TEAHOUSE DRAFT ARTICLE SUBMISSIONS

Teahouse is the name of the process and group of dedicated admins who have been granted the power to oversee new draft article submissions on Wikipedia. If you think there should be an article on Wikipedia that doesn't yet exist, you can create one and submit it to Teahouse. Teahouse has their own policies about reviewing submissions, ensuring a draft qualifies, approving or denying the draft, then typically allowing the editor six months of editing time to try and improve their drafted article if Teahouse denied it. If after six months, it doesn't appear that the author of the draft or any other editor is putting any effort into improving it, the draft will then finally be nominated for deletion. If there are no objections, it will soon after be deleted.

That's the normal fairly-designed process on paper for drafting new articles on Wikipedia. If at some point everyone agrees that a draft article is up to par, it's then moved into the mainspace where the public can view the official Wikipedia article. At anytime even after an article is live in the mainspace, it can be nominated for deletion by any admin, and the whole survival process for the article begins again. An article basically needs the blessing of some powerful admins to be left alone and to keep others backed off from trying to kill it.

A real world Wikipedian example of how the draft article submission process is supposed to work follows. An editor noticed there was no article for Friedrich Goethe, the grandfather of a famous German poet. So the editor decided to create one and submit it to Teahouse for Friedrich Goethe's future Wikipedia article. The problem is that Friedrich Goethe isn't considered notable. He is related to someone notable, but that doesn't make a person notable. Likely, he could never have a Wikipedia article because he died in November of 1730. The eager editor pressed on anyway, surely a loyal Friedrich fan and a firm believer in his extreme notability. It's all rather relative. Interestingly, Friedrich could possibly someday be considered notable for being written about at length in this short story, but let's stay on track shall we...

This particular editor submitted his draft to Teahouse on September 5th, 2025, the same week as the other events with editor RandyKnotts you'll soon hear more about, and which were chock-full of admin abuse. The Friedrich Goethe draft was submitted with only one reference and an inadmissible reference at that, because it was a reference to a user-editable website called WikiTree. It's a family tree site that anyone can log into and start making changes, and therefore it's considered to be an unreliable secondary source. So on this seemingly non-notable subject with only one shaky reference cited, the draft article was still seen by TeaHouse. Not only did Teahouse admin PadGriffin review and deny it, he fairly allowed six months of further improvement time.

Next page: Draft Article Submission on Wikipedia