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Structure of the Austrian Armed Forces in 1989 (
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I would like this close reviewed and request that it be relisted for further discussion. I do not feel there was a consensus for deletion and it is now being used as a precedent for deleting other similar articles (see
1989 Portuguese Armed Forces order of battle). The closer made a good faith close, but I feel it was incorrect. //
Timothy ::
talk 13:55, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
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- Endorse My guess is that this will probably be overturned to no consensus since the vote count was close, but it seems to me that delete is not only a correct outcome but the proper outcome here - even though the keeps were more numerous, there was a lot of back and forth about whether sources existed, but the delete !voters arguments (notdir, OR, failing GNG) seem much more compelling than the "sources must exist" arguments of the keep !voters, especially after the back and forth.
SportingFlyer
T·
C 14:48, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
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- Overturn to No Consensus - The two questions should be:
- 1. What was the consensus of the participating editors?
- 2. Was that consensus supported by policy arguments?
- The answer to the first question is that there was no consensus, that the arguments both ways were about equal. The answer to the second question is that both Keep and Delete had policy reasons. So the close does not accurately reflect policy-based consensus and should be overturned.
Robert McClenon (
talk) 16:10, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
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- Endorse Numerically the AFD was no consensus, but unfortunately none of keep !votes offered policy-based reasons to do so, nor any independent reliable published secondary sources to establish notability of the subject. The keep side attempted to show that
WP:NEXIST is met because of the existence of classified documents that describe the Austrian Armed Forces in detail; this was effectively countered by the delete side by pointing out that classified documents fail
WP:V and
WP:PUBLISH. The remaining keep rationales were various forms of
WP:ITSIMPORTANT and
WP:ITSNOTABLE; I didn't see any other policies being cited or implied. The delete !votes challenged the entry on
WP:NOTDIRECTORY,
WP:GNG, and
WP:OR grounds, none of which were refuted by the keeps. I don't see how this could have been closed any other way.
CThomas3 (
talk) 16:21, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
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- Closer's comment Ultimately I don't have a stake or even belief in whether this article should be kept or deleted, which is why I felt myself an appropriate closer. I view my job as closer to reflect back the consensus of participants considering
the quality of the arguments given on the various sides of an issue, as viewed through the lens of Wikipedia policy. In this particular AfD the lens of Wikipedia policy played a more important role than the sheer headcount and I acted accordingly as a closer. The argument the keep side advanced is that 1989 is a significant year in Military History. There were no sources provided at the AfD to back this up, arguably making it
WP:Original research. However, when closing I give the benefit of the doubt to arguments advanced by the participating editors. According to our 1989 template (which can be seen at
1989 but is not easily linked directly because of how the template works) we have articles on 1989 Archaeology, Architecture, Art, Aviation, Awards, Comics, Film, Home Video, Literature (poetry), Meteorology, music plus three specific genres of music, Rail transport, radio, science, spaceflight, sports, football, television, and video gaming. So we don't even have an article on Military in 1989 to fall back on. As we have no article and we have no sources presented at the discussion for this claim, I could lend the "1989 was an important year" argument less weight given it's issues with our
WP:No original research policy. There was also a suggestion that this kind of article should be considered under list notability. Again no policy or guideline (or even essay) was linked to support this, and delete participants challenged this assertion, but again I attempted to give it full consideration. When asked for sources that supported its notability as a list the most meaningful responses were
Independent sources establish the notability of the subject. In this case, the Austrian Army. Articles are sourced from reliable sources, which have been provided above. which was challenged as the Austrian Army was not up for deletion its notability was not important to the discussion. It was also suggested that classified documents exist which do document this topic. It was pointed out that
WP:V does not let us consider classified documents. Again for policy based reasons I afforded these comments little weight. Given this, according to our policies, procedures, and
practices I arrived that those participating had reached a delete consensus. Best,
Barkeep49 (
talk) 17:27, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
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- An oddly bad-tempered debate about an oddly specific article. I bet there's a wikia that wants it, so as a minimum outcome, I'd encourage userfication or draftification to enable that. I also think that even if this wasn't notable there may be scope to merge it somewhere.—
S Marshall
T/
C 00:06, 11 November 2020 (UTC)
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- Overturn to no consensus. That discussion is a mess and I don't think it should be a basis for any decisions going forward. The endless arguments about the significance of 1989 seem to me to have an obvious solution, which nobody seems to have suggested: retitle the article to something like
Austrian armed forces during the Cold War. I'd be amazed if that topic isn't notable, and the deleted article had a large amount of prose discussing general Austrian strategy and doctrine during the Cold War which isn't specific to 1989 anyway. The deleted article had citations to 16 sources at the time of deletion, so I'd have expected somebody supporting deletion to have at least gone through them and demonstrated why they don't meet the GNG or
WP:V. Nobody seems to have done that. Admittedly most of the Keep arguments made during the discussion weren't great either, but I'm not seeing as much of a cast-iron case for deleting as the closer did.
Hut 8.5 20:39, 11 November 2020 (UTC)
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- Re-titling it was indeed not suggested which means it would not have been appropriate for me to close it that way and given the level of participation at the AfD I'm skeptical that it would be an appropriate outcome at DRV. As for the sources present while there was no source chart it was clear that several editors favoring deletion, most prominently the nominator Fram, had gone through all the sources and made statements about their lack of suitability. Best,
Barkeep49 (
talk) 21:47, 11 November 2020 (UTC)
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- No, re-titling wasn't discussed, but the fact that it wasn't suggests the discussion was defective. Per
policy deleting pages is a last resort and shouldn't be undertaken unless the problem is not fixable through editing. An argument that something should be deleted because of a fixable problem is flawed. I am confident that the participants didn't read all, or even most, of those sources because they weren't in the article at the time. When nominated on 13 October the article was completely unsourced. It remained completely unsourced until late on 17 October, halfway through the discussion, and most of the sources weren't added until the 20th of October. Only one person commented after the article had reached that point, and they supported keeping it.
Hut 8.5 08:00, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
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- I had seen the sources, and none of them were at the same time reliable, indepth, and about the actual specific subject. Feel free to list whatever sources you think supported the notability of the actual article under discussion. Having a large number of sources is completely irrelevant if they don't meet these requirements of course.
Fram (
talk) 08:23, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
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- Restoring and retitling the article doesn't really make sense any more either; the contents of the article are largely repeated (but without the specific 1989 focus) in
Austrian Armed Forces#Army (both textual background in the first few sections, and then the structure of the army during the later years of the cold war in "Initial dispositions" and following).
Fram (
talk) 08:29, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
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- OK, I'm happy with the solution of having the content as part of
Austrian Armed Forces, it doesn't look like we need to keep the edit history for attribution reasons, and it may well need to be split out into something like
Austrian Armed Forces during the Cold War if the article gets too big. Nevertheless I think the discussion should have considered an option like this instead of just trying to get the material deleted. Admittedly most of the content in question wasn't added to this article until late on 20 October after the discussion had died down, but that doesn't mean there was a consensus to delete it either.
Hut 8.5 08:47, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
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- Endorse- The votes were numerically even, but most of the keep offerings were unsupported claims of ITSNOTABLE or "it can be improved". The !votes on the delete side were more thoughtful and of higher quality. I don't think this was an unreasonable close. If people are using this discussion as an unsuitable precedent for others, that's something you should mention on those discussions. It's not a reason to revisit this one and say that suddenly there was no consensus when there actually was.
Reyk
YO! 08:01, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
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