Draft Abuse

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 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.

That's how draft article submission is "supposed" to work on Wikipedia.
However, it's extremely common for drafted articles to be cut off at the metaphoric pass by a stalking abusive admin
for any arbitrary reason including personal bias, morning power trip after cereal, or their dog Rover just died.
They have a posted rule on Wikipedia forbidding biting new editors for this very reason, but almost nobody polices Wikipedia's abusive admins.
So the rule is extremly rarely enforced.
Next is a real Wikipedian example of a typical abusive situation
upon a draft article submission.
Another editor, the talented RandyKnotts, spent much more effort on his draft article only to have it instantly annihilated upon submission by a disgusting-behaving admin Jimfbleak.
Remember, he's the same admin who will block an editor that hasn't even logged in for years to make sure their corpse stays unequivocally dead forever. He's a big fan of capital punishment.
The subject of the draft article submitted by RandyKnotts to Teahouse certainly seemed to be plenty notable.
There were oodles of good secondary sources with their own independent fact-checking and verification systems.
The subject had publications which included a famous independent video game, software, famous artwork, and
a notable series of in-depth interviews with dozens of the world's most famous video game designers, artists, and musicians.
He's also notable for creating the first ever published video game to be made using the popular image editing software Gimp,
a historic milestone which has been written about by many different people in reliable secondary sources, in multiple languages,
and in many countries around the world.
The draft article that was submitted by RandyKnotts contained 46 references, 24 of which were independent of the subject.
Based on Wikipedia guidelines, this draft article should have been reviewed, approved, and immediately moved into the mainspace.
Even if the reviewing Teahouse admin for some reason thought there was an issue with it like tone or structure,
the Teahouse admin should have denied it with the stated reason, and given the editor and any other interested editors a chance to
improve the draft and fix the cited issues.
There's no doubt that an equal opportunity to improve the draft article for up to six months should have been
the worst case scenario for RandyKnotts' draft article.
Well, that's not what happened because... abuse.
The draft article submitted to Teahouse had been cut off by a notorious admin and killed ruthlessly. It had likely taken many hours
of skilled research and writing.
Then a brute Jim F. Bleak who was unauthorized by Teahouse, swooped in like a vulture and used his admin power to delete the draft article completely.
Gone forever with one disastrous button click and a grin.

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