Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Executive Order 12986

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. Can't sleep, clown will eat me 11:15, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Executive Order 12986

This article is about an executive order, the legal details of which are of no particular importance or notability. There are currently relatively few articles about executive orders (full list here: [[1]]) and those that do exist are about orders of a great deal more significance (domestically and internationally) than this one. This was a very troublesome article for a time, due to the fact that it was based on highly erroneous information, from a disreputable source. Once the facts were established, and all of the POV content was removed, one is left with an article of no particular significance. I suggest, therefore, that it be deleted. Charles 15:26, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete per WP:NOT indescriminate info, unless its importance is asserted. Mitaphane _talk 20:43, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, I'm a policy wonk by nature but this is insignificant. --Dhartung | Talk 23:31, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per above. --Richard 06:12, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
• Strong keep all executive orders. I'm shocked we'd nominate any executive order, especially based on "importance" or "notability." What next? "Non notable piece of legislation?" --badlydrawnjeff talk 12:04, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

I'd like you to reconsider your thinking on this one. I don't care that much about keeping or deleting this particular article but I do think the idea that we should keep all Executive Orders in Wikipedia is something worth discussing.

Your "what next?" suggests that every "piece of legislation" should be included in Wikipedia. Surely you must be kidding. Every piece of legislation in what country? The U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, Germany, Russia? After all, this is not the "U.S." Wikipedia, it is the English Wikipedia. So, assuming we did want to include every piece of legislation in Wikipedia, we would have no reason to include only U.S. legislation and not those of other countries, English-speaking or not.

But the real counter-argument to yours is that there are all sorts of legislation which are not worth documenting. Please review Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. It might be useful to have a database somewhere that stores a description of every bit of legislation promulgated in the U.S. Wikipedia (IMHO) is not it. --Richard 17:08, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

You read into my suggesiton quite well. I can't imagine a single piece of national (federal level for an idea of what level I'm thinking) legislation that shouldn't be included in an encyclopedia. I also can't imagine a single executive order (or similar head-of-state action) that shouldn't be included. These are inherently "notable" if we want to use that measure, and they're easily verifiable as well. This isn't an "indiscriminate collection of information," but rather a very clear and focused information set that should be encouraged, not discouraged, especially since the source of such legislation/orders are often in difficult-to-understand legal terminology. This is exactly the sort of information an encyclopedia lacking space and scope limitations should be compiling and presenting. --badlydrawnjeff talk 17:56, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete I believe WP:NOT includes in spirit things like "Wikipedia is not a compilation of headers for national laws". The article tells us nothing about what the Executive Order does, so it is not even up to stub quality, and contains no valuable information for our readers. GRBerry 03:38, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per not meeting WP:NOT TheRanger 22:21, 1 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.