Open main menu

Articles for Deletion (AfD), formerly Votes for Deletion (VfD) is the process by which articles on Wikipedia are deleted according to the Wikipedia Policies and Guidelines. Thankfully, like all Wikipedia rules, it was carefully planned and written so it is not rampantly abused.

How Votes for Deletion Work

  1. By sheer accident an interesting article appears on that site. This is against Wikipedia policy.
  2. Some fag marks a page as "votes for deletion". Why? To quote Fight Club, "I just wanted to destroy something beautiful."
  3. The fag brings in either 50 sock puppets or 50 stupid people. They all add cliche Wikipedia reasons that amount to circular logic.
  4. The people who want to keep the article vote fairly and/or use sock puppets incorrectly and the article gets deleted. A month later someone remakes it and the process restarts.


  1. Someone who wanted to keep it had spent the last 6 months making at least 100 sock puppets and putting harmless edits in them. They unleash them all on the AfD and the article stays.

To successfully pull off Step 4B, you have to know how to use sock puppets skillfully. First of all, know your weaknesses and your strengths.

  1. Your weakness: You have a life whereas the enemy is unemployed and spends 16 hours a day stalking people (yes stalking, no joke) on Wikipedia to revert their edits and delete their pages -- they are pros at this.
  2. Your strength: You have a job so you have money. Since you have a life, you can't spend 6 months creating sock puppets (and the Wikipedia stalkers check to make sure each voting account is old with plenty of edits or they tattle on you), but you can do the next best thing: Either hire Mexicans or children (depending on where you live) for less than minimum wage to do the work for you. Just tell them to pick random sentences and rewrite them in their own words. Your employees will create lovely spelling combination's.

Once the sock puppets are ready, make sure you haven't logged onto them with your real IP for a week and then find proxies that Wikipedia doesn't know of (yet) and log into each one. Then you vote to keep, but you can't just say keep. You have to give a reason. This is where you must thank Adolf Hitler, not just because "Nazi" is such a versatile insult for the people who want to delete your precious article, but also for his "big lie" theory that says if you lie to people, as long as they think a bunch of different people are saying it, they'll believe it. You don't have to try very hard for reasons to keep the article because all their delete reasons are circular logic; just say things like "What makes something encyclopedic is its inclusion in an encyclopedia. Therefore to say something is unencyclopedic as an argument for uninclusion is circular logic." Then create a bunch of fake webpages on .edu sites (hell, even Geoshitties sites work) proclaiming the validity of the page, and poof! They start changing their votes!

Does everyone even get a vote?

AfDs on Wikipedia

The second best way to vote on a AfD page:

Abstain I abstain. --Kittens 07:21, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Most fun on a wiki where they take AfDs seriously because they always have to ask, "Why the heck did you post if just to abstain?"

  • UPDATE: When this idea was mentioned here, Summer 2005, nobody has abstained. Now, a year later, abstaining is growing common.

Even better ways are:

  • Weak Abstain. — Fnordulicious 03:27, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Abstain -Roofus 02:17, 26 December 2007 (CST)
  • DO NOT WANT Miltopia 03:46, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
  • OBJECTION! Spoom 18:20, 11 October 2008 (CDT)

Voting Weak Abstain will make them ask, What does Weak Abstain even mean?!

It is a great way of trolling, especially nominating articles that shouldn't be deleted for AfD.

A AfD is basically a joke with staged outcomes

It's one of two possibilities:

  1. It's like a staged trial in a totalitarian country where they pretend that someone is judged fairly when the government is going to execute the person on trial regardless--like the trial in Chrono Trigger. This possibility is when an administrator or one of their sockpuppets nominates something.
  2. Somebody creates a vanity page and after they had built up at least 100 sock puppets all on different IPs. They run a AfD just to keep the article from being speedy deleted. This is why Wikipedia has things like two page synopses of every single episode of unwatched TV shows.

VfD to AfD renaming on Wikipedia

Wikipedia renamed VfD (Votes for Deletion) to AfD (Articles for Deletion) and even has a template to show it's not a vote and there's reasoning. However, reasoning doesn't matter and even if something is proved keep-able or deletable, the closing admin always goes by the largest number of votes, as long as those votes are for "delete".

VfDs on ED

Unlike some other lame Wikis, Encyclopedia Dramatica does not believe in a democratic process for determining the value and objectivity of articles. Instead, it relies heavily on Dramacratic processes: the funniest edits win (particularly those which inflate the Good Joke:Word Count Ratio), as do the most biased, factually inaccurate, or blatantly h8ful.

With that in mind, a VfD on Encylcopedia Dramatica is not, as some might expect, a "Vote for Deletion", but is instead a "Vote for Dramafication". In other words, when an article is found to be lacking in lulz or relying on an accursed NPOV, an ED user might note a VfD in a talk page. Like votes in American presidential elections, VfDs are not actually counted and the results are instead determined by the first person to step in and rape the offending article.

See Also