Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Democide

Democide

Democide (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

Democide is a neologism

According to Webster's dictionary [1], the American Heritage dictionary [2], and dictionary.com [3] , democide is not an established word in the english language. Using Neologisms certainly violates Wikipedia's Avoid Neologisms guideline. This article should be a candidate for speedy deletion. I have included the relevant sections of the guideline:

Neologism as defined from Wikipedia's Avoid Neologisms

Neologisms are words and terms that have recently been coined, generally do not appear in any dictionary, but may be used widely or within certain communities.

Why Wikipedia prohibits using neologisms

Generally speaking, neologisms should be avoided in articles because they may not be well understood, may not be clearly definable, and may even have different meanings to different people. Determining which meaning is the true meaning is original research—we don't do that here at Wikipedia. [4]

From the Guideline: Why this article qualifies

Some neologisms and protologisms can be in frequent use and it may be possible to pull together many facts about a particular term and show evidence of its usage on the Internet or even in larger society. It may be natural, then, to feel that Wikipedia should have a page devoted to this new term, but this is not always the case. There are several reasons why articles on (or titled with) neologisms may not be appropriate:

• The first is that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and so articles simply attempting to define a neologism are inappropriate.
• The second reason is that articles on neologisms frequently attempt to track the emergence and use of the term as observed in communities of interest or on the internet—without attributing these claims to reliable secondary sources. If the article is not verifiable (see Reliable sources for neologisms, below) then it constitutes analysis, synthesis and original research and consequently cannot be accepted by Wikipedia. This is true even though there may be many examples of the term in use.

In many cases, articles on neologisms get deleted (either via proposed deletion or articles for deletion). Articles on protologisms are almost always deleted as these articles are often created in an attempt to use Wikipedia to increase usage of the term.

As Wiktionary's inclusion criteria differ from Wikipedia's, that project may cover neologisms that Wikipedia cannot accept. If you are interested in writing an article on a neologism, you may wish to contribute it to that project instead.

Abe Froman 16:26, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

• delete I am the editor who brought this action. This article should be deleted because it is devoted to one academic's neologism. This violates Wikipedia's Avoid Neologisms guideline. Abe Froman 16:41, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
• keep Looks like a bad faith nomination. The term has been cited by 400 academic works[5] and has 200,000 Google hits.[6]. As noted in Wikipedia:Avoid neologisms "the best approach is to arrange to have your results published in a peer-reviewed journal" which has been done. The term has been cited, used, and debated by many scholars. If Wikipedia should only include terms found in the above dictionaries, then terms such as state terrorism, anarcho-capitalism, Public choice theory, and Juche should be deleted as well. The contents of an encyclopedia are not limited to that of dictionaries.Ultramarine 18:30, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
• keep the is the epitome of a bad faith nomination. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 17:21, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
• Keep - Google News Archive and Google Books also find plenty of prior third-party use (which further fit the Wikipedia:Avoid neologisms criterion of being "reliable secondary sources such as books and papers about the term — not books and papers that use the term". Gordonofcartoon 17:37, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
• Speedy keep, passes WP:RS, verifiable term. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(((Broken clamshells • Otter chirps)))} 19:19, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
• It appears to me that Ultramarine and TDC's suggestions of bad faith are due to their own misunderstanding of what Wikipedia:Avoid neologisms means. The sausage king of Chicago Abe Froman is, of course, right that "democide" is a neologism whose use should be avoided on Wikipedia, especially as a pagename. The Google hits provided above show only that the term is used, not, as Gordon suggests, that there are secondary sources about the term.

  From looking through the Google scholar hits, this is what I gather. "Democide" is a neologism, which appears loosely to mean the killing of people by their own government as used here for example, though it's more precisely defined by Rummel himself. The multitude of Google hits are, again, not about the term itself. But they are about the general concept of the killing by a government of its own people. The Wikipedia article should focus on that concept, not on Rummel's coinage of the term. The article should be renamed to Killing by a government of its people, or something less unwieldy, per Wikipedia:Avoid neologisms. The article should also be refactored to include all scholarly work on such killing, not just Rummel's, per Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. Pan Dan 19:52, 8 July 2007 (UTC)