Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Social issue

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus leaning towards keep. Both sides have strong policy based arguments alongside the usual weak non-policy based arguments such as Dingo1729 in the delete and Raccoon W. in the keep. Some work has been done in this article, and couple of the commentators note that his might be worth saving, but needs a complete rewrite. AFD is not for cleanup and this isn't a serious TNT candidate. Secret ^account 07:20, 13 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Social issue[edit]

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I have no idea what this is supposed to be about. WP:TNT seems appropriate. [UseTheCommandLine ~/talk] #_ 08:56, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - Having tried on several occasions to make some rational sense of this, it always becomes a dumping ground for individuals' pet hates and theories. It would better gone. Velella ^{Velella Talk} 11:53, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Runs along the lines of your typical dicdef padded with examples. Not entirely sure what it does for us though so I'm open to reasonable reasonings. tutterMouse (talk) 16:17, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete I'm not sure it even rises to the level of "your typical dicdef padded with examples". It looks more like a parody. What other article could link black cats, abortion and the current unemployment rate in the USA? I think the definition starts out being wrong and everything else is rubbish. I'm not sure that a better article could be written on the subject, so DELETE. Dingo1729 (talk) 17:36, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - While the article itself could certainly be made more cogent, the subject appears noteworthy and seems to be the focus of quite a few sociology courses. The article also serves as a main article for a fairly robust category. Buddy23Lee (talk) 21:26, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep per Buddy23Lee. - Camyoung54 talk 02:30, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep This article is a good learning experience for social problems courses--what knowledge to accept and what knowledge not to accept (based on their studies). Social problems courses exist at pretty much any university in the sociology department. Revisions need to be made, so offer some revisions rather than deleting the article. And so you know, all the issues in the article are actual social problems by definition of social problems whether you take an objectivist or a subjectivist outlook on social problems. Simply because some cannot discern this fact does not mean that the article should be deleted. Raccoon W. (talk)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Social science-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 14:28, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - providing students with a good learning experience.....what knowledge to accept and what knowledge not to accept is not and cannot be a justification for having an article with no valid references or supporting publications. It also suggests to me that you are condoning having inaccurate or inappropriate material in the article that the students can use to work out what is, and what is not a social issue. This is absolutely what Wikipedia is not. We should only include that which verifiable and which relates directly to the article title. Please look again at many of the sections and the refs that support the individual issues (obesity, abortion, Health and Medicine, excessive drinking or whatever). Few if any of these refs indicate that the topic is a Social issue. Many of the topics are, in any case, wholly without any references. The article doesn't appear to have a definition that the editors themselves agree about and the whole tone of the content is incredibly subjective and strongly biased towards the norms of the individual editors. It fails WP:NPOV. I do agree that it ought to be able to make an appropriate article based on a sound definition supported by reputable references. The current version is so far from that, that I see nothing that could be readily salvaged and a fresh start might be the only practical way forward. Velella ^{Velella Talk} 15:08, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - If you have spent any time studying the social sciences you would find that social problems are subjective (e.g., video games versus black cats versus school shootings). There is not one universal thing that makes a social problem a social problem. This may in fact be the point. As for the references, I agree each post needs a legitimate citation and the posts need to accurately portray these references. Perhaps, the definition can be changed to an actual sociological definition. The page is already referring to social problems so each post does not need to indicate it too is a social problem. Raccoon W. (talk)

Does anyone have an actual sociological definition? The only references I see are "X is a social issue" or "X, Y, Z,... are social issues". "Social issue" is a common adjective-noun combination, but without an agreed definition, is it possible to write anything other than an arbitrarily long list of things that someone has described as "social issues"? Dingo1729 (talk) 17:21, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep with massive reworks I can see how this article is a significant issue, but the state it's in right now is kinda pathetic. Needs to be re-written from the ground up by someone with experience and knowledge. Command Conquerer Logs 09:06, 6 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as it currently stands. I see there's been some effort to prune this, but I think WP:TNT is the way to go. The proper approach to this article's topic spends far more time on the definition and far less time on the examples. What we have here suffers from POV sampling bias, fatal tonal issues that sometimes rise to the level of explicit advocacy, dubious sourcing -- and absent sourcing of the key definitional elements, and some credible suggestions of copyright violation (at least some of which have now been removed, but still...). I'm generally a supporter of pushing for a WP:HEY redemption of viable-topic articles that find there way to AFD, but I think blowing this one up is the way forward; a viable article on this big-picture topic would include nothing of what is here now. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 22:45, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. It's not a good article, through it's not a total mess. Nonetheless, the concept of a social issue or similar is notable. If we have no good target for merge, this should be kept, and hopefully, rewritten and improved one day. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:01, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.