Wikipedia:Mass action review

This policy- or process-related proposal is in the brainstorming stage. Accordingly, please allow an opportunity for it to evolve based on input provided by users. This tag should be replaced with the {{historical}} or {{proposed}} tag if the proposal goes a lengthy spell without major changes. The latter is appropriate if a specific proposal emerges that appears ready for advertisement and debate followed by adoption or rejection by the community.

Shortcut WP:MARV

Mass Action Review (MARV) is a forum that specifically empowered to deal with challenges to large-scale actions on a large scale. For the purposes of this board a mass action is defined as: to be discussed

Requests must clearly identify (e.g. with links, diffs, and/or logs):

• What action is being reviewed
• Why the review is being requested
• Whether the whole action or only parts of it are relevant to the review (and if the latter, which parts)
• Relevant prior discussions, including:
  • Prior discussion with the editor undertaking the mass action
  • Any discussion (that the requester is aware of) that took place prior to the mass action being initiated

Once a request has been initiated, it remains until both of the following are true:

• The editor undertaking the mass action has been informed on their talk page, including a link to the review
• It has been evaluated by an uninvolved administrator as appropriate (see below)

Pending reviews are evaluated by an uninvolved administrator against the following criterion:

• Has prior discussion been attempted?
• Is the request clearly submitted in good faith?
• Is it clear what action is being requested for review and why?
• Does the request concern a mass action?

If the answer to all four is yes, then the request is accepted for review. If the answer to any is no, then the request is dismissed and suspended tasks may be resumed at the editor's discretion subject to the usual rules regarding such. Dismissal is without prejudice to good faith requests about mass actions being resubmitted here after prior discussion and/or additional information being provided and/or good faith requests about non-mass actions being submitted to the appropriate venue.

This evaluation is not about establishing the merits of the request and acceptance does not imply any wrongdoing on the part of the editor undertaking the action.

• Once accepted for a review, all relevant ongoing mass actions must be suspended while discussion is ongoing. This is enforceable by (partial) block or other suitable means.
• Actions part of a review should not be nominated for discussion at any other process (e.g. XfD, DRV, RM, MRV, etc) prior to the conclusion of the review. The exception is pages that meet one of the following speedy deletion criteria G9, G10, G12, F5 or F9, or which must otherwise be dealt with urgently. Such cases must always be noted in the review.

After a period of discussion, normally at least 7 days, an uninvolved administrator will assess the consensus of the discussion based on the following are the possible outcomes:

• Endorse the mass action as is - i.e. there was prior consensus for what is being done or there didn't need to be one (e.g. it wasn't actually a mass action)
• Endorse the action going forward - i.e. there wasn't but should have been prior consensus, but there is consensus at MARV that it is a benefit to the project and doesn't need more discussion
• Stop here - i.e. what's been done can stay, but no more (without explicit consensus at the correct venue)
• Revert to the prior status quo - e.g. delete articles, undo moves, etc.
• Discuss individually/smaller subsets at standard processes - i.e. this doesn't need to be or can't constructively be discussed as a single unit or large subsets.
  • This outcome would have sub-outcomes either allowing actions to continue at the original scale, at an individual scale or not at all.
  • No consensus would default to this while allowing actions to continue at an individual scale

Split decisions are possible - i.e. different parts of the task are endorsed/not endorsed (e.g. endorse the redirects to articles but not talk pages; allow the creation of articles related to lacrosse players but not hurling players, etc)

Where consensus for a subset of the action while discussion on one or more other subsets continues if this can be done without prejudicing the unresolved parts and an uninvolved administrator believes it would be beneficial to do so. Consensus for the subset where this has been reached may be implemented if this can be done without prejudicing the part(s) still unresolved.

• Any action not endorsed at MARV may be (re)started if an explicit consensus to do so is reached at the correct venue for a new request (although such consensus would probably be tricky to achieve if it wasn't (retrospectively) endorsed at MARV).
• No judgement precludes discussing/nominating for deleting/recreating/redoing an individual action at the normal venue after discussion has concluded, but doing it at a large (even non-mass) scale (at the same time or over a period of time) when the outcome was something other than discuss individually would be treated as wilfully ignoring consensus (e.g. if a set of mass created articles about German figure skaters were kept nominating a single one for deletion is fine, nominating multiple a day for several consecutive days is not).

Disagreement or queries regarding the closure of a MARV discussion should be raised with the closing administrator in the first instance. If that that cannot be done or this does not resolve things satisfactorily the closure may be appealed at Wikipedia:Deletion review (for matters relating the creation or deletion of pages), Wikipedia:Move review (for move-related matters) or WP:Administrators' noticeboard (for other matters).