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 no consensus to delete. Editorial decisions are outside the scope of afd. Flowerparty^☀ 17:14, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Academic views on Falun Gong

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The reasons are outlined on the talk page. There are a number of problems. I mainly wrote the page, then it went through some other changes. The overarching problem is the concept of the page: wikipedia pages shouldn't be divided up by sources, but by meaningful themes. For example, if we have a page "Academic views on X", then why not a page "Journalists' views on X" -- what is the point of that? Sources are grouped together based on the actual subject, like "Persecution of Falun Gong," and not the nature of the sources themselves. So the concept of the page is flawed. Secondly, all this information will still be available for anyone who wants it, and it can be ported to other articles associated with the subject as appropriate. There are other things wrong with the page, even very obvious ones, but they aren't related to why the page should be deleted so let's not bother discussing them--things like neutrality, relevance, usefulness to the reader, etc., are all considerations, but anyway. The issue is the floored theme--the information should not be collated on the basis of the type of source. Let's just delete this page and the content in it can be used later in more appropriate settings if necessary. Asdfg12345 02:10, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

delete (or rather redirect to preserve history) this rationale sounds very good. I would like to see comments on why the academic views can't simply be placed in Falun Gong, Persecution of Falun Gong, Falun_Gong_outside_the_People's_Republic_of_China, etc. according to what they talk about. --Enric Naval (talk) 04:34, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
delete: there is no reason why this should be a separate article from Falun Gong. I would not object to a redirect, but I can't see anything wrong with deleting it outright: I see no great harm in losing the history of an article which never had a good reason for existing. JamesBWatson (talk) 10:05, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This AfD nomination was incomplete (missing step 3). It is listed now. DumbBOT (talk) 12:09, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

merge back into the appropriate sections of the main article if not already there. DGG (talk) 04:37, 13 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. This is an unusual situation, that a major contributor to an article nominates it for deletion, because the contributions have got out of hand. Strangely, I cannot trace back article creation, only to a 2006 revision [1] - definitely the article has drawn considerable interest, and has been heavily edited, and it currently seems to have a number of quality academic RS. The question is then, if it is a WP:POVFORK or if it merely is a legit article spinout. I would be inclined to say a legit spinout. As the article lede goes: "Falun Gong has received a range of scholarly attention — including ethnographic studies, analysis on the teleology of practice and also ...". It is a problem that the article also seems to have been a battleground at times. These problems are unlikely to go away with a merge though. A merge is also unrealistic, given the size of main article Falun Gong currently is 62k. The right course of action would be to fix the article, focus it, prune it, etc - but not delete it. Power.corrupts (talk) 10:21, 13 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

But this does not advise us why an article that exists on the basis of what kind of sources it refers to, rather than what it is about, is appropriate as an article at all? You know what I mean? That was my main problem with it. Once it's deleted, the info won't be lost. I stored it in a doc file on my computer, and others probably will too. It's not like there's a shortage of space on wikipedia, either--we could just shove it anywhere for reference for other articles on the subject. While some of the information on the page belongs in other contexts, most of it has a distinct feel of "there's nowhere else to put it." It's just simpler to delete it and be done with it, rather than have a scrappy hodgepodge that has no real justification for not being deleted. For readers, the useful stuff on the subject should be able to be put elsewhere. All peripheral arguments to the basic deletion premise though, which I think is watertight. --Asdfg12345 07:29, 14 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete The article currently is poorly written and sounds like an essay. By restricting its sources on the reception of FLG, it presents a limited range of views which certainly violates WP:NPOV and WP:WEIGHT. Furthermore, the article is full of technical jargon and block quoting, which makes it inaccessable to the average reader. Criticism articles shouldn't be catagorized by critic.--PCPP (talk) 04:08, 14 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Merge back - if article spinouts are necessary, it should be by subtopic, not by source. --Rudy Waltz (talk) 06:52, 18 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep or Merg back per Power.corrupts. --S.dedalus (talk) 18:17, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

For those suggesting 'merge back', what do you mean exactly? The size is far too big to merge back into the main article. This article is so little contributed to or noticed that no one will realise if someone just blanks and orphans it, which maybe someone will do sometime soon. Wouldn't that avoid this oddly bureaucratic process where people who have no interest in contributing to the article help decide its fate? It also seems there is no response to the argument that the premise for the article (i.e. source based rather than topic based) is itself mistaken.--Asdfg12345 02:34, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As best I can tell, this isn't an article about Academic views on Falun Gong, but rather a summary of academic views, correct? Well, perhaps I'm misguided, but shouldn't a summary of academic views about Falun Gong be, well, a part of the article on Falun Gong? Now, it seems that it's incredibly long, which is presumably why it is its own article. My view is that the length means the content needs to be pared down, tightened and focused on only necessary commentary so that it can reasonably fit on the main article. Which is what I support being done here. ÷seresin 06:27, 20 June 2009 (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.