Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?


 * 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. The fact that I have spent the better part of an hour looking at the arguments show what an interesting discussion this was - and I would like to thank everyone who took part. Not surprisingly, this AfD is as controversial as the subject matter. I note that a few of the 'keep' contingent appear to do a lot of editing in the race-and-intelligent areas. While this is not a problem in and of itself (we have a lot of editors who focus on one area in which they are knowledgeable and/or interested), in light of this their 'keep's are hardly surprising. The main argument for keeping is that this article has been much-cited and is regarded as important in its field. The main argument for deleting is that it is a POV fork. I feel that those arguing for its deletion have sufficient weight behind their arguments to just push the decision towards a delete. With regard to the claims of sockpuppetry/meatpuppetry, I see no evidence of this - the majority of the contributors on both side of the debate are accounts which have been around for a while. If you suspect this to be a case of sockpuppeting, please take this to WP:SPI --  Phantom Steve / talk &#124; contribs \ 18:28, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I have been asked to expand on the "POV fork" aspect, so I will do so briefly. Pleae do not comment on this rationale on this page - should you wish to discuss it, then you can do so at the AfD's talk page (or on my talk page) - but please note that as far as I am concerned, the issue is now closed.
 * The deleted article was not about the controversy arising from the article; the argument for it being a POV fork is partly the fact that criticisms of the article were not present in the article. There is also the fact that it appears to be an offshoot of the content dispute around Race and Intelligence. As  said "[articles on Race and IQ, Jenson and the controversy] are legitimate articles because they are on notable topics. This article is or will be mentioned in each of these articles. It is obvious to me that an article on an article fails the notability test. This is POV pushing." - this very much sums up what I believe to be the "POV fork" argument in a nutshell. Please bear in mind that as the closing admin, my purpose is not to provide my opinion (if I wanted to do that, I would !vote myself) - it is to judge the consensus. In this case, although the arguments for keeping the article were good, I feel that the balance was just in favour of deletion as a POV fork. I hope this explains my reasoning more clearly, and will be helpful should anyone consider re-creating this article in the future. --  Phantom Steve / talk &#124; contribs \ 07:00, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?

 * – ( View AfD View log  •  )

This article was created by copy-pasting content added mostly yesterday by me to History of the race and intelligence controversy without any proper discussion. The summary of the paper in the 1995 book by Adrian Wooldridge is essential to the history article. From comments on the talk page of the history article, and  appear to have created this article as a POV-fork, although so far they have not provided any extra sources or material. Mathsci (talk) 11:09, 3 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete JNN Hipocrite (talk) 11:15, 3 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep. First of all, I didn't create this article; I merely approved of its creation.  But more importantly, the reason it doesn't have any information that isn't in the R & I history article is because it was only created a few hours ago.  Over the next few days, I intend to add some additional information in order to flesh it out, and DJ probably will also, as long as you don't attempt to prevent us from doing this in order to maximize the chances of it being deleted. --Captain Occam (talk) 11:18, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Note that I've now added another source (Nyuborg's article) which isn't used by the R & I history article, and can be used to provide more detail about the reactions to Jensen's paper. --Captain Occam (talk) 11:30, 3 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete. Moron admins who don't follow the licensing rules should be criticized as well. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.190.187.183 (talk) 11:23, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment - please keep this discussion WP:CIVIL Claritas (talk) 11:40, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep: Jensen's 1969 HER article How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? is certainly one of the most frequently cited pieces of academic (not "popular science") writing in the field of modern psychometrics; Google Scholar lists 2432 individual citations. It has been extensively analysed and commented upon by a large number of academics. Even those who have railed against its conclusions have described it as "famous" (Sternberg; Wolpert & Richards). I see no credible arguments against notability here. If there is a content conflict between this article and History of the race and intelligence controversy, that can be sorted out through discussion and additional editing. In any event, it doesn't make this article a POV violation. I have no interest in editing the article, but I applaud the effort, and feel confident that, given time to develop, the article will be improved greatly. -- Aryaman (talk) 12:07, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete - an article on an...article? Does not seem like there is any sound rationale being provided for how this meets WP:N.  Seems like people are confusing the the subject matter within the article with the article itself.  Not exactly the Magna Carta here. Tarc (talk) 12:55, 3 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I recommend that you look through the some of the commentary on this paper provided by a citation search with Google scholar. A large portion of them are discussing the article itself, not just its subject matter, and they include several collective statements by major scientific organizations such as the APA and the AAA.  I would venture to say that this paper is one of the ten most heavily-discussed psychology articles of the 20th century. --Captain Occam (talk) 13:18, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * On the WP article on Arthur Jensen, there is a break down of the citations. It's usually mentioned in books as one of the most notorious articles in psychology. It's discussed in his BLP and in the history article, both of which give it context. The current article would only duplicate that material, unless it is a POV-fork, which seems to be the stated intention of the creator(s) in the diff I provided. Mathsci (talk) 13:51, 3 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Comment Interesting question this. Do we count articels in the same way we would books? After all if a book is discused and disected at length we would consider it notable.81.158.169.99 (talk) 13:40, 3 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep Wikipedia articles which cover notable books and article are quite common and useful. There are many examples. Should I provide some? I take no position on the current quality of the article or its sourcing. Those looking for a good source should consult Loehlin et al . David.Kane (talk) 14:52, 3 May 2010 (UTC)


 *  Weak keep Delete (wow, there is already a super-long coverage in History_of_the_race_and_intelligence_controversy, in the proper context) A scientific article is usually considered "less important" than a book, so it would require good quality sources talking about how important it is. If it's only notable inside a certain field then it should appear inside the article devoted to that field.


 * For Albert Einstein, if you look at Category:Works by Albert Einstein, then you will see that the only paper with its own article is very long German title, which was a field-changing paper.


 * I think that the sources sort of show that Jensen's paper changed the field beyond being a controversy-causing field that raised public awareness. And I think that there are sources that actually enter into discussing the gory details of the article itself and its significance into the context of the field like and . In other words, there is enough material to make a neutral and balanced article on the paper (which means, please include also the criticisms and explain how and when his theories were invalidated/superseded by later research. Please don't make an acritical article that recounts the excellences of jensen's article, because that would be a POV fork to avoid criticism and it would have to deleted/merged back into the main article). --Enric Naval (talk) 14:57, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Enric, the dispute over this paper is well chronicled in books and in fact on wikipedia. History of the race and intelligence controversy describes the paper carefully and lists the numerous problems that were pointed out with it. It is a notorious paper which has not changed science; instead it has sparked more controversy than any other paper in psychology. That is why it is only appropriate to discuss in a more general context, with prior history and subsequent events. There are plenty of groundbreaking papers in which do not have their own article and are not based on notoriously flawed data (Cyril Burt). The appropriate place to discuss this paper is where the original content was created (the history article) and Arthur Jensen's BLP. Reading the book of Wooldridge might give you a clearer idea. As far as I can tell Jensen's article has had almost no positive impact on academic research. Mathsci (talk) 16:59, 3 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete as POV fork arising from Talk:History of the race and intelligence controversy. Creation appears to have been a tactic in the long-running content dispute related to Race and Intelligence, subject of a very large currently active ANI thread which is proposing to topic-ban quite a few of this AfD's "keep" proponents as agenda-driven single purpose accounts.  They are trying to spread This has the effect of spreading the drama to more venues.  I have some sympathy with Enric Naval's "weak keep" argument since the Jensen article is very widely cited.  We may be able to have an acceptable neutral article about it some day, depending on due-weight considerations raised by creating special prominence for this one topic by putting it in a separate article in a group of several closely related articles without justifying the splitting by WP:SIZE of existing articles.  However, there is no deadline and the battleground issues surrounding this article make us better off without it for the moment even if it's a valid topic.  Its content can be saved to a sandbox for later re-use if that looks helpful.  69.228.170.24 (talk) 15:15, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Response to DJ and Captain Occam: 1) I edited my above comment slightly to improve its AGF. 2) The problem with this article is it creates a fait accompli in the middle of the edit dispute, so that opponents now have to battle over yet another article if they want to bring it towards neutrality (article was created by proponents of what mediation determined was a minority view).  Mathsci (the AfD nominator) made an error of judgment in the earlier talkpage in agreeing to this article's creation while at the same time predicting that it would be a POV fork.  It's just not helpful from a drama-containment perspective. 69.228.170.24 (talk) 04:18, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Weak Keep First -- so much for WP:AGF. As far as I'm concerned creating this article was a good faith effort to fix a problem that had tacit approval from multiple editors. Second -- the body of this article was growing into a massive paragraph at History of the race and intelligence controversy. Discussion of its content was overloading the main article. The historical discussion was getting lost while at the same time it wasn't possible to really explain what this paper said. Re: Enric Naval's comment: Race and intelligence would be the most appropriate place for a full discussion of what the contemporary views on this topic are. But I believe this paper is a lot like The Bell Curve, and an article about it could be similar situated. --DJ (talk) 16:43, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep, as per DJ. Claritas (talk) 17:02, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete Guys, this is simple and I ask all the weak keepers to reconsider.  Look: we will have an article on Jensen.  We willl have an article on Race and IQ, and we will have an article on the history of the controversy.  These are legitimate articles because they are on notable topics.  This article is or will be mentioned in each of these articles.  It is obvious to me that an article on an article fails the notability test.  This is POV pushing. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 17:37, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Does the same argument apply to The Bell Curve? What about Snyderman and Rothman (study) or Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns? I think that Jensen's article is every bit as notable as these entries. David.Kane (talk) 18:02, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * The Bell Curve is a book, I have always felt notable books merit their own articles. You mention another article and yes I would apply the same criteria: to what extent are or should those article be used prominently in other articles?  If it is relied on extensively as a source in other article, I would vote to delete it too.  I think major statements from profssional organizations as a rule are more notable than journal articles, so I would be less likely to vote to delete the statement. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 20:41, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * We have an article on cold fusion. Yet there are no separate wikipedia articles on the original papers of Fleischmann and Pons. The present situation - a questionable paper by Jensen relying on questionable data (Burt) with an ensuing unresolved controversy - seems quite similar. Mathsci (talk) 20:54, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete - per 69.228 and Slrubenstein. POV fork and copyvio. Beyond My Ken (talk) 18:22, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Copyvio ? It was copied from wikipedia, which is Creative Commons, so no copyright applies here. Claritas (talk) 18:29, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Claritas, you know very well that wikipedia articles are not written by copying and pasting from other wikipedia articles. If that is the basis on which you act as a recent changes patroller, perhaps you should look for a mentor. Mathsci (talk) 20:57, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Claritas, when you edit any page, you'll see below the edit box the words "You irrevocably agree to release your contributions under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license." What this means is that material on Wikipedia canbe used by anyone, as long as attribution to the original contributors is given.  This material was moved here by copying-and-pasting without reference to the contributors who originally added it, hence it is a copyright violation, albeit an internal one, not an external one. Beyond My Ken (talk) 00:01, 4 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Isn’t this problem relatively easy to fix without deleting the whole article? I imagine that most or all of the text that’s currently borrowed from the other article will be replaced soon as this article is expanded.  (Remember, it’s still less than a day old at this point.)  If it’s not acceptable to wait that long, we could also include an attribution of some sort until then. --Captain Occam (talk) 03:17, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
 * You seriously do not understand Wikipedia policy. All content on Wikipedia can be "edited, used and redeistrubted at will", and this includes its use on other Wikipedia articles. Attribution is not relevant here, because the same legal entity (Wikimedia foundation) owns the copyright for all articles. As for copy and paste, although an article which is only a copy and paste of other Wikipedia content can be speedily deleted (see WP:CSD), this article has already been developed beyond that, and there is obvious scope for further development. I suggest you read the relevant guidelines. Claritas (talk) 14:58, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
 * You still need to attribute the content to the original author of the text. To make a long story short: the content is still copyrighted by its original authors, who have simply released it on a series of conditions outlined in those licenses, one of those conditions being that the original author is credited when you copy the text.


 * (that being said, this could be solved by saying "text copied from [diff of article before extraction of the text]" because then people can check the author list of the other article). --Enric Naval (talk) 16:31, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Exactly. Please read the edit summary of the article, where such a statement was made. Claritas (talk) 16:37, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Just to make sure there's no violation, we could also add a copyright note to the top of the talk page, like the one here. --Captain Occam (talk) 01:45, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I added one. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:49, 10 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete as a POV fork and redirect to Arthur Jensen. Wapondaponda (talk) 11:42, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Social science-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 17:15, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Education-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 17:15, 4 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Comment - In response to the complaints that this article only duplicates information that’s also in History of the race and intelligence controversy, I've expanded the description of the reactions to Jensen's paper in order to cover them in more depth than the R & I history article does, using a source that isn't used by the other article. People who voted "delete" based on the fact that this article only contained information that was already in another article might want to reconsider their opinion based on the changes I've made. --Captain Occam (talk) 23:28, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
 * The material added so far by Captain Occam seems to confirm that this is a POV-fork. There is no detailed discussion at all of academic criticisms of the paper: eg Cyril Burt's name is not mentioned, even though his flawed twin study was the main source for Jensen's statements on heritability. (Captain Occam also removed some of that material from the history article on the grounds that it was non-neutral and because the 4 page summary in Wooldridge was too short to be used as a source.) The new source is by Helmuth Nyborg, a controversial figure himself, briefly suspended from his academic post as professor of psychology in Denmark in 2006 and subsequently reprimanded for gross negligent conduct. The source, from a tribute to Jensen, is problematic - it is written by a known polemicist and could be expected to be one-sided - and is at odds with most other accounts in standard textbooks on the history of psychology. The extra paragraphs and additional cherry-picked comments in the article give the appearance that Jensen's critics, even from professional bodies in pyschology and anthropology, were objecting to Jensen's research purely on ideological grounds, i.e. on the grounds that it was racist. That is a misrepresentation of the academic world and of the bulk of scholarly criticism: it is not borne out by any textbooks. The 1973 petition was in fact an October 1973 letter "A Resolution against Racism" in the New York Times organised by Students for a Democratic Society. There is a lot of POV-pushing here: most significantly the pushing of the view of Jensen and his followers that the reaction to his paper was a form of Neo-Lysenkoism, the demonization of Jensen (Nyborg's own term). The article in its present form seems now to be at odds with the BLP of Arthur Jensen. That article states that the paper is so often cited because of its notoriety, not because of any academic merit. Mathsci (talk) 07:24, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict with Mathsci) Hum, it's still out of context. No mention of the racial debate at that time, for example. It says that he was called a racist, but it doesn't say why he was called a racist (because of arguing that racial minorities should be taught in a different way, because there would be learning differences between blacks and whites, if I read this correctly. In other words, blacks are dumber / blacks use a more primitive thought process, somewhat similar to Jung's ideas of primitive tribes). No mention of the propaganda campaign by Pioneer Fund. No mention of being fired from Berkeley because of the paper. No mention of being at the same time as the "Burt Affair". All these things are in the history article but not in this article. Additionally, the words "black" and "white" only appear in the "summary" section, and there was no link to the article that details the history of the controversy! (I just added one in the See Also section). Race and intelligence should be linked in the lead. Still looks like a POV fork, and if it was complete then it would repeat tons of content from the history article. (I see that Mathsci found similar problems). --Enric Naval (talk) 07:52, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment: "Blacks are dumber"? Um... no. Jensen favours an individualistic approach, which would include taking each child's strengths and weaknesses into account. Saying that "associative learning" is for "dumb people" - a commonly held opinion among practising educators - is exactly the kind of thing Jensen was trying to correct. The study showed that by rewarding cognitive learning only, the educational system is systematically discriminating against individuals who do not excel in cognitive learning but who may excel in associative learning. In other words, the educational system is not taking variations in learning strategies into account and, as learning strategies do not distribute evenly among racial groups, thus enforcing racial disparities in educational outcomes rather than mitigating them, as it should.


 * Why do people take such pleasure in misunderstanding this man? I guess it's easier to hate the guy than it is to actually read his work. Enjoy. -- Aryaman (talk) 13:17, 5 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Eric, Mathsci: the reason this article is missing certain things is because it’s only existed for a few days.  I’ve been adding stuff to it as best I can, but I’m sure there’s still a lot more to add.  If you think it’s missing things that it ought to cover, why don’t you work on actually improving it, rather than just complaining and trying to get it deleted? --Captain Occam (talk) 07:43, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Ahem, the parts of the article that are carefully sourced were written by me, and were copy-pasted from the history article. The large amount of extra content added later from Nyborg is WP:UNDUE and fails WP:NPOV. If this is the intended stable form of the new article, then it is fairly evidently just a POV-fork, pushing a very particular point of view. Since it doesn't add any useful extra content to wikipedia, the only way I can think of improving this article at the moment is by making it into a redirect to Arthur Jensen. Mathsci (talk) 08:09, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * If you don’t want this to be the finished stable form of the article, then it doesn’t have to be. Nothing at Wikipedia is ever “finished”.  The important thing is just that the detailed reactions to Jensen’s paper (including statements from the APA and the AAA, among other organizations) are notable enough that they ought to be covered somewhere on Wikipedia.


 * The reason the article relies so heavily on Nyborg for this is because it was one of the few possible sources for it that you didn’t reject out of hand, as you did for all six of the sources that VA suggested here, as well as the additional sources proposed by him and DJ later in the discussion.  When you refuse to accept the vast majority of sources that discuss certain notable pieces of information, our options for how to describe them are kind of limited.  If you can find another source discussing the reactions to Jensen’s paper that you want to add in order to balance the Nyborg material, though, you’re welcome to do so. --Captain Occam (talk) 08:52, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * This is an AfD discussion. It is not the talk page of either History of the race and intelligence controversy or How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?, which I do not edit. Please don't try to divert this discussion off-topic. Mathsci (talk) 09:12, 7 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete The contents of this article is a subject of great interest mainly to the SPA race editors (see WP:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents/History of the race and intelligence controversy), and the article is simply a POV fork allowing those SPA editors to yet again unduly focus on Jensen's dubious claims. Johnuniq (talk) 01:28, 9 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep. It's obvious from reading many of the comments here that most are ignorant of Jensen's views and his impact on the field. That to me screams that a balanced article on this is needed. You'd be hard pressed to find another single article or book (i.e., scholarly contribution) that has had more impact on psychology over the last 50 years. One criterion for a good scientific contribution is that it be "fruitful" (generate lots of interest which then contributes to the *peer reviewed* literature). No doubt this article did that, which to me makes it wiki-worthy. -Bpesta22 (talk) 13:44, 10 May 2010 (UTC) — Bpesta22 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.


 * Tarc, I can see from the edit history that this unsigned small-text comment about Bpesta22 is from you. Why is it necessary to make anonymous disparaging remarks about the other editors in an AFD discussion?  If the arguments being presented in favor of deletion hold water, shouldn’t efforts like this to diminish the impact of the “keep” votes not be necessary?


 * Considering that several of the delete votes are also from SPAs (i.e. Wapondaponda), as well as from anonymous IPs (one of which has no prior contributions outside of this AFD discussion), it’s hard for me to assume good faith about your needing to point this out specifically in Bpesta22’s case. For the record, the reason he’s an SPA is because he’s a cognitive psychologist who’s published peer-reviewed research about IQ, and who was enlisted to help us with the race and intelligence article because it was tagged as needing attention from an expert. --Captain Occam (talk) 16:01, 10 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Comment - I suspect that some abuse of sockpuppets/meatpuppets has been going on here. Claritas (talk) 16:31, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
 * 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.