representative cricketers
Brian IllmanList of South Australian representative cricketers
Brian MallinsonList of Border representative cricketers
Brian Murphy (Jamaican cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Brian NdzundzuList of Border representative cricketers
Brian PatoirList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Brian Patterson (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Brian Porter (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Brian SheenList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Brian SorensonList of Auckland representative cricketers
Brian SpraggList of Northern Districts representative cricketers
Brian Warner (cricketer)List of Auckland representative cricketers
Broderick WarnerList of Trinidadian representative cricketers
Bruce Baldwin (cricketer)List of Central Districts representative cricketers
Bruce FriderichsList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Bruce Gordon (cricketer)List of Border representative cricketers
Bruce HodgettsList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Bruce JohnList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Bruce LivingstonList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Bruce LongList of Border representative cricketers
Bruce MoirList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Bruce SuchList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Bruce Taylor (Australian cricketer)List of Queensland first-class cricketers
Bruce VawserList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Bruce WardlawList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Bryan Doyle (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Bryan Higgins (cricketer)List of Northern Districts representative cricketers
Bryan McGanList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Bryce CooperList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Bryce PostlesList of Auckland representative cricketers
Buddhadeb MitraList of Bengal cricketers
Buxton PetersList of Trinidadian representative cricketers
Byron Drury (cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Byron HylandList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Caleb GaylardList of Central Districts representative cricketers
Calvin MooreList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Capel BainesList of Border representative cricketers
Carey CawoodList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Carey SmithList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Carl André (cricketer)List of Border representative cricketers
Carl BoyList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Carl GouveiaList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Carl MellorsList of Boland representative cricketers
Carlton GordonList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Carlton HayList of Auckland representative cricketers
Carlton ReeceList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Carvick ThompsonList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Castell FolkesList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Cecil BryceList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Cecil De CordovaList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Cecil Gray (cricketer)List of South Australian representative cricketers
Cecil HanifyList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Cecil McCallumList of Border representative cricketers
Cecil McKewList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Cecil OakesList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Cecil PerryList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Cecil ShearmanList of Border representative cricketers
Cecil Thomas (cricketer)List of Guyanese representative cricketers
Cecil WarnerList of Border representative cricketers
Cecil Wood (Australian cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Celso de FreitasList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Chandranath ChatterjeeList of Bengal cricketers
Charanjit Singh (cricketer)List of Bengal cricketers
Charles AlleeList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Charles Allison (cricketer)List of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Charles AlsopList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Charles Barker (cricketer)List of Canterbury representative cricketers
Charles BassonList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Charles BladesList of Barbadian representative cricketers
Charles BrittonList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Charles Chandler (cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Charles DelbridgeList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Charles DelgadoList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Charles Dick (cricketer)List of Border representative cricketers
Charles Drew (cricketer)List of South Australian representative cricketers
Charles FearonList of Canterbury representative cricketers
Charles FootList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Charles Gardner (Australian cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Charles GingellList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Charles Gregory (cricketer, born 1847)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Charles Griffith (Australian cricketer)List of Queensland first-class cricketers
Charles GuineyList of Canterbury representative cricketers
Charles Hammond (Australian cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Charles HendrieList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Charles HendrikseList of Boland representative cricketers
Charles HurditchList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Charles InderList of Bengal cricketers
Charles KellickList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Charles Lawes (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Charles LetcherList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Charles LowndsList of Border representative cricketers
Charles McAlisterList of Border representative cricketers
Charles McAllenList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Charles McCalganList of Border representative cricketers
Charles MengelList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Charles Miles (cricketer, born 1850)List of Wellington representative cricketers
Charles Morgan (Victoria cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Charles Munro (cricketer)List of Western Australia first-class cricketers
Charles NichollsList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Charles O'Brien (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Charles OsmondList of Auckland representative cricketers
Charles PatrickList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Charles Payne (Australian cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Charles RestieauxList of Auckland representative cricketers
Charles RixList of Canterbury representative cricketers
Charles Ross (Australian cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Charles Russen (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Charles SnymanList of Border representative cricketers
Charles Stafford (cricketer)List of Auckland representative cricketers
Charles Stone (New Zealand cricketer)List of Auckland representative cricketers
Charles SumptionList of Bengal cricketers
Charles ValenciaList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Charles VautinList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Charles Wakefield (cricketer)List of Border representative cricketers
Charles Warner (Trinidadian cricketer)List of Trinidadian representative cricketers
Charles WeirList of Border representative cricketers
Chase Young (cricketer)List of Border representative cricketers
Chatterpaul PersaudList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Chelluri JaikumarList of Hyderabad cricketers
Chris Beatty (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Chris BrentList of Border representative cricketers
Chris CruikshankList of Central Districts representative cricketers
Chris Davies (New Zealand cricketer)List of Otago representative cricketers
Chris Killen (cricketer)List of South Australian representative cricketers
Chris Lee (cricketer)List of Auckland representative cricketers
Chris SmartList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Christopher Davies (South African cricketer)List of Border representative cricketers
Christopher Dwyer (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Christopher Simpson (cricketer)List of Guyanese representative cricketers
Christopher Webb (cricketer)List of Central Districts representative cricketers
Clarence DriscollList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Clarence Lee (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Clarence McCoombeList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Clarence WormeList of Barbadian representative cricketers
Claude MandyList of Border representative cricketers
Clement Browne (cricketer)List of Barbadian representative cricketers
Clement BryceList of Border representative cricketers
Clement GaskinList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Clement Hill (cricketer, born 1904)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Clement McFarlaneList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Clement WellingtonList of Western Australia first-class cricketers
Cleveland BaileyList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Cleveland DavidsonList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Clifford KuhnList of Border representative cricketers
Clifton CawleyList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Clifton FolkesList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Clifton HurburghList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Clifton JefferyList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Clifton SatherleyList of Northern Districts representative cricketers
Clinton ReedList of Barbadian representative cricketers
Clive Campbell (cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Clive PageList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Clive White (cricketer)List of Border representative cricketers
Clyde Lucas (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Col CostorphinList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Colin ArnoldList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Colin Bloomfield (cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Colin Fletcher (cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Colin Fraser-GrantList of Border representative cricketers
Colin KretzmannList of Border representative cricketers
Colin MaritzList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Colin McCallum (cricketer)List of Border representative cricketers
Colin Richardson (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Colin StibeList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Colin ThwaitesList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Collin KelbrickList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
Conrad LotzList of Boland representative cricketers
Courtenay DaleyList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Courtney O'ConnorList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Coventry TaintonList of Border representative cricketers
Craig AbrahamsList of Boland representative cricketers
Craig BallantyneList of Border representative cricketers
Craig Bartlett (cricketer)List of Central Districts representative cricketers
Craig Brown (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Craig GlassockList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Craig Howard (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Craig Ross (Canterbury cricketer)List of Canterbury representative cricketers
Craig Ross (Northern Districts cricketer)List of Northern Districts representative cricketers
Cyprian BloomfieldList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Cyril SolomonList of New South Wales representative cricketers
D'Arcy GaltList of Trinidadian representative cricketers
Dale EllcockList of Barbadian representative cricketers
Dale O'HalloranList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Dale Turner (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Daljit Singh (cricketer, born 1935)List of Delhi cricketers
Daljit Singh (cricketer, born 1937)List of Bengal cricketers
Dan HorsleyList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Danico PhilmonList of Boland representative cricketers
Daniel Archer (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Daniel ColebornList of Queensland first-class cricketers
Daniel Cullen (New South Wales cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
Daniel Erasmus (cricketer)List of Mashonaland first-class cricketers
Daniel GeeList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Daniel McLeodList of Victoria first-class cricketers
Daniel Noonan (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Daniel StephenList of Border representative cricketers
Darrell JackmanList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Darren ChyerList of South Australian representative cricketers
Darren DempseyList of South Australian representative cricketers
Darren TuckerList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Darren Walker (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Dattatreya MukherjeeList of Bengal cricketers
Dave ChardonList of New South Wales representative cricketers
Davendra SharmaList of Delhi cricketers
David AireyList of Wellington representative cricketers
David Boyle (cricketer)List of Canterbury representative cricketers
David Clarke (Australian cricketer)List of South Australian representative cricketers
David Cooper (Indian cricketer)List of Bengal cricketers
David Cowper (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
David Daly (cricketer)List of Eastern Province representative cricketers
David Dempsey (cricketer)List of Canterbury representative cricketers
David Ellis (Australian cricketer)List of Queensland first-class cricketers
David Emerson (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
David EmslieList of Eastern Province representative cricketers
David Harris (Victoria cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
David Hosking (cricketer)List of Wellington representative cricketers
David Johnston (New South Wales cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
David Kerr (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
David KivellList of Central Districts representative cricketers
David Lumsden (cricketer)List of Eastern Province representative cricketers
David MailerList of Victoria first-class cricketers
David MartinsList of Guyanese representative cricketers
David McGuire (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
David MullettList of Tasmanian representative cricketers
David Noonan (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
David Ogilvy (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
David Pryor (cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
David Shepard (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
David StrudwickList of South Australian representative cricketers
David SultanList of Trinidadian representative cricketers
David Sutherland (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
David TarrantList of Central Districts representative cricketers
David Taylor (Australian cricketer)List of New South Wales representative cricketers
David Weston (cricketer)List of Auckland representative cricketers
Dawson RitchieList of Auckland representative cricketers
Dean BartlettList of Auckland representative cricketers
Dean Morgan (cricketer)List of Jamaican representative cricketers
Dean Potter (cricketer)List of Auckland representative cricketers
Debasis ChakrabortyList of Bengal cricketers
Debendra RoyList of Bengal cricketers
Debu MajumdarList of Bengal cricketers
Delroy MorganList of Jamaican representative cricketers
Demitri HayidakisList of Border representative cricketers
Denis Cotter (cricketer)List of Victoria first-class cricketers
Denis RampersadList of Trinidadian representative cricketers
Dennis Blair (cricketer)List of Tasmanian representative cricketers
Dennis HewittList of Guyanese representative cricketers
Dennis HollardList of Border representative cricketers

|}

BilledMammal (talk) 06:17, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Convenience break (mass draftification of cricket articles)
[mali mi di yibu sheena n-niŋ]
  • @BilledMammal: - why only A-D? How about E-Z? starship.paint (exalt) 06:47, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Doing from A-Z would have involved nominating ~5000 articles. We decided that was too large a step up from the first RfC and so decided to limit this nomination to the first 1200. BilledMammal (talk) 07:11, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    I see. Thank you. starship.paint (exalt) 07:30, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Who is "we"? Why do the discussions among this unspecified "we" not appear in the Background section of this RfC? It would seem like important background. Gnomingstuff (talk) 16:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Since @BilledMammal did not feel it necessary to answer this question, I did it myself. The discussion happened on this subpage of his user page, and the "we" in question appears to be Paradise Chronicle, Avilich, Levivich, Dlthewave, S Marshall, and FOARP. It does not seem to be a widely publicized discussion. I wouldn't call it "secret," because it is a public page; but I will note that when MatthewAnderson707 found it via Google, BilledMammal's reaction was I'm a little confused how you found this discussion, and when BeanieFan11 commented, the reaction was the same (I found it by going through BilledMammal's contributions. I suppose I should apologize for drawing public attention to this public page.)
    I would agree with the comment by @Spike 'em: hiding this away in user space and demanding to know how people found it does not come across as collaborative to me. Its omission from the "Background" section is misleading. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:23, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Since @BilledMammal did not feel it necessary to answer this question I did not notice this question; it had only been up for two hours and this discussion has already become extensive. It would have been helpful if you had pinged me on the first message you left, rather than just the second.
    Regarding the rest of your comment, there have already been a couple of discussions on that opened by an LTA; see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1129#Failure to assume good faith and Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 182#NSPORTS proposal and outcome should be null and void. BilledMammal (talk) 18:35, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Thank you for the links to the discussions. (I had assumed you had seen it since you had responded to other comments in the intervening time; apologies for the assumption.) These should also have been included in the Background section; "the proposal was successful and this proposal continues this process" elides a lot of context. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:52, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    I liken the idea of "mass draftification" of articles to be similar to what Richard Beeching did with British Railways in the 1960s. Removing vast pieces of the system without much care creates issues that still impact the United Kingdom today. This is very much the Wikipedia equivalent to the "Beeching Axe" and appears to be more of a reckless mass purge than something that would benefit the website. "The Great Purge", if you will. This action could easily be taken or misunderstood by the general public as "Wikipedia is purging articles as part of an agenda" or something of the like, coming back to impact the entire website in a negative light. I'd like to please appeal to the masses that this is a bad idea and will only create negative repercussions. I would also like to add that this could be a "back door" to bypass the AFD process and save time. I left a similar comment expressing the red flags mass draftification put forward in the discussion I was apparently not supposed to see, according to Gnomingstuff. — MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 18:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Gnomingstuff, BilledMammal is being hounded. His edits are followed and targeted by people who want to disrupt what he's doing. He started a discussion in his own userspace about which RfC to pursue next, and his stalkers materialised very promptly indeed. Note that there is no reason at all why that discussion had to be public. It was a strategy discussion, not one that would lead directly to a change. But prominent pointers to it were swiftly posted in the places where sports inclusionists gather, and they soon arrived en masse. I agree with you that there's un-Wikipedian behaviour in evidence here. I don't agree with you about who's perpetrating it.—S Marshall T/C 18:57, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    I sincerely hope this isn't an accusation that I'm hounding or "stalking" BilledMammal, considering this was a reply to my own comment and not Gnomingstuff. If this was an accusation, then allow me to provide a defense in response. I came across the discussion in question by chance and have never interacted with or paid much attention to said user before or since. The only reason I even participated in this discussion is because I was notified after being mentioned. I have a right to partake in a discussion involving myself in any shape or form. If anything, I felt I should share my misgivings about the situation since I was brought into the conversation. I would like further to clarify the link to the discussion in question was provided most kindly by Gnomingstuff, allowing me to refresh my mind on this topic. I would like to conclude with if this happens to be an accusation directed at myself among others, I do not appreciate defamation or being likened to slanderous behavior or implied of causing such, and would ask you take your personal attacks elsewhere. — MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 19:06, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    You think its the "inclusionists" who are hounding others and are being un-wikipedian? I would say the opposite; there's at least one "deletionist" who's hounded the heck out of me for the past several months. BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:09, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    @S Marshall: I can confirm this has happened, after reviewing talk page archives for BeanieFan11, linked for everyone's convenience. I apologize in advance if this assessment is wrong, but at a glance, it appears BilledMammal has also participated in hounding, as there are several messages on BeanieFan11's archives, accusing the user of negative activity. Your accusations and slander are not only a potential violation of WP:CIVIL, but are a case of the teapot calling the kettle black. Also, accusations of hounding doesn't change the fact key details pertaining to the goals and purpose of this RfC were withheld from the RfC discussion page in a private talk page that would normally be unseen by users participating in this discussion. — MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 00:37, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    FWIW, MatthewAnderson707, BilledMammal wasn't the user I had in mind, though he's done a bit of that as well. BeanieFan11 (talk) 00:49, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Calling people "stalkers" is, unquestionably, a personal attack. (As someone with several friends who have experienced actual, real-world stalking, I find it rather offensive.) For that matter, I don't especially care about sports (besides very casually watching the NBA playoffs), let alone enough to be a "sports inclusionist" or to "gather" wherever those people gather. One of these days, people will start enforcing WP:CIVIL, which is official, longstanding policy.
    As far as "disrupt[ing] what he's doing," it is more disruptive to create a RfC with an incomplete version of the context, discussion, and planning leading up to that RfC than to provide links to it so that people can make informed arguments. It is more disruptive to hold an un-publicized discussion among a handful of editors with the stated intent of deleting thousands of articles and bypassing established deletion processes, while questioning anyone who happens to find it. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:33, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    I believe S Marshall is only saying that hounding has occured, which is obviously true, not that any of the editors here where involved. It's more likely some LTA trying to cause arguments. Also this wasn't planned in secret, although user space isn't necessary high visibility it is still publicly viewable. If it had been planned offwiki then it could be an issue, but that's not the case here. It was also brought to light both at ANI and VPP that the discussion was ongoing in BMs userspace. I do feel though that having somekind of pre-discussion at VPI could have alleviated some of these concerns. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:14, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    The question is, why were key details only talked about in a private user talk page, rather than on the RfC for better transparency? It's still withholding key details from the public to easily see or access without stumbling across it by accident or actively searching through Billed's activity to find. If an RfC is being made, people deserve to know all details involved with it and not have those details kept to private discussions, otherwise it gives the impression there is something to hide from people voting on the decision. — MatthewAnderson707 (talk|sandbox) 00:07, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    There's often discussions done between editors before RfCs, and anything not in the RfC isn't considered by the closer. It's normal. SportingFlyer T·C 08:55, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • @BilledMammal: - Help me out here - there are ones in the top list (Arthur Nott for example - just happens to be the first one I clicked on!) who should almost certainly be in this list aren't there? Is this list the ones where there was a link in the article to "List of..."? Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:11, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Is this list the ones where there was a link in the article to "List of..."? Yes. Happy to work on trying to add others to the list if you have any suggestions; where do you think Arthur Nott should redirect to? BilledMammal (talk) 08:19, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    List of Gloucestershire County Cricket Club players I should think. I'll check the other Gloucs ones at some point as it might well be that they were all done in one set and so the link wasn't included. Thanks btw - it makes sense to have filtered them on that inclusion. It would possibly be useful to include a column in the top table that indicates they're in the bottom table? Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:42, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Luguts created the Gloucs ones in 2014. It seems the List of... links started to be added in 2015, so this might be an easier thing to deal with than I thought. What's going to be easiest - add the List of link to those articles are re-run the redirect query? Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:52, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    I think I'll be able to fix that looking at the categories; it shouldn't be necessary to add the links unless you want to do so for unrelated reasons. I'll look into it when I finish looking into the Brett Matthews problem.
    Regarding adding a column to the top table, I want to keep this possible WP:BOLD action separate from the formal proposal; however, if you want a list of articles that do not currently have a redirect target (I assume that is the reason you wanted that column) I can create that for you elsewhere? BilledMammal (talk) 08:57, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Ta - it might make life slightly easier. You could add it at User:Blue Square Thing/sandbox7 if that's suitable. Blue Square Thing (talk) 09:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Done. Will work on using categories to expand the list of proposed redirects when my mind is fresher. BilledMammal (talk) 13:05, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • This is a much more mixed list than the last one. In particular, the mixture of much older athletes (eg. Arthur Nott) together with BLPs of currently active players (eg. Chintan Gaja) creates different considerations. Unlike with Olympic athletes, it's also less obvious to me where their context (if encyclopaedic) might be contained. (The Olympics info was already present elsewhere happily, how orphaned or not are these cricket articles?) CMD (talk) 09:58, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Most are contained within lists. Some, like Chintan Gaja, aren't because some of the lists are incomplete - although I have added him now. I'm going to try to craft a query that will allow me to identify those that should be in a given list but aren't. BilledMammal (talk) 12:28, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • BilledMammal Like the last RFC, I notice that there is mention of a Quarry query using those 5 metrics, but no accompanying query with it. Can you first show the query itself as well? In particular I am curious how you plan to implement #4 (only CricketArchive or ESPNcricinfo refs) and #5 (no other editors) without adding some assumptions.
    Likewise, you should have added #6 (Alphabetically first 1200 among all articles that follow 1-5), because it wasn't clear to me without reading discussions that you restricted this to A-D (As opposed to taking everything that matched 1-5). In other words, I want to confirm again that the list provided above has no assumptions other than the 5 points mentioned above
    Soni (talk) 12:10, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Quarry:query/73984
    Regarding your #6, I did say these 1,200 articles are a subset of the articles that meet the following criteria, emphasis mine, but I could have made it clearer. BilledMammal (talk) 12:28, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    @BilledMammal That still does not clarify my main question. Did you apply any other metric other than #1-#5 (and #6, alphabetcal) when curating this list? I'm trying to figure out how much additional filters were applied.
    For example, did someone do a run-through of the list manually to quick-check things and remove any "this is obviously a mistake"? I'm trying to tell if there was any manual (or automatic) filtering from the quarry query Soni (talk) 06:22, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Yes, while not every article in the list was reviewed we did review a substantial portion; when errors were discovered (articles that should be excluded per the criteria) we would modify the query to ensure that those errors, and any like them, were excluded. BilledMammal (talk) 07:22, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I estimate that I've probably looked at 300 or so in some detail - clicking through to the CricInfo reference on each - and maybe another 200 or so briefly. Obviously people have looked at others as well. The scale of the list and the sheer amount of work required the check is really problematic and something that I'm still not entirely comfortable with (although, as indicated above) I'm not unhappy to compromise). I think there are better ways to approach future lists - the list with team categories that BilledMammal provided is a really helpful way of picking out people that are more likely to show up as interesting. In some ways, providing a list for checking of, say, English cricketers (there are 298 that Lugnuts created that fall into the sort of category of articles BM is suggesting) would be much more manageable - it would let us pick out people like David Partridge (cricketer) quickly (he played in over 100 top-level games in England - there will be a tonne of coverage on him, although he falls into the time span where it'll be difficult to find online sources (he's worth removing from the list actually - I already have three or four sources)). I appreciate that there's a demand to get through the 5-6000 articles that have been identified, but smaller, more targeted lists might be a better longer-term approach perhaps Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:25, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • @BilledMammal: Can we make a "Draftified Lugnuts articles" category to keep track of all of the Cricket and Olympic draftifications? It would be quite useful. QuicoleJR (talk) 15:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    See Category:All drafts subject to special procedures BilledMammal (talk) 16:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    See what? QuicoleJR (talk) 16:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    NVM, I see it now. QuicoleJR (talk) 16:52, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    Yeah, I messed up the link; thank you BeanieFan11 for fixing it. BilledMammal (talk) 16:54, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • I think there are around 573 articles in the list for redirection, yes? On a rough count. BilledMammal provided me with a list of 625 articles (at User:Blue Square Thing/sandbox7). Working through that and looking for other redirects I **think** I have another 306 or so which have lists to redirect to. That leaves 319 to draft - lists at that sandbox. There are a number of shortcuts that we could adopt in this sort of situation in future - I've noted those at that sandbox. I'll comment above regarding this as well as there are a few issues. Blue Square Thing (talk) 20:53, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Random question: are we going to treat suspected WP:BLPs differently? SportingFlyer T·C 21:41, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    I don't think I've come across a BLP of this kind where there's anything in the articles that isn't 100% verifiable fwiw Blue Square Thing (talk) 06:16, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • I understand the thought process of discussing these mass created articles in chunks rather than all at once, but it raises another question: are we going to have to go through this agonizing debate every single time? I don't see the level of consensus significantly changing between WP:LUGSTUBS, this discussion, and the next one, but I do see it taking up many cumulative hours every single time a new one of these is opened, and more bad blood forming each time. And let's say that becuase of who happens to show up for a given discussion, the consensus does change. Say the consensus for E-H tilts oppose while the consensus for A-D and I-L tilts support. Does this mean we have an island of thousands of cricketers whose names start with E, F, G, and H that are immune to mass draftification and have to be sorted manually simply because of a procedural quirk? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:21, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
    The problem is that there's so many to check, especially when it comes to identifying redirect targets. The 625 that I checked through yesterday to identify redirects (309 ahve redirect targets) cost me a few hours of time. I think there are some future shortcuts we might take to be clever, but it's not straightforward Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:29, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I'm definitely going to be able to create the redirects targets in an automated way even when the article doesn't currently include a link to the list using categories. I also expect to be able to expand lists that are currently missing players based on the categories, but I will want to take that through a WP:BRFA first.
    In general I will want to go through larger groups in the future - my plan if there is a consensus for this is to do the rest of the articles that meet this criteria in a single group - but I also want to do whatever I can with quarry and possibly a bot to make it easier for you. BilledMammal (talk) 08:33, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I'm not sure you'll get consensus for that many at once. I'm not sure that I could be persuaded that it's a good thing. There are better ways of dealing with these I think. We can get it done in a decent timeframe still, but there are significant issues that a number of editors have raised about checking articles; I don't think this passing gives consensus for presenting a much longer list you know. Trying to check 1,200 has been hard work; over 4,000 in one hit is a different ball game. Blue Square Thing (talk) 13:14, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    My thinking is that while these RfC's are better than 1200 AfD's in terms of consuming the communities time they still do consume considerable amounts of time, and the community will become worn with them if done too often or frequently. At a rate of one every four months, and ~1200 in each, it will take us ten years to go through Lugnut's mass creations alone, assuming that half of them need to be brought through a process like this or similar.
    That doesn't mean we can't adjust the process. Perhaps if the list was provided to the relevant WikiProject - in this case WikiProject Cricket - three months in advance? BilledMammal (talk) 13:20, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Be much easier to deal with the lists broken down by nationality. There are about 1,200 Australians in all, for example. We know what we're doing with them - there are redirects for virtually all of them, but we might also be able to filter out some articles that there's clearly a good reason for setting to one side. The problem with the way they're broken down right now is that you're jumping around geographically so much, which has a major impact when you're considering redirects and sources and so on.
    If we broke those Australian's down further it would be even easier - people can cope with a list of 234 Tasmanians or 320 Victorians. That's manageable. Someone can sensibly sit down and push through most of the list in a day or so, make some decisions and then recommend some solutions. I think that's a way forward. Well, for me it is, but there's probably people who have created cricket articles who are sticking pins in effigies of me right now. Blue Square Thing (talk) 13:30, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    Would it be suitable if I provide the lists with groupings like that to WikiProject Cricket, but when it comes time for the RfC to group them together? I would prefer not to keep them split in that manner both because it limits the size of the group and because it will result in accusations about racism and systematic bias regardless of which nationality the group is "targeted" at. BilledMammal (talk) 13:36, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I was worried about that element as well - but the reality is that we have much better sourcing for some nations than others. And people have more of an interest in some teams than others - someone's already looked over the Surrey ones to check that there's nothing obvious that really shouldn't be there, for example. It's also going to be worth asking at various other wikiprojects - there are IPL and PSL projects and they might fancy looking at Indian and Pakistani articles. There are certainly enough people editing cricket articles from the south Asian area that if they saw a list might do something about it perhaps.
    I think the list at my Sandbox6 probably already does what we need to a greater or lesser extent. I'v just worked up a formula in Excel to check how many cats a players is in - if it's not 2 then there are decisions to be made. There are probably some other technical things that we could do to make things a little simpler to handle, but it'll take a little while to get that done. It would certainly be easier to categorise in various ways, just so as someone can say "hey, I got the Otago list; can someone else do Canterbury" Blue Square Thing (talk) 13:54, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
    I'm happy to send the subsets anywhere you like; it would make sense to let editors from the area take a look and see what they can do.
    I'v just worked up a formula in Excel to check how many cats a players is in - if it's not 2 then there are decisions to be made. It's probably easier for me to get that done in Quarry; just let me know the sorts of categories you want included in the count. In general, if there is some questions you have about the full dataset it might be easier to ask me; even if you're not convinced that it can be automated I might be able to manage something, particularly since I've recently started looking at bots - I'm hoping I can use them to reduce both the false negative and the false positive rate from our article selection criteria (for example, a bot would allow us to look at the number of words of prose, rather than estimating whether an article is substantial based on the number of bytes.)
    If it needs a bot rather than a quarry query it might take a little more time for me to get you the answer, but I suspect it will still take far less time than doing it manually. BilledMammal (talk) 15:09, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment - I supported the previous draftification, but I'm hesitant to support this process in general. In particular, the selected query criteria seem a little arbitrary, and I would love to see better justification for the selected criteria. This process makes me think of bot approvals discussions for things like vandalism removal or error fixing: a total set of articles is identified, but a small random sample is retained for initial, manual evaluation. Basically, what is the precision of your query, i.e. what percentage of these articles should we expect to be truly non-notable vs what percentage would be found to be notable (and improved) if submitted to WP:AFD? I would suggest that a test would be relatively cheap: submit a random 50 of these articles to AFD and see what happens. Has there been a thought about running a test like this, rather than Village Pump discussions about 1000 articles at a time with slightly varying criteria? Suriname0 (talk) 04:57, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
    Comment -@Suriname0 - The plan at one point seemed to be to mass draft even more than 1,000 articles at a time. KatoKungLee (talk) 17:33, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    Multi-article AfDs have generally ended as train wrecks, and sending 50 articles singularly to AfD has resulted in threads at ANI as the AfD process isn't up to the task of some many discussions happening at the same time. Hopefully a better solution than these RFC's can be found, but other methods have already been attempted. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:32, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    ActivelyDisinterested - If the people who want these articles gone don't want to actually see if these people are notable and if the same people also don't feel like even making the case for them to be deleted in AfD, are the articles really problems? The more this goes on, the more it becomes clear to me that the people mass creating these articles without proper research and the people calling for these articles to be deleted without proper research, really seem to be two sides of the same coin. The articles just HAVE to be made/deleted without proper research as soon as possible despite there being WP:NORUSH.KatoKungLee (talk) 13:27, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    My comment was in regard to how the AfD processed isn't really setup to handle large volumes, if you have any ideas about that I'm more than willing to listen. I have no interest in redoing the argument that has been going on, as it's been going round in circles for months. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 14:10, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    To be clear, I was suggesting 50 independent AfD submissions, with the intent of estimating the precision of the query used to identify this set of articles. If the concern is that this is a backdoor to deletion, it would be nice to know approximately how many notable articles would be incorrectly "deleted" in this way. Suriname0 (talk) 02:14, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    And as I said if you send 50 articles to AfD today, you find yourself at ANI tomorrow. This isn't a new issue, it has gone round and round these ideas. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 11:14, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment. I think the "If this proposal is successful" caveats 1-5 make this proposal too complex. I think it'd have a better chance of passing and of being implemented smoothly without those caveats. For example, trying to make G13 not apply to these for 5 years is going to mess up reports and require special tracking of when the 5 year timer is up. The special tracking will require special reports, special templates, special categories, and modification of the text at WP:G13. Requiring that these pass GNG to be returned to mainspace would require some kind of detection and enforcement mechanism. Allowing userfication and adoption by WikiProjects is already allowed and probably doesn't need to be mentioned explicitly. I think the normal draftify rules would be best, and the only caveat should be that no one is allowed to return these to mainspace en masse. –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:24, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    Would you have any objection to anyone bringing them back en masse as merge and redirects? · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 17:15, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
    Sorry if I'm being obtuse, not enough coffee yet, but how logistically would bringing them back en masse as merge and redirects actually work? If this is just a stupid question from a non-techie editor, feel free to take it to my talk instead of here. Valereee (talk) 10:21, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
    Imagine a world in which a group of dedicated volunteers got together to build an encyclopedia that was both inclusive of all encyclopedic content, and laid out usefully so that little bits of it were not scattered around and hard to find. Maybe some of them have the skills to code a gadget to take some of the the scattered bits and put them in places that make the encyclopedia more user-friendly by adding them to articles where they are in context by category, and easily accessible by searches. While you are indulging these flights of whimsy, imagine that the editors had the good sense to do this in the first place... Then drink your coffee and come back to reality, and the herding of cats. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 06:13, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Just noting I'm sampling and investigating some of the Australian cricketers to see if there's coverage on Trove – a useful but often overlooked Australian newspaper archive. So far I have investigated and found sources for David Taylor (Australian cricketer), which I believe would now need to be removed from the list. – Teratix ₵ 02:36, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose Per many others' comments. In addition, I see such a step leading to prevention of steps such as taken by Teratix, and by myself with Alfred Grace, which is now quite a decent article. --Dweller (talk) Old fashioned is the new thing! 11:59, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Alternative proposal (mass-draftification of cricket articles)

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  1. Most of these substubs would be quite acceptable content if merged into an existing article which already meets general notability.
  2. The existing database references are adequate for mention in an already accepted topic. I.e. the information itself, while minimal, is encyclopedic, verifiable, neutral and non-trivial. Someone may even find it useful educational or interesting. It is within scope for Wikipedia.
  3. Most of the articles already give enough information to find a suitable article or list to merge them into.
  4. A category for all these articles can be divided into subcategories based on the category of article which they could be merged into without dispute. This would make it quicker to find merge targets
  5. A few new articles and lists might be needed for the outliers. This should not be a problem in most cases.
  6. Merging one of them into a list and leaving a redirect would be about the same amount of work as commenting meaningfully and usefully on AfD for that article, and would be constructive and almost always non-controversial. Far less a waste of time than this RfC, because all of the work and time expended would actually be fixing the problem and building the encyclopedia.
  7. Some of the substubs might be found unusable, AfD them.

Looks like a no-brainer, what have I missed? Cheers · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 13:22, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

  • We're a bit short of lists in some parts of the world. Yesterday morning I created List of Sikkim cricketers which is a quick one to do. There are others that will be harder to do and that *I* won't have time to anytime soon. The majority of the easy to access source information that would be most useful to use is behind a slightly annoying paywall as well. Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:20, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    Perhaps the WMF could be persuaded to put some of the donors' money into access to that paywalled stuff, though it might be a bit of a shock to the donors to see their money going towards expanding content. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 17:06, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
  • The BOLD redirecting of such articles seems a simple solution, as a simple revert brings it back if someone wants to improve it. It's something I was for in the last RFC, unfortunately it didn't get much support. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:26, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
    Yes, me too. For some reason hardly anyone sees it as obviously logical. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 17:06, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
    Merging the articles into one master list or a series of lists is a significantly better proposal and wouldn't require an RFC at all if the content and sources were largely preserved. Steven Walling • talk 01:59, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
    And we would end up where this whole farce should have started, with encyclopedic information preserved where it best fits. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 16:59, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
    So given that it's within policy, why don't we just do it? We can propose a list grouping scheme to WikiProject Cricket. Steven Walling • talk 00:21, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
    In the past such changes have been reverted so some caution is suggest, but you could always give it a go. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 15:11, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
Merge work is pretty tedious. I don't have an objection to merging, but what I've often seen after merge discussions end with consensus to merge is that no one actually wants to do that work. Valereee (talk) 18:15, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
Sorting the stubs into categories would be a good start, as a large part of the work would be finding a suitable destination article. For a job this big, maybe some skilled hacker could write us a script for the actual merge and redirect work, as it would be fairly repetetive. Perhaps some of those who are so keen to get rid of the stubs would put in a bit of constructive work, and perhaps some of those who are keen to not lose the content would help. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 05:55, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
Also, though tedious, it is actively constructive, which puts it ahead of tedious and unconstructive debate, and much less tedious than AfD first, then merging. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 06:21, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
Also far less pointy than AfD or mass draftifying. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 06:24, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
BlueSquareThing and I have been discussing ways to do this. If there is a consensus for this proposal we are likely to take a WP:BOLD action to merge and redirect many of these in line with If this proposal is successful #5. BilledMammal (talk) 10:36, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
Merging and redirecting to lists eliminates any objection centered on this violating deletion policy, per WP:ATD-M. Any particular article that editors want to expand with additional sources can be unmerged later, but in the meantime that route preserves the minimal current content and reader ability to access it. The main thing remaining is to get a mapping of which stubs would go to which lists, but the obvious framework seems to be country of origin and year they played. Steven Walling • talk 02:23, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
Regarding the years they played in, some of the difficulty is that these stubs don't include that information; for example, Dean Mazhawidza. Indeed, this is part of the issue with Lugnut's mass creations; if we really wanted these mass created we should have written a bot to do it; it would have taken considerably less work, would have permitted the inclusion of considerably more information, and would have prevented the inaccuracies - whether deliberate or accidental - that we see in many of Lugnut's creations.
When I have the initial draft of the plan for merging and redirecting I'll ping you to it, as I believe you'll have useful insights on what can be added or changed. BilledMammal (talk) 07:41, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Editors who have improved any of the articles on this list please add them to User:BilledMammal/Improved cricketers, so that I can ensure they are not draftified with the rest at the end of the discussion. While I should catch any that have been improved I may miss some, and adding them to that page will ensure I don't miss yours. Pinging James500, who I know has improved some. BilledMammal (talk) 10:35, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

I have anything I've worked on watchlisted, so I'll pick anything up that way. Tbh I've been working on lots of articles, only some of which might be on this list, so I think we'll catch any that way - I assume that a bold revert would be entirely appropriate in these circumstances! I'll try and get to some of the other things above when I have time, but I've missed quite a bit of this. Blue Square Thing (talk) 07:51, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
Just noting I've added the ones I've improved so far and will continue to do so. – Teratix ₵ 21:27, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Notifications (mass draftification of cricket articles)

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The following people/pages will be notified:

Please list any other groups of editors you notify here. BilledMammal (talk) 06:38, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Notes (mass draftification of cricket articles)

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    Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Hong Kong#Request for comment for Hong Kong or Hong Kong, China?

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    Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Hong Kong#Request for comment for Hong Kong or Hong Kong, China? for an RfC regarding how to phrase the place of birth for people born in Hong Kong after the Handover of Hong Kong on 1 July 1997. Cunard (talk) 05:33, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

    Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Hong Kong#Request for comment: British Hong Kong or Hong Kong? for an RfC regarding how to phrase the place of birth for people born in Hong Kong before the Handover of Hong Kong on 1 July 1997. The RfC also discusses a bot request to modify all affected articles to comply with the new guidance. Cunard (talk) 04:58, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

    Replace nyt with reuters

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    i disagree with https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Module%3AFind_sources%2Ftemplates%2FFind_sources&diff=prev&oldid=722553515 . i propose to replace nyt with https://www.reuters.com/ .

    reuters search link format is https://www.reuters.com/site-search/?query=Canton+Hong+Kong if keywords are "Canton Hong Kong". RZuo (talk) 20:35, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

    Because...? Why do you disagree with that change from 2018? Why are you making this proposal? — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 02:08, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
    1. there was no argument for why nyt was preferred over other news agencies to justify that edit.
    2. nyt is US-oriented. reuters is world-oriented.
    3. nyt has a paywall.
    just any of AP, reuters or AFP is better than nyt. RZuo (talk) 21:50, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
    Those sounds like "I don't like it", not an actual reason to change. Zaathras (talk) 22:18, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
    I dunno, I think the paywall issue is a reasonable point. Schazjmd (talk) 22:22, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
    Reuters also has a paywall that kicks in after a few complimentary articles.
    No reason we can't use both, though. We definitely should be suggesting both Reuters and AP. Masem (t) 22:47, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
    If we were going to any more links, they should ideally be to non-paywalled articles. Reuters paywalls after a few articles, and NYT does similar. Joseph2302 (talk) 16:44, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
    The Guardian begs for contributions, which apparently it sorely needs, but has been trying to stay solvent without a paywall (however non-subscribers will see a small, voluntary, "please contribute" box). It may not be quite so comprehensive as the AP, AFP or Reuters, and not everyone likes its political slant (any more than everyone likes those of The New York Times’ or The Wall Street Journal’s), but it's still (after 2 centuries) a sound source. —— Shakescene (talk) 20:50, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
    1. reuters has a registration wall.
    2. it can be easily bypassed by browsing incognito. hit the wall? close and open incognito again.
    RZuo (talk) 21:12, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

    Infobox RfC on the biography of Felix Mendelssohn

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    There's an ongoing discussion about adding an infobox to the biography of Felix Mendelssohn. Community feedback is welcome. Thanks! - Nemov (talk) 22:12, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

    Comment: is it really appropriate that this is going on at the same time as the exact same question at Richard Wagner. If the truth is that some people like infoboxes in composer articles, others don't, for consistency shouldn't these two RfC's be amalgamated into one, addressing the underlying question properly? Otherwise we run the risk of misleading new editors who will fail to appreciate that the landscape they see is shaped by a multitude of long-forgotten individual debates, and that for magic reasons it is acceptable to give Bach an infobox, but not Gibbons. Elemimele (talk) 20:27, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Elemimele, the section header might be misleading. This is notification to the community that there is an RfC at Talk:Felix Mendelssohn, not an RfC here. Schazjmd (talk) 20:31, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
    Yes, I understand, I wasn't sure where to point out that it's unhelpful to hold multiple small, near-identical RfC's when I felt this might be part of a larger dispute. Is there a better place to mention it? Elemimele (talk) 05:41, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    A recent attempt at creating a general guideline closed as no consensus; a lot of people felt that this should be decided on a case-by-case basis, which does necessitate a lot of near-identical RfCs. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 07:03, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    @Elemimele, my bad for not reading properly, sorry about that. Schazjmd (talk) 13:20, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    Many of these RfCs have editors pro/con that vote in a consistent block. To help break this deadlock it's helpful to get more community feedback. I spent a considerable amount of time attempting to create a modest guideline and many of the same editors opposed it. So unfortunately, this is the bureaucratic process necessary to find consensus. Nemov (talk) 13:45, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

    Invitation to participate in a research about Wikipedia's Main Page

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    Hello!

    First of all, I would like to introduce myself, I'm Laura Fernández, a postdoctoral researcher of the Women & Wikipedia project at the University of Barcelona, Spain (https://www.ub.edu/wikiwomen/).

    Our research group is currently working on the analysis of the Wikipedias in English, Spanish and Catalan's Main Page. In the case of Wikipedia in English, we are currently in a phase of interviews to learn more about the mechanisms that exist for the selection of the Main Page and we would like to interview Wikipedia volunteers (particularly those who are more familiar with the Main Page). We are sure some of you can guide us specifically on the subject, given your involvement in the community and your knowledge of the functioning of Wikipedia in English. We would like to delve deeper into the processes and mechanisms behind the programming of the main page from the point of view of communication theories.

    I hope you find it interesting and have availability to participate with us. In that case, We will of course adapt to your needs, availability and time (we could do a written interview, call or videocall). Our ultimate goal in any case is to contribute to the improvement of Wikipedia through data and scientific knowledge, so we think we can learn a lot from the people who work continuously and are committed to Wikipedia.

    If you prefer to continue this conversation by email, you can send an email to my university email address: laurafernandez[at]ub[dot]edu or get in touch with me through my Wikipedia user page. Do not hesitate to let us know if you have any doubts or questions about the research.

    I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much in advance and best regards, Laura. Lauferagui (talk) 06:26, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

    Add "Random article" button to Home Page

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    Sometimes I get bored and I like to go onto Wikipedia and find a random article, but it's hard to actually get a random article that I am interested in. 2601:600:877F:1530:29:D645:40AD:6935 (talk) 04:40, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

    If you are on a laptop, there is a random article link in the main menu on the the left (unless you've removed with some personal setting I guess). If you're on mobile view like , it's under the top-ish left hamburger. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:31, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    The keyboard shortcut (see Wikipedia:Keyboard shortcuts) of Alt-Shift-x (depending on browser and assuming you have a keyboard and not a mobile device) can also be useful for being able to more easily go through multiple random pages. Skynxnex (talk) 13:56, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    If you're struggling to luck into articles you find interesting from the standard functionality of Special:RandomPage, you might want to try out Special:RandomInCategory. Someone has also written a user script with even more functionality. If you register an account, you'd be able to install the user script, although I don't remember what it's called at the moment. Folly Mox (talk) 00:01, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

    Improve move page dialogue

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    There are three separate proposals here, based on feedback from my Village Pump (idea lab) to improve understanding/reduce mistakes when moving pages across different name spaces.

    1. Within the move page dialogue interface rename the displayed namespaces. The motivation is to make it more clear what each namespace does. A common mistake is to mix up Wikipedia and Mainspace, because publishing on Wikipedia is not same thing as publishing in Wikipedia namespace.

    • (article) -> (article / main space)
    • Talk -> (article Talk page)
    • Wikipedia -> Wikipedia (project)
    • Wikipedia Talk -> Wikipedia Talk (project)

    2. On mobile, when a user is moving a Draft to Article space, they need to scroll very high up, and are more likely to select wrong namespace then. So a solution would be to always move the highlighted option to the top OR move Draft / Draft talk options higher up, so that when someone is publishing a Draft they don't need to scroll up 18 different options before finding (Article) and Talk namespaces.

    3. In the move dialogue, make a visual separation (by regrouping, as well as having a thick black line between the groups) between Project and Public facing pages. Project pages include Wikipedia, Wikipedia Talk, Categories, Categories Talk, Portal, Portal talk and public facing pages include (Article), Talk, File, File talk, Template, Template talk.

    Feel free to vote on each of these separately and or use common sense to modify original proposal. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 15:00, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

    I haven't read the former discussion so I don't fully understand why #1 and #2 are being proposed and what they do, but I would support a visual separation between Project pages and non-Project pages. However, I think we need a concrete proposal for what that visual separation would be; perhaps a slightly darker shade of a grey as the background? BilledMammal (talk) 15:19, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    BilledMammal thanks! I have edited original proposal to clarify that. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 15:25, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    Ah, I see what you are proposing now. I still support a general visual separation between project and public facing pages (it seems sensible to me), but considering your suggestions limited as they are to the move system they seem sensible and likely to make the system more intuitive and thus I would support them. BilledMammal (talk) 15:28, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    Something I forgot about at the VPI discussion is that people commonly publish from User: as well as from Draft:, so I'm not sure moving only "Draft" in the namespace destination list will fix enough of the issue. I do like the idea of always targeting the top namespace (mainspace) in the selection dialogue, which I think can be done in CSS or at least JavaScript.
    As to the other two ideas / subproposals, a few words of explanation disambiguating namespaces 0 and 4 couldn't hurt, but I'm not sure grouping the namespaces can be accomplished technically using the current setup, although maybe it's possible to put an unselectable horizontal rule into a selection dialogue – I been outta the web dev game for decades.
    Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm somewhat partial to my own never responded to proposal to separate out the tasks on Special:MovePage into rename (same namespace as before), publish (namespace 0), and all other cross-namespace moves. Folly Mox (talk) 23:48, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
    Categories should be considered public-facing pages; plenty are used for navigational purposes. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 02:51, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
    1. ↑ This excludes many mass-created microstubs, but it keeps the number of false positives extremely lowA chirim ya: &It;ref> tuma maa yi laɣingu din yuli nyɛ "lower-alpha", ka lee bi saɣiritiri $It;references group ="lower-alpha"/> tuka maa bon nya
    2. ↑ With the exception of ESPNcricinfo references with the subheading of "Stories" or "Wisden" as such references are not database sourcesA chirim ya: &It;ref> tuma maa yi laɣingu din yuli nyɛ "lower-alpha", ka lee bi saɣiritiri $It;references group ="lower-alpha"/> tuka maa bon nya
    3. ↑ "Significant contributions" is defined as "larger than 200 bytes, excluding edits that are reverts or were reverted"A chirim ya: &It;ref> tuma maa yi laɣingu din yuli nyɛ "lower-alpha", ka lee bi saɣiritiri $It;references group ="lower-alpha"/> tuka maa bon nya
    4. ↑ This does not mean that the article is guaranteed to be kept at AfD on the basis of the sources contained within it, just that it is possible to make a good faith argument at AfD that WP:GNG is met on the basis of those sources.A chirim ya: &It;ref> tuma maa yi laɣingu din yuli nyɛ "lower-alpha", ka lee bi saɣiritiri $It;references group ="lower-alpha"/> tuka maa bon nya
    5. ↑ This option is provided to support editors who may determine that some of the articles on this list would be more useful as redirects than drafts.A chirim ya: &It;ref> tuma maa yi laɣingu din yuli nyɛ "lower-alpha", ka lee bi saɣiritiri $It;references group ="lower-alpha"/> tuka maa bon nya
    6. ↑ Nominating 500 articles a month would increase by a third the number of articles going through AfD, and conservatively assuming that only half of Lugnut's creations have notability issues would take almost eight yearsA chirim ya: &It;ref> tuma maa yi laɣingu din yuli nyɛ "lower-alpha", ka lee bi saɣiritiri $It;references group ="lower-alpha"/> tuka maa bon nya
    7. ↑ Most of these aren't candidates for draftification due to the extremely conservative nature of the query we decided to useA chirim ya: &It;ref> tuma maa yi laɣingu din yuli nyɛ "lower-alpha", ka lee bi saɣiritiri $It;references group ="lower-alpha"/> tuka maa bon nya
    Di yila "https://dag.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)&oldid=70653"