Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of right-wing publications in the United Kingdom (2nd nomination)


 * 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. postdlf (talk) 23:25, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

List of right-wing publications in the United Kingdom
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Unreferenced POV article. Indiscriminate collection of articles that lists The Times and The Daily Telegraph with neo-Nazi publications. If some sources describe a newspaper right-wing, we cannot simply accept that opinion as fact. The list of far right publication will be better suited in an article titled List of neo-Nazi publications or something like that. And I believe the article List of liberal publications in the United Kingdom is also problematic. For example The Guardian is a well-known left-wing newspaper, not a liberal one. Reference Desker (talk) 12:26, 3 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete both These political labels are too subjective, relative and open to change. The lists thus violate WP:NPOV and WP:SOAP. Colonel Warden (talk) 20:15, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United Kingdom-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 23:46, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 23:47, 3 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment - I think that the concept "List of X publications in Y country" is a valid one. The problem comes in strictly defining and limiting X. This particular list is not acceptable for POV reasons because it lumps together mainstream conservative and neo-fascist publications as if they are not differentiable. Which, of course, would lead to conservatives being pissed off and making their own list lumping together, for example, a List of left-wing publications in the United States including the New York Times and The Nation with the publications of the Progressive Labor Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party. And around and around we go with edit wars, AfD challenges, vandalism, and so on, as the partisan mice play. If one wants to make a List of neo-fascist publications in the United Kingdom, that would seem fine. If one wants to make a List of conservative publications in the United Kingdom, that would also seem fine. Those would be valid navigational tools that would be of service to Wikipedia users... But not this POV-inspired mixed list. Carrite (talk) 04:56, 4 April 2011 (UTC) last edit: Carrite (talk) 05:10, 4 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete as it stands, without prejudice to recreation of properly sourced. Might be a case for an article that lists publications regarded as right-wing by third-party sources if these are listed, but this is simply the author's opinion. Also, note that not everyone agrees fascists are automatically right-wing - certainly the BNP aims itself at the underdog (provided the underdog isn't gay, black, Arab or Jewish). Chris Neville-Smith (talk) 07:35, 4 April 2011 (UTC)


 * strong NPOV cleanup, then see what's left Carrite hit it on the head, the trick is the inclusion criteria which must be specific and verifiable.  For this purpose self-identification or a wide-spread and non-controversial attribution should be the standard in my opinion.  By wide-spread and non-controversial I mean that every political party loves to tag anyone that writes critically of them as biased, those claims should not be taken as a reliable source. HominidMachinae (talk) 09:07, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
 * "not acceptable for POV reasons because it lumps together mainstream conservative and neo-fascist publications as if they are not differentiable" Rubbish. It lists mainstream conservative publications under the section heading Right wing and neo-fascist publications under Far right. By the same token, all we ever hear at AfD nowadays is interminable whining about how articles are PoV because the content has to be judged for inclusion. PoV describes the decision by authors in creating content, not the process of choosing what goes in an article. If editing were PoV, then the process of judging content to be PoV would itself be PoV. Enough of this crap. Anarchangel (talk) 11:45, 4 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep Nom asserts that we cannot accept the interpretation of reliable sources. "If some sources describe a newspaper right-wing, we cannot simply accept that opinion as fact" Have a little look at WP:V: "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth: whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true." Delete voters here are quite happy about judging publications to be "mainstream conservative" and "neo-fascist", yet declare themselves incapable of making those distinctions when it comes to defining inclusion. The deletion arguments disprove themselves.Anarchangel (talk) 11:45, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The trouble is that it is too much of a value-judgement. It's like having lists of well-written publications, lowbrow publications, serious publications, evil publications, successful publications &c.  Newspapers and magazines, by their nature, contain a large number of different items in each issue, written by numerous authors from numerous perspectives.  In this respect they are like Wikipedia which is variously accused of being left-wing, populist, US-biased, &c.  One can cherry-pick examples of sources and details to support such positions but this is the stuff of polemical op-ed, not encyclopaedic fact.  It is our policy to keep polemics out of Wikipedia. Colonel Warden (talk) 12:30, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I vote for all scholars to immediately stop whatever they are doing and spend however long it takes to come up with some better terms than right wing and left wing, and to replace slippery and muddy links between historical political groups and modern ones, eg Fascism. Too much to ask, you say? Well, the extent to which that is too much to ask is the extent to which those phrases are mainstream scholarship, unfortunately.
 * In the meantime, we should not be saying nothing at all, just because we can't say what we want to say. I am right behind scrapping the elitist WP policy on RS and replacing it with content-based rules, because the assertion at the heart of RS is less accurate than a case-by-case analysis of content, but that is not likely to happen either. Anarchangel (talk) 04:10, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I restored the right wing list with citations. I left the far-right, much harder to cite, out. However, I feel that to leave it deleted is to trade the responsibility of eternal vigilance for the dubious ease of hoping the problem will stay away. Anarchangel (talk) 05:23, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
 * There's a whole world of difference between project/talk pages and mainspace pages. Rightly or wrongly, Wikipedia editors often express their own opinions on the subjects of articles on associated pages such as deletion discussions. However, that cannot possibly be used to justify unsourced opinions in the mainspace. As I said, I have no objection to a list of newspapers considered to be right-wing provided the citations makes it clear who is saying this, but we can't have article which does nothing but present disputed opinions as fact. Chris Neville-Smith (talk) 17:30, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Are you sure you are ok with it as long as it is sourced? Because that is quite doable. Anarchangel (talk) 04:10, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I'd have to put that as a maybe rather than a yes. The difficulty is that anyone can pick out a reference from a reliable source that calls The Times right-wing, left-wing, liberal, authoritarian, Monster Raving Loony or anything else. You could show a pattern of descriptions from a variety of reliable sources, but even that would be straying into WP:OR. Having looked at articles about the papers themselves, they tend to portray political allegiance by which party the papers supported at previous elections, which is probably the least subjective you can be. However, given the way this deletion debate is going, a better home for this might be Political allegiances of UK newspapers. Chris Neville-Smith (talk) 08:03, 5 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete - per Colonel Warden. This is an article that will be POV no matter how well sourced it could be, with many of the sources disagreeing and contradicting eachother. Yaksar (let's chat) 04:37, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete POV problems are almost certainly insuperable. --Folantin (talk) 12:39, 5 April 2011 (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.