- 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 keep. This discussion has not reached consensus about merging, so there should be no prejudice against a future merging proposal. Arbitrarily0 ( talk) 03:34, 11 November 2022 (UTC)
Political editing on Wikipedia
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- Political editing on Wikipedia ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log | edits since nomination)
- (Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)
Reliability of Wikipedia, Criticism of Wikipedia and Ideological bias on Wikipedia already exist. Why do we need another article covering the same point of view? Wareon ( talk) 16:58, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
- Keep. Passes WP:SIGCOV. It's a clearly defined topic with significant independent coverage. While its true that we have multiple related articles, I am not seeing much redundancy in the overall content or focus of this page on those pages. As such I would view as this as an appropriate content fork per WP:SPINOFF and to a lesser extent WP:SUBPOV and WP:RELAR; all of which have applications here. 4meter4 ( talk) 18:18, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
- Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Politics and Websites. Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 21:58, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
- Keep Agree with User:4meter4 and his arguement above. What I don't see is a plausible, cited policy for its deletion (other than I DON'T LIKE IT). GenQuest "scribble" 01:17, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
Snowkeep. I, too, see no reason to delete this article. silviaASH ( User:BlankpopsiclesilviaASHs4) ( inquire within) 01:42, 4 November 2022 (UTC) Oppose merge proposal: I disagree with the assertion that this is a poorly defined content fork. It is most certainly not. It has a specific definition of "political" for its purposes which it seems to adhere to and there is hardly any overlap between the COI editing article and itself, in terms of content. Additionally, politically motivated editing is not necessarily conflict-of-interest editing. COI editing, according to the article lede, is "when editors use Wikipedia to advance the interests of their external roles or relationships." That is to say, when they are paid for their edits, or are editing articles about themselves or people they know. Politically motivated editing, however, is not necessarily done in one's own interest, as not everyone who promotes a political ideology directly benefits financially or materially from the propagation of its associated rhetoric. It is a distinct topic that is clearly defined, it has enough material for its own article, and it is not accurate to describe this topic as a straightforward subtopic of conflict of interest editing. silviaASH ( User:BlankpopsiclesilviaASHs4) ( inquire within) 23:49, 5 November 2022 (UTC)- Keep, the page seems relevant to Wikipedia culture and history. Randy Kryn ( talk) 01:56, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
KeepMerge to Conflict-of-interest editing on WikipediaKeep (see below). It's definitely not WP:POVFORK; the article seems generally neutral and I can't see any statement that differs in POV from any of the other mentioned articles. Nom may have meant WP:OVERLAP, which could be an argument here—mostly with List of Wikipedia controversies—but they differ significantly enough for me to think it's not an issue (plenty of the examples of political editing here aren't Wikipedia controversies, and plenty of Wikipedia controversies aren't about political editing). Ideological bias on Wikipedia isn't the same thing: that's about claims that Wikipedia (as a website, generally speaking) is biased, and this is about individuals and groups editing with a political goal. Dylnuge ( Talk • Edits) 05:44, 4 November 2022 (UTC)- Updated to merge, per @ My very best wishes:'s identification of Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia, which does appear to be a significant overlap in content. Dylnuge ( Talk • Edits) 21:47, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
- Changing this back to Keep again in light of further discussion and consideration (and thus creating my most confusing AfD comment of all time, sorry!). I think there is some overlap here and might be some contention with how to handle both topics, but given the author's explanation of a goal to separate political and commercial/personal conflict-of-interest editing as a WP:SPINOUT, I can see how that overlap would be handled. As Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia currently stands, I think it's confusing that some political examples (Koch brothers, WikiScanner which appears on both) are still on the other page, and that the other page doesn't make the spinout clear, but these are things that can be improved (and that work seems to be underway), not a rationale for deletion. Also, while I can see the argument for merging (clearly), I'm a bit confused by people claiming this is a WP:POVFORK. A POV fork is a fork that exists to explicitly cover a topic from a non-neutral POV, or when editors cannot agree on content of the page being spun out, which this does not seem to be. Dylnuge ( Talk • Edits) 23:22, 9 November 2022 (UTC)
- Keep (as creator). COI editing on Wikipedia is a >100kb article that is mostly examples of political and commercial nature, so it seems obvious per WP:SPINOFF / WP:SPINOUT / WP:SIZERULE that it should be split into topical sub-articles. There's no doubt the subject meets WP:GNG, and care has been taken to maintain neutrality and avoid redundancy vis-à-vis related articles. François Robere ( talk) 13:52, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
- Merge to
Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia as a poorly defined content fork. First of all, this is a misleading title of the page. The actual subject of this page, as currently written, is
Political editing by people with a conflict of interest. Simply a "Political editing" (the current title) is something different: this is editing driven by personal political bias, not by the conflict of interest. Secondly, I doubt that "political" can be separated from "non-political". As correctly defined in our page,
politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. Nearly all content of page
Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia is closely related to
politics. Hence the merging. "Politics" does not mean "
government"; it is much wider and involves decisions and activities by individual people and groups. Please check
Politics#Definitions. This is "who gets what, when, how".
My very best wishes (
talk) 16:10, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
- Article titles need to be "recognizable... natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with those of related articles" (
MOS:AT), and this one is. Where there's need for further explanation - eg. of scope - then it goes in
the lead. It's the same with other, more established articles like
Reliability of Wikipedia and
Vandalism on Wikipedia, which rely on specific terminology the exact meaning of which is explained in the lead: "reliability" is the "validity, verifiability, and veracity" of an article, and "vandalism" is "editing... in an intentionally disruptive... manner". If we were to follow your logic, then we should've renamed the articles to the longer, but more exact definition ("Validity, verifiability, and veracity of Wikipedia"), instead of keeping the titles short and the leads exact. But regardless - this is not an argument for merging, just for renaming.
As for "what 'political' actually means" - I don't disagree with the observation that politics is omnipresent, but there's no doubt the most common use of the term is in the context of government - at least by our article, which deals almost exclusively with governments, states, inter-governmental organizations, forms of government, political participation, political values, etc. etc. In fact, the only parts of the article that seem to not deal with government are those two sentences that you quoted, and one of them is the title of a book whose "interpretation of politics... underlies the working attitude of practicing politicians" (Laswell, 1936). So for a lay reader the term "political" should be both "recognizable... natural, [and] sufficiently precise" to understand what this article is about - and that's all it needs to be in this context. François Robere ( talk) 16:52, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
- Article titles need to be "recognizable... natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with those of related articles" (
MOS:AT), and this one is. Where there's need for further explanation - eg. of scope - then it goes in
the lead. It's the same with other, more established articles like
Reliability of Wikipedia and
Vandalism on Wikipedia, which rely on specific terminology the exact meaning of which is explained in the lead: "reliability" is the "validity, verifiability, and veracity" of an article, and "vandalism" is "editing... in an intentionally disruptive... manner". If we were to follow your logic, then we should've renamed the articles to the longer, but more exact definition ("Validity, verifiability, and veracity of Wikipedia"), instead of keeping the titles short and the leads exact. But regardless - this is not an argument for merging, just for renaming.
- Merge to Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia, per the sensible and well-formulated argument and valid points made above by User:My very best wishes. Sal2100 ( talk) 19:55, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
- Merge - (obviously🤷♀️) to Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia per convincing arguments of User:My very best wishes - GizzyCatBella 🍁 02:20, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
- (Below is an additional comment by the user who expressed keep opinion already -
GizzyCatBella
🍁 03:17, 6 November 2022 (UTC)) --> Oppose merge proposal: Already I disagree with the assertion that this is a poorly defined content fork. It is most certainly not. It has a specific definition of "political" for its purposes which it seems to adhere to and there is hardly any overlap between the COI editing article and itself, in terms of content. Additionally, politically motivated editing is not necessarily conflict-of-interest editing. COI editing, according to the
article lede, is "when editors use Wikipedia to advance the interests of their external roles or relationships." That is to say, when they are paid for their edits, or are editing articles about themselves or people they know. Politically motivated editing, however, is not necessarily done in one's own interest, as not everyone who promotes a political ideology directly benefits financially or materially from the propagation of its associated rhetoric. It is a distinct topic that is clearly defined, it has enough material for its own article, and it is not accurate to describe this topic as a straightforward subtopic of conflict of interest editing. silviaASH (
User:BlankpopsiclesilviaASHs4) (
inquire within) 23:49, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
- @ BlankpopsiclesilviaASHs4: But why you are voting again when you have already !voted once? Wareon ( talk) 02:58, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
- Merge per My Very Best Wishes. desmay ( talk) 00:01, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
- Keep as this is a distinct sub-topic covered by scholarship. The Conflict of interest article is already very long. Scholarship includes: this book, Political Advertising on the Wikipedia Marketplace of Information, How Partisanship and Perceived Political Bias Affect Wikipedia Entries of News Sources, Digital era open government and democratic governance: The case of Government of Canada Wikipedia editing, Biased Representation of Politicians in Google and Wikipedia Search? The Joint Effect of Party Identity, Gender Identity and Elections. -- ZZXW ( talk) 11:00, 6 November 2022 (UTC)<--- — ZZXW ( talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this comment - 5 days (1hour and 6 minutes) of editing spread out over 2 years time period.- GizzyCatBella 🍁 16:15, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
- Keep Due to WP:SPINOFF, as per 4meter4. MrsSnoozyTurtle 08:21, 9 November 2022 (UTC)
- Merge Pure POVFORK. NavjotSR ( talk) 15:57, 9 November 2022 (UTC)
- Keep: a valid WP:SPINOFF from Reliability of Wikipedia & Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia; organises the content into a cohesive narrative without the it being spread across two articles. -- K.e.coffman ( talk) 16:51, 9 November 2022 (UTC)
- Merge due to it being a significant topic (Wikipedia is left biased!11!) with significant coverage. However, I think the topic discussed here would made more sense when it is placed in a broader context. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk)
- 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.
- 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 keep. This discussion has not reached consensus about merging, so there should be no prejudice against a future merging proposal. Arbitrarily0 ( talk) 03:34, 11 November 2022 (UTC)
Political editing on Wikipedia
[Hide this box] New to Articles for deletion (AfD)? Read these primers!
- Political editing on Wikipedia ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log | edits since nomination)
- (Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)
Reliability of Wikipedia, Criticism of Wikipedia and Ideological bias on Wikipedia already exist. Why do we need another article covering the same point of view? Wareon ( talk) 16:58, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
- Keep. Passes WP:SIGCOV. It's a clearly defined topic with significant independent coverage. While its true that we have multiple related articles, I am not seeing much redundancy in the overall content or focus of this page on those pages. As such I would view as this as an appropriate content fork per WP:SPINOFF and to a lesser extent WP:SUBPOV and WP:RELAR; all of which have applications here. 4meter4 ( talk) 18:18, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
- Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Politics and Websites. Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 21:58, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
- Keep Agree with User:4meter4 and his arguement above. What I don't see is a plausible, cited policy for its deletion (other than I DON'T LIKE IT). GenQuest "scribble" 01:17, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
Snowkeep. I, too, see no reason to delete this article. silviaASH ( User:BlankpopsiclesilviaASHs4) ( inquire within) 01:42, 4 November 2022 (UTC) Oppose merge proposal: I disagree with the assertion that this is a poorly defined content fork. It is most certainly not. It has a specific definition of "political" for its purposes which it seems to adhere to and there is hardly any overlap between the COI editing article and itself, in terms of content. Additionally, politically motivated editing is not necessarily conflict-of-interest editing. COI editing, according to the article lede, is "when editors use Wikipedia to advance the interests of their external roles or relationships." That is to say, when they are paid for their edits, or are editing articles about themselves or people they know. Politically motivated editing, however, is not necessarily done in one's own interest, as not everyone who promotes a political ideology directly benefits financially or materially from the propagation of its associated rhetoric. It is a distinct topic that is clearly defined, it has enough material for its own article, and it is not accurate to describe this topic as a straightforward subtopic of conflict of interest editing. silviaASH ( User:BlankpopsiclesilviaASHs4) ( inquire within) 23:49, 5 November 2022 (UTC)- Keep, the page seems relevant to Wikipedia culture and history. Randy Kryn ( talk) 01:56, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
KeepMerge to Conflict-of-interest editing on WikipediaKeep (see below). It's definitely not WP:POVFORK; the article seems generally neutral and I can't see any statement that differs in POV from any of the other mentioned articles. Nom may have meant WP:OVERLAP, which could be an argument here—mostly with List of Wikipedia controversies—but they differ significantly enough for me to think it's not an issue (plenty of the examples of political editing here aren't Wikipedia controversies, and plenty of Wikipedia controversies aren't about political editing). Ideological bias on Wikipedia isn't the same thing: that's about claims that Wikipedia (as a website, generally speaking) is biased, and this is about individuals and groups editing with a political goal. Dylnuge ( Talk • Edits) 05:44, 4 November 2022 (UTC)- Updated to merge, per @ My very best wishes:'s identification of Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia, which does appear to be a significant overlap in content. Dylnuge ( Talk • Edits) 21:47, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
- Changing this back to Keep again in light of further discussion and consideration (and thus creating my most confusing AfD comment of all time, sorry!). I think there is some overlap here and might be some contention with how to handle both topics, but given the author's explanation of a goal to separate political and commercial/personal conflict-of-interest editing as a WP:SPINOUT, I can see how that overlap would be handled. As Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia currently stands, I think it's confusing that some political examples (Koch brothers, WikiScanner which appears on both) are still on the other page, and that the other page doesn't make the spinout clear, but these are things that can be improved (and that work seems to be underway), not a rationale for deletion. Also, while I can see the argument for merging (clearly), I'm a bit confused by people claiming this is a WP:POVFORK. A POV fork is a fork that exists to explicitly cover a topic from a non-neutral POV, or when editors cannot agree on content of the page being spun out, which this does not seem to be. Dylnuge ( Talk • Edits) 23:22, 9 November 2022 (UTC)
- Keep (as creator). COI editing on Wikipedia is a >100kb article that is mostly examples of political and commercial nature, so it seems obvious per WP:SPINOFF / WP:SPINOUT / WP:SIZERULE that it should be split into topical sub-articles. There's no doubt the subject meets WP:GNG, and care has been taken to maintain neutrality and avoid redundancy vis-à-vis related articles. François Robere ( talk) 13:52, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
- Merge to
Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia as a poorly defined content fork. First of all, this is a misleading title of the page. The actual subject of this page, as currently written, is
Political editing by people with a conflict of interest. Simply a "Political editing" (the current title) is something different: this is editing driven by personal political bias, not by the conflict of interest. Secondly, I doubt that "political" can be separated from "non-political". As correctly defined in our page,
politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. Nearly all content of page
Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia is closely related to
politics. Hence the merging. "Politics" does not mean "
government"; it is much wider and involves decisions and activities by individual people and groups. Please check
Politics#Definitions. This is "who gets what, when, how".
My very best wishes (
talk) 16:10, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
- Article titles need to be "recognizable... natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with those of related articles" (
MOS:AT), and this one is. Where there's need for further explanation - eg. of scope - then it goes in
the lead. It's the same with other, more established articles like
Reliability of Wikipedia and
Vandalism on Wikipedia, which rely on specific terminology the exact meaning of which is explained in the lead: "reliability" is the "validity, verifiability, and veracity" of an article, and "vandalism" is "editing... in an intentionally disruptive... manner". If we were to follow your logic, then we should've renamed the articles to the longer, but more exact definition ("Validity, verifiability, and veracity of Wikipedia"), instead of keeping the titles short and the leads exact. But regardless - this is not an argument for merging, just for renaming.
As for "what 'political' actually means" - I don't disagree with the observation that politics is omnipresent, but there's no doubt the most common use of the term is in the context of government - at least by our article, which deals almost exclusively with governments, states, inter-governmental organizations, forms of government, political participation, political values, etc. etc. In fact, the only parts of the article that seem to not deal with government are those two sentences that you quoted, and one of them is the title of a book whose "interpretation of politics... underlies the working attitude of practicing politicians" (Laswell, 1936). So for a lay reader the term "political" should be both "recognizable... natural, [and] sufficiently precise" to understand what this article is about - and that's all it needs to be in this context. François Robere ( talk) 16:52, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
- Article titles need to be "recognizable... natural, sufficiently precise, concise, and consistent with those of related articles" (
MOS:AT), and this one is. Where there's need for further explanation - eg. of scope - then it goes in
the lead. It's the same with other, more established articles like
Reliability of Wikipedia and
Vandalism on Wikipedia, which rely on specific terminology the exact meaning of which is explained in the lead: "reliability" is the "validity, verifiability, and veracity" of an article, and "vandalism" is "editing... in an intentionally disruptive... manner". If we were to follow your logic, then we should've renamed the articles to the longer, but more exact definition ("Validity, verifiability, and veracity of Wikipedia"), instead of keeping the titles short and the leads exact. But regardless - this is not an argument for merging, just for renaming.
- Merge to Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia, per the sensible and well-formulated argument and valid points made above by User:My very best wishes. Sal2100 ( talk) 19:55, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
- Merge - (obviously🤷♀️) to Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia per convincing arguments of User:My very best wishes - GizzyCatBella 🍁 02:20, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
- (Below is an additional comment by the user who expressed keep opinion already -
GizzyCatBella
🍁 03:17, 6 November 2022 (UTC)) --> Oppose merge proposal: Already I disagree with the assertion that this is a poorly defined content fork. It is most certainly not. It has a specific definition of "political" for its purposes which it seems to adhere to and there is hardly any overlap between the COI editing article and itself, in terms of content. Additionally, politically motivated editing is not necessarily conflict-of-interest editing. COI editing, according to the
article lede, is "when editors use Wikipedia to advance the interests of their external roles or relationships." That is to say, when they are paid for their edits, or are editing articles about themselves or people they know. Politically motivated editing, however, is not necessarily done in one's own interest, as not everyone who promotes a political ideology directly benefits financially or materially from the propagation of its associated rhetoric. It is a distinct topic that is clearly defined, it has enough material for its own article, and it is not accurate to describe this topic as a straightforward subtopic of conflict of interest editing. silviaASH (
User:BlankpopsiclesilviaASHs4) (
inquire within) 23:49, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
- @ BlankpopsiclesilviaASHs4: But why you are voting again when you have already !voted once? Wareon ( talk) 02:58, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
- Merge per My Very Best Wishes. desmay ( talk) 00:01, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
- Keep as this is a distinct sub-topic covered by scholarship. The Conflict of interest article is already very long. Scholarship includes: this book, Political Advertising on the Wikipedia Marketplace of Information, How Partisanship and Perceived Political Bias Affect Wikipedia Entries of News Sources, Digital era open government and democratic governance: The case of Government of Canada Wikipedia editing, Biased Representation of Politicians in Google and Wikipedia Search? The Joint Effect of Party Identity, Gender Identity and Elections. -- ZZXW ( talk) 11:00, 6 November 2022 (UTC)<--- — ZZXW ( talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this comment - 5 days (1hour and 6 minutes) of editing spread out over 2 years time period.- GizzyCatBella 🍁 16:15, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
- Keep Due to WP:SPINOFF, as per 4meter4. MrsSnoozyTurtle 08:21, 9 November 2022 (UTC)
- Merge Pure POVFORK. NavjotSR ( talk) 15:57, 9 November 2022 (UTC)
- Keep: a valid WP:SPINOFF from Reliability of Wikipedia & Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia; organises the content into a cohesive narrative without the it being spread across two articles. -- K.e.coffman ( talk) 16:51, 9 November 2022 (UTC)
- Merge due to it being a significant topic (Wikipedia is left biased!11!) with significant coverage. However, I think the topic discussed here would made more sense when it is placed in a broader context. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk)
- 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.