Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Timeline of historic inventions

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 speedy keep. The Helpful One 23:36, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Timeline of historic inventions[edit]

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About 5-10% of the edits were by user:jagged 85, a notoriously badly researched and sloppy Islamic POV pusher. His edits were done in 44 blocks, which have been listed, either people should go through the list and remove his work (roughly 10 hours person hours work to do that maybe), or we should completely trash the entire article and start again (I can't begin to estimate how many hours work that would take, probably hundreds). The article is about 50-100 pages, most of which is well meant by others. Please vote either, KEEP (and fix) or DELETE if you want it blanked (I propose by default we should keep the history, unless you specifically vote for a complete delete). Rememberway (talk) 21:36, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not at all sure this is the right place. Over here you reverted the article content with the edit summary rv: and called for deletion review- it's the only way to be fair. But this is AFD, not DR William M. Connolley (talk) 21:50, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Yes, this is very, very poorly done. However, it meets the criteria for WP:NOTABILITY because it can be a very good historical article. It's gonna take a lot of work to clean up, but it has too much potential to just delete.. We need to just delete the stuff that seems quite unnecessary to mention and just start over with the very good stuff on there. It's gonna take a LOT of work. But it should be done. Soxrock24 (talk) 21:46, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This AFD is an abuse of process. No-one (as far as I know) is proposing to delete the article. Therefore I vote speedy keep; this AFD should simply be closed as meaningless. Since there is no proposal to delete the article, any discussion here isn't going to be meaningful. Anyone interested in the article *content* should join the discussion on the article talk page William M. Connolley (talk) 21:48, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This is just a bad faith personal attack. This venue is precisely intended to discuss whether articles should be scratched out or not. They didn't delete the article and start rebuilding it, they just deleted and left it.Rememberway (talk) 22:06, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy close. Rememberway is clearly unaware that his proposal is incongruent with WP guidelines. Afd are not platforms for votes on particular contents, but on whether a topic is notable as such or not. The current proposal is mixing the two things and trying to make a keep for the article a thumbs up for its present contents. This is clearly not in accordance with Afd guidelines, the admin should immediately abort this Afd, subject missed. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 21:51, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Stub as editors have been doing and rebuild. Having an article which is demonstrably 20% incorrect (for example) is worse than having no article. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 21:54, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Presumably it's 80% correct though? And people are supposed to check references.Rememberway (talk) 22:06, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No, we cannot presume anything. Gun Powder Ma did a quick check of only a subset of items and listed all the errors found. Stub the article and add items after references have been verified. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 22:17, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy close as improper. If nominator wants this discussed on AfD, they should follow proper process – but an RfC seems a more reasonable approach. Also, AfD is not a voting booth, and nominators should refrain from giving instructions on how people should "vote". --Lambiam 21:55, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see what the problem is they're saying that the article doesn't meet the "relevant criteria for content" for the Wikipedia and are planning to axe the lot. That's a deletion. Fine, if there is consensus.Rememberway (talk) 21:58, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: The person that 'stubbed' the article did a delete of all the material and simply left it for 4 days until some anonymous reverted it, that in my book is a delete, in which case there should be a deletion review. YMMV.Rememberway (talk) 22:13, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Who are saying that the article doesn't meet the "relevant criteria for content"? One of the content requirements – not for an article to exist, but a requirement on what can be included in an existing article – is that the claims made in the article are verifiable. In this case we know that one editor has been extraordinarily diligent in putting large amounts of fabrication into the article, which means it is totally unreliable: no one knows what can be trusted and what not. So should we keep that article with all its falsehoods in full view of unsuspecting readers who don't know what has been going on here? Of course not. So that is why it has been reduced to a stub in order to rebuild it reliably, which is essentially different from deletion. --Lambiam 22:18, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Spot on. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 22:23, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In my opinion, there's no credible way to rebuild the article after as you put it 'stubbing' it, so this amounts to a deletion. You can't copy material from the old article without checking that it wasn't done by Jagged, and there's no easy way to do that (there is a history search tool, but it's dog-slow). And there's also issues that Jagged deleted stuff, so you'd never find that material in the old article. The article is 9 years old, and 80-95% of it is nothing to do with Jagged.Rememberway (talk) 22:39, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

But if we kept it we could remove 100% of jagged's work with just a few hours work, with complete certainty, simply by going through the 44 diffs of his edits.Rememberway (talk) 22:41, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy keep and polite warning: if the extent of your argument is that there's too many Muslim inventors... we might need to create a reflective mirror on the WP:NPOV guideline for your own benefit. This is not what AFD is for. It's not even what Wikipedia is for. It's forgivable but you have to accept verified fact and the ordinary editing process. Shooterwalker (talk) 22:52, 27 April 2011 (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.