Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Vital articles

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 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was keep. JohnCD (talk) 11:30, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Vital articles


This list of topics seems to violate our core policies of WP:V, WP:NPOV and WP:OR as it lacks support from independent reliable sources, per WP:LISTN. Our readership decides with their feet what is important to them and the results may be seen at Top_5000_pages (why is ID such a massive hit!?) The list may have had some use when Wikipedia was still small and there were significant gaps but that time has long since passed. Now the page seems to be just a place for editors to bicker about the comparative merits of Golda Meir, Beethoven, Lady Gaga, &c. which violates WP:NOTOPINION, WP:NOTFORUM, WP:NOTSOAP, &c. Warden (talk) 12:40, 9 March 2013 (UTC) Warden (talk) 12:40, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
 * (Just to answer a question, "ID" is almost certainly a big hit because of science. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 14:25, 11 March 2013 (UTC))


 * snow keep and a damn big fish. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:44, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Keep. Ridiculous. Also, project space rather than article space - David Gerard (talk) 13:03, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
 * That's why I brought the matter to MfD, not AFD. Perhaps the page should be marked as historical rather than deleted - I'm not fussy.  But we should really put a stop to editors arguing about comics vs drawing, for example.  The matter is currently listed on centralised discussion (which is where I found it) and so will tend to become a train-wreck per WP:LIGHTBULB. Warden (talk) 13:08, 9 March 2013 (UTC)


 * per the above, none of the policies listed apply to non article space. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom  13:07, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
 * WP:NOTFORUM and similar policies apply to non-article space. Wikipedia is not a forum in which to discuss what is "vital".  The concept is quite subjective and therefore endlessly debatable. Warden (talk) 13:13, 9 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep WP:V, WP:NPOV, WP:OR and WP:LISTN are article content policies which only apply to articles, so this page cannot possibly violate them. The page does have a useful purpose: by identifying which articles are considered most important we can focus resources on improving them. That something is the subject of debate amongst editors does not mean it violates WP:NOTFORUM or WP:NOTSOAP. Hut 8.5 14:02, 9 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Some examples might be helpful. For example, the section for literature lists 5 great works.  I doubt that anyone would be able to guess what they are because none of them are in the English language.  So, no Lord of the Rings, for example.  Instead, we have stuff like Shahnameh.  Vital, eh?  Perhaps the fans of this list can explain how, without reference to sources, we can ever settle such questions. Warden (talk) 14:04, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
 * You've raised real issues, but none of them are reasons for deletion, and none of them would be helped by deletion. Do something that's useful to what you're complaining of, not just something that's easy to do. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:14, 9 March 2013 (UTC)


 * So because the editors tasked with picking the five most important works from the whole of world literature didn't pick something you personally agree with, the page has to be deleted? Hut 8.5 14:15, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
 * As I understand it, there's no ownership or tasking. Instead, it's a case of who shouts loudest and because I say so.  Sensible editors will avoid such time-wasting and so you're left with the other sort to determine what we ought to be working on.  But the editors who actually do the work don't have to pay any attention to this list and so they will work upon what they consider important or interesting.  Today's featured article, Dobroslav Jevđević, isn't considered vital I suppose but it's on the main page regardless and those other articles aren't.  So what is the point of the list and the associated argumentation?  It now just seems to be a WP:BADIDEA that isn't working. Warden (talk) 14:51, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
 * The value of VA has shifted in a decade and it has gone from "we need articles" to "we should have FA articles, or at least GA". I doubt that anything needs to be added to VA more than once a year by now, but we still have a pressing problem where clear VAs are still of poor quality.
 * If your motion was "stop adding things to VA" then I'd support it, but we should still be aware (and ashamed) of the quality issues. Andy Dingley (talk) 15:39, 9 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Comment this is not an article, V, NPOV, OR doesn't apply. As for what belongs on this list, we can ask our founder(curator), Jimbo, to check it, since normal encyclopedias have staffs that select topics for inclusion. -- 65.92.180.137 (talk) 01:15, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
 * WP:V, WP:NPOV and WP:OR do not apply (with certain caveats) to community pages. This is, by definition, a work of consensus where the goal is to establish the community's opinion of where our efforts are best directed. It's no less suitable than any task force page or discussion. Now, there are certainly problems with the way we're going about it, but unless there's a concrete reason to believe that these problems are insurmountable (I don't believe that the community's fixation with / revulsion of pop culture is insurmountable) then we should endeavour to work our way through them. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 10:32, 11 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Here's some more evidence. On the talk page, there's a table showing the grading of the supposedly vital articles.  In 2007 the number of FA+GA was 173.  In 2012, it was 131 so there's no sign of any progress in these statistics.  Meanwhile, the discussion shows obvious signs of POV-pushing: Anarchism, Ayn Rand, Adam Smith...  While today's FA is David Bowie.  He's not in the list of vital musicians and composers but Jim Hendrix and Duke Ellington are and they are both B-grade. Warden (talk) 13:04, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
 * So VA "isn't working very well". In what way would deleting it improve matters?  Andy Dingley (talk) 13:16, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
 * It would shoot the fox of the editors who are wasting their time arguing there. They would perforce have to find something else to do and that work might instead be useful.  It's like WP:NOT says, "Please try to stay on the task of creating an encyclopedia.".  Warden (talk) 14:02, 11 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I think you're reading those FA numbers wrongly. The reason the numbers have dropped is that FA demands a stratospherically higher quality now than it did in 2007, and so a great many articles that we formerly showed off as the best we had have been demoted. I dare say that very few of them have actually gotten worse; they are merely relatively less excellent than the rest of the project's articles than they were six years ago. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 13:21, 11 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Former FAs seem to go into a different column. My impression is that the table has been organised so you can compare like with like. Warden (talk) 14:02, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately not. A-class is not at all the same thing as former-FA. The post-2008 tables drop former FAs and former GAs entirely. As can be seen from the current live page, the average rating of a former FA is B. In most cases, this simply indicates that what we now class as a fairly mediocre article would at one time have been considered one of our best works. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 14:37, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't want to waste my own time trying to make sense of such incoherent and inconstant metrics. We should leave such work to independent scholars who will happily benchmark our project for us and seem to do so in a much more objective and scientific way.  For example, see Analyzing and Visualizing the Semantic Coverage of Wikipedia and Its Authors and An analysis of topical coverage of Wikipedia.  They take the sensible approach of comparing the coverage of Wikipedia with such independent equivalents as Britannica, Encarta and the Dewey Decimal System.  Now this approach is more in accord with our core policies because it is based upon reliable sources which are analysed in a reasonably neutral way.  If we analyse our own work then we have a conflict of interest and the result will not be considered reliable, not even by ourselves. Warden (talk) 15:47, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
 * There's certainly an element of truth in that Wikipedia (largely created by anonymous and pseudonymous contributors of wildly varying and frequently unverifiable aptitude) is so atypical of the open source development process (where technical ability can generally be more accurately assessed, and where professional contributors are increasingly commonplace) that peer review (where by "peer" we mean "anyone else with an account") is less useful; however, you're not going to do away with Wikipedia's incredibly deeply-rooted peer review process with a tangentially-related MfD. If that's your goal, develop a plan and start an RfC. For now, peer review is the largest motivator for high-quality work on the project (for better or worse) and the nominated page helps guide it. Deleting it would be counterproductive. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 16:10, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Keep this is part of a series like WikiProject Canada/Vital Canadian articles.Moxy (talk) 17:04, 11 March 2013 (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 page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.