Going through AfD today, I was struck by frequent accusations of 'advertising' being thrown at articles about companies and commercial products, and contributors to those articles. (The case I especially noticed was [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Roland System-100]], but that's only one specific example; it's an endemic problem). I think this is a problem, an assumption of bad faith, and an unnecessary biting of newbies. I think that Wikipedia being constantly bombarded by genuine spam has put us in an overly defensive mindset, which is also fed by the free-software anti-commercial attitude of some contributors. Spam is when an article is created to garner publicity or hits. It's not documenting anything anyone cares about, it's instead trying to give false respectability to something our readers don't want to see. We delete huge amounts of things as 'Spam' and 'Blatant advertising' that are not. They are well-meaning attempts by someone who is interested in something to document it in Wikipedia. By calling their attempts to help by such names, we are burning people. We're taking someone who might become a useful contributor and slapping them because they had the temerity not to know the rules, including the unwritten ones. Some of these articles shouldn't be created at all, because no reliable sources exist for them. If that's the case, that's what we should tell the contributor. In other cases sources exist but the creator didn't cite them; this is a cleanup issue. In yet other cases, the information belongs in Wikipedia, but not where the contributor placed it; an education issue. And yes, I realize that workload means that new page patrollers etc. may have to work in a hurry - templated messages that don't assume bad faith can be made, and even deletions can be done without insulting. In many cases what's deemed 'advertising' isn't advertising at all, as in the above example; that Roland synth hasn't been sold in almost 30 years, and nobody's trying to make money by writing a Wikipedia article about it. What's actually the case is that the article has been written by someone who doesn't know our house style. It reads like an article on a vintage-synths website, written by an enthusiast. The difference between enthusiast-site writing and encyclopedia writing has to be learned. Can we start to not assume that peoples' motives are bad unless they show that they are? -Matt