Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Post-Cold War era


 * 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   Move to Article Incubator. Clearly a notable topic, but as mentioned before, this is merely a collection of OR and SYNTH that does little to enlighten the reader as to that topic. Black Kite 22:21, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Post-Cold War era

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This page appears to be OR with SYNTH. The sourcing is a couple of newspaper articles and a non RS website (the link currently goes to a page saying "ass"). Although the term is in common usage, it is not defined clearly enough in lots of RS for this article to be able to get anywhere without SYNTH. VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 10:05, 21 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep. I'm very surprised by the nomination. It's a phrase that's been used in 3000 books, 15,000 news stories, and 35,000 scholarly articles, so I think there's a clear case for notability, and no real issues with improper synthesis. The currently poor sourcing is no reason for deletion. Fences  &amp;  Windows  21:22, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions.  --  Fences  &amp;  Windows  21:23, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions.  --  Fences  &amp;  Windows  21:24, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. I might !vote later, but let me first say (and I sincerely don't mean to offend anyone here) that this article is quite bad, perhaps irremediably so in terms of conception and scope such that it warrants deletion. What it the actual topic of the article? If it is really about the "post-Cold War era," (to the extent that that term has any agreed upon meaning, which it largely doesn't) then it should be about the history of the entire world during that time period, which it obviously is not. Is it about post-Cold War U.S./Russian (and ex-Soviet Union satellite states? or no?) relations? Then it should be called that. Is it about diplomatic history between Western powers in general during this time period, or economic history, or both? Is the fact that there is absolutely no agreed upon outer limit to the "Post-Cold War era", or indeed agreement that "Post-Cold War era" is a coherent or useful term, problematic? I think so. Post-WWII history is what I study, and I don't know what this article is supposed to be or how to turn it into something that makes sense. The fact that the term is clearly used does not mean we should have an article with that exact title, at least not if we, at the moment, have no idea what the content should be. I'm interested to hear what others, including those who have worked on this, have to say about it, but the article as it currently stands is not really acceptable encyclopedia content in my view. --Bigtimepeace | talk |  contribs 21:44, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't think the issues you raise condemn the article, indeed they probably give us more material to work with. I will try to improve it - there's more than 50,000 potential sources to work from - but if editors still want to get rid of the article at the end of the discussion, an alternative to deletion is to move it to the Article Incubator where it can be worked on away from articlespace. Fences  &amp;  Windows  23:58, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment Of course the phrase is used. The wide use of a phrase does not mean that it is used consistently or coherently enough for there to be a distinct encyclopaedia article on it. (My favourite oft-cited but unencyclopaedic phrase is "British intransigence", which gets thousands of hits, including 400 on google scholar). The post-cold war period is defined by not being the cold war, and there not being the Soviet-US stand off and the predictability that that brought. I am not convinced that there is enough material without the necessity of OR/SYNTH, or content forking from articles with a narrower scope (unless we want to assemble the end of history theories of people like Francis Fukuyama, in which case the article would be very different indeed.) For example, is it post-cold war Europe, or is it the international system in general? What is the difference between this article and one on the collapse of the Eastern Bloc? (which is not a period so much as a series of definable events) If you do put some effort into improving it Fences, make sure that there are some over-arching RS sources that provide a structure.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 03:41, 23 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep: I agree that the article is quite bad. I think this article should probably be wiped down to a stub, but not deleted.  As Fences notes above, it is a very widely used phrase, used to indicate the current epoch of international history.&mdash;Perceval 02:49, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Part of the problem is that there is little or no agreement whether the term actually indicates "the current epoch of international history", or whether it is even a meaningful historical epoch at all. It's even worse than "Post-1945 U.S. history", which is a recognized period in academic history, but whose "end point" is entirely unclear. The problem is akin to someone in 1655, with the Peace of Westphalia in their minds, calling their time the "Post-Awful Terrible War" period. While it could have been (but obviously wasn't, I'm joking here) a meaningful term at the time, there is no real analytical strength to it and thus not much to build an encyclopedia article on. There's a similar problem here which could probably be resolved with a lot of good sources discussing the very idea of the "Post-Cold War Era" and its inadequacies, but we don't have that now and without it I think this article likely does more harm than good. --Bigtimepeace | talk |  contribs 04:41, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I think you're right that there isn't one commonly accepted definition. But I think that's something you will find dominates nearly any term used in the social sciences.  There is no one accepted definition of sovereignty for example, but the idea which is implicit in NPOV is to represent the state-of-the-debate as accurately as we can.  I agree with you that the article as it stands is bad.  But I do not agree that the solution is to delete the article outright.  Wiping it down to a stub and starting from scratch is the far more reasonable solution.&mdash;Perceval 17:30, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Of course social science terms are nearly always contested. But then there are terms which are so ill-defined that there isn't really even a debate about them. I think that's largely the case here. What is the "state-of-the-debate" on "the post-cold war era?" I'm not aware that there really is one to speak of, other than various individual people making remarks from time to time about the "Post-Cold War era" (though that doesn't happen much anymore). I think my analogy about how people might have referred to their era in 1655 is a bit more apt than a reference to sovereignty, which is a concept with an enormous scholarly literature. Stubbing this article down would be better, but what would it say? "The Post-Cold War era started after the end of the Cold War era and either stopped sometime after that or is still continuing, or the term should not be used at all, and it's not clear whether it applies to the whole world or just relations between major powers or what exactly was going on during whatever time it was (is?) occurring"? Obviously I exaggerate, but I genuinely would not know what to write. If we don't have an idea for specific content right now (and no one is really proposing anything) I think the existence of this article probably does more harm than good. Maybe the "article incubator" (which I'd never heard of, I'm guessing it's new) is a good place for this. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 02:10, 25 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep -- This is a poor article, but the topic is a significnat one. Speculation on the end of the era (now) is premature WP:OR.  The "background" section would be better described as "Cold War" and linked to a main article on that.  The article needs a lot of work, but that is a reason for improvement, not deletion.  My only query is whether there is a better article onm the subject already.  Peterkingiron (talk) 17:56, 27 September 2009 (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.