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.
Merge prose to Islamic terrorism#Europe, attacks to List of Islamist terrorist attacks, and plots to List of thwarted Islamic terrorist attacks, then redirect to Islamic terrorism#Europe. I'll copy my reasoning from the talk page of the article and paste it here: ideally we would have a wide variety of academic sources covering the same topic as this article does. And there we run into a problem, because those sources don't exist and never have. The scope of this article, i.e. the particular set of inclusion and exclusion criteria it uses, is wholly original to Wikipedia. The conceit is that it is in some way meaningful to consider the 2004 Madrid train bombings, 7 July 2005 London bombings, 2015 Istanbul suicide bombing, November 2015 Paris attacks, Shchelkovo Highway police station attack, and 2017 Turku attack (and possibly also the 1995 France bombings, which was added recently) part of a single topic, a topic that does not also include the September 11 attacks, 2014 Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu ramming attack, 2015 Ankara bombings, or Orlando nightclub shooting. Of course, this does not even remotely match the scopes of any of the sources (I doubt there is even a single WP:RELIABLE source with a somewhat similar scope that includes East Thrace but excludes Anatolia the way this article does, for instance). Rather, this is an arbitrary collection of disparate topics which equally arbitrarily excludes things which the sources consider part of the same topic(s). The issue is further compounded by the fact that there are four different types of content on this article: the prose (which contains, among other things, analysis of trends and patterns), the list of attacks, the list of plots, and whatever the "response" table is (really, that table is pretty much solely a navigational aid right now – if it were converted to prose it might however be able to be informative as well). The reason that that is a compounding factor is that the scopes don't match. The WP:LISTCRITERIAshould be unambiguous, objective, and supported by reliable sources, but they are not – the lists define the scope geographically, but the sources define the scope geopolitically. The prose takes the geopolitical approach, being based upon sources that do likewise. To solve this, we need to either match the lists to the prose or the prose to the lists. There are ways to try to fix or at least mitigate the problems with the scope, but they all entail radically changing the way this article is constructed. We could adjust the scope geographically/geopolitically (perhaps changing it to Western Europe or "the West" in general) and/or temporally, or perhaps some other way, to better reflect the sources. Of course, we have tried to resolve the problem this way before without much success (and the successive scope changes may have even contributed to the problem). We could also remove the prose (or merge it to Islamic terrorism#Europe) and convert this to a pure list article. A problem with that is that it would turn this into a WP:REDUNDANTFORK of List of Islamist terrorist attacks and List of thwarted Islamic terrorist attacks. Conversely, we could remove the lists (any content that belongs on them also belongs on List of Islamist terrorist attacks and List of thwarted Islamic terrorist attacks, after all) and focus solely on the analysis of trends and underlying factors, but that would make it redundant in scope to Islamic terrorism#Europe instead. We could even merge the content to Islamic terrorism#Europe, List of Islamist terrorist attacks, and List of thwarted Islamic terrorist attacks (and perhaps additional others, as appropriate) and then turn this into a redirect to Islamic terrorism#Europe. That's the easiest solution and the one I would suggest. It wouldn't mean removing any content, only moving it around between different articles. This is content in search of an appropriate article (or several, rather) to be included within. The content itself is not the problem, the way it's assembled here on this article is. TompaDompa (talk) 05:09, 13 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Speedy Keep All I'm seeing in the nomination is a reference to some other editor proposing merger. This is not done by deletion. Andrew🐉(talk) 08:29, 13 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Speedy Keep - Sorry, but you’ve failed to explain why it should be deleted. If you want it merged, that’s not what AfD is for. Besides, the subject has enough significant coverage to have an article if you ask me. Foxnpichu (talk) 10:57, 13 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Comment the editor who nominated for deletion, A Thousand Words actually opposes deletion, but appears to think that a merge discussion necessitates an AfD. I suggest a speedy close of this AfD by some uninvolved person. Pincrete (talk) 12:53, 13 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think this technically doesn't qualify for being closed as WP:Speedy keep since an argument for merging and redirecting has been made (sorry about that, I guess), but as the only editor to have expressed a preference other than (speedy) keep so far, I have no objections to a WP:Procedural close on the grounds that this is the wrong venue. I would, in fact, be in favour of a procedural close. A discussion already exists at the correct venue. TompaDompa (talk) 14:25, 13 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I didn't know the difference between a speedy and procedural close. Either way, it's obvious that noone (inc the proposer) actually wants to delete!Pincrete (talk) 15:07, 13 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
An AfD helps to decide on whether the article should remain as a standalone article. TompaDompa has argued that the subject does not warrant a WP:STANDALONE article by suggesting that all of its contents be merged to other articles. A Thousand Words (talk) 05:28, 14 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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.