Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk | contribs) Parking my draft close of the AFD here |
(No difference)
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Revision as of 14:18, 12 February 2020
Draft "delete" closure that Jo-Jo Eumerus was planning to propose as part of a team AFD close at Race and Intelligence
This discussion is quite long, controversial and deals with a controversial article, so it won't be closed without a detailed closing statement/rationale.
Numerically, we are at 28 delete (27+nominator) and 30 keep (including one "strong keep"), with some deletes also advocating a redirect after deletion and some keeps considering a rename. That's not a consensus in favour of either keeping or deleting this topic, but on Wikipedia consensus is not simply a matter of counting up the !votes but also need to consider the arguments presented. There are some accounts and IPs that have been tagged as WP:SPA (and some SPAs which haven't been tagged as such and appear to violate the part of WP:SOCK that prohibits the use of undisclosed alternative accounts in project space), but it's not clear in many cases why they are tagged as SPAs, as well as some which are suspected of being sockpuppets. I note that there are one or two unactioned WP:SPIs on the sockpuppet accusations which greatly hampers assessing whether these !votes should be discarded as sock arguments or not. Apart of this there are competing accusations of canvassing. Nevertheless, it looks like there are a number of established editors on both sides. Because of these concerns, in this discussion we'll need to give particular weight to the arguments offered by the participants, rather than merely considering the nosecount. There are also way too many comments that are more remarks on other editors than on the article's suitability and some which are in a rather mocking tone (in particular on the keep side, or so it seems to me), a large amount of back and forth that sometimes edges into WP:BLUDGEON (and is sometimes offtopic - we aren't discussing Gender and intelligence here) and some arguments about edits done to the article while it was pending deletion.
The delete argument is essentially that even if the article topic is notable and of great interest as evidenced by e.g the page views, it is a) covered already in existing articles such as Scientific racism, Race and genetics and Heritability of IQ which according to the delete claim are the actually notable subjects and b) that the article has problems with WP:Undue weight so severe that a WP:TNT deletion is called for and c) "Because it is controversial it has WP:UNDUE visibility." Additional concerns flagged by the delete camp are that the title presupposes that there is a correlation (i.e that it pushes a POV), that any valid content in it appears to already exist at history of the race and intelligence controversy (this point plus the a) point above has led to concerns that we are looking at a WP:POVFORK), the article attracts problematic editors, that it relies too much on old or unreliable sources and perhaps WP:MEDREV would apply (some have posted vaguely explained sources to counter this argument), that we can't have an article on such a topic as "race" isn't defined the same in every places (i.e WP:NOR concerns), that it appears to serve to push a fringe POV, that the existence of similar articles is not a reason to have this one per WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS and has lead to accusations of racism against Wikipedia.
On the keep side we have the statement that the topic is notable and needs to be discussed in some way, that the existence of articles on related topics does not mean this one needs to be deleted, that many of its concerns can be solved by editing in lieu of deletion, contestations that the article title does not insinuate that intelligence is correlated to race, that the article has been kept at prior AFDs and AFD not be the place to deter, that it can't be a POV fork of the ...and genetics and Heritability of IQ articles as it came first, that being a POV fork is not a deletion reason, that not having this article but having history of the race and intelligence controversy makes no sense, that there are in fact correlations between race and intelligence, that we don't delete articles for being controversial/uncomfortable simply for being controversial/uncomfortable per WP:NOT#CENSORED, and that there are similar articles on similar topics. I am not so sure what "NARD" in Peregrine Fisher's argument is supposed to mean as WP:NARD is a redlink, and have some difficulty understanding Tickle me's argument as well. Some additionally have proposed the development of a disambiguation, or a redirect to another article (several candidate targets have been proposed), or a retitling to mend the concerns about the title being insinuatory.
On balance, it looks like we have a consensus that the topic is notable and that being contentious isn't a reason for deletion (in the sense that only a few people have supported this deletion rationale), most arguments have equally compelling counterarguments in some way (e.g on the title) but it's not clear if it should be covered at Race and intelligence or in the various sub-articles mentioned w/o a central race and intelligence article. There are a bunch of weak arguments on both sides (in particular, vague arguments that do not quite address the counterarguments) and it seems like a few delete arguments (the sole WP:NOR concern given by HiLo48, the concerns about the quality of its current sourcing which are admittedly somewhat vague) haven't been addressed although that isn't really enough to justify deletion on its own. The delete arguments go into much more detail about why they feel that the topic is duplicative to the other articles mentioned than the keeps go into explaining why it is unique - they often appear to be a little too much "keep, it's different" or "keep, it's necessary" with no explanation of how or why this should override the duplication concerns, and there are some points (e.g Grayfell's) that most of the distinctions are due to improper source usage in Race and intelligence that haven't been effectively rebutted as far as I can see. Perhaps the strongest point of contention is whether this is actually a deletion reason, but as pointed out WP:DEL-REASON §5 allows forks to be deleted (it and WP:CFORK also do not require the fork to be more recent than the original article). That suggests that we actually have a delete consensus here. Alternatively, rather than delete one could disambiguate or redirect the topic, but it doesn't seem like we have a consensus on what a redirect target would be or what to put on the disambiguation and either solution can be implemented after a deletion as well (normally when AFDs have competing redirect proposals, that justifies a deletion if no redirect is clearly preferred).
Ending with a procedural note, given that both the article and the talk page are well north of 5000 edits local admins can't delete it; if a consensus for deletion ensues we'll need to ask a steward at meta:Steward requests/Miscellaneous to delete the article and its talk page. This has never been considered a reason to not delete a topic, so if a delete consensus arises a request will be filed there. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:17, 12 February 2020 (UTC)