Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2006 October 18

Full reviews may be found in this page history. For a summary, see Wikipedia:Deletion review/Recently concluded (2006 October)

18 October 2006

Sixth Party System

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sixth Party System

This article has had a somewhat tortured history. It was prodded, deleted, and the deletion was brought here. It received six Endorse deletion !votes before it was sent to AfD as a contested prod. Because of this, the AfD had no deletion argument at all for a while. The deletion argument is straightforward:

This is an obscure addendum to V. O. Key's Fifth Party System. It reflects the views of a single paper that the Sixth Party System began in 1964, and ended in 1994. This itself is one of 23 papers variously dating the beginning of the Sixth Party System between 1960 and the present. Some of them mention the Sixth Party System only to deny it has begun. These in turn are a small fraction of the hundreds of papers on critical elections in the United States.

I do not believe that any of the keep !votes (except KChase, who has a copy; I look forward to his expanded version) even addresses this argument, save by ungrounded assertions that there must be more scholarly papers out there somewhere. If so, scholar.google.com and JSTOR have not found them.

If we take out the dates, we are left with the dicdef: "After the Fifth Party System comes the Sixth Party System." (This is itself not uncontroversial: some scholars think the Fifth Party System has been replaced by a system of dealignment.)

Insofar as what I have said here has encyclopedic content, it is in Fifth Party System. So I propose to overturn and delete. Septentrionalis 15:51, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

• As the closing admin, my reasoning was that neither the delete arguments nor the keep arguments were fully addressed, and there seemed to be no clear thoughts as to whether it should be redirected. I disregarded the OR claims concerning the fact that the Sixth Party System must have come into existence by now, but I did note Uncle G's point of Aldrich's claim and Septentrionalis' own research revealing that articles had been written concerning at least the concept of a Sixth Party System. The claims made in the article may have been badly skewed toward the existence of a Sixth Party System, but I judged that would be a matter for cleanup or merging (as I stated when closing).Yomangani^talk 16:24, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• While I think this really should have closed as a clear keep due to the obvious references to the system, endorse closure anyway. I originally said keep due to UncleG's statement, but looking back at it, I'm more compelled by Septentrionalis's delete recommendation, where he notes the amount of citations. The article needs to be written accurately, for sure, but that's not a reason for deletion. --badlydrawnjeff talk 18:19, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Overturn, delete, userfy on request. Closing admins need to understand that they are guardians of WP:V, WP:NPOV, and WP:NOR first, guardians of consensus second. The article is, after 5 days of prodding and 11 days of discussion, still wholly unsourced. The onus to establish keepability per those three policies is on the editors, and in extension keep voters. Instead of positive evidence we mostly got assertions and "looks good to me" waffle during the AfD. As long as this article doesn't establish that it isn't OR and reflects more than a fringe PoV it has no business in the mainspace. ~ trialsanderrors 18:21, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Wouldn't a better solution at this stage be to take the citations available at the AfD and incorporate them? It's one thing if sources don't exist, it's another completely if they just haven't been incorporated. --badlydrawnjeff talk 18:26, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
    • The AfD makes only one citation for this idea; that's all there is. That's the problem. I think trying to put in an average of all 23 articles would look like the last paragraph of Fifth Party System, and that's not an article. Septentrionalis 18:35, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
      • Stubs aren't bad things, though. --badlydrawnjeff talk 18:41, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
        • Neither are redirects. ~ trialsanderrors 18:56, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
          • But stubs are better than redirects. Or something. --badlydrawnjeff talk 18:57, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
            • Not always. ~ trialsanderrors 19:04, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
              • Well, I was being somewhat coy with that last response, but I'm not entirely sure how your links qualify with this situaiton. --badlydrawnjeff talk 19:19, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
                • This article gives undue weight to Aldrich's single, rarely cited view (one of the five papers that does is also on the list; it cites him for the 1994 critical election, but denies the 1964-8 critical election.) Septentrionalis 19:35, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
                  • So merely having the article gives it undue weight? This is a new one for me. Am I missing something? --badlydrawnjeff talk 19:56, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
                    • "If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small (or vastly limited) minority, it does not belong in Wikipedia (except perhaps in some ancillary article) regardless of whether it is true or not; and regardless of whether you can prove it or not." ~ trialsanderrors 20:18, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
                      • Right, I don't think that qualifies here. --badlydrawnjeff talk 21:59, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Overturn and Delete It's original research. Deleting it should be strightforward. Why is this still a question? Eusebeus 19:47, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Overturn and delete, due to absence of discussion in the academic press. This is notionally an academic concept, so if it's not covered by several papers in the peer-reviewed journals it's somewhere between original research and a report of one man's protologism. Guy 21:20, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Comment: seems that very little content could meet WP:V, why not merge and redirect to Fifth Party System? -MrFizyx 21:48, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
  • I tried that on Seventh Party System, now deleted on much the same grounds, and was immediately reverted. Septentrionalis 23:00, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Both this and Seventh Party System should redirect to Fifth Party System, which they now do. Phil Sandifer 03:51, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
  • I wish you hadn't done that in the middle of a discussion. --badlydrawnjeff talk 16:37, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
    • I wish we would stop using DRV to paralyze common sense decisions so that we are instead bound into the "consensus" created by this den of idiocy, but hey, nobody gets everything they want. Phil Sandifer 00:03, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
• Overturn and Delete as the relevant content has been merged into Fifth Party System and the previous article gave undue weight to a minority idea. I also updated the template. I've added this article to my to-do list and will attempt a rewrite soon. In leiu of spamming, I'd ask interested parties to add Sixth Party System to their watchlist. When I get to it, I'll put the new version on that talk page and folks can comment before it goes back into mainspace.Kchase T 16:33, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
• Endorse Closure Septentrionalis complains that sources don't exist but my keep recomendation was based upon his own listing of acedemic references. Eluchil404 11:42, 23 October 2006 (UTC)