Recently an improperly formatted article that had incorrect URL (with a colon in the url) went unnoticed for a week until now. The article in question is here http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-931-the-encyclopedia (likely deleted soon) and as you may see, it has SCP-931 written as the title, and puts SCP-3002 as the main number in its text, despite both spots already being occupied by well-known SCPs. Now, maybe it's because we aren't in Series IV contest mode and the coldpost isn't really hurting anyone, but I understand that out-of-range articles are usually summary deleted (i.e. SCP-5xxx for the time being).
However, it's come to my attention that a lot of deleted articles follow a similar pattern - no proper formatting, bad image code, name of SCP used in the page - and really, most of the time the newbie does not look at comments or even care. I suspect a lot of them just dump the post, show it to friends on their Roblox server how cool that they made their own SCP, not noticing the giant -34 in the corner, forgetting the page and account within a week, and the page is deleted alongside the meticulous line-by-line from a well-meaning JS member, preserved by Conwell and Zyn in their thankless1 Sisyphean jobs.
My point is, right now I appreciate all the work and effort that is put into critique and criticism - but some drafts are abundantly clear that they either did not read or don't care about the "How to Write an SCP" page. Masterworks like this and this2 aren't "unfinished" in our current definition, but they damn sure are not up to par with what the website currently wants. I think staffers are more hesitant to delete these articles, because they aren't clearly unfinished - they have a number, class, cont. procedures, desc., and sometimes even a picture or addenda. However, it's incredibly rare that anyone of these articles are up to par for the site's standards, and the lack of formatting should indicate that they did not read the guides at all.
I am proposing that we expand our current Summary Deletion to include improperly formatted articles, at each staffer's digression.
People may disagree whether an article is truly worthy of being summary deleted, and some people might say that it's not necessary because the current deletion process handles them well.
One thing that I believe that this creates is that some newer members might mistakenly think that the reason why these articles are downvoted is because of their bad formatting - and while yes, that's one reason, that doesn't indicate that an article without bad formatting/SPAG/etc won't be downvoted. I don't think we emphasize this enough, but proper spelling, punctuation, grammar, and formatting is the bare minimum. I'm not saying that people need perfect spelling/grammar/etc, but it's always abundantly clear when an author does not fully grasp the basic language skills needed (either underage or ESL), and we aren't a school - this shouldn't be the place you learn the basics of how to write.
Another issue is the shitsniping that a lot of bad articles get, but that's a smaller issue since it's already falling under shitcrit policy. What's more concerning is the wasted time people giving critique that is clearly not going to be read. I understand a lot of users mean well and want the author to succeed, or they're ambitious asses like myself who will pretend contribute in meaningful ways until they get promoted to a high enough position in the community and become useless, but it's time wasted that's better used for authors that follow the guides and still fall short.
Doing so will hopefully let the quality of the lowest rated pages be slightly better - there are times when an article that has lots of effort put into it get no responses or comments (I am similarly guilty for not leaving any critique) and simply get deleted, where terribly formatted articles get long criticism - because it's easier to critique when the problems are glaringly obvious.