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One of Wikipedia's strengths is how easily editors create new Wikipedia articles—quick, efficient, no bureaucracy to get permission from. But some editors abuse the privilege, creating nonsense articles, attack articles, or promotional articles, for instance. Others just make mistakes because they don't understand Wikipedia's rules and purpose: They create an article about a non-notable topic, or a subject already covered by an article of a different name, or containing a definition (which should be a Wiktionary entry)—not an encyclopedic topic, for example.
In order to keep Wikipedia the useful encyclopedia that it is, articles with all these problems need to be improved or removed. For Wikipedia, the challenge is to have processes that delete inappropriate articles (more than a thousand a day) while keeping potentially good articles and avoiding offending well-intentioned editors. In this chapter, you'll learn the different ways to deal with problem articles (often without resorting to one of the three deletion processes). You'll also learn what recourse you and other editors have if you feel that an article was deleted inappropriately.