Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Witness accounts of the Roswell UFO incident (3rd nomination)


 * 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.  Sandstein  19:47, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Witness accounts of the Roswell UFO incident
AfDs for this article: 
 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

A POV fork of Roswell UFO incident giving massive undue weight to fringe conspiracy views. Majority of article is sourced to non-independent sources like "roswellproof.com" and "The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell," that are pretty far out on the fringe. During a previoust AfD in 2008, it was argued that pro-conspiracy sources were reliable as long as they were published. It's 2014. Consensus can change. LuckyLouie (talk) 13:16, 27 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete. Poor fringe sourcing makes for a big neutrality problem, and gives very undue coverage to a topic which is already (over-)extensively covered in the main Roswell article. Alexbrn talk 13:29, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Delete Article appears to be a massive PROFRINGE PROMO piece. As noted by the nom it is also a CONTENTFORK. It violates DUE which as policy trumps any claim to notability, that being doubtful in any case. Far too many of the sources are fringe, which are emphatically not RS. On a side note I am a bit confused by the history of the article. It survived the first AfD but the second directed that it be transwickied to Wikiquotes. Did this ever happen? In any event it is not an encyclopedic article and it needs to go. -Ad Orientem (talk) 13:43, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of New Mexico-related deletion discussions. - MrX 14:18, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Conspiracy theories-related deletion discussions. - MrX 14:19, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Popular culture-related deletion discussions. - MrX 14:19, 27 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete per violations of fork and fringe. The article is largely built upon unreliable sources reiterating stuff people heard from others, said they heard from others, or thought they heard form others (i.e. violations of WP:REDFLAG are pervasive throughout the article). Exemplifying this is the section titled "Military Police" which has four paragraphs about four people and each contains hearsay:
 * 1) "Easley’s doctor, Harold Granik, reported Easley spoke about creatures at Roswell on his deathbed."
 * 2) "According to his wife, Sarah Mounce, her husband told her during his final days in 1976 about guarding Hangar P-3 and seeing the bodies inside."
 * 3) "Blanche Wahnee, daughter of Capt. Meyers Wahnee, said her father told the family that the Roswell Incident was true in the last year of his life."
 * 4) "Lovekin added he heard Pres. Eisenhower talking and worrying about how control was slipping out of government hands and being assumed by corporations tasked with studying the situation."
 * Deathbed confessions? Come on. Location (talk) 15:54, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Paranormal-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 02:39, 28 August 2014 (UTC)


 * On the fence On the one hand, poor sourcing and NPOV issues are not valid reasons to delete an article (see WP:SOFIXIT). And given the vast amount of coverage from reliable sources, there's absolutely no reason to believe that this topic hasn't received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject and thus meets WP:GNG. On the other hand, the article is so poorly written, it might be easier to delete it and start over from scratch.  A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 03:04, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I think you might be right. If some of the sources are reliable, then the presence of the rest of the sources shouldn't cause the article to get deleted. If somebody knows how to fix up the article to include only the information from the sources in the article which are reliable, then maybe they should blank the article then rewrite it all in one edit, though just blanking it without rewriting it is not permitted according to the nomination template. Feel free to ad the rewrite template at the top of the article. I think maybe we should follow Ignore all rules and determine whether deleting Witness accounts of the Roswell UFO incident would satisfy the original purpose of WP:GNG. I think WP:GNG exists to help enforce Verifiability as I said in Village pump (policy)/Archive 114 before it got archived and that the more reliable the sources are, the fewer of them there need to be to for an article to be worth having and any information that appears over and over in lots of the sources is worth keeping in the article and if there's enough of such information, it should be a stand alone article and otherwise, it should be merged into Roswell UFO incident. The only thing that should make the article deleted even if a lot of its information appears over and over in many sources is if there's some reason they could have all made the same mistake, like they write what they learned from another person or another web page that made the same mistake. Blackbombchu (talk) 17:06, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Comment I agree that an article that can be fixed should be. But WP:DUE is policy and it trumps WP:N which is a guideline. An article that is not policy compliant is a no no on Wikipedia. That means this article can't be kept in its current form. I will be happy to reconsider my !vote if sufficient improvements are made to remedy the listed issues, though I am unsure how we can fix an unnecessary content fork. But the PROFRINGE and DUE problems have to be resolved. Until then my !vote remains DELETE. -Ad Orientem (talk) 18:28, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
 * We should do what's good for Wikipedia's distant future, not what's good for its near future in whether to delete Witness accounts of the Roswell UFO incident. According to Wikipedia's rules, even an article that's as bad for Wikipedia as being unreferenced shouldn't get deleted if it's predicted that it will get references later because otherwise, maybe no one will recreate it by that time once those references are found. Unless some of the information in the article is so harmful that it people should not even be seeing it in the article's history, if there is a way to fix the problem in the article, it should not be deleted but if there isn't a way to fix it, it should get deleted. There's no need to hurry up and delete the article not giving anyone a chance to fix it. People have enough sense not to delete Double circulatory system just because it was marked as unreferenced for 5 years when there is no evidence that those sources don't exist and will never be added to the article. Blackbombchu (talk) 22:58, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, one option is to trim the article to what appears in reliable secondary sources, and I've taken the in consideration in my !vote. What would remain is material that already appears in the main article. -Location (talk) 00:39, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I think you are comparing apples and oranges. The fatal issues with this article is not references, although they are problematic. The major problem is that at present it is little more than a promotional piece for fringe theories, which we do not allow. It is also a POV Content Fork which is a no no. You keep quoting guidelines, which as I have already noted, are trumped by policy. And for the record, five years without sources is unacceptable IMO. It makes a complete mockery of any claim to being an encyclopedia. As for this article, fix it or delete it. I have doubts that it is fixable, but will happily reconsider if major improvements are made. On a side note; why is it even being discussed at all? As far as I can tell the previous AfD directed its removal from the main space. -Ad Orientem (talk) 00:44, 29 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete, as a pov-fork. If anybody is able to create a policy-compliant article on this topic at some point in the future, I can live with that, but the current article should be deleted. bobrayner (talk) 15:10, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Delete. I see no evidence that the proper due diligence was executed before the WP:CFORK was created. Useful content (if any) should be merged back into the main article. jps (talk) 02:03, 3 September 2014 (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.