Wikipedia:Featured list removal candidates/List of states with nuclear weapons

List of states with nuclear weapons
Delisted This list clearly fails criteria (d) "uncontroversial" and (e) "stable". Circeus 19:24, 4 July 2007 (UTC) 
 * The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

This was made a featured list in 2005. I question how comprehensive and well written this article is. There is a lengthy debate on the talk page about poor and unsystematic writing and lack of information that should be mentioned. There have even been suggestions that the list needs to be rewritten from scratch in order to correct all of the problems. The sourcing is poor and there are a number of citation needed tags. KnightLago 13:56, 14 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Whoa, hold the bus!  There are a total of 3 citation needed tags in an article with 57 references.  The subject is controversial and will attract countering points of view about the way its written, but from what I can see there is basically a single user (User:NPguy) suggesting certain changes; hardly a "lengthy debate".  Previous suggested improvements have been integrated into the article.  Are these really grounds for delisting or just more just improvement suggestions? &mdash;Moondyne 14:32, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Two "citation needed tags," 58 references now. I did some Googling about this "Saab A36" bomber, also known as Saab Project 1300, but I didn't find anything too reliable.  Apparently it is covered in an article "In issue 4/1991 of the magazine Flygrevyn" but... I don't speak Flygrevyn ;-) TomTheHand 14:44, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

The following paragraphs on a controversial topic have no citations or other problems:
 * United States
 * Soviet Union
 * United Kingdom
 * France - one citation for a single sentence
 * North Korea - one citation to another WP article
 * Iran - the first sentence runs four lines
 * Nazi Germany
 * Poland
 * Spain - one citation to a Spanish source, is there nothing in English?
 * Sweden
 * Yugoslavia
 * Bulgaria
 * Canada - one citation for entire paragraph
 * Italy
 * Lithuania
 * Netherlands

The current citations themselves are a mess too. Numbers 1-2, 12, 14, 16-17, 19-20 are improperly formatted, missing access dates etc. These numbers have broken external links: 3-11, 13-15. Number 9 links to GlobalSecurity.org when it is supposed to be for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Also, numbers 5 and 8 have two different sources each under one number. I haven't seen this done before, so I am not sure if this is correct or not. Number 21 directs you to another WP article for citation. I stopped at 21 but I could keep going. Also, the external link to Pakistani Nuclear Development is a 404.

NpGuy and 2 IP's raise a number of issues on the talk page that I think should be taken care of. Read through the dispute section here. There seems to valid criticisms that I don't see being resolved. KnightLago 16:18, 14 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm guessing that 69.143.20.172 is NpGuy, and I can't see a second IP. I'm not dismissing his concerns by the way, just pointing out that it appears to be an individual rather than several editors.  But anyway, thanks for the specifics: I'm sure the referencing and other issues can be dealt with. &mdash;Moondyne 16:52, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

I sign all my comments. I've had one comment on this article and chimed in on another. I'm relatively new to Wikipedia, which has its good and bad points. This is not one of the good ones. NPguy 01:11, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Greetings all. I'm CP Guy, not to be confused with NP Guy (FYI, and not to be snide at all, but folks who don't know the difference between the two probably should not be editing an article about proliferation issues. CP and NP are acronyms for terms of art used in the field). I did put one comment unsigned, when I first started on Wikipedia, the other's signed CP guy is me.

This is a bad, bad article. Much of the article deals with states that pursued and then abandoned NW programs (called "rollback" within the field, as an FYI) or potential nuclear weapons states. Numerous books and articles have beeb written on these subjects, including by such serious proliferation policy scholars/practitioners as Lavoy, Reiss, Solingen, Einhorn, Dunn, Hersman, and Peters, and yet none of these folks are referenced. Why? Also, there is an entire journal dedicated to studying this very subject, Nonproliferation Review, but it is never referenced. Again, why? The only answer I can come up with is that this page was written by dilettantes who do not really understand the subject. This is a serious subject, with serious authors writing volumes on the subject of which this page is ignorant. The citaton list, in short, is a joke (remember, quantities of citations doesn't equal quality).

The statements about metrics, definitions, organizing principels, etc., being problematic, are correct. The page was written in an entirely hap-hazard way and does not relfect any intellectual rigor. This would not stand up at the university level, much less at the serious academic/policy level. The page needs to be scrapped, and redone using a standardized set of definitions, etc. The paradox, of course, is that wikipedia is unable to do this since it is open to anyone's editing. In short, this subject is too complex for wikipedia. Wikipedia is great, but it should know its limitations. This is an area that is beyond Wikipedia's limits, and we should accpet that. Scrap the page, because people who know little about the subject and turn to Wikipedia to learn about it will either go away confused (at best) or misinformed (at worst). CP Guy, June 28, 2007, 4:26 EDT.


 * For all of the complaining above I have not really seen too many attempts to actually improve the article by those who are complaining. If you are arguing that the article should be totally re-written from scratch, that's fine, but do the re-writing first and then substitute it in for the old one. In any case, complaining that this subject, among all others, is uniquely un-coverable by Wikipedia is pretty silly. If you don't want to put in the work, fine, but the argument that this is just too tough is silly. Wikipedia is edited by all sorts of people — including experts — and the need for experts to help police articles with a lot of amateur appeal is not unique to this article (it is, I would argue, the fundamental conflict at the heart of Wikipedia—though I do think it is often a productive conflict, when it is not being a frustrating one).
 * In any case, I do agree that two of the sections ("7. States formerly possessing nuclear programs", "8. Other nuclear-capable states") need to be systematized and made more rigorous. They are currently very loose with facts and assertions. The other sections, though, do not strike me as being terribly incorrect — in some cases some increased concision would be good but otherwise they carry the basic facts across.
 * Just a note on references: many of the very brief sections on the US, UK, France, etc. are basically sentences about which entire articles are written. There is little need to provide a citation for a sentence like " It was the first nation to develop the hydrogen bomb, testing it ("Ivy Mike") in 1952 and a deployable version in 1954 ("Castle Bravo")" since either of those links will confirm what the sentence says about them (and have their own references).
 * Should it be featured? I have no opinion, personally. The criteria for what "featured" means seems to change regularly and I have not been keeping up to date. --Fastfission 23:19, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree that at the very least, States formerly possessing nuclear programs and Other Nuclear capable states should be deleted. As one of the "complainers," I will note that I have tried to edit this page, only to have my edits overturned and my IP address blocked from being able to edit (I deleted the Spanish nuclear weapon program section, and gave justification for doing so. The only response I got to my justification was having my IP address blocked). I have been hesitant to engage in more changes, for obvious reason.

Moreover, Fastfission, you assert that my argument about the fundamental weakness of Wikipedia is "silly", but you don't provide any evidence to back this up, and you don't address any of the substantive points I offered as to why pages such as this are beyond the limits of Wikipedia. In addition, you seem to (inadvertantly) support my proposition that the best way to address this issue is beyond the limits of wikipedia: Have one person rewrite the article and repost it. I would be happy to do so (and have published on this subject in print), but quite honestly, the problem is that once it is posted, who is to stop a dilettante from bastardizing and tearing apart a cohesive set of metrics, methodologies, and definitions? The result would be what we have today: Something that starts strong ("list of states with nuclear weapons") but becomes an incoherent mess (list of states with past programs). Wikipedia does not allow for any intellectual rigor that would stand up in the academic or policy worlds, and I can tell you that with what is currently up on the page, people who don't know much about the subject and turn to it will come away worse off then they already were. If the goal of wikipedia is to spread knowledge, that's fine, but don't be so blind as to the limitations of wikipedia that your actions actually result in the dissemination of poor information. CP Guy, July 2, 12:42.
 * Without wishing (or having the knowledge) to engage in the detailed debate about the shortcomings of this page, I believe that enough concerns have been raised to support removing this as a featured list. --OpenToppedBus - Talk to the driver 11:25, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.