Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Northwestern Europe

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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 keep‎. Cleanup can continue outside of this discussion. Star Mississippi 21:24, 23 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Northwestern Europe[edit]

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Northwestern Europe (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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WP:OR WP:SYNTH, full of generalisations and out-of-context quote mining of contradictory definitions. Already removed a lot of bogus sources that were nothing more than googling for a term and then citing whatever comes up, ignoring context, disregarding inconsistencies in an uncritical pursuit of confirming one's own beliefs. Most additions were done by now-blocked User:Madreterra (blocked for.... "persistent addition of unsourced content)". My prod was deprodded by Necrothesp, who thought it needs to go for a full AfD, so here it is. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 16:37, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agree, WP:OR WP:SYNTH are both applicable to this article. Conceptually I can see how a wiki page on Northwestern Europe could be defensible and a great page, but in its current form this isn't close to that. Vote delete WilsonP NYC (talk) 17:10, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think there is no solid conceptual ground either, because the term is only used sparingly, in wildly different contexts, and everyone defines it ad hoc, for the purposes of whatever story they want to tell, or whatever research they want to do, or whatever graph they want to show. There is no long-term commitment to "Northwestern Europe" as an enduring concept and analytical category in the sources that I checked, and therefore no commitment to defining it consistently. In other words: everyone makes it up as they go along, and this article is an arbitrary sample of people making definitions up as they go along. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 17:18, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
PS: My edit summaries may help explain just how random and SYNTH it all is. As I noted, most references are a URL which is literally someone typing in the words "northwestern europe is defined as" into Google Books, clicking on whatever looks cool, copypasting the URL into this page and then thinking they've "proven" something, disregarding contradictions and context. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 17:30, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete or redirect to Regions of Europe. Reviewing the sources, it seems some don't even use the term "Northwestern Europe", and in others they use a lowercase "northwestern Europe", using simple compass directions in a brief usage without defining a specific region. Perhaps Nordic race should have more relevant geographic discussion with those sources, but I agree that this article seems like synthesis because there's not much discussion of the region as a whole and how it may be consistently described. The ethnographic definitions seem like broad generalizations that are rarely consistent with geography. One can make directional references to any place with one's own definition, but without more established meaning than pointing out the obvious of what "northwest" and "europe" mean, or finding more in-depth and universal discussion, I don't see the need for this. Reywas92Talk 18:02, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    My thoughts exactly. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 18:55, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and United Kingdom. Spiderone(Talk to Spider) 18:54, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, but improve. Looking at other Wiki articles, it appears to be quite specifically defined by the EU as a development region, in addition to its rather looser cultural definitions. So although it may be poorly sourced and written, my sense is that it definitely worth a topic as a geographical area tightly defined by a major international body and also, more loosely, but nonetheless meaningfully by historians, geographers and other specialists. Bermicourt (talk) 21:22, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    it appears to be quite specifically defined by the EU as a development region What do you base that on? The European Union is not mentioned anywhere in the article. Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, the UK (unfortunately), and Switzerland are not even in the EU. How is the EU supposed to define a set of countries a "development region" if it has no jurisdiction over half of them? Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 21:51, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    RE: [The development region] is not mentioned anywhere in the article. It is now. Guliolopez (talk) 01:15, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    So "North-West Europe" is an interreg comprising "Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Netherlands and parts of France and Germany." As I suspected this excludes Iceland, Faroe Islands, Norway, UK, but also Sweden and Denmark, and "parts of France and Germany", and also Switzerland. Completely different from the given definition and map. Starting to think this should be a DP if anything. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 06:34, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. And remove or cleanup the OR/SYNTH. Based on the sources returned in my own WP:BEFORE (some of which I've added to the article), it seems that the topic (the term) has notability and a breadth of coverage in geographic, history, military and other works. While, per the nom, the article has become a COATRACK for OR, SYNTH and editorial on ethnographic and genetic content (neither section being, to my read and per the notes in the nom, supported by the linked sources), those issues can be addressed without deletion. Guliolopez (talk) 01:10, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I appreciate your improvements. As noted above, I'm starting to think this is going to become a list of definitions about different things rather than an article. But even if we were to make this a DP, I'm afraid all entries would fail WP:GNG.
    E.g. interreg#Strand B: transnational cooperation shows these are temporary programmes. Interreg North Sea Programme is the only one with a standalone article and I'm not sure it meets GNG either. If it does, and this NWE programme as well, then this whole article must be renamed and rescoped and purged to fit the interreg project, otherwise it is still a WP:COATRACK. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 06:49, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I've removed more SYNTHed and UNSOURCED stuff that were reductionist generalisations about religion and language families. Simplistic attempts to cast "Northwestern Europe" as "Germanic" and "Protestant" seem like ethnolinguistic pan-nationalist ideas, and are probably the reason why "Germanic-speaking Europe" and "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant" were included in the See also section. I had already removed the latter as being too tangentially connected, but we should probably be removing the former as well. Given that the purported region is home to millions of speakers of Romance, Uralic, Celtic, Turkic, Semitic and other non-Germanic language families, as well as being home to millions of Catholics, atheists/agnostics/humanists, Muslims, and other non-Protestants, such generalisations really don't pass the pub test. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 08:57, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I'm considering either declaring this an unnecessary content fork or a valid entity discussed in academic literature. Awaiting further comments. Draken Bowser (talk) 07:56, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. It's a real geography, supported by WP:SIGCOV quality sources, just lesser used. WP should absolutely also carry and discuss these. In other cases, nominator addresses the WILD GROWTH of articles around such geographies, organizations or ethnicities, nominations I support. Here he is questioning whether we should keep the core in such cases. According to WP:NEXIST, we should. No concern here of WP:OR, WP:SYNTH, or WP:COATRACK beyond minor stuff that can be removed in simple cleanup. And WP:AFDISNOTCLEANUP! The concept is out there, recognized, just not that frequently used in comparison to other subdivisions of Europe. gidonb (talk) 13:59, 18 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Sources:
  • Europe; Volume II: the North-West: Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel. Chisholm, Geo. G. Published by Edward Stanford, London, 1902.
  • Monkhouse , Francis J. The Geography of Northwestern Europe. New York: Praeger, 1966. 528p.
  • Boesch, H., Monkhouse, F. J. (1967) The Geography of Northwestern Europe. Economic Geography, 43 (4). 369pp. doi:10.2307/143256
  • North Western Europe: A Systematic Approach. Morris, Joseph Acton. UK: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1973. ISBN 9780174440307
gidonb (talk) 02:13, 19 August 2023 (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.
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