The result was keep. Approve of rename as well, less POV. Keeper ǀ 76 21:11, 8 August 2008 (UTC) reply
This article was allegedly created as a content and POV fork of John Edwards, related to a recent controversy in which it has been claimed that he fathered a love child. The article was speedily deleted, but related discussion here seems to be against the idea of the speedy deletion; I myself agree, especially (as was noted in the ANI discussion) because a speedy tag was removed before the article was speedied. Personally, I believe that the article is giving undue weight to the subject, and therefore deserves deletion; I have recreated it just now simply because I believe it deserves a discussion here at AFD. Nyttend ( talk) 15:36, 5 August 2008 (UTC) reply
A little thought experiment - let us pretend that we are looking back from 25 years later and everyone agrees that this marked the end of Edward's political career. How much material would belong in the John Edwards article in those circumstances? Probably no more than one or two paragraphs, because what he actually did during his career would need to be covered also, and we wouldn't want to unbalance the main biography. Additional coverage about the mess would belong in a sub article. This projection is comparable to how the Lewinsky scandal is handled in Bill Clinton. If no matter how important this becomes, we wouldn't put significantly more in John Edwards than was already there when Kelly wrote this page, than the issues we need to handle definitely do not include it being a POV fork. As one of the admins who is monitoring John Edwards (and the latest to use my tools on the main biography), I'm reasonably well aware of the consensus there (which continues to shift to fine tune the paragraph as more sources become available - just as it should). I'm also highly aware that new editors will probably be back in a couple days (when the current protection period ends) trying to get more material added. Kelly was attempting to get ahead of that forthcoming problem and wrote an article that if it had a POV problem was only going to far towards "this story matters". (I.e., it was neither an attack page nor unsourced, though bits might have needed to be edited to be more succinct.) Kelly definitely does not deserve any opprobium for his/her writing this article.
As to whether or not now is the time for this article, I've long been an occasional advocate for taking WP:NOT#NEWS a lot more seriously than we do. (I think if someone were to propose adding that to the policy now the community would reject it, because the evidence is that the community largely ignores it and writes articles whenever a major news story occurs.) So I'd be happier if we now had a Wikinews article, and waited a while before we started a Wikipedia article, possibly just keeping a soft-redirect to wikinews at a reasonable title. Assuming this doesn't linger on - and it might, depending on whether or not any of the mainstream news sources decided to do investigative journalism the way they did years ago and what such hypothetical investigations might find - then in a few months we'll be able to have better encyclopedic perspective. I refuse to predict whether the main story will be about how the media and blogosphere handled this, the substance of the allegations, or something else we have yet to identify. And until we know the main storyline, we are just to close to the event to know how to handle it. So my preferred outcome would be to have a wikinews article instead, and adopt a temporary policy of just waiting a few months here. But if this comes to DRV for a straight up/down decision, I'll have to opine based on those two options. GRBerry 02:58, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
The result was keep. Approve of rename as well, less POV. Keeper ǀ 76 21:11, 8 August 2008 (UTC) reply
This article was allegedly created as a content and POV fork of John Edwards, related to a recent controversy in which it has been claimed that he fathered a love child. The article was speedily deleted, but related discussion here seems to be against the idea of the speedy deletion; I myself agree, especially (as was noted in the ANI discussion) because a speedy tag was removed before the article was speedied. Personally, I believe that the article is giving undue weight to the subject, and therefore deserves deletion; I have recreated it just now simply because I believe it deserves a discussion here at AFD. Nyttend ( talk) 15:36, 5 August 2008 (UTC) reply
A little thought experiment - let us pretend that we are looking back from 25 years later and everyone agrees that this marked the end of Edward's political career. How much material would belong in the John Edwards article in those circumstances? Probably no more than one or two paragraphs, because what he actually did during his career would need to be covered also, and we wouldn't want to unbalance the main biography. Additional coverage about the mess would belong in a sub article. This projection is comparable to how the Lewinsky scandal is handled in Bill Clinton. If no matter how important this becomes, we wouldn't put significantly more in John Edwards than was already there when Kelly wrote this page, than the issues we need to handle definitely do not include it being a POV fork. As one of the admins who is monitoring John Edwards (and the latest to use my tools on the main biography), I'm reasonably well aware of the consensus there (which continues to shift to fine tune the paragraph as more sources become available - just as it should). I'm also highly aware that new editors will probably be back in a couple days (when the current protection period ends) trying to get more material added. Kelly was attempting to get ahead of that forthcoming problem and wrote an article that if it had a POV problem was only going to far towards "this story matters". (I.e., it was neither an attack page nor unsourced, though bits might have needed to be edited to be more succinct.) Kelly definitely does not deserve any opprobium for his/her writing this article.
As to whether or not now is the time for this article, I've long been an occasional advocate for taking WP:NOT#NEWS a lot more seriously than we do. (I think if someone were to propose adding that to the policy now the community would reject it, because the evidence is that the community largely ignores it and writes articles whenever a major news story occurs.) So I'd be happier if we now had a Wikinews article, and waited a while before we started a Wikipedia article, possibly just keeping a soft-redirect to wikinews at a reasonable title. Assuming this doesn't linger on - and it might, depending on whether or not any of the mainstream news sources decided to do investigative journalism the way they did years ago and what such hypothetical investigations might find - then in a few months we'll be able to have better encyclopedic perspective. I refuse to predict whether the main story will be about how the media and blogosphere handled this, the substance of the allegations, or something else we have yet to identify. And until we know the main storyline, we are just to close to the event to know how to handle it. So my preferred outcome would be to have a wikinews article instead, and adopt a temporary policy of just waiting a few months here. But if this comes to DRV for a straight up/down decision, I'll have to opine based on those two options. GRBerry 02:58, 5 August 2008 (UTC)