Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dalmatians (ethnic group)

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. To be clear, the discussion is flawed insofar as it argues that "Dalmatians are not an ethnic group". That is not for us to decide; Wikipedia is about verifiability, not truth. If people call themselves Dalmatians and this is sufficiently documented in reliable sources, we can have an article about it. But as the discussion also points out, these sources are lacking here. Sandstein 07:11, 19 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Dalmatians (ethnic group)

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To put it simply: "Dalmatians" are not an ethnic group. It's just a peculiar way to declare one's ethnicity e.g. in the official census, like Ličanin, Slavonac, Zagorac - in effect, nothing more than declaring oneself as being an inhabitant of a particular region in Croatia without explicitly saying anything about your ethnic background. I don't believe there is a reliable source which would state otherwise, therefore the article is fundamentally flawed in terms of factual correctness and is thus not salvageable. GregorB (talk) 10:42, 4 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Croatia-related deletion discussions. —GregorB (talk) 10:48, 4 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is true, there is no such modern-day ethnicity, it's just what a few local-patriots tell census workers :) There was the idea of Dalmatians at the time of romantic nationalism, so delete and possibly merge scant amounts of content into Dalmatia or History of Dalmatia. Also, page history indicates that newbie Dalmatiaforce (talk · contribs) created this in late 2009 with a tag "possible cut and paste move or recreation", probably because it had a cleanup tag from 2008 on it, so I'm tempted to ditch this ASAP as a plain procedural violation. There was also this and Dalmatian grammar by the same user. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 12:45, 4 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ron Ritzman (talk) 01:34, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Merge into Croatians, who are their descendants. Bearian (talk) 13:02, 12 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I'm reluctant to say this, because it may be true that some people say that they are of Dalmation ethnicity, and ethnicity is, to a certain point, a mental construct. However. First, while it may be true that some people self-identify as being of Dalmation ethnicity, it may also not be true, as the article doesn't prove it with any refs and for all I know the author just made it up. Second, while we give some leeway to self-identification as a valid marker of an ethnicity, we don't give complete leeway, and if Dalmation (as an ethnicity) is not generally accepted as a valid ethnic category by anyone except a few outlier people, it's not valid. (If some people at Bob's Happy Hour Bar in Utica decided to start describing themselves as being ethnic Uticans, we wouldn't allow that.) If there's more to the Dalmation ethnicity than that, let the article author prove it with refs. Until then, delete the article with no prejudice against re-creation if proper refs are provided. (The bulk of the article has nothing to do with with ethnicity, it is about history, and could be merged into Dalmatia or whatever, if desired.) Herostratus (talk) 02:50, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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.