Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Foreign trust

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 delete. Sandstein 11:32, 18 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Foreign trust[edit]

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Article written by Lawguru20002, all of whose edits revolve around lawyer Jacob Stein. All of the articles the user edited and created are sourced primarily to, repeatedly credit, and otherwise promote lawyer Jacob Stein (including his bio article). As the work mentions use of Stein's material "with his permission," I have to assume WP:COI is a factor here, in addition to the more obvious WP:PROMO. The articles are some years old now but have not been substantially edited otherwise. It's possible there are some notable concepts here, but notability is not the [primary] basis for this nomination.

For context, I came across these articles when I was going through edits of a[nother] spam-only account and noticed one site he/she added had been added to many other wiki pages, too. The site was maximumassetprotection.com, also run by Jacob Stein.

Also nominating Jacob Stein and Qualified personal residence trust. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 06:34, 24 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Law-related deletion discussions. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 06:48, 24 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Keep and improve. In all fairness this article does not appear to promote Jacob Stein. Merely citing him as a source is not enough to justify deletion. Looking at GBooks, I immediately find, amongst hundreds of results, law books devoting entire chapters to foreign trusts, so I think it is safe to assume that the concept or area of law satisfies GNG easily and by a very wide margin indeed. James500 (talk) 03:13, 31 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, NorthAmerica¹⁰⁰⁰ 00:40, 1 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Spirit of Eagle (talk) 06:26, 8 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Delete This is an overtly US-centric topic in a worldwide encyclopedia, intended to promote one attorney's business. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 07:15, 8 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This article contains no promotion whatsoever. "US centric" is an absurd and preposterous argument because law books (including books on what is known as "conflict of laws" and "private internal law") are normally written from the perspective of the law of a particular jurisdiction. This is because "law" is not an international subject. It is primarily several hundred distinct and separate national subjects because legislatures and courts are (primarily) organised along national lines and, to significant degree, these countries and states refuse to imitate, recognize or co-operate with foreign legal systems and produce national laws that are radically different from those of other countries. To argue that an article about law should be deleted because it is about the laws of a particular nation is to display complete and utter ignorance of that subject and demonstrates that one lacks the minimum level of competance necessary to edit articles on that topic. Even if the laws of countries outside America recognise some concept of a foreign trust, that can be easily dealt with either by expanding the article to include those countries (almost certainly in their own separate national sections because there will probably not be a core international topic and it would be SYNTH to try to construct one) or by moving the article to Foreign trusts in US law. The fact that an article needs to be expanded, rewritten or moved is never a grounds for deletion (WP:IMPERFECT). James500 (talk) 08:36, 8 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
And since there are plently of books and coverage about the American law of foreign trusts, written from an American law perspective, this easily satisfies GNG even as a national law topic about American law, so the argument you are advancing has no merit whatsoever. James500 (talk) 08:45, 8 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Furthermore, we are not just a worldwide encyclopedia. The five pillars clearly state that we also include all specialist encyclopedias aswell (WP:5). There are plenty of national encyclopedias. Moreover, legal encyclopedias are normally about the laws of a particular jurisdiction. There is, for example, an encyclopedia of American law called the Corpus Juris Secundum. And we should be doing what legal encyclopedias do because WP:5 clearly says that we are one. James500 (talk) 09:09, 8 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
And for the avoidance of doubt, American law does actually treat foreign trusts (ie non-American ones) differently from American trusts, and recognises them as a distinct category, for reasons that look like protectionism: [1]. This is obviously an important aspect of American law and should be covered. James500 (talk) 09:53, 8 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Delete and restart I have to go with the WP:TNT principle on this one. I am compelled by James500's argument that the topic should certainly pass notability guidelines easily enough with a little effort to securing new sources, but the current version as it stands has so many varied and significant issues with regard to our quality and admissibility standards that I can't see it getting from the current version to his vision of it while retaining any of the present content. Particularly, it was strong issues with regard to WP:WWIN, WP:SUMMARYSTYLE and with the formatting, style and tone of the prose. An encyclopedic summary of the topic of the general legal principle involved could very well prove useful to our readers; this jumbled mess of an attempt to replicate a text detailing highly specific statutes in the idiolect of a law school lecture (complete with powerpoint-style presentation) most certainly is not. I'm also troubled by the apparent COI activity of the single-purpose account. Snow talk 15:37, 8 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

WP:SUMMARYSTYLE is about how we split up articles that have become too long. It has no application to this article which is only 9 kilobytes long and is therefore not eligible to be split up on grounds of length. Even if this article was very long that would not be grounds for deletion.
WP:TNT is only an essay. It contradicts our editing policy (WP:IMPERFECT). Frankly, the argument advanced by that essay is simply wrong. Deleting badly written articles does not result in their being replaced with better articles. What is actually does is to make notable topics disappear forever. In particular, it prevents anonymous users from improving articles, because they cannot recreate a deleted article. Even a truly awful article should normally be stubified rather than deleted. WP:TNT is, in any event, an argument that I would not give a moment's serious attention in the absence of a express promise, on the part of the person advancing that argument, to recreate that article immediately as at least a valid stub.
Citing WP:NOT without further explanation is a WP:VAGUEWAVE. WP:NOT is a very lengthy and multifaceted policy. It is not clear what part or parts of that policy are being invoked.
Issues with formatting, style and tone should never result in the deletion of an article that contains any information (ie facts) that might conceivably be retained in the encyclopedia even if every single sentence needs to be rewritten for stylistic reasons. It is not obvious to me that all of the information presently in this article is useless for creating an encyclopedia.
There is nothing wrong with detailing highly specific statutes if they are relevant.
If an article is written in the idiolect of a lecture, that is at worst an argument that it should be transwikied to Wikiversity (which accepts lectures) using the import process, not deleted.
As "foreign trust" is a term of art in American law, defined, in particular, in the Code of Federal Regulations, it must be, if nothing else, at the very least, a plausible redirect to some broader article in American law (ie the parent topic of foreign trusts). That means it is not eligible for deletion, period (WP:R). This is why terms of art are almost never eligible for deletion and should not normally be nominated for deletion, even if the article is atrocious. James500 (talk) 22:01, 8 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

James, you make some salient points that need addressing, and I'll try to do so in what detail I can in the time I have. Yes, WP:TNT is just an essay, which is why I referenced it as a "principle" (that is, the most reasonable course of action) that I was following as opposed to a guideline. That being said, it's a principle which holds a lot of support from editors with regard to certain contexts (as I'm sure you're well aware from contributing at AfD). Mind you, I understand your reservations (I used to take a universally dimn view of it myself, but have grown to accept its utility in some cases), but I would not have referenced it were there not multiple other policies and standards that the article falls completely short on. As to which sections of WP:NOT I was referencing, they are WP:NOTREPOSITORY (specifically, item 3) and WP:NOTGUIDE (points 6 and 8 in particular) and yes, I should have linked directly to them from the outset. Per the latter section, your position that perhaps this argues more strongly for transwiking to Wikiversity than it does for simple deletion does indeed have some traction; perhaps that is an option we should explore, though from your wording I think perhaps you were just making a rhetorical point and would not necessarily support this. Likewise, the section of WP:SUMMARYSTYLE I was referencing was WP:DETAIL; again, we should not be attempting to replicate a law text, legal code compendiums, or lectures, which is an approach that pretty much every last word of the article as it stands is married to. If we had even a small, but significant, core of text that we could strip the article down to a stub around to form an encyclopedic summary of the topic, I'd probably accept your approach, but at present this is just not a Wikipedia article, but rather something that is outside the project's goals and standards.

Having addressed those points, I just don't agree with your ultimate conclusion. I'm not aware of anywhere in policy where terms of art are afforded a special status with regard to deletion procedures. On the other hand, you seem capable in this area and if you were saying that you were going to make the effort to reform this article into something more encyclopedic, I'd probably have commented here only, instead of voting for a deletion. But as I don't view the editor who is primarily responsible for this article as being experienced enough in our project and priorities to appropriately reform it, I'm still favouring the dynamite. That said, do you have an interest in fixing the article? I for one am willing to change my vote to give you the time, if you are. Snow talk 01:46, 9 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It is not clear to me that NOTREPOSITORY is relevant. It is not clear to me that Stein's writings are only useful when presented in their original unmodified wording. I don't why the information they contain cannot be conflated with new information added from other sources. In fact, since the web page is a dead link and GBooks does not allow users to see a preview the book, it is not clear to me that those writings have in fact been presented in their original unmodified wording. The fact that more than one source has been cited, and the brevity of the article, strongly suggest they have not.
Criteria 6 of NOTGUIDE is not engaged by this article because it does not contain "leading questions and systematic problem solutions as examples" (ie it is talking about specimen examination questions). Nor does this article appear to be an annotated text. Criteria 8 is not engaged as this article does not contain academic language and is not written only for academics. Members of Congress and judges (who presumably invented some of this language) and practising lawyers (to whom the title of Stein's book refers) are certainly not academics. I don't think that everyday readers, including non-lawyers such as investors and litigants, many of whom are far more intelligent than the average lawyer, would have any serious difficulty understanding the language used in this article. I could have understood this article at the age of ten. I can imagine an article on, for example, the tensor calculus necessarily containing far more arcane terminology than this one does. Nor do I think everyday readers expect to be addressed in baby talk. Even if criteria 8 was invoked, it is at most an argument for rewriting an article (eg by explaining jargon that can't be dispensed with altogether as being inappropriate for the context, such as describing a dog as "canis lupus familiaris" in a context that has nothing to do with zoology; and I can't see anything obviously like that in our article).
All WP:DETAIL says is that daughter articles should be more detailed than parent articles. The only way this could possibly be relevant is if the parent article of Foreign trust gives more detail than Foreign trust. Can you identify an article that gives more details about foreign trusts than this one does? WP:DETAIL says nothing about replicating anything. What it does say is that all topics should be covered "very thoroughly" somewhere in the encyclopedia. In any event our article does not, as far as I can see, replicate any legislation. As for "replicating" a lecture, we can use published lectures as sources of information (and we aim to be "the sum of all knowledge", so we don't exclude information for the sake of it) and problems with style are not grounds for deletion because than can be fixed very easily by editing (WP:IMPERFECT). James500 (talk) 10:10, 9 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

James, I don't think you're seeing the forest for the trees here, and I very much disagree with your interpretations of WP:WWIN with regard to this article, but I don't see the point in going down an endlessly recursive process here describing those policies in more and more minute detail when it seems there's zero chance you will be won over to seeing the issues in the article that I do. My position is that the article does not contain content which is suitable to the project at present, and the person who put it there seems to be a single-purpose promotional account with a COI (albeit one who is well-intentioned and thus far not in the least disruptive) whom we can't depend upon with regard to bringing the content in-line with out standards until they have much more experience. That means the content must be removed, which in turns leaves a blanked page which must be deleted, hence my recommendation. This is often the place we come to with single-purpose accounts, because they never have experience in our methods, protocols and priorities but still make their first order of business the creation of an article.

The irony is that as an experienced editor, if you understand the topic to the degree you seem to feel you do, could have, in the time it took you to write any one of the above responses, done a rewrite on the article and I probably would have enthusiastically changed my position. But, honestly meaning no disrespect, you seem to be repeatedly passing up a practical editing solution to this problem in order to try to win the policy argument. We all get caught up in our arguments here on occasion, of course, but if you're devoted first and foremost to keeping the subject matter included in the encyclopedia, perhaps you should focus on viable work-arounds by applying your knowledge of the subject rather than redundant and exhaustive arguments drawn from policy? Snow talk 16:10, 9 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It is not clear to me that the whole content of this article is useless for purposes of this project.
If you do not provide details of what your interpretation of WP:NOT consists of, I cannot respond to that interpretation, and an admin closing this AfD cannot have regard to your undisclosed reasoning.
I have not agreed to do a rewrite on this article because WP:IMPERFECT says that I don't have to, because demanding that every unsatisfactory but notable article that appears at AfD be rewritten within the seven day deadline would be an impossible burden, because there is a strong consensus that there should not be a deadline on rewriting unsatisfactory but notable articles (which would probably take years) and that such a deadline would nullify the whole point of running Wikipedia as a wiki which is to allow incremental improvements to articles over a long period of time because this is known to be more efficient, because if I agree to one demand that I perform a rewrite it would open the floodgates to large numbers of further demands that would be impossible to perform in the time demanded and distract me from dealing with other problems with the encyclopedia, and most importantly, because I simply cannot understand why the person demanding the rewrite refuses to perform it himself.
In the time that you wrote your comments above, you could have done a rewrite on the article. Why are you not prepared to rewrite the article yourself? Why do you insist that I do it for you? James500 (talk) 23:01, 9 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Clearly you are not required to do so and no one ever said anything to remotely suggest you are. But if your priority is to see that an article for this subject is retained on the project, why waste your time here making policy arguments that may be non-starters when there's a practical option available to you that would achieve that same end? And how in doing so would you be doing it "for me"? You'd be doing it for the project and because you are the one who is so strongly of the opinion that this topic should be retained therein; I'm the one who feels that it's current state means that it should be removed to avoid having content up that is so glaringly not policy-consistent. As to why I haven't made the changes myself, the answer is simple: I don't have the requisite first-hand knowledge of these particular legal issues to fix the page with the alacrity you apparently can, if your knowledge in this case is as significant as you've implied. Anyway, I've made position clear here and, again, don't see the point in going around and around on it; we'll just have to wait to see what further voices have to say on the issue. Snow talk 01:42, 10 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

When I believe strongly that an article should be kept, I improve the article. As a matter of fact, I have done so 85 times, and every one of those articles has been kept. I will happily change my recommendation from "delete" to "keep" if an advocate of keeping the article actually improves it to an acceptable state. The article has not been edited since December 24, 2014. Are you up to the challenge, James500? This is an optional request to you. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 03:02, 10 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Cullen, as far as I can see, this article is not in a wholly unacceptable state. The criticisms made against this article appear to me to be either insufficiently serious to justify deletion (AfD isn't cleanup) or simply wrong. James500 (talk) 13:13, 10 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - it is not one of the major 7, or 8, or 12, types of trusts. I don't see how this can be rescued -- and I, too, am infamous for doing so, especially legal articles. Bearian (talk) 20:48, 13 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

WP:MILL is a ludicrous essay that, if followed, would change Wikipedia into the Guiness Book of Records. The fact that it can be invoked against a topic that has received massive coverage, and easily satisfies GNG by a very wide margin, like this one (with hundreds of sources including whole chapters of books), indicates what is wrong with it. You could use that essay to argue for the deletion of all medium sized countries on grounds that they are neither the biggest nor the smallest, and are therefore run of the mill (eg "Belgium isn't particularly large or populous, and isn't a major power: therefore if Chewbacca lives on Endor you must delete Belgium"). The examples given in the essay, where they are not wrong, are based on a misreading of various parts of WP:NOT, and do not support the general principle advanced by the essay. And the concept of a foreign trust (unlike individual foreign trusts) is far removed from those examples, which include individual houses and individual football matches. There is simply no comparison. James500 (talk) 12:50, 14 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

James, you seem to be personalizing this discussion more than a little; certainly I think it should be possible to disagree with the policy positions of another commenter here with analogizing them to a cartoon caricature of non-sequitur spewing spinmaster, don't you? You say that this article should be maintained on the principle that it is a legitimate legal concept that could be theoretically improved upon. The question is, can we be certain such improvement will take place? Yes, the subject could be salvaged with some new content, but the content there now does not meet our guidelines in numerous ways and thus needs to be deleted. So how long do we wait? The article has not been altered substantially since about a month after it was created -- clearly as a companion piece to Jacob Stein -- about a year ago, when the author, having accomplished their narrow purpose here, disappeared without taking the time to better learn what a Wikipedia article actually is and improving the article accordingly -- leaving behind instead something that doesn't look, read, or serve as Wikipedia content. You say there are hundreds of sources that could support this subject, but I don't see hundreds of sources supporting the topic now; I see two references, both apparent plugs of Stein's work. WP:IMPERFECT doesn't override these considerations -- indeed the explicit wording of that blurb points to the very practical distinction that demonstrates why, in that is presumes active work by engaged editors in the improvement of content, a state of affairs that is not at work here (and which apparently isn't going to take place before the close of this AfD, which needs to assess whether there is enough of the current content that can be retained to support an article).

And putting all of these compelling factors aside for a moment, there's something else which concerns me which occurred to me after my last re-read of the article and comments; are we sure this isn't a straight-up copyvio situation? It seems that Lawguru200002 shares a close association with Stein (and may in fact be the same person), and the presentation style certainly seems consistent with a legal texts. I think it's worth looking into. Regardless, it's clear that the content in this namespace at present is not a Wikipedia article and has to go. Whether that means deleting it outright or removing the current content and replacing it with a reasonable encyclopedic summary of the concept really depends on the initiative of anyone who wishes to apply the latter before the inevitable application of the latter, but it's clear that what we cannot do is leave the current mess up as an article indefinitely, which I think is the point everyone here but yourself has converged upon. Snow talk 10:30, 15 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't compare Bearian to anything. The criticism was directed at WP:MILL itself and the counter example that I gave, Belgium, was not suggested by Bearian and is not expressly suggested by the essay. The point that I was trying to make was merely that the essay, when pushed to its logical conclusion produces a result so absurd as to indicate that the principle advanced by the essay is unsound. It wasn't my intention to upset anyone and I'm sorry if what I said was misunderstood. Citing WP:MILL is not a "policy position" because the essay is not a policy. Whilst WP:IMPERFECT and WP:PRESERVE are predicated on the assumption that content will be improved, they do not impose or allow for any kind of deadline. They certainly are not predicated on the assumption that improvement will be started let alone finished within the seven day period of an AfD. I see nothing about a deadline of a year for improvements, and if I was going to impose a deadline (contrary to consensus that there should not be one), I would be more likely to make it ten or twenty or fifty or a hundred years or longer, simply to take into account the sheer size of Wikipedia and the leisurely pace at which editing normally takes place. It is far from uncommon for articles to go five or ten years without much change and then suddenly be drastically overhauled. A year is a short time on Wikipedia. I think that it is reasonable to assume that all Wikipedia articles will be improved eventually, on the assumption that no matter how obscure a topic is (and this one isn't particularly obscure) there will be someone who sufficiently is interested in it to improve the article. (There are a huge number of people in the world and a great many of them have interests in far more arcane topics than this). The number of sources presently cited in the article has no bearing on the notability of topic (WP:NRVE). In determining notability, it is obligatory to use a search engine to look for sources (WP:BEFORE: GBooks is specifically mentioned as one that must be checked). The impression that I got was that there were about three hundred relevant sources in GBooks, IIRC. So, all things considered, I regret that, having regard to our policies, I am unable to agree that any of these factors is grounds for deletion. Nor would I describe a mere three !votes as a convergance, especially where one of those !votes is entirely based on a mere essay (essays carry less weight). Now, moving on to copyvio: if this page is a blatant copyvio, it certainly must be deleted immediately (CSD G12). I was under the impression, however, that we are supposed to check the source to confirm that copying has taken place. If you can get hold of a copy of the sources, and can confirm the article is eligible for deletion on grounds of infringement, I will not oppose deletion on that grounds. That said, I don't believe that copying can be inferred from style alone. Anyone who understands law should be capable of writing something that sounds like it was written by a lawyer. James500 (talk) 21:59, 15 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I agree as regards the necessity for confirmation on copyvio and as such I'm not predicating position on deletion upon it (though I will try to look into the matter, just to be certain -- though I rather suspect the AfD will close before I can put hands on a copy. As to the more germane question of how we balance a patient approach against content that needs improving, I think there's a distinction that needs to be born in mind. As you point out, it's not uncommon (nor necessarily a problem) for an article to go years without substantial improvement. But what distinguishes those stable cases from this one is that the original material (however minimalist and incomplete), still meets with our quality and admissibility standards; it is a Wikipedia article, if only a stub. That's a satisfactory (if less than ideal) state of affairs, while content like that in question (which does not meet those minimal standards for encyclopedic material) is a different matter entirely. Sometimes AfD's are about the usual suspects (notability, forking, ect.), while other times they are just about recognizing that an article is fundamentally broken with regard to numerous, more minute, content issues (these, as in this case, are usually articles created by COI-accounts) and that they can't be expected to improve from their current state through the normal processes. Again, a stub or incomplete article is a different matter from the kind of mess we're looking at here, born of promotional intents by inexperienced non-editors.

On a side note, it only takes two people to "converge" on a given perspective, which is exactly why I chose that wording as opposed to implying established consensus -- though, for the record, there are actually four !votes for deletion, for all that numbers are worth, when we include the expressed position of the nom. Snow talk 02:10, 16 January 2015 (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.