Talk:List of defunct motorcycle speedway teams in the United Kingdom

Merge target

A large number of defunct motorcycle speedway teams have been entered as individual pages, which will have trouble passing notability on their own. I plan to tag them for merge into this list. --Slashme (talk) 05:55, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Looks like there is far too much detail on the individual pages to reduce to a list, though not sure about notability of the individual teams. Keith D (talk) 10:46, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Exactly Keith D - i see he's started meddling with other teams and immediately he has lost some information about Aldershot Shots by merging it into one line in a table. Most of the other teams have far more info that will be lost. This guy is making me very angry interfering in a subject he's not really interested in.

I'm going to start sticking notability tags on things he's interested in soon and call him a vandal if he deletes them. See how he likes it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rml123 (talk • contribs) 12:46, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

I might not have been expressing myself clearly enough here. The intention is not to delete all the teams and simply keep this list. The idea is to create a list; then any teams that are not notable enough to warrant their own pages will at least be listed here. The ones that keep their own pages can be linked to from here. It might indeed turn out that the consensus will be that every speedway team that ever existed is notable enough to warrant an article in an general encyclopedia, but that remains to be seen in due course. Even in that case, though, this list would be useful.

By the way, Rml, I am interested in Wikipedia as a project, not just each individual topic. I would not be unduly concerned if you were to put notability tags on any articles that I am working on. Either they're notable, or they're not notable. If the notability cannot be established, they should indeed be deleted. However, please keep in mind that you should not disrupt Wikipedia to make a point, so consider your actions carefully. --Slashme (talk) 14:19, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

But by putting merge tags on to articles you are saying that the article should be merged into this article. This you cannot do without loss of information. The idea of a merge is to preserve the information not to get rid of it. Keith D (talk) 15:12, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

In some cases, such as the Exeter Falcons, there is no question of non-notability, so I didn't even bother putting up a merge tag. I also agree that some of the merge tags were a bit over-zealous, and I will sort this out over the weekend.

Remember, the merge tag is just a suggestion, and it can have at least these three possible outcomes:

1 The merge can be completed, with all the notable information in the article ending up on the merge target article, and the stand-alone article being deleted.

2 The information that is relevant to the merge target can be placed there, but the stand-alone page can be kept as encyclopedic and notable in its own right.

3 The merge can simply be discarded as a bad idea, and the tag can be removed.

In this case, I think #2 might apply to most if not all of the articles in question. In my opinion some of the articles (such as the one on the Carmarthen Dragons, which originally started my involvement in this issue) are not notable per se, and should fall under #1, but I think that this list would be useful to the project, so #3 should not apply to any of the pages.

One might contend that this list is a duplication of the information in Category:Speedway Defunct teams, but I disagree: it will contain more information on the teams, and if some of the teams are not notable in the eyes of the community (Remember that membership of a class of items does not imply notability!), their information would be preserved here. --Slashme (talk) 13:00, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Removed prod template

I removed the prod template (the template specifically says that it should be deleted when the issues have been addressed). I strongly believe that this page will be useful, partly because in the process of filling in the gaps, one can update the other pages, and partly because it provides a nice summary of the information. By the way, there is a "citation needed" tag after one of the dates in the list, because I couldn't tell which date to put there from the page. --Slashme (talk) 16:25, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Merging, continued discussion

I have removed the merge tags from most of the team pages, as most of them are clearly notable, but there are a few left that I have doubts about.

I can see that a significant amount of work has already been put into giving accurate information with good sources for the speedway teams, and I don't want to give the impression that I don't think that speedway teams (current or defunct) belong on Wikipedia. However, a team that operated for one season and never won anything and which had little or no impact on the world in general or even speedway racing in particular is in my opinion not notable by the standards of Wikipedia. --Slashme (talk) 16:25, 19 July 2008 (UTC)