Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The honeybee "dance language" (DL) controversy

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.Blnguyen | rant-line 04:38, 4 August 2006 (UTC) To clarify this decision, there is evidence that this article may be a copyvio, and also of somewhat dubious quality, which somewhat compounded one another. Blnguyen | rant-line 05:20, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The honeybee "dance language" (DL) controversy

This is total parody or hoax and does not deserve to hang around on a prod. Have a read! Mattisse 17:54, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

• Delete fails WP:OR in ways I never knew to be possible. WilyD 18:10, 26 July 2006 (UTC) I'm so confused. WilyD 23:36, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per above. NawlinWiki 18:16, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete but imagine how much time the author must have spent writing this... -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 18:19, 26 July 2006 (UTC) Keep I'll give Rossami and Aquilina (and others) a chance to improve the article. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 23:46, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete I prodded it, so that's an obvious delete vote from me. -RaCha'ar 18:31, 26 July 2006 (UTC) Weak Keep if yall really think you can make it NPOV, please do. -RaCha'ar 04:46, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete as all above. Nuttah68 20:34, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete as blatant OR. --Coredesat talk. o.o;; 21:07, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
• I can't believe I'm voting keep ... but this is no hoax or parody. The Nobel Prize winning (see Karl von Frisch) dance language hypothesis is one of the classic examples given in animal cognitive science and the self-organisation of communal behaviours - see the summary article from Nature here. More than that, it was indeed a highly controversial hypothesis, after failures in initial experiments - this book [1], supported by the American Journal of Psychology, summarises the arguments, and other papers from J.Insect Behaviour [2] flesh out details. (The latest work in Nature supports the hypothesis - [3])

  IANA-animal behaviour scientist - I'm a linguist who happened by AfD - but half an hour's research and the little background I (by chance already knew) has shown this is a distinctly notable topic. Yes, the current article is awful and unwikified, but given time and the attention from those more qualified than I could make this into a Featured Article. I'll start work on improving it over the next few days if it is to be spared from the sword of AfD. Aquilina 22:44, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

  • Comment: I suggest you copy & paste (userfy) the article and use the material to update Bee learning and communication, which could use some attention as well. hateless 00:17, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
    • I suggest not copying the text of the article, because it is a word-for-word copyright violation of a message published to a discussion forum in February 2006. Uncle G 00:43, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
      • Then one can copy to a text or Word file and save it on locally on your computer. hateless 04:49, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per nominator as unreferenced original research. Yamaguchi先生 23:08, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete without prejudice (as the present version). Concur with Aquilina in a sense; if it's rewritten, to add sources, change to Strong Keep. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 00:21, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Why bother rewriting? The proper places to write about this subject are bee learning and communication and honeybee#Honeybee_communication, where it is in fact already written about. Uncle G 00:43, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
    •  :-o Good point. Details on the controversy could easily bee included in those articles. Changing vote to delete. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 00:56, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
• Keep but rename (the use of quotes and parens are non-standard) and mark for clean-up. This controversy is very real and well-documented among bee-researchers. See, for example, the extensive discussion and the multitude of articles referenced in the BEE-L archives on this topic. While I believe the presentation of facts in this article are one-sided and do not reflect the current scientific consensus of bee researchers, none of the facts presented in the page qualify as original research because they have been previously published in at least one peer-reviewed journal. In fact as articles go, this is already better referenced than most Wikipedia pages. The author several times cited texts and articles relevant to this controversy. The editorial comments in the page should be edited out but that's a clean-up problem, not a deletion problem.
  It is not a copyright violation because the person who posted it is the same person who made the post in the discussion list. Authors have free rights to rerelease their own writings into GFDL. The forum where she first posted this message is not independently copyrighted, leaving her as the author with an unencumbered right to republish.
  This page could be merged but this level of detail would unbalance the bee learning and communication article as it's currently structured. Rossami (talk) 14:07, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
  • The assertion that this is not a copyright violation because it is the same person is not built on any solid foundation. We don't have a statement from either person even claiming that they are the same, let alone confirmation of that. The two names (the discussion forum poster's and the Wikipedia editor's) are not even identical. Your user name is as close to the original author's name as the original editor's name is. Uncle G 01:03, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
    • I'm sorry, I should have laid out my evidence more clearly. 1) The user's chosen name (Rosinbio) is identical with the email account prefix which was used to make that particular post to the discussion forum. 2) The user's chosen name the same as the email prefix commonly used by Ruth Rosin on BEE-L discussions and other bee-research related forums (where a person with the same signature has made very similar arguments, presented similar evidence and uses the same tone and style of language). 3) This same text was largely cut-and-pasted into Talk:Bee learning and communication but with a header and some minor changes which are again consistent with this person's observed pattern of edits when reusing material across other discussion fora. I agree that it would be helpful if the user would return and explicitly confirm her identity and the rerelease of this content under GFDL and have asked her to do so but in the meantime, I think the circumstantial evidence is quite strong that this is more likely to be the same person than not. Rossami (talk) 13:05, 29 July 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.