Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Trouble With Atheism


 * 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 No consensus. —Quarl (talk) 2007-03-03 07:52Z 

The Trouble With Atheism

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

Not a notable TV show. Article contains no reliable sources, and this topic as a whole fails notability. Also is a POV soapbox with no encyclopediac content. Sefringle 20:16, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete - no evidence of coverage in external sources to establish notability per WP:N. Delete unless sources can be added. (Although it should be possible to find sources to demonstrate notability - this show was fairly high-profile in the UK when it was on, and I recall it being mentioned in magazines and such.) Wal  ton  Vivat Regina!  20:23, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete No sources and does not appear to be notable, but I don't think it is very POV. It is an article about a TV show that is POV, there really is no other side to present. Mr.Z-man  talk ¢ 20:25, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 *  delete  Only blog results on google, and no news results. I wonder if "The programme meets Britain's two atheist fundamentalist scientists" is what the nominator considers POV soapbox? --Merzul 20:25, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Changing to keep, per Silence below.
 * Delete - like Merzul, I'm having trouble finding independent sources for this. -- Chairman S. Talk  Contribs  21:12, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. About as noteworthy as, say, The Atheism Tapes, which I doubt we'll see deleted. I find the arguments made in the documentary absolutely atrocious, but it's by far one of the most noteworthy and high-profile atheism-related documentaries. As Walton noted, "this show was fairly high-profile in the UK when it was on, and I recall it being mentioned in magazines and such"; that makes it noteworthy, all we lack are some reliable secondary sources to give this article some substance. (Much like we need exactly that for The Atheism Tapes, etc.) I'm not British, or I'd look for some print news sources about this myself; could anyone here check up on that? As for the POV soapbox issue, that's not relevant here, as it's a content issue. It's also one I've already fixed, as I removed the "atheist fundamentalist scientists" and "other religious beliefs" misnomers, and the rest of the article is perfectly fine (reporting on a POV is not the same as having a POV). It's also simply untrue that this article doesn't have encyclopedic content. I don't see the need to resort to these weak arguments when the only argument you need is "it lacks references", and that should be our focus&mdash;find sources, in print if they can't be spotted through the blogosphere online. -Silence 21:29, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree that this has equal notability with the atheism tapes, but in both cases all that can be written is then a summary of the program. I guess that can be done well, like The root of all evil?, but I doubt in this case that it will ever get to encyclopedic quality. I'm keeping my delete vote until I see at least one reasonable editor that will promise to work on this article. If anybody votes "keep": I will adopt this article, then you can discount my delete vote, but until then, I think the soapbox concerns are valid. --Merzul 22:37, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * That's perfectly fair, but then we should be consistent. Let's nominate The Atheism Tapes for deletion too. (Not for the sake of POV "fairness", but for the sake of consistency with our referencing standards as applied to this class of articles.) That article is in any case doubly unnecessary because it's about an offshoot for another non-noteworthy atheism documentary, Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (which we'll probably want to nominate as well; it's an unreferenced stub and gets 61 unique hits on Google!), which it can be incorporated into if necessary. I'll change my vote to a "Weak Keep" or a "Neutral" if we're consistent with our standards.
 * Also, I'm perfectly willing to adopt this article and help work on it, so you needn't be concerned about it becoming a soapbox. Our concern should remain focused on its lack of references, because I can help flesh out this article and keep it neutral, but I'm American and don't have any familiarity with or significant access to most of the places that would have referenced this documentary in the UK press. -Silence 22:44, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm changing my vote to keep on this one as I promised, but I'm not so sure about the other articles; I haven't looked at how actively they are being contributed to. Generally, I prefer to keep most articles related to religion, but I have seen the word "fundamentalist atheist" a little too much recently, so apologize that I jumped on it. Now, I have been looking for sources for both this one, and the atheism tapes; but we really need somebody visiting a UK library to look for print sources. I can't help you with that. --Merzul 23:09, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, I'm open to either keeping or deleting all of the unreferenced atheism documentary articles. All that matters to me is that we keep our standards consistent; otherwise it looks like we're being selective in how we apply our policies, and either keeping certain undeserving documentaries because we agree with them or deleting certain deserving documentaries because we disagree with them. The easiest way not to give this impression, as well as the best way to send a clear and unequivocal message about what Wikipedia's basic standards are for articles of this sort, is to treat all of these articles in exactly the same way so long as they are equally unreferenced. Concerns about POV advocacy are not really relevant because they're content issues that should be resolved through editing and maintenance, not deletion. Besides, this is why WikiProject Atheism exists: to help monitor these articles and keep them NPOV. -Silence 23:22, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * A word of outside advice. From my vantage point the speed at which this AfD was put up makes it look even worse.  You don't want people to think that WikiProject:Atheism (where the issue was first raised right after the entry was created) is a staging ground for this.  That there is an organized effort to one sidedly pinch out these entries before anyone even gets a chance to see them.  I know that's not what's going on, but it could look better.  Exercise a little more reasoned restraint is all I'm suggesting.PelleSmith 23:14, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree. That's part of the reason why I'm trying to add a more balanced perspective on this article (and I recently heavily expanded the article as well, to show that we atheists don't solely spend time on articles espousing issues we agree with, like The Root of All Evil?). WikiProject Atheism exists to improve Wikipedia's coverage of atheism-related articles, not to advocate or further the aims of atheists (and if it does so, it should do so only as an incidental consequence of the aforementioned aim). -Silence 22:07, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment. I completely agree with Silence on the consistency issue, if we delete this one; then we should delete the Atheism Tapes. That would be a pity. I think they are both valuable because they present the views of very notable thinkers; even if these articles haven't developed as far as one would wish. Besides, look what I found... a start? --Merzul 23:31, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. The show was POV but the article reports facts about opinions, and so is NPOV. JamesMLane t c 09:52, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Part of PoV campaign by its creator. --Mel Etitis  ( Talk ) 11:06, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Very true, but that's not a valid reason for deletion. If someone created an article on Global warming in order to further a POV campaign, that would not be a valid reason to delete the article. Noteworthiness and verifiability is what matters here. -Silence 15:28, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Very true, and if I'd said that it was my reason for choosing "delete" (rather than an additional comment, after my agreement with the nominator) I'd have been wrong. --Mel Etitis ( Talk ) 15:45, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong keep, until enough time has passed to adequately judge the entry. This entry was created all of one day ago.  Isn't the normal, respectful line of action to "assume good faith", put up tags, use the talk page, and/or contact the creator before launching an AfD?  Maybe this needs to be deleted, but this isn't the way to go.  Unless this TV series never aired or has been flat out made up (making the entry clearly irrelevant), it deserves at least some good natured criticism and pressure.  Also, lets not judge the merits of an entry by the behavior of its creator(s).PelleSmith 18:52, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree with you latter ideas that an entry should not be judged by its creator; and this rant is not about you, I'm just generally upset about this whole Wikipedia mentality to "assume good faith in spite of all evidence to the contrary". Why is kindness to new users, who persist in POV-pushing in spite of various indpendent requests to stop, valued higher than the stress, frustration and waste of time of quality contributors like Mel Etitis? I don't get it...  --Merzul 19:18, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Hey I have the same gut reaction all the time when I know an editor's history. I also think that the "assume good faith" guideline can be taken to an extreme--there are cases when bad faith is more than apparent.  However, the way I see it the guideline has a practical end which has nothing to do with actually "assuming good faith" but has everything to do with judging a contribution on its merits and not on the intentions of the contributer.  The guideline is also a check for us to not to overreact when editors who we know to be POV pushers make edits or create entries.PelleSmith 23:08, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Now, the goal of WikiProject atheism is to guarantee NPOV and consistency among all atheism related articles. The problem here was that I suspected this would remain a one sentence description about "atheist fundamentalists". In any case, I have changed to "keep" in light of Silence's commitment to this article, and there are at least a few TV guide mentions & one review, which are at least third part opinions that can be used. --Merzul 08:44, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep a neutral, sourced article about TV show on a POV subject. Nuttah68 17:42, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep There are now sources. I'm not sure why a TV show on a national terrestial channel is not notable - bear in mind that there are TV shows on lesser-viewed channels which have a Wikipedia article for every single episode... Mdwh 00:24, 2 March 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.