Wikipedia:Article Incubator

Articles should not be added to the Incubator. Consider WP:DRAFT instead.

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

This page in a nutshell: Incubation is a "soft deletion" process whereby articles that have been found not to meet Wikipedia's content criteria but do meet the incubation criteria, which means there is an intention that the article can and will be improved, are removed from mainspace and search engines but remain accessible by non-admins so they can be collaboratively worked on.

The article incubator was a place for holding articles that did not meet Wikipedia's content criteria (WP:NOT, WP:N, WP:OR, WP:NPOV, WP:BLP, and WP:V), but a rationale had been put forward that the article met the incubation criteria, which meant there was an intention that the article could and would be improved. Incubation was intended to be a more centralized alternative to WP:Userfication. Articles in incubation were "in limbo"—they had been deleted from article namespace, but were still part of Wikipedia, awaiting a decision to be moved back into the article namespace (mainspace), or be deleted completely from all Wikipedia namespace.

Incubation was not designed for creating or developing new articles outside of mainspace—that role was taken by WP:Articles for Creation. Nor was it designed as a buffer zone between nomination for deletion and a deletion decision—that role was taken by Wikipedia:Article Rescue Squadron. Incubation was a "soft deletion" process whereby problematic articles were removed from mainspace but remained accessible by non-admins so they could be worked on. Incubated articles were automatically "noindexed", meaning they wouldn't show up in search engines.

Articles entered the incubator via 2 main paths:

• From a deletion process such as AfD, MfD, PROD or Speedy, in which a decision was made to incubate rather than delete or keep
• From userspace, when a previously deleted article had been userfied,

Incubation waas for material or articles that had already been through the deletion process and it had been decided that while, at the time of the decision, the material did not meet our inclusion criteria, there was justifiable reason to believe the material/article could be made to meet the inclusion criteria given enough time; sometimes articles that had been deleted were userfied (moved into userspace), and these articles may'd've be worked on in userspace and then brought to the incubator for assistance in moving back into mainspace—but articles that originated in userspace and had never been through the deletion process may'd've be moved directly into mainspace and so were not appropriate for the incubation process.

There was no guarantee that incubated articles would be moved back into the Wikipedia mainspace. As a rule, an article should'n't've'd been moved to incubation unless it met the incubator criteria, which meant there was an intention that the article could and would be improved. Content intended for mainspace shouldn't've'd be kept indefinitely on subpages, per the Wikipedia guideline regarding the third disallowed use of subpages. Pages in the incubator may'd've be nominated for deletion through Wikipedia:Miscellany for Deletion after a reasonable time had been allowed for development. What was "reasonable" would vary depending on circumstances