Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Street fighting


 * 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   keep.   A rbitrarily 0   ( talk ) 03:08, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Street fighting

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This article has been tagged as unreferenced original research for more than two years and tagged for clean-up for more than two and half years. The sole ref cited supports one single statistical fact in the article. WP:PROD tag was removed without improving the article. - Ahunt (talk) 15:52, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep - regretably the term is used in current society and there are many links to this page. The term drew 30.4 million google hits. While Wikipedia should not glorify this conduct, an encyclopedia article on this subject would be appropriate. I agree that the article is very low quality and someone should remove the orginial research and avoid defining the difference between a street fight and a riot (unless we can cite to an authoritative source). Perhaps the article should be expanded to cover the various criminal laws against such conduct. Racepacket (talk) 16:17, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment - I don't in the least disagree with you that this is a worthwhile subject for an encyclopedia article, but this article is of such poor quality that it it preventing a better article from being written. As in many cases trying to sort out facts from personal opinion in an unreferenced article such as this and find references to bring it up to Wikipedia's standards is very difficult. I believe that there should be an article with this title but that it would be better to delete this article and start over, working from refs instead of scrambling to find refs to support this problematic text. As can be seen by how long this has been tagged as substandard and how little substantial work has been done recently, I think most editors look at it and walk away. - Ahunt (talk) 17:54, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment - As the person who removed the prod tag, I take offense to the statement "WP:PROD tag was removed without improving the article". As I pointed out in the edit summary, the French Wikipedia article was a former featured article, and though it recently lost it featured article status, it still has several references.  However, I don't read a word of French, so there is no way I could improve the article using those references.  Though I can't read the references, I would be very surprised if there wasn't some useable information there. Calathan (talk) 16:27, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment - I am sorry that you took offence to my nomination language, as no offence was intended; it is just a factual statement. I found the article in a poor state, with virtually no refs, tagged for over two years, clearly no where near Wikipedia's standards and not being actively improved. I PRODed it and you removed the PROD tag, with the suggestion that refs might be found on the French version. The article is still of as poor a quality as when I found it, so I have brought it here to hopefully have it improved, or deleted so it can be started over, working from refs as I mentioned above, instead of trying to find refs to support a large amount of opinion. My statement "WP:PROD tag was removed without improving the article" is simple fact and wasn't intended as an insult. By the rules you are allowed to remove it for any reason and that is part of the reason that we are here at AfD. - Ahunt (talk) 17:54, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Ok, sorry about that. It just seemed to me that you were ignoring the potential sources I had mentioned, but I see now that you were not.  Anyway, if you think an article should exist on this topic, there is no need for a deletion discussion.  You are free to completely replace all the text in the article if you think that would make it better (though you might want to discuss that on the article talk page first before doing so).  Articles aren't normally deleted for being of poor quality, but only when an article shouldn't exist at all at that title. Calathan (talk) 18:23, 13 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Comment - Thanks for your comments. I still believe that the article should be deleted and perhaps, if refs can be found, started over again rather than fixed through normal editing, as that approach hasn't worked over the last two years in this case. If no refs can be found, then by definition, it isn't a notable topic. Let's see what the result of this debate is and work from there. - Ahunt (talk) 18:40, 13 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep The topic is clearly notable, even if the article needs some serious work (although, frankly, it's not nearly as broken as any number of other articles on here, not that that's really meaningful or surprising information!). Ginsengbomb (talk) 20:21, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep per Racepacket and Ginsenbomb. Not so awful it needs to be deleted, and of an obvious encyclopedic topic.  30 million Ghits must have a few good sources. Bearian (talk) 02:27, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Strong keep Street fighting is real and notable. What needs to be fixed is the organization and layout of the article. Portillo (talk) 05:10, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep and clean up. It is a notable phrase/term which needs more than a dicdef, I've done some bits to try & improve it but it's a mess and needs someone to sit down & do a complete re-write to provide a frame work for building on (time I don't have right now) --Natet/c 08:30, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep and clean up. Just needs more refs and general cleanup. Notable in its various uses. CarolMooreDC (talk) 10:09, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Modified delete. This article reads like OR from beginning to end. While it is an extremely notable subject, I agree with Ahunt that we can't just leave it and wait for someone else to insert references to match all the assertions. Are any of us prepared to take the time to do that? On the other hand, we can't delete it entirely, or else someone will probably come up with a new post that looks just as rough as this one. I suggest leaving the first paragraph and deleting the rest, with a wiki note on the editing page that warns people to reference whatever they're going to say. This might be unconventional, but maybe it will solve the problem here. Yoninah (talk) 22:16, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment: Thanks for your thought on this. Given that the overwhelming consensus seems to be to keep the article at this point, I am also concerned that once this AfD closes that all those who participated here and indicated keep will fade away and not work on the article, leaving it as bad as it is now. Once this AfD is closed I support your idea, we can take that up on the talk page at that time. - Ahunt (talk) 22:32, 19 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.