Wikipedia:Cruftcruft

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This is an essay, a page containing the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays may represent widespread norms or minority viewpoints, and they may be heeded or not based upon your judgement and discretion.

Shortcuts: WP:CRUFT2 WP:CRUFTCRUFT

Cruftcruft or meta-cruft (a reduplication of the word cruft to mean 'cruft on the topic of cruft'), is a term used to refer to editorial and policy issues often encountered in the course of dealing with Articles for Deletion.

1 What is Cruftcruft?
2 Ways to spot Cruftcruft
3 Cruft essays
4 Editorial and policy issues of Cruftcruft
5 Dealing with Cruftcruft
6 References
7 See also
- 7.1 Other Wikipedians' commentaries on this area

What is Cruftcruft?

Before moving on to "Cruftcruft", one must first analyze "Cruft" on its own.

"Cruft" originated in hackerdom, where it was used to mean "something which [is] badly designed, poorly implemented, or redundant." It was picked up in popular culture, where it has been defined as "useless junk or excess materials", and ultimately "to describe material which is typically lacking in quality, selectively biased, of a poor nature and of interest only to a small audience."

Unfortunately, this definition's complete and utter lack of any objective criteria leaves "cruft" in the eye of the beholder. Rather than being anything meaningfully nonencyclopedic, Cruft becomes any topic, subject or article that the beholder is uninterested in.

Having turned up their nose at a topic, the article must be deleted, and must be disposed of without any meaningful discussion. A wave of the cruft wand is all that is necessary to pass off one's subjective ennui on a subject into a delete vote on an AfD. Other members of the cruft police are drawn to the scent and toss their own nonsensical cruftspeak into the mix.

This has resulted in Emmy award-winning TV series going from having a large detailed article with a page for each episode and character to a short article, a bare-bones episode list with and a sentence for each character. Just because a few people thought that an award-winning show with millions of viewers was not notable; was original research because they were too lazy to look at the sources; or, my favorite, there is too much information in the article.

Ways to spot Cruftcruft

Almost always used as "justification" for a delete vote in an Article for Deletion.
Options other than delete not often considered.
Often accompanied by the two-letter abbreviation "nn" as a justification for deletion.
Strange interjections are often tossed in.^[1]
Use of the word "Cruft", commonly found in increasingly bizarre portmanteau forms, such as "listcruft", "gamecruft", and the nearly all-inclusive "Vanispamcruftisement".
Multiple repetitions of the word "cruft" in fragmentary sentences, often accompanied by unnecessary punctuation.^[2]
Wikipedia policies and guidelines are seldom referenced.

Cruft essays

Various essays have been created to describe supposed variations of the "cruft" problem:

Editorial and policy issues of Cruftcruft

Cruftcruft covers editorial and policy issues including the following, though anything corresponding to relevant Wikipedia policy is traditionally ignored:

Dealing with Cruftcruft

Quite challenging. The cruft police is often too busy deleting articles to engage in any meaningful discussion, nor do they feel that anything more than throwing around the word "cruft" is necessary in any discussion.

References

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