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Revision as of 18:34, 12 September 2010

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There is to my mind a current discontinuity between our policies and guidelines, and current consensus when trying to delete certain aircrash articles. I've written this proposal to try and progress the issue. The basic question in dispute, presented neutrally, is as the proposal page states. Namely:

• Is it a violation of What Misplaced Pages is not (WP:NOT) for Misplaced Pages to consider all fatal airliner 'hull loss' crashes automatically notable, or not?

This specifically refers to:

• Airliners - aircraft from the largest jet liners to the smallest island hopping turbo-props
• Scheduled air transport - any crash involving an aircraft carrying passengers or cargo on a scheduled flight
• Hull-loss Accidents - crashes where the aircraft is written off due to the damage, or cost of repair
• Fatal - crashes that involve any amount of fatalities, even down to just one or two crew members, or just a proportion of passengers, or even bystanders

Relevant links

• WP:AFD - the instructions and procedures for deleting articles
• WP:NOT#NEWS - the basic content Policy covering articles based on news coverage
• WP:GNG - the basic content Guideline covering notability
• WP:EVENT - a situation specific content Guideline extending NOT#NEWS and GNG for articles on events
• WP:AIRCRASH - an Aviation Project Essay about aircrash notability
• Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Aviation/AfD record - a record of Afd discussions on Aviation subjects

Discussion

Opening statement from proposer

I ask the question because, despite the presence of detailed guidance like WP:EVENT, which goes into detail as to how to interpret WP:NOT#NEWS and the WP:GNG with respect to current events like aircrashes, it has proven absolutely impossible to get any proper discussion of these types of articles at Afd wrt policy, outside of the usual basic deletionist/inclusionist confrontation. After some recent experience through nominating some articles on recent unremarkable crashes, I think I can pretty much guarantee now that any article which is about a fatal crash of an airliner (which is a classification which goes all the way down to 10 or 15 seat planes use just for regional flights) involved in scheduled air transport (which includes cargo flights and therefore small crew manifests) cannot ever be deleted, simply because of the understandably numerous (if not necessarily in-depth or unique), and often international, news coverage they generate at the time. This seems truly amazing to me, a rather blatant and de-facto violation of NOT#NEWS, which even gets into WP:NOT#INFO territory, by seeking to turn Misplaced Pages into an almanac of such aircrashes. Of course many of these crashes are notable, but we cannot simply ignore EVENT just for this topic as far as I'm concerned, otherwise for these incidents, Misplaced Pages is just becoming a competitor to Wikinews. But this is what is happening at Afd as far as I can see.

The specific debates are to me, simply closed on nothing more nuanced than basic vote counting, where strength of argument is almost totally irrelevant, and where it seems like WP:AFD#How to discuss an AfD might as well never have been written. The Afd's are often littered with very bad arguments. Most people simply make basic arguments from assertion, arguing keep because there is 'lots of news coverage' or that it will 'likely' be important, or because of vague assertions of significance, like it was a 'big' plane which was written off, or 'lots' of people died. It turns out though that it really doesn't even have to be a big plane like a jetliner, and death tolls often don't even have to be barely larger than the average serious road crash. These kinds of Afd keep arguments are simply made and adjusted to suit the idea that they are all automatically notable, and rarely if ever are supported by anything like concrete evidence. Other people argue using total irrelevancies, like 'there will be an investigation' which means it was significant (there is always an investigation). Barely, if ever, will keep arguments get beyond basic hand waving to the GNG, even though it does not over-ride NOT, and the very real fact that EVENT was written taking into account the GNG. Often, people just make astoundingly blatant violations of WP:CRYSTAL with their votes, where they make wild predictions over the lasting notability of a crash they know barely anything about based on the available facts. I don't think any of these arguments being made at Afd, when put against the inherent consensus of EVENT etc, are remotely justifiable without the backing of a proposal like this one.

There is an essay on the subject, WP:AIRCRASH, which tries to define what is and is not likely to be a notable crash, but it is routinely ignored, and is often just totally and blatantly misrepresented. Keepers will often claim it justifies articles on 'hull losses', or any fatal crash if it is scheduled flight, or it is the most significant crash of an airline, all of which is simply flat wrong - those are all assertions that are absolutely not supported by that essay. People will often even claim that AIRCRASH is already a WP:Guideline, which is just total rubbish. Some people claim that all these articles being kept is an expression of the 'community will', as if the community weren't the people who actually wrote EVENT, which represents the true community consensus on current events, and requires good solid evidence of deficiency before it can justifiably be routinely swept aside. I find it really odd that, if this really is a justifiable expression of the community will, why nobody has ever bothered to write a Guideline that remotely comes close to documenting the general thrust of the Afd keep arguments as the current consensus on fatal airliner aircrashes. It's an even more bizarre claim when the AIRCRASH essay doesn't even support the keepers. Which is why, even though I disagree with it, I've been forced to put this proposal forward.

Actual RS proof or justification of the view that all of these crashes always instantly have lasting notability or historical significance is usually very thin on the ground, despite this being a basic demand of NOT and EVENT to elevate articles beyond being simple news stories, and this is what even AIRCRASH was also written to make clear - it's primary purpose is to detail what marks out a crash as significant, something which is likely to have lasting notability based on actual historical experience, not finger in the air prediction, despite how often it is misquoted and misrepresented. People have claimed that these Afd's can simply be judged based on experience, but I think the routine abuse of AIRCRASH makes that not very believable, and one does wonder what, if any, historical evidence is going into any of these debates, except the bad kind of Other Crap Exists - i.e., these sorts of news articles have been kept in the past, so keep them now. This is obviously a deficient approach to take to Afd, hence this proposal.

Quite a few votes in these Afds deal with this issue by effectively pretending it is a case of 'write it now, we can delete it later if it turns out to be non-notable'. Except later, other people can and will justifiably invoke WP:NTEMP. This is simply not sustainable, and it is producing a huge problem of WP:RECENTISM on the project, where every article except about the most trivial of incidents is being automatically kept. You can see that when you have a look at our coverage on aircrashes from 2008 and before, where investigations have concluded, yet many of the articles are still nothing but news reports of what happened, and nothing else. When you look at this list it becomes even more clear that Misplaced Pages is becoming more and more unbalanced in this topic by the month. It's pretty obvious why there is a massive disparity between the numbers of these articles created on incidents that happened in the Google News era and those that didn't, but if we can't write a decent article on an accident that did occur in the pre-internet age without relying on the contemporary news coverage, then that is a pretty good sign that it was not hugely significant or historically notable. Still, this concept is again something which is routinely ignored at Afd.

A lot of people claim these articles are valuable research material for aircrash researchers, and comment in Afd as if nothing but a separate article is ever good enough, covering these in other article sections is barely considered, even though it is recommended by AIRCRASH. I find this argument dubious, and barely supported by any proof. If I was an aircrash researcher and I saw what Misplaced Pages considers worthy of wasting my time as a reader on, I would simply use more credible sources, which actually have better standards than just 'omg it was in the news (for a day or two) / it was a big (sort of) plane / many (some) people died', and will take proportionate notice of such incidents in their coverage, as a tertiary resource, which is after all what Misplaced Pages is supposed to be. Some people bizarrely think we are here to act as competitors not only to Wikinews, but also to resources like the Aviation Safety Network, or Aviation Herald, which will cover any incident in minute detail. This is obviously not Misplaced Pages's mission in the slightest. Fatal aircrashes happen, it's a fact of life. Not only that, it is quite a routine aspect of life, coverage of them all is very much the domain of news sources, not encyclopaedias. Wanting an article on every single one of them is to me, taking inclusionism to a very damaging degree, turning Misplaced Pages into an irrelevant collection of fancruft, for want of a better term, where only some articles are truly historically notable or significant. Pretending that EVENT or even AIRCRASH allows this is a fantasy to my mind.

I've tried to address this at Afd, but I have evidently failed. It doesn't help also that one admin has chosen to close nearly all of the recent debates himself, with zero explanation of his closures, meaning that it's pretty impossible to know how these decisions were made wrt to actual policy, or if they reflect a true consensus among a number of people when using valid arguments, and when actually considering strength of argument, and not just simple vote counting, or giving equal weight between policy backed argumentation and argument through speculation/assertion. Admins don't even seem to bother distinguishing between completely invalid votes or not, which often form a large chunk of the keeps. And when challenging these closures, WP:DRV has proven itself yet again to be a totally pointless venue, where people questioning the logic of the closures are completely ignored again in the face of simple vote counting, and people just turn up to make the same arguments as in the Afd, or clsing admins buddy up and endorse each others closures. Even worse, some people at DRV seem to accept that if the weight of numbers is big enough, it doesn't even matter if the majority made poor points or not, as it seems there is no admin out there willing to over-turn their opinions using actual policy based logic. WP:CONSENSUS is pretty clear - a simple crowd-sourcing of invalid or weak opinions is not a consensus at all. In the same way that it doesn't matter how many people call for it, you will never be able to ignore BLP for certain articles, so it should not be possible to have EVENT ignored for just aircrashes. And if it should be, it should at least have the strength of an approved Guideline behind it, hence this proposal.

So, it's time to have this question discussed properly in an Rfc, outside of Afd, where I hope people have a more experienced and sensible idea of policy, and the fundamental purpose of Misplaced Pages. If every one of these crashes is automatically notable, which is to me the de-facto outcome of how Afd currently treats this topic, then clearly Misplaced Pages has a problem which needs discussion. I've presented it as a proposal rather than an Rfc on a talk page, as it is a mixture of a content and policy interpretation issue, which if settled either way, is going to need some policies to be changed/restated, so by presenting it as a proposal, it should hopefully focus people on the issue of what they are and are not making a case for, and not just end up as another wastefull talking shop people will ultimately ignore at Afd/Drv anyway. I'll ask an uninvolved admin to summarise the feedback after 30 days, and whether or not the proposal has support or not, or if there is a compromise way forward, what it is.

To advertise the proposal, I've spammed notifications to Talk:AFD, Talk:Not, Talk:EVENT, the Aviation WikiProject, and the Village Pump. MickMacNee (talk) 16:45, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Feedback

Regardless of which way this goes, there is zero need for a new guideline for it. Place whatever results in WP:NEVENT. --MASEM (t) 16:53, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

• Comment This goes a bit further than my own thoughts, but if agreement here will stop the constant carping about what is and what isn't a notable accident (and associated AfDs), then I'm in favour. Mjroots (talk) 17:42, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

  I really don't see how it goes further. Have you ever voted delete on an aircrash Afd that would meet this proposal? MickMacNee (talk) 17:53, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

How do you get to refactor other people's comments? See removal of: Couldn't you say the above in 1,000 words or more? LOL Bzuk (talk) 17:16, 12 September 2010 (UTC). Bzuk (talk) 18:16, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

• Comment I like MJroots proposal better and would think the vast majority of scheduled airliner crashes are notable ( enough to have an article) regardless of where they happen in the world and a much smaller percentage of small private plane crashes are notable. So in general terms I prefer separating these two if we are going to have a specific guideline for aircrashes. Having said that looking at having more and more specific guidelines in the hope it will dissuade disruptive editors from unnecessarily taking articles to AfD/DRV is like hoping that more and more laws will decrease crime. we need to use existing guidelines and policies better to educate/discourage/block/ban those kind of editors who persist with the attitude that no matter how many disagree with them their personal interpretation of the guidelines is better than everybody else . So I am not personally that hopeful that the bickering will stop even if we agree to on something here.--Wikireader41 (talk) 18:34, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

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