Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-02-27/Deletion report

The 10 most SHOCKING deletion discussions of February: You WON'T believe #8!

Deletion report

The 10 most SHOCKING deletion discussions of February

By JPxG

Last month, you got a very serious and well-written deletion report. This month, well — I've been busy with some stuff, so you're getting a deletion report.

NSPORTS RfC continues sailing past outfield and into bleachers

Remember that massive village pump discussion about the sports notability guidelines, which was covered in length in last month's deletion report? Well, it's still going. It was 400,000 bytes then, and it's 800,000 now, so who knows what we'll be looking at by March. Maybe it'll have increased again to 1,200,000, doubled again to 1,600,000, or ${\frac {(n*10^{-5})^{2}}{2}}*10^{5}$ed again to 3,200,000. Or maybe it's a factorial, and the entire world's industrial output will become subordinated to manufacturing storage media to host discussion of the sports notability guidelines. It's anyone's game right now. Bottom of the ninth. Triple overtime. Thirteenth subproposal. Let's go for the gold!

Longest AfDs, by size

• Jamie Fitzgerald (American football) (31 !votes, 69,634 bytes)

All of that pent-up frustration over the sports notability guidelines had to come out somewhere. Was this football player notable? Nobody could tell. More importantly, was the discussion "bush-league song and dance" or "nonsense wikilawyering"? No consensus could be found on that, either. Or on whether the article should be kept.

• Pepe Escobar (7 !votes, 61,626 bytes)

Is he a prophetic geopolitical analyst or a non-notable literally-who? The no-consensus close, by Sandstein, said that nobody could tell because the AfD had been "bludgeoned to death by walls of text by the nominator, who has since been blocked for this kind of conduct". They advised a renomination, without their participation, could result in a clearer consensus. Said second nomination is already rolling – we'll have to see what shakes out.

• List of feature films with LGBT characters (22 !votes, 61,319 bytes)

Keep !voters say that deletion is not cleanup. Delete !voters say that the list criteria are impossibly broad. Some point to the category system as a remotely maintainable alternative to this article. Some point to the bathwater, and advise against babies being thrown out with it. Whose arguments are more persuasive? Well, we don't know. It hasn't been closed yet.

• Meadow Oaks, Florida (11 !votes, 58,481 bytes)

Geostubs really bring out the sword in the Wikipedian's soul, don't they? A long time was spent delving into census records, newspaper clippings, and that old favorite, the conduct of other AfD participants. In the end, it was kept.

• Sarah Azhari (13 !votes, 57,634 bytes)

While it would be possible to write a succinct description of what went on in this protracted no-consensus nomination, perhaps the best way to summarize this AfD is by a verbatim transcription of Vanamonde's close note:

What a mess. Those arguing to keep this article have spent far too long badgering the opposition, and far too little providing reliable sources and explaining what makes them so. Conversely, the few sources that have been provided (albeit late in the discussion) haven't been commented on by most !voters. The walls of text are long enough to scare most fresh eyes away; so I'm closing this as no consensus, explicitly with no prejudice against speedy renomination. I would like to remind the "keep" !voters in particular to confine their attentions to evidence for notability, substantiated by sources, in any future AfD, and to lay off of personal commentary.

Largest AfDs, by participation

• Ghost of Kyiv (48 !votes, 30,655 bytes)

There's a war going on, which is a serious and dismal event in which many people have died and many more have suffered greatly. This is not a subject of humor; it is a human tragedy. However, this article – what's even going on here? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it even a real person, or simply a meme run amok? Is it notable when a meme runs amok? The non-admin close, by Styyx, was a SNOW keep "before it turns into a clusterfuck of a thing". Indeed!

• Jamie Fitzgerald (American football) (31 !votes, 69,634 bytes)

No, get out of here, I already wrote about you. You can't be in both lists.

• Poul Nielsen (footballer, born 1915) (27 !votes, 56,864 bytes)

This is one of those weird batch nominations you see sometimes. Initially, it was a batch of five Nielsens: Poul, Leo, Kaj, Jørgen and John. All five, according to nominator RandomCanadian, were created in a "rapid spree based on database entries only". This was a perfectly respectable batch, but after a few comments had been made, a much larger list was contributed by another participant. It turned out that those five Nielsens had been part of a family of speedily created articles – Wilhelm, Poul, Leo, Kaj, Kai, Jørgen, John, Hugo, Henry, Frank, Flemming, Erik, Erik, Benny, Arthur, Arno, Allan, Aksel, and Ernst. Once noticed, this new, nineteen-strong nation of Nielsens was notched (none too neatly) into the nomination, making it nearly nonsensical and nudging it towards being a non-starter. The current imbroglio over NSPORTS was cited in the note from Star Mississippi, who closed it as "no consensus/trainwreck" and said "I would suggest rather than 19 separate AfDs, which no one wants, that the creator, nominator and interested parties see if draftification might be an amenable solution until such point as suitable sourcing can be identified".

• Neo-Nazism in India (25 !votes, 42,186 bytes)

CFORK created to split out content from a bloated main article, or POVFORK to avenge the deletion of a category? It's hard to say. The article was nominated fairly shortly after creation, but consisted of a few short paragraphs (mostly duplicated from other articles). Some SYNTH concerns were raised. Mostly, what I learned from this is that there's an ice cream shop named after Hitler. And a pool parlor named after Hitler. What's next, "I Kissed A Hitler And I Liked It"? Maybe if that hit the charts in Mumbai, this article would still be standing. But it isn't – the discussion was closed as "delete".

• Timeline of the war in Donbas (2020) (23 !votes, 26,295 bytes)

This one is still ongoing. Arguments in favor of deletion are primarily based on WP:NOTNEWS, and allege undue detail in the article. Arguments in favor of keeping it revolve around the information being properly attributed to reliable sources; a tale as old as time. The nomination is batched with similar timeline article for 2021 and 2022.

← Previous "Deletion report"

Next "Deletion report" →

In this issue

27 February 2022 (all comments)

From the team

News and notes

Opinion

Special report

In the media

Serendipity

Technology report

WikiProject report

Featured content

Deletion report

Recent research

Arbitration report

By the numbers

Gallery

Traffic report

News from Diff

Crossword

Humour

+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try .

• Maybe I'm a numbers and charts person but I love lists like this. It catches me up on subjects generating a lot of discussions of which I was unaware. It also satisfies my curiosity to know what topics are current under dispute (not that I want to jump in, I'm just curious!). I only recently heard about this debate about sports notability and I think more editors who work outside the sports field would be interested in this discussion about notability criteria and how much influence WikiProjects should have over setting standards since that question cuts across a lot of other subjects. I'm not sure how you get a hold of this data but I hope this will become a regularly monthly feature. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:28, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
  • I think they get it from a tool they made: User:JPxG/Oracle. BilledMammal (talk) 05:02, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
  • Liz Perhaps I'm the opposite of a numbers-and-charts person (applying that very differently than your original sense, admittedly) but what frustrates me about sports articles isn't so much the subjects and/or their notability: it's the content.

Nailing down WP:NSPORTS rules is all well and good, but no matter what they end up being, every one of the articles that meets them ends up a WP:NOTSTATSBOOK nightmare. Whether it's about some kid who plays junior high basketball, or James Harden, the article doesn't need to be edited every single time they score a basket. But that's exactly what we can expect to happen; never once with any citations to back it up. (Worse, tons of those articles are under pending-changes protection, and that just ends up wasting even more of the community's time.) FeRDNYC (talk) 23:12, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

I agree, Liz. I also think it's safe to say that many discussions would turn out differently if the participants were drawn at random from the experienced editor base rather than from those heavily invested in the content area. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 01:35, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

• Like last time, very well written and fun to read! (Although it's also a bit depressing to think about how much editor time goes into some of these discussions...) 15 (talk) 12:37, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
• These are quite clever. Kudos to the writer(s).--Gen. Quon_[Talk]^{(I'm studying Wikipedia!)} 14:56, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
• Deletion discussions are a splendid spectator sport, at least as described by a spirited analyst, but no, I don't want to see a biography of any of our highest-scoring deletionists or inclusionists (Sis, boom, bah! Delete them all!) Jim.henderson (talk) 15:56, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
  

The Signpost: doing it for free since 2005.

Home

About

Archives

Newsroom

Subscribe

Suggestions