Wikipedia:Speedy keep

WP:KEEP is a deletion guide on entire articles. For the editing policy about keeping information in an article, see WP:PRESERVE.

WP:SK redirects here; you may be looking for Wikipedia:WikiProject Slovakia or Wikipedia:WikiProject Saskatchewan.

Speedy keep is the process of closing debates at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion and related pages with a result of "keep" before the normal discussion period ends, but without unlisting or deleting the actual discussion. This guideline applies only to "keep" closures; the criteria for speedy deletion cover the circumstances under which pages may be deleted immediately.

Applicability

Reasons for a speedy keep decision are:

1. The nominator withdraws the nomination or fails to advance an argument for deletion—perhaps only proposing a non-deletion action such as moving or merging, and no one other than the nominator recommends that the page be deleted.
   • An example of this includes posting a nomination in response to a proposed deletion but advocating a keep position. (If you dispute the deletion of a prod-ed article, just remove the prod-tag, sometimes nobody will want to pursue deletion of the article via AFD anyway.)
   • Exception: If the nominator indicates that the nomination is procedural in nature (most commonly due to a "relist" result from deletion review), then the nomination is ineligible for speedy keep.
2. The nomination was unquestionably vandalism or disruption and (since bad motivations of the nominator don't have direct bearing on the validity of the nomination) nobody unrelated recommends deleting it. For example:
   1. obviously frivolous or vexatious nominations (such as recently featured articles)
   2. nominations which are made solely to provide a forum for disruption (e.g., a userpage of a contestant in a heated edit war by their opponent(s) solely for harassment)
   3. making nominations of the same article with the same arguments immediately after they were strongly rejected in a recently closed deletion discussion
   4. nominations that are clearly an attempt to end an editing dispute through deletion, where dispute resolution is a more appropriate course
   5. nominations which are so erroneous that they indicate that the nominator has not even read the article in question, looked at the file license at all etc (eg nominating a correctly tagged non-free image as a potential copyvio).
3. The nominator is banned, so they are not supposed to edit. In that case, the nominated page is speedily kept while the nomination can be tagged with {{db-ban}} and speedily deleted as a banned contribution. However, if subsequent editors added substantive comments in good faith before the nominator's banned status was discovered, the nomination may not be speedily closed (though the nominator's opinion will be discounted in the closure decision).
4. The page is a policy or guideline. The deletion processes are not a forum for revoking policy.
5. The article is currently linked from the Main Page. In such cases, please wait until the link is no longer on the Main Page before nominating the article. If the problem is urgent, consensus should be gained at WP:ERRORS to remove the link before nominating for deletion.

If a page is nominated for deletion on the wrong forum (for example, a template on AfD or an article on MfD), the misplaced discussion may be speedily closed and the page renominated on the correct forum, with the original nomination, and any comments made so far, copied over to the new nomination. The closing comment should indicate where the discussion has been moved. This does not strictly count as a speedy keep, since the page still remains nominated for deletion.

Please realize that while you may personally dislike having a deletion tag on your favorite article, the harm it does is minimal, and either the article and/or the tag will be gone in less than a week.

What is not a speedy-keep

The "snowball clause" is a valid criterion for an early close, and is not subject to any of the other criteria necessary for a speedy keep, but it is not a speedy keep criterion itself. Specifically, discussions must meet specific criteria to be speedily kept. "Snowball closes" are justified by "Ignore all rules" and "Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy" as opposed to a specific set of guidelines. For that reason, "snow closes" may be controversial and their use is sometimes discouraged. Though the two may seem similar, closes under the snowball clause should never be closed as "speedy keep."

When closing an AfD debate as speedy-keep

When a discussion is closed as a speedy-keep:

• Close the debate as you would a standard close.
• Record the nomination to the talk page of the article using {{oldafdfull|result=speedy keep|votepage=as appropriate|date=date of nomination}}. Be aware (a) that whilst the name of the votepage usually matches that of the article, this is not always the case); and (b) the prefix "Wikipedia:Articles for deletion" should not be part of the "votepage" name.

See also

• Guide to deletion
• Introduction to deletion process
• Snowball clause