Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Argument from evolution

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 (kept by default) - Yomangani^talk 11:18, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Argument from evolution

Not encyclopedic quality, and has been for 5 months without substantial edit. Hackwrench 20:55, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

• Hold - WP:EDINN --Ineffable3000 22:25, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
• Speedy keep What the? This article has been around since Januray 2002 and it is linked to from various places about Darwinism. It needs cleanup? Then let's clean it up but there's no way this has to get zapped. Pascal.Tesson 22:52, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

It's been linked to from various places about Darwinism because someone put a link to it in the "See also" of just about every article it's even tangentally related to. There's been five months since the cleanup tag had been applied and nobody thought the article was significant enough to clean up. Hackwrench 00:16, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Please take a look at the backlog Category:Cleanup by month. It's been a little more than a year and nobody has touched Han Chinese clothing. That does not mean the article should be deleted. Pascal.Tesson 02:01, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Except that the tag on this page wasn't just cleanup, but cleanup-rewrite, which says: "This article or section needs a complete rewrite for the reasons listed on the talk page.", which is a more severe state than just cleanup. Hackwrench 03:36, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

• Speedy keep. I see no reason for deletion. Even bad quality has never been a reason to delete an article, see Wikipedia:Deletion policy#Problem articles where deletion may not be needed. IronChris | (talk) 23:00, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

AfD is not a vote. You need to give a reason why it should be kept. Bad quality is a reason. That section you linked to gives reasons why an article should be deleted and then gives alternative possibilities that, if siuccessful will keep the article from being deleted. Five months is plenty of time to see if cleanup would have saved this article. Hackwrench 00:16, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Change my vote to Neutral. While I don't think the reasons behind this AfD are valid, or that rallying others who are known critics of this article is a fair practise, I understand Silence's arguments, and it does seem that this article contains badly written versions of parts of other articles, in particular Evidence for evolution. Also, the title isn't very good. Salvageable content could easily be moved to evidence for evolution and other articles, if this one is deleted. IronChris | (talk) 04:46, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

My intention wasn't to rally them. I didn't tell tem to vote against it or in any way push them to it. I saw that there were several statements of support for the article and felt that known critics needed to comment here in case I had misunderstood their criticisms or that their belief was that this article would be salvageable if their criticism were addressed. Hackwrench 05:08, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

• Comment Hmm, so the article needs cleanup. It's a shame we don't have a tag for that and have to completely delete entries as soon as they drop below a certain standard. Sockatume 00:29, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
• In less sarcastic terms, this article needs to be flagged for attention, not wiped from the face of the Wikipedia. VfD should be the last port of call for an article that's got problems, not the first. Sockatume 00:31, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

As I pointed out in other responses, it had been flagged for attention for five months. It had not gotten attention in thse five months, which is sufficient time to illustrate it's nonimportance. It has been in other ports of calls. Hackwrench 01:33, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, how far did it get? If it's been sitting there with just a Cleanup or Attention tag on it for five months, it could be argued that editors simply didn't know about it (of course it would also mean that the article is seldom-visited and perhaps shouldn't be around in the first place). It needs a definite plan of action set out, and nobody's sitting down and doing so. Is there a "Wikiproject evolution" or somesuch it could go under where it would get more attention? We could try putting up requests for attention in Talk pages of the articles which link to it. I'm not convinced that deletion is the right course of action in such a situation. Of course, if the alternative's complete inaction, well, I could be persuated. Sockatume 01:41, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

That it has been tagged for five months does not mean much. By the way, have you tried to clean it up? Before going to AfD on grounds of "impossible cleanup", you probably should have asked for help in cleaning it up by posting a note on the talk page of Darwinism, evolution and the other articles that link back to this one. Pascal.Tesson 01:55, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Where do you get the idea that other pages talk pages are the place for discussing cleaning up this one. There was much talk that recongnized the need for cleaning up this article on the talk page and little progress was made on a course of action to do something about it. Since it failed, what makes you think that I or anyone else would have success? Hackwrench 03:32, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

• Speedy keep The subject's notability is shown by numerous reliable and verifiable sources. 4800 Google hits. If there is a problem, Anyone can edit Wikipedia, as boldly as is needed. Edison 00:33, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

"Numerous" has many interpretations. The number of hits for evolution is 298,000,000. 4800 is a drop in the bucket in comparison. Also, "argument from evolution" is vague enough for numerous arguments to all claim to be the argument from evolution, and that's one of the problems the article encountered. See Talk:Argument from evolution#What_Happened.3F and #Some examples of use of this term.Hackwrench 01:33, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

After 208 entries Google is omitting results.[1] Some of the results displayed on that page are spam. Hackwrench 02:00, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

• Keep Since when has poor quality ever been a rationale for deletion. Seriously. Point me to one place in policy where it says this. Also, it no doubt would have been better form to not contact only critics of the article ([2] and [3]) to !vote on deletion. JChap2007 02:04, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I only contacted them after there was much weighing in to keep the article. Why do those who want to keep it feel such urgency to keep this that they feel it should be spedily kept and thus shorten the time to really talk about this?Hackwrench 03:24, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Poor quality has been a rational for deletion ever since "Completely idiosyncratic non-topic" and "Patent nonsense (total gibberish)" were part of the Wikipedia: Deletion policy, This article doesn't cover one topic, but is a mishmash of things that say evolution and may mention either intelligent design or God. Hackwrench 03:57, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: None of the people who are proposing the hypothesis that it can be cleaned up have made an edit to the page towards that goal, at least since the article has been proposed for deletion. When I feel an article might be salvageable, I at least do that much. Hackwrench 03:42, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. I would have thought an "argument from evolution" would take as one of its premises that evolution was true and then derive conclusions from that. But, instead, this article consists of arguments for evolution. As such, it would appear to duplicate various other Wikipedia articles. (Evidence of evolution and sections of Intelligent design come to mind.) --Metropolitan90 03:45, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. Disingenuous, OR title/"subject": this is not an "argument from evolution" (the format of which implies some specific, well-established logical argument, not a disorganized assortment of various endorsements of evolution), it's a series of criticisms of ID and defenses of evolution (which might make fine pages in their own right, but this isn't it). Poor quality is not a reason to delete an article on a valid topic, but this article lacks a valid topic: "argument from evolution" is an unverified, non-noteworthy term in its own right, even if related issues would be noteworthy if reformated. Even if this article isn't deleted, all of its contents very clearly need to be moved elsewhere. -Silence 04:34, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, original research, this article is pure nonsense. --Terence Ong _{(T | C)} 04:52, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
• *Keep Most of the current draft of the article has little to do with what the argument from evolution is, which is a variant of the naturalistic fallacy. However, the article needs clean up, not deletion. JoshuaZ 05:26, 3 November 2006 (UTC) Chaning to weak Delete per Hackwrench's comments below the term appears to be possibly too much of a neologism for it to be reasonably covered in an article. JoshuaZ 02:53, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

If we first accept that you truly believe that the article needs cleanup and not deletion, why over the past 5 months haven't you made attempts towards that? Otherwise, it just seems to be an excuse to satisfy a fear that something bad will happen if the article gets deleted. Hackwrench 07:27, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Furthermore, what basis are you using to determine that your assessment of the primary meaning of the phrase "argument from evolution" is correct. Hackwrench 07:29, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

To Hackwrench's points- first) I haven't gotten around to cleaning it up, but will do so now that it is on AfD. As to the second, do a google search for the phrase, one gets as some of the top hits [4][5]. JoshuaZ 07:36, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Except that those seem to be the only top hits that are not clones of the Wikipedia article or spam. It seems that the only reason it is anywhere near the top is because the wikipedia article and clones link to it and several widely linked wikipedia articles link to this article in their "see also". Also, as I noted above, the phrase "argument from evolution" isn't widely used. While Google reports about 4800 pages, you only go to 208 before Google sais that the rest are hidden due to being too similar to the ones already displayed.Hackwrench 07:49, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

• Keep this interesting article, but also clean it! It does not meet high quality standards right now.--Yannismarou 10:15, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
• Delete as per Silence - UtherSRG (talk) 14:02, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
• The argument is not about 'evolution' at all, which simply means change - from the Latin verb 'evolare' meaning to change. Even the stupidest of fundamentalists admits that things have changed: society for example and even that change is necessary to 'bring God's plans to fruition.' As far as the natural wortld goes; the question is: by what process has that chagned occurred? One theory is the theory of natural selection as put forward by Darwin and Wallace. This is people usually mean by the theory of evolution. It is not the theory of evolution, but a theory of evolution. There is no reasonable argument against the evidence for change as evidenced by the fossil record. The question is how that change occurred. An enlightened theist might neatly solve the debate by saying that of course God created a wonderful world in which animals could evolve by natural selection. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 150.101.122.132 (talk • contribs).
• Speedy Weak Keep per everyone else that said the same. Strongly agree with Sockatume's sentiment that an article in need of cleaning up needs cleaning up rather than deletion, even if it takes awhile before someone gets around to it. Also agree with IronChris that Hackwrench's arguments around this article are unconvincing. But, Silence makes a much stronger point... Would support renaming if a better title were suggested, but definitely merge content elsewhere if not kept. --Arvedui 02:31, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. well referenced, verifiable text on notable subject. Cleanup. `'mikkanarxi 21:12, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
• Keep It is well referenced compared to the majority of articles that get sent to AfD but I would, ideally, like some more work done to clear up the OR concerns. However AfD is not a substitute for clean up and there is no convincing reasons to delete. Agne 23:51, 8 November 2006 (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.