Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Race and intelligence (history)


 * 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 merge back into the parent article. See notes below. --bainer (talk) 10:04, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Race and intelligence (history)

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

Closer's notes

There were very few people here who supported keeping these various articles as-is; essentially the debate was divided fairly evenly between deleting these child articles and starting again, or merging them back into the parent article from whence they were split.

In the end, since both positions contemplated continuing with an article on this topic in the future, these child articles will be merged back into the parent. Should the consensus from there be to start from a blank slate, as it were, then that content can be abandoned and work begun anew. Should the consensus be to work with what we've got, then that will be possible also.

As usual, comments of anonymous users were disregarded in determining the final consensus. --bainer (talk) 10:04, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

While the concept of racial differences in IQ test scores has stirred up more than enough controversy, and attracted enough notable proponents to justify a fairly substantial treatment here on wikipedia, this series of articles is a disgrace.

Including the top level article, there are twelve pages on this, and every one of them is a haven for WP:OR, racist POV pushing and undue weight. Most of them have merge proposals, NPOV templates, cleanup templates, weasel templates and requests for citations, that have been sitting unattended for months. Many dedicated and well meaning editors have tried to clean them up, and have made some inroads on the main article. It's not enough though, because with an unmanageable series like this, there's always somewhere for the racist POV pushers to slink to when they meet resistance.

My proposal is to aggressively delete all of these forks, and merge anything worthwhile, notable and NPOV, into the main article. In anticipation of protests that the final article would be prohibitively long, I put it to you that the bulk of the material is either extremely dubious, redundant, gratuitous and excessive quotes or references and links duplicated multiple times. I believe with judicious editing, the entire series of articles can be reduced to a single article under a hundred kilobytes in length.

It's my belief that trying to take on this travesty piecemeal is doomed to failure, and the only way to knock this topic into shape it to take a bulldozer to most of it and start afresh. – ornis ⚙  08:44, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Note that I moved the later listed article to a seperate AfD, as requested by several people: Articles for deletion/Ashkenazi intelligence (2nd) --Cpt. Morgan (Reinoutr) 21:27, 25 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete/Merge per nom. While Wikipedia is not paper, we are supposed to be writing articles about each topic, not books! The current set of articles is only one step away from having Race and intelligence (chapter 42) and such. :) --Itub 08:55, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Comment. I have not been active on this group of articles, but as far as I know, all splits has been discussed in Talk:Race and intelligence or resp. talk pages. The group of articles is reasonably well written and very well referenced - and considering the topic, it seems that there has been every attempt to stay away from racism. The topic is understandably very delicate, as can be seen how few careless remarks destroyed James D. Watson. I will not cast a vote on this one, but I think that creating a special WikiProject might be a better way to deal with this group of articles then deletion. Several of nominated articles could be deleted, though, but not all. --  Sander Säde  10:04, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete. While there has been a lot of work done on these articles, the task, if one were to want to do a proper overhaul, is herculean. Better to start over if need be. While the subject is indeed a potential haven for racists, several editors indeed are watching the different pages and reverting introduction of racist POVs. However, do we need the entire dozen articles? Probably not. Is there a fair amount of duplication between the articles? Certainly, there is. Is it a good idea to take a bulldozer to it and delete the whole thing? I think not; there has been a tremendous amount of work going into this over the years, and the articles have stood for at least two years (about four or five AFAIK for the main one). Is a major overhaul sorely needed? Yes. But should we rush into things and delete the whole thing because some racists might get a foothold in this? Aboslutely not, there is no such rush. However, there is the need to have some action plan to avoid making this into an eternal work-in-progress. For all these considerations, I say Keep for now, but create a Wikiproject to deal with it --Ramdrake 10:57, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete I have watched this mess for many years. I grant the topic is important but I do not think a specific article on race and intelligenceis a good idea, especially when the article on "intelligence" itself is so weak.  personally, I think we need much better articles that are far more specific: In-depth articles on the major topics of Race and Intelligence and then very specific articles on controversial books by Murray/hernstein and Rushton, and then articles that are appropriately specific eg. "Race and I.Q. testing" and "Race and Educational Policy" or something like that. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 11:24, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Race and IQ testing. I very much agree. Amongst other problems the very titles take for granted the notion that IQ testing can really measure intelligence in any meaningful way, or that "race" is an accepted or clearly defined notion. The focus issue I think is key here. –  ornis ⚙  13:42, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete as per Slrubenstein. I can't agree that there has been every attempt to stay away from racism, the whole set of articles reek of bias. Alun 12:24, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete, per Slrubenstein. I gave up on the articles as unworkable years ago, and they have gotten much worse in the interim.  Almost all of them are not about "race and intelligence", but rather, about race and IQ.  Since the articles equate the two, they are necessarily misleading.  Additionally, too much information is segregated into subarticles, which makes individual articles misleading.  I really don't think this is salvageable.  Guettarda 13:05, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree the titles are misleading. futurebird 13:17, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete Comment - I'm watching and withholding judgment. I agree that something needs to be done. People who are not familiar with this project will object when they see how many references all of these articles have. Sorting through the sources is confusing as each of these articles contradicts itself every other sentence-- and all of the contradictions are "sourced." I'll be interested to see how people not involved with this project respond to this idea. I don't yet have a strong stance either way. But, I encourage the "outside editors" who speak up on this deletion debate to look at each of these articles and perhaps look at the size of the archives on some of the talk pages. I have put in many hours trying to improve all of these articles, and they are still in an abysmal condition, I think it should count for something, that an editor who has worked hard on these articles is willing to even consider chucking them out and starting over. I have not made up my mind yet. I'm a little concerned we'd lose information in the process. futurebird 13:16, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I understand you and others have put in a lot of work, and I don't wish to belittle that in the slightest. There's no need to worry either about loosing material, I've taken off-line copies of all the articles, I'd be happy to mail to you should they be deleted, or of course you could make your own. – ornis ⚙  13:42, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete as per Slrubenstein and Guettarda -- these "articles" are just conduits for stupidity, and are very poorly written. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jim62sch (talk • contribs) 13:24, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Note that I moved the later listed article to a seperate AfD, as requested by several people: Articles for deletion/Ashkenazi intelligence (2nd) --Cpt. Morgan (Reinoutr) 21:27, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment -- What about Ashkenazi intelligence ? Is this part of the group too? futurebird 13:31, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I honestly hadn't even noticed that one. Give me a few minutes. – ornis ⚙  13:42, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Alright, I'm not sure this is exactly kosher, but I'm adding that article to this debate. I'll put it at the bottom, so as not make it appear that those who've already commented were commenting on it as well. – ornis ⚙  13:54, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment I'd just like to say I think the comments by Slrubenstein and Guettarda, (re: having given up) are exactly why such drastic measures needed here; the articles have become completely unmanageable. – ornis ⚙  13:42, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete as per Slrubenstein and Guettarda. If anything perhaps renaming to Race and IQ tests. The articles are a mess, full of bias and dubious claims. IQ tests are flawed and do not measure intelligence. If they did, I would have found the meaning of life by now. Jeeny (talk) 00:05, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete Essays shouldn't exist on wikipedia. Describe the phenomena through the articles on publications and people. Bulldog123 00:53, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Merge - The articles are getting more unmanageable but not grounds for deletion. --TheSeer (TalkˑContribs) 13:24, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete - Most of the info on these pages is totally redundant. I'm going to rewrite the entire Race and intelligence article top to bottom and most of these pages will have been deleted in the process anyway.  Wikidudeman  (talk) 17:58, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete I agree with Slrubenstein. The whole of Race and intelligence is not in a great state at the moment, with evident POV pushing by some unscrupulous editors. I also agree that the main article needs to be completely rewritten, very much in the same way that User:Dbachmann cleaned up European People to create European ethnic groups. --Mathsci 17:17, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete for all of the reasons stated for deletion plus ruthless obsession by racial POV-pushers. These articles routinely slander large numbers of people and that those slanders are unacceptable within the community of mainstream scientists was made clear by the bi-continental condemnation of Nobel laureate James D. Watson, prompting his apology for making unscientific claims about race and intelligence. Interestingly, the promoters of this racist POV on Wikipedia made three obsessive edits to the citation in race and intelligence to the NYT article that summarized the Watson affair, then censored all mention of it, making Wikipedia appear in this article as both racist and ignorant . Skywriter 18:27, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep I think the pages should be kept for the references and the work done so that a more appropriate central article could be made based on it if necessary, and I don't think deletion is needed. The material should reflect references and research done on the subject, but not personal opinions of users. JonatasM 18:46, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Note that I moved the later listed article to a seperate AfD, as requested by several people: Articles for deletion/Ashkenazi intelligence (2nd) --Cpt. Morgan (Reinoutr) 21:27, 25 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Merge what little is salvagable to the main article. The mere existence of no less than 12 articles on this subject gives it severe undue weight compared to many other scientific topics (that are much more firmly established than this controversial topic). Also, the existence of a page solely for references (many of which are not even used in the actual articles, according to the reference page itself) is an indication that something is very wrong here. Cut it down to one page by cutting severely and try to keep that single page a decent representation of the topic. That will be much more informative than the mishmash of articles and contradictory statements that are presented here now. In its current state, casual readers might think that this actually is a big research topic in modern day science, rather than the highly disputed field of research it is in reality. --Cpt. Morgan (Reinoutr) 14:16, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree with the points you're making about undue weight from sheer bulk. futurebird 14:24, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete and merge Along with a major rewrite of the main article. It needs a lot of work to be seriously objective. CJ 17:35, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Just so it's clear, my vote was for the original nom. I agree with the below that Ashkenazi intelligence should be relisted separately. CJ 12:28, 25 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete and merge per above. Jeeny (talk) 00:10, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete and merge Essays should not exist on wikipedia. Report the matters through the publications. Bulldog123 00:53, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Judaism-related deletions.   —— Malik Shabazz (Talk | contribs) 22:23, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Merge useful content into main article, per nom. After reading the nomination, I agree with the nominators's "proposal... to aggressively delete all of these forks, and merge anything worthwhile, notable and NPOV, into the main article."  That educated persons debate about the relationship of one to the other can't be denied, but I think it will be difficult to keep the neutrality on the main atricle, let alone the forks.  Many of us question the concept of describing a person as being a member of one particular race anyway.  Mandsford 01:55, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep and revert This was a promising stand-alone article last year with some fine tuning to be done.  Sadly many people who are now advocating deletion were the proponents for breaking this into the unmanageable mess we see today.  I predicted that the dispersion to multiple articles would make this unmanageable and prone to special interest POV. --Kevin Murray 03:53, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep all for now and deal with editorially in a project. there is good content in some of these articles, such as Race and intelligence (test data) -- though I think its a poor choice of title. I think some people new to the debate here are needed to sort it out -- and I dont mean to nominate myself. I do not see the advantage of starting over, when we have a fairly good start of various sections here--it will just get the same conflicts. DGG (talk) 04:03, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * a single combined article will be no more manageable--this is a valid use of WP:Summary style. Considering the topic, and considering that one of the sides in the debate on this topic is that the subject is inherently biased and prejudicial, I wonder at the possible intention of deleting this groups of articles--does it perhaps represent the POV of one side of the debate only, trying to down-pedal this topic?DGG (talk) 04:06, 24 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep I too suspect an ulterior motive of POV censorship.  These articles seem to have plenty of notability and sourcing.  If fewer articles can do the job of all these then create them first in a process of merge/redirect.  AFD is not cleanup.    Colonel Warden 08:23, 24 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Comment, although I am not the nominator, I still want to say that I think it is not very fair that both last commenters have questioned the good intentions of the nomination. As is apparent from the start post, his/her main goal is to merge suitable information into a single, proper, article. That might, or might not, involve deletion of articles, depending on what turns out to be merged. There is no censorship here, just a lot of redundancy, bias and undue weight in these articles. And no, AfD is not cleanup, but (unfortunately) it is the only forum on Wikipedia that gets reasonable attention from a wide variety of editors, so I fully support this listing, even it just was to get a different set of editors to have a look at the articles. --Cpt. Morgan (Reinoutr) 10:07, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment the proposer said, inter alia, "there's always somewhere for the racist POV pushers to slink to when they meet resistance".  The proposer seems intent on expunging another POV with this mass deletion.  Colonel Warden 11:47, 24 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Merge - The articles are getting more unmanageable but not grounds for deletion. --TheSeer (TalkˑContribs) 13:24, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * keep and merge only if editors who work on the articles think it is necessary. This should be talked about on the talk pages not in AFD.  There is no reason to impose structure by an AFD.  Merging can be done by anyone who thinks it will improve the series of articles (and can be reverted by anyone who disagrees, that is why there is a talk page).  Jon513 15:54, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: though the pages in this AfD look quite lousy the concept of splitting complex and controversial articles into smaller parts works more often than not. Pavel Vozenilek 23:58, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete All - As they stand, the articles are useless. When I first ran into them, I thought the title was "Race and IQ" and that is why I really did no care much about it.  Sometime later I ran across them while reading entries in RFCU and realized that the title was "Race and intelligence."  Yet, most of the articles give undue weight to IQ testing.  The articles are constructed in such a poor way that it is better to start from scratch.  Its like writing code, if its messy, its faster to begin from zero.  All the articles above serve as POV forks for Race and intelligence.  The only articles we should keep and work on are Race, Intelligence, and Race and Intelligence.    Brusegadi 01:02, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Note that I moved the later listed article to a seperate AfD, as requested by several people: Articles for deletion/Ashkenazi intelligence (2nd) --Cpt. Morgan (Reinoutr) 21:27, 25 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete and merge There is far too much information here to simply eliminate everything--if only because when someone tries to start the article all over again it will just as easily follow the same path that it has this time. Still, some of the above sections do not deserve to remain at all and others must be cut down to the barest of bones just to reach an inkling of truth. Oh and note: Ashkenazi intelligence is, by definition, just another article describing "racial" differences in intelligence (On the whole I believe that the only valid title would be "human intelligence"; but, I suspect this title already exists in a much cleaner article :P)

Frank0570618 01:30, 26 October 2007 (UTC)Frank0570618


 * Comment. Normally a WP:MERGE tag, not WP:AfD, is the place to request article mergers. Controversial topics are inherent troll magnets and our commitment to an open encyclopedia that is WP:NOT means that we cannot delete verifiable articles on notable topics simply because the topics are controversial and have attracted vandals. If we started deleting articles just because they were vandalized too often, vandals would start hacking into articles they didn't like in droves in hopes if they were persisitent enough we'd give up and delete the ones they didn't like as well. We don't want to encourage them]. Best, --Shirahadasha 02:20, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
 * That said, if we make a decision here, I agree Delete and Merge into Race and intelligence is appropriate, and agree that splitting the article sections into separate articles as has been done has creates an unfortunate redundancy. Best, --Shirahadasha 02:22, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep not that some may not need to be merged but nominate individually weak articles for Afd on their own individual merits, this mass nomination serves no purpose. Although some may find this topic objectionable, it is a topic which is notable even if only for controversy and the succor it provides for would be racists. The best way to deal with such racists is to give them all the rope they need to hang themselves with by accurately reflecting their views in the articles without endorsing those views and to provide the scientific rebuttals and contexts to those views. Notable topics however difficult shouldn't be avoided by simply by deletion. KTo288 03:44, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment - I agree with most of what you say in the general sense but I feel that it does not apply here. If we were speaking about deleting the article Race and intelligence I would be totally on your side.  Yet, we are talking about a bunch of sub-articles that say the same thing and were probably created by frustrated editors because they were not able to get their 'point' across in the main article.  Hence, POV forks.  While some people will nominate (for deletion) articles simply because they are politically incorrect, others will fear to nominate politically incorrect articles that are perfect candidates simply because they fear to be promoting censorship.  There are policy-obedient politically incorrect articles that should not be deleted, and then there are politically incorrect articles that should be deleted because they do not follow our guidelines.  I feel that the articles in question fall in the second category. Brusegadi 06:25, 26 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep and/or merge but don't delete if merging content. "Delete and merge" is prohibited by the GFDL; this would remove the history of the merged content. DHowell 21:06, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep and merge if necessary. There is a lot of good, sourced information in these pages and deleting them is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  As far as I can tell, these are more WP:SS subarticles than POV forks.  While perhaps this all could be cut down a bit, there is much information that would be lost by deleting these articles, and if we want to use the content at all delete/merge is forbidden by the GFDL, as has been noted above. Calliopejen1 15:31, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep! This is a great resource, with many useful citations. Yes it is messy and unruly, but very much in the spirit of Wikipedia. Do not censor information! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.156.167.148 (talk) 15:47, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. How would starting from scratch help anything? Some degree of imperfection with these kinds of articles is inevitable, especially when they become the subjects of controversial, separative AfDs. AfD isn't cleanup; deleting these would erase a lot of valuable and appropriate information. — xDanielx T/C 03:36, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. This is a very poorly-organized set of articles with a huge amount of redundancy, but the best solution is some large-scale merging and restructuring. If the underlying problem is that the involved editors can't obtain consensus, then deletion will not make that problem go away. – Smyth\talk 09:01, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep This is clearly a valid topic.  This is clearly difficult.  Don't shy away from the challenge and take the easy way out.Meniscus 20:22, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete This can all be merged, and doesn't need to be seperated. There is no need for several Race and intelligence articles.  Yahel  Guhan  00:49, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Ethnic groups-related deletions.   — Yahel   Guhan  00:49, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete all but one of the articles linked at the top of this page. They are clearly POV forks that can be merged into one article.Skywriter 06:31, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Weak Keep as the articles are extensively made, sourced, and written. As long as someone thinks they can keep a lid on vandals (no way am I trying; I couldn't keep it separated), we can keep. Otherwise, 'merge to main article. &mdash;ScouterSig 14:40, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep &mdash; All notable topics and with WP:RS references. &mdash; EliasAlucard|Talk 16:13 31 Oct, 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep. First of all I think if the deletion were done to silence a discussion that without any doubt stirs enough emotion and demand for clarification to deserve a debate and encyclopedia coverage it would be unworthy of the ideals behind Wikipedia. Second - to provide such a structure with several articles is worthwhile regarding the amount of information. 217.236.252.61 15:31, 31 October 2007 (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.