AfDAide
A reading aid for Wikipedia editors that summarizes Articles for Deletion discussions, flags procedural weaknesses in vote counts, and drafts keep/delete rationales grounded in cited policy.
active Wikipedia editors and deletion-review volunteers
- One-click AfD-thread digest: vote tally, account-age distribution of !votes, strongest sources cited on each side
- Procedure checker: flags sock-puppet patterns, vote-weight issues, and missed policy citations
- Drafted keep/delete rationales the editor can edit before posting
- Subscription to watchlist pages that re-opens AfD context automatically
The Odin thread shows how deletion discussions fracture into ideology accusations because the procedural record is hard to parse in real time — a tooling gap, not a community-values gap.
HN source thread has only 8 points; while AfD volume is high (~200+ articles/day per ReputationX) there is no visible editor-side demand signal (no user requests, no GitHub issues, no survey of pain). Academic interest exists but that is researcher demand, not end-user demand.Wikipedia AfD: How Articles for Deletion Works ↗WiDe-analysis: Enabling One-click Content Moderation Analysis on Wikipedia's Articles for Deletion ↗
Research tooling already carves this space: WiDe-analysis (Cardiff NLP, PyPI + HuggingFace Space) does AfD stance/policy prediction and Notabilia visualizes AfD discussions. No polished editor-facing SaaS exists, but the academic 'toolkit gap' is partially filled.WiDe-analysis PyPI/HF Space ↗Notabilia - Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia ↗
Wikipedia editors are explicitly volunteers ('Wikipedia is a volunteer service' is an official policy page); charging them is culturally hostile and WMF already funds/free-builds editor tooling. No obvious willing-to-pay segment other than reputation-management firms, who already use human editors not end-user AfD tools.Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a volunteer service ↗Participate - Wikimedia Foundation ↗
Articles for Deletion is a core, decades-old Wikipedia process with no signs of being deprecated; tooling built against it would remain useful indefinitely if it survives community adoption.Wikipedia:Articles for deletion ↗
AfD data is fully public via MediaWiki API and Wikipedia dumps, summarization is straightforward with off-the-shelf LLMs, and policy-grounded rationale drafting is feasible by retrieving from Wikipedia policy namespace — though accuracy/grounding work is non-trivial.WiDe-analysis: Enabling One-click Content Moderation Analysis on Wikipedia's Articles for Deletion ↗