Talk:Soap Box Derby
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These are my pictures used on this site. The girl with the white and blue car is my sister Daralyn Fitzgerald. I read the insert and it is correct. There are 2 forms of derby racing All American and NDR. NDR was formed in 1977 because the All American race was not fair. It has been going every since. Its usually the week after Akron and contestants compete in both organizations. The other pics are of the disqualified 1973 magnet car of James Gronen. For more references checkout www.zero-error.com —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.151.140.233 (talk) 19:18, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
The history of this article exhibits suspicious behavior. In particular, the following paragraph seems to have been inserted and removed repeatedly:
Keep in mind the World Championships held in Akron, Ohio are ran on a "first to the finish line wins" meaning that it is a wheel race and is usually fixed so the local favorite wins the race. The National Derby Rallies is a rotating wheel swap race and is considered the "real race" which yeilds the fastest car and driver. NDR is considered the fair race.
Quite aside from the various problems with this paragraph (no sources cited for what would obviously be a potentially controversial statement; use of the second-person imperative; various grammatical issues; no attempt to explain the difference between a wheel race and a rotating wheel swap race; no link to any article on the NDR, nor any information about where that race is held), its insertion has been marked as a "minor edit". Please don't mark edits as "minor" when they introduce (or re-introduce) entire paragraphs; the "minor edit" checkbox is intended for stuff like adding or removing a punctuation mark or fixing a misspelled word.
I noticed this because I was considering commenting on this talk page regarding the various issues (cheifly in terms of the lack of cited sources) with that paragraph, but when I revisited the article to pick up a copy of the paragraph for quoting, it was gone. Then I looked at the history...
Apart from that, if the material in the above paragraph were to be re-added, it ought to be accompanied by a citation or reference, an explanation of the difference between the two types of races and what implications this has for fixing, and better NPOV wording (e.g., with a statement like "NDR is considered the fair race" there should be a qualifier indicating who considers it to be so).
[edit] Biased removal of content?
I just reverted the two anonymous, edit-summary-less content-deletions by 68.117.193.232, (who's only two edits are these removals of paragraphs from this article). The content-removal may have been justified, though I don't see how. The only vein of similarity between these specific paragraphs is that they are all critical of, or speak to the decline in popularity of, soap box derbies. I undid the removal as the edit served to push the article away from a NPOV. —Joel D. Reid (talk) 04:32, 1 July 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Scandals
I suggested to contributors to cite references to these instances, the last having been written in a rather non-encyclopedic style.
Bill Wrigley, 01:09, 11 September 2007 (UTC)