Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Scientology Timeline

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 of the debate was Keep - Richardcavell 23:22, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Scientology Timeline

This article is basically a POV fork of Category:Scientology, cherry-picking items favorable to Scientology ("1997-12 Thousands of Scientologists hold candles and demonstrate in front of Clearwater police headquarters, accusing police Chief Sid Klein of discriminating against Scientologists." -- why is this protest notable enough to make the timeline?) and slanting items in a notably pro-Scientology fashion ("the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association ... rejected [Hubbard's claimed "findings on the mind"] and later attempted to discredit his work and reputation." (emphasis added); "the High Court of Australia overturns Scientology ban, contributing greatly to the scope of religious freedom in that country.") At first I thought a timeline of the major events involving Scientology could be useful. After seeing this, however, I'm not sure it would even be possible to create an NPOV timeline. -- Antaeus Feldspar 17:15, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

• Delete per own nom. -- Antaeus Feldspar 17:15, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
• Cleanup. Not sure if cleanup is a vote, but regardless this article does have some factual content. Instead of deleting it why not slap a POV tag on it and add information from the other point of view.--SomeStranger (T | C) 17:19, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Cleaning it up is what I started to do. But where would it end? When an article has a tight focus, editors from all sides might be able to reach agreement on which events are significant enough to merit discussion and which are not. Here, where the only requirement is "it involved Scientology and it can be tied to some rough span of time," there's nothing to prevent an arms race in which all sides add whatever incidents they feel support their cause, going into ever-more-intricate detail in order to counter what they'll see as over-representation of the other side. In the best-case scenario, all we'd wind up with is just a duplication of everything that's in all the other Scientology articles, rearranged chronologically. And the worst case is a never-ending POV-fork maelstrom. -- Antaeus Feldspar 17:41, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. Sorry, but AfD is not for content problems, and this does not appear to be a content fork of a category (I can't really imagine such a thing) or of anything else, although I'm not familiar with the Scientology-related articles. The timeline is probably encyclopedic, given the impact (for better or worse) that Scientology has; also, the first entry I picked at random was quite non-flattering ("Hubbard's wife and 10 other church staffers are convicted of conspiring to steal federal government documents and cover it up."). Cleanup is quite warranted, though. Normal editing practices ought to be able to determine what to include or not; if necessary, criteria need to be agreed upon.Sandstein 18:28, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Per Sandstein. — WCityMike ^(T | C)  ⇓ plz reply HERE  (why?) ⇓  19:52, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep but rename for consistency with Timeline of Christianity- as you can see by that link, there is precedent for this sort of thing. I did notice some unflattering things here- legal disputes and whatnot aren't feelgood material. If it was written by User:Terryeo, who has a history of pushing pro-Scientology POV, I could understand the charge, but this was written by the author of Scientology History of Man (an article that, by the way, also desperately needs renaming), which the last time I looked at it leaned against Scientology views. CanadianCaesar Cæsar is turn’d to hear 20:34, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
• Weak Keep. Yes, all the significant events could never fit in one article, but that doesn't stop it from including the most important. Plus, if it gets too large, we can always go to the summary + main article link format, maybe by decade. This could be interesting if fully wikified. --Davidstrauss 10:52, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep, but.... I think if the article is to ever be any good, the timeline should be restricted to MAJOR events, not an endless torrent of trivia like dates that various books were published (There are so many Scientology publications, this one aspect alone would make the article unacceptably long) or dates that various churches and missions were formed (ditto). Keep it to BIG news items like "L. Ron Hubbard dies" and "FBI investigates Guardian's Office". wikipediatrix 13:52, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep — Yeah it's just a goofy little "Hubbard wants to be a millionare" club, but still it's kinda notable, in a granola cereal sort of way. ;-) — RJH (talk) 22:08, 7 June 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.