Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sealand War of Independence


 * 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. Nothing to merge, all info is included in Principality of Sealand in sufficient detail. Neither the original title nor the moved-to title are supported by reliable independent sources, so no need for a redirect either. Fram (talk) 13:46, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Sealand War of Independence

 * – ( View AfD View log  •  )

All three of these articles are POV forks from Principality of Sealand and are lacking in independent reliable sources, in many cases they are mirrors. The "War of Independence" gets zero google hits, the "Conflict" seems to be little more than a disagreement between the two groups on Sealand, and the "Royal Family" are not recognized as such by any country on earth. Delete all three as redundant, poorly-referenced POV forks. ---  RepublicanJacobite  The'FortyFive' 04:00, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I am also nominating the following related pages because same problem as above, POV forks:


 * Salvage whatever can be salvaged into Principality of Sealand, then delete. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 06:19, 3 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I wouldn't object with the article being deleted. However many conflicts, in particular civil wars, have description pages and are listed on the conflicts page despite the potential for exageration of their significance and the POV issues - one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter.  It is important on these types of pages to maintain objective neutrality.  Consequently I think that it is better to retain the page but rename it, than to be pejorative and delete it.  I have now renamed the page as the "First Sealand Incident" which describes the conflict in an appropriate way.  I have also renamed The Sealand Conflict as Second Sealand Incident.  Hope this improves things and hopefully I haven't confused things furtherUser:Marlarkey User_talk:Marlarkey 3 January 2010 (UTC)
 * That page move was inappropriate in the midst of a deletion discussion, and the new names are only more vague, rather than more descriptive. Your arguments for keeping are not persuasive, by the way, as there is nothing said in those articles that could not be, or is not already, said in the main article. ---  RepublicanJacobite  The'FortyFive'  18:33, 3 January 2010 (UTC)
 * AfDs are mainly about page content, not titles... so the "move of moving it" didn't help much. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 18:42, 3 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep: Firstly as I said, sorry if renaming it was inappropriate.  I wasn't aware of that restriction.  I am now.  Secondly, I have no connection with Sealand and have no vested interest.  Thirdly, renaming it as 'incident' was intentionally vague because the incident does not confirm to more conventional conflict descriptions eg "war".  It is an 'incident' in the same way as the Yangtze Incident is an 'incident', eg "A definite and separate occurrence; an event" .  Fourthly, the page First Sealand Incident does have independent references.  "Sealand incident" gets >15000 hits on google.  There is also a link to the transcript of the Essex County Court case where the incident is described.  There are many pages where the unsubstantiated claims of different sides to a dispute are decribed in a neutral and objective fashion.  Fifthly, the incidents (both the first and second) should be separate pages because they are discrete incidents in the chronology of Sealand and there are links to the pages from other pages eg List of conflicts in Europe which is a complete list of links to similar pages that describe conflicts and incidents.  For instance Insurgency in the Preševo Valley links to a page describing that conflict rather than the insurgency being incorporate into the page for Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  That is exactly the same page structure as First Sealand Incident and Principality of Sealand.  Sixthly, many incidents linked to from List of conflicts in Europe are internal disputes between unrecognised factions eg 2004 Adjara crisis.  Just because the Sealand case is smaller and more unconventional does not mean that it is not conceptually the same type of incident deserving of description.  If the Sealand pages are removed they will have to be delisted from the list of conflicts and by extension so will many other incidents and their respective pages User:Marlarkey User_talk:Marlarkey 3 January 2010 (UTC)
 * In your favor, I'm assuming you are joking -- you seriously want to compare 42-52 dead and 39 wounded (including 2 "blue helmets") to two guys throwing firebombs on an oil platform? Besides, this is about the nominated article only... Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 19:39, 3 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually I'm not joking !  I should also point out that List of micronations lists many similiar scenarios where there are self-proclaimed rulers eg Giorgio Carbone, Nick Copeman so the proposal to delete Bates (Royal Family) should either be extended to all these pages or they should all be kept.  Many of them are even flimsier than the case of Sealand.  The point is that I'm not making any judgement at all about the relative merits of the Sealand claims, their legitimacy and relative significance of the dispute versus other disputes.  What I'm highlighting is the structure of the information - nations, rulers, conflicts - and that it is legitimate to apply that information structure consistently and objectively regardless of personal judgement about the circumstances of the case concerned.  That is the basis of my argument to keep the pages - that these pages fit the consistent structure used for describing nations, rulers and conflicts that has been adopted elsewhere.  Thanks for the link by the way.User:Marlarkey User_talk:Marlarkey 3 January 2010 (UTC)
 * "Sealand incident" gets >15000 hits on google? Surely you are joking. For me, "sealand incident" gives 7 hits. --Jmk (talk) 17:06, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
 * They may not have included quote marks. -- Thin  boy  00  @065, i.e. 00:32, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Perhaps, but they should have, if they meant to say something about the phrase "Sealand incident" instead of isolated words. --Jmk (talk) 04:00, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
 * "they" didn't use quotes. However, to be honest, number of google hits is a pretty poor measure but it was referred to by  RepublicanJacobite  in his original post.  Marlarkey (talk) 09:00, 6 January 2010 (GMT)
 * FWIW, I see exactly eight google hits for "sealand incident" as a phrase. Two of them are these articles, and one is a Wikipedia mirror; two are about a fire at a Korean amusement park; one is about an aquarium. This leaves two, which are both comments (one on a blog, one on a forum), both of which seem to be referring to the Sealand "project" as a whole rather than a specific incident in history. The name's better than "war of independence" or the like, but no-one else calls it that. Shimgray | talk | 22:42, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete or partially merge per Seb az86556. Low notability and POV problems does not allow a separate article. The same for similar "wars" etc.--Ioannes Pragensis (talk) 21:49, 3 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete Fails notability. Silly pretend country's "war of independence" does not merit an encyclopedia article.Edison (talk) 02:11, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete all as massive POV forks. The events have not been covered in sufficient detail to merit separate articles, and as such they amount to POV forks. "Sealand incident" is not a widely used term contrary to the assertion above. The argument about against the Bates Family article being deleted is specious. Nobody is suggesting deleting the articles on various family members yet (although that may change after looking at the sources on one), what is objected to is the framing of them as a "royal family" when they are nothing but self-proclaimed royals not recognised as such by anyone non-fringe. 2 lines of K  303  13:43, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep all per Malarkey, or spin off History of Sealand. Sealand was featured on the American television show, That's Incredible. So if we're gonna call silly happenings, you might as well include World War I-- someone made a wrong turn and stalled the car, seriously? MMetro (talk) 20:30, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Someone's seriously out of touch with history - how many people died due to that WWI... "incient"? Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 05:26, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
 * The size of the "incident" isn't relevant, Just because it didn't involve many people or much fighting doesn't mean it shouldn't be described. For consistency compare with the extensive article on the Anglo-Zanzibar War which was the shortest war in history. That too was a "trivial" incident in comparison with WW1 and other wars, conflicts and incidents that have articles Marlarkey (talk) 09:00, 6 January 2010 (GMT)
 * Yeah. Right. Except for... this time you're bringing up over 3,000 people involved. At least your comparisons become more megalomaniacish. Way to go. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 09:22, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Toledo War is another example, no lives lost, but very important to Michigan's statehood. Sealand's skirmishes are issues of micronational sovereignty. Choy calls me out of touch for calling WWI silly? Note that I described Ferdinand's assassination, which precipitated the events-- an utterly silly, stupid, preventable mistake by the chauffeur and those handling the Archduke's travel plans. Silly is merely someone's POV. And in regards to the articles attached to this AfD, that POV belongs to someone else. MMetro (talk) 09:00, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
 * U-ha. Case A, Result: Michigan Statehood. Case B, Result: WWI. Case C, Result: err? Some guys voluntarily kept freezing their asses off on an oil-platform?... awesome. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 14:37, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Your POV re how to describe Result C... to those on the oil-platform it is their declaration of independent nation status. Sealand is recognised as a micronation and the issue of micronation sovereignty is a notable subject, so from a neutral POV it seems reasonable to include an article on how a particular micronation come into being Marlarkey (talk) 16:18, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Let's just leave it. But let me also say that in the unlikely event that these articles survive this AfD, I will take it as a precedent. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 20:58, 9 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Comment How can X be a POV fork of Y when X and Y are about distinct subjects? I'd go for notability here instead.  Thin  boy  00  @061, i.e. 00:28, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
 * PS WP:N recommends merging where possible since it applies to articles but not their contents. -- Thin  boy  00  @067, i.e. 00:35, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Quite easily, really - by making Y seem much more important than a treatment under X would give it. Shimgray | talk | 10:09, 7 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I would strongly recommend merging into Principality of Sealand. I've just stumbled across these "incident" articles when trawling for miscategorised pages, and I really can't see how characterising them as wars or conflicts in their own right is useful in any way. They have no independent significance outside of the history of Sealand itself, and the history section of that article adequately summarises them in that context.
 * The articles were (I've since made a stab at fixing the first) pretty misleadingly presented; we talk of "belligerents" when it's POV to characterise it as a state action at all, make entirely unsourced and lurid claims of military participation, and all for what it basically a single arrest warrant on a firearms charge with no actual violent crime.
 * If we merge, we allow these minor incidents to be treated appropriately - as solely relevant to Sealand, and not to any other entity - and we avoid a lot of creeping POV problems from thinking of them as wars, or from edits outside the mainstream consensus on Sealand, both of which seem to be the problem here. Shimgray | talk | 10:09, 7 January 2010 (UTC)


 * well Shimgray you've managed to make a complete pigs ear of this haven't you. All your edits change the content of the article and the content is what justifies whether it should be deleted or not as proposed by RepublicanJacobite.  Your edits anticipate the result of this deletion proposal...  if the deletion proposal is confirmed then the article is deleted, if the deletion proposal is not confirmed then that is validation of the article meeting the notability criteria etc and all your edits would have to undone to make the content of article consistent with it being a notable conflict worthy of an article.  Right now your edits make it neither one thing nor the other.  And it can't easily be undone either to put it back to how it was for the duration of this AfD Marlarkey (talk) 20:45, 7 January 2010 (GMT)


 * Of course my edits change the content of the article - they were meant to, because I was removing content which was both wrong and impressively misleading, and that's what should be done whatever the situation. I stumbled over the article, noted it was being debated as possibly a fork, looked at the content, found something which didn't look right, and corrected that material both there and on the main page. Then I commented here, explaining the problems and how they related to the issues under discussion; I don't have a dog in this fight, but I see no reason to leave an article being wrong just because we're debating precisely just how bad it already is.
 * I am not sure why you think these edits would need to be undone if the article was kept - that material is factually incorrect, and needed removed, and the decision of this discussion won't magically make them true again. There is no doubt more like it, but I am not familiar enough with the sources to dig any deeper than removing the most obvious errors. Shimgray | talk | 22:42, 7 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep as per Marlarky's first comment. This seems notable enough to me for inclusion. Outback the koala (talk) 21:23, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete, this is WP:SYNTHESIS and a WP:CFORK. Sources are a blog, a court record (a primary source), and an article in Wired that might be appropriate for the main article, but not strong enough to support this page. Abductive  (reasoning) 01:52, 11 January 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.