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 delete. There's no process problem with this AfD; a mistaken "keep" closure by Wikidemo was correctly overturned by Stifle per WP:DPR#NAC.  Sandstein  16:38, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Jews in the history of business[edit]

Jews in the history of business (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

This article/list is essentially a "List of Jews in business" which had been nominated for and remains on the deleted list since 2005, see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jews in business and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jewish bankers. The reasons for asking that this article be deleted are the same as the earlier one, that such lists are WP:LISTCRUFT that easily lead to conspiracycruft and are automatically unencyclopedic and unmaintainable and could potentially have thousands of entries, a violation of Non-notable intersections by ethnicity, religion, or sexual preference, there is no one single definition of what "business" means (some writers and even Shylock are in this list and they are clearly not in any "real business"), it also sets a bad precedent for a slew of articles that could be called Christians in the history of business, or Muslims in the history of business, or Hindus in the history of business, or Atheists in the history of business. In the case of most of the people in this article almost all are non-religious secular and highly assimilated people who may not even be universally recognized as Jews by all Jewish groups, with little or no connection to Judaism or even to their supposedly fellow Jews so that to retroactively connect them with their alleged or assumed religious and ethnic background makes no sense, and may even be offensive and insulting to them and others since most of them do not adverstize their Jewishness, and so all this serves no purpose because surely in this case religion/ethnicity and profession are not provably and definitively related. IZAK (talk) 20:15, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Delete for above reasons. IZAK (talk) 20:15, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Judaism-related deletion discussions. IZAK (talk) 20:18, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Delete per WP:OVERCAT — Malik Shabazz (talk · contribs) 20:26, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Question. Why is this list being nominated for deletion, when Lists of Jews in various other fields of life are not being nominated? Don't prominent Jewish businesspeople and bankers also merit recognition? Jheald (talk) 20:40, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Hi Jheald: Not all questions have clear-cut answers. Yours is an old question but there has never been one clear-cut policy. The two schools of thought, pro and anti lists of any Jews have never had a meeting of the minds and there is no policy guideline about it, so each list and AfD is taken on its own merits and stands or falls on its own merits or demerits. These have been deleted so far AFAIK:

1. Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/List of Jewish Nobel Prize winners (September 2004) (Deleted July 2007)
2. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jewish engineers (October 2005)
3. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jewish Fellows of the Royal Society (2nd nomination) (November 2005)
4. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jewish American criminals and victims (March 2006)
5. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jews in the media (June 2006)
6. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jewish Peruvian activists (and other trivialised lists of Peruvian Jews) (February 2007)
7. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of atheist Nobel laureates (2nd nomination): List of Jewish Nobel laureates (July 2007)
8. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Messianic Jews and Hebrew Christians (July 2007)
9. List of people of Polish Jewish descent (July 2007)
10. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of religious leaders with Jewish background (August 2007)
11. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jewish American social and political scientists (August 2007)
12. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jewish American engineers (October 2007)
13. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jewish American fashion designers (October 2007)
14. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jewish Foreign Ministers (October 2007)
15. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jewish Orthodox anti-Zionists (October 2007)
16. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Jewish jurists (2nd nomination) (May 2008)

and as you can see the lists often verge into quirkiness and can be easily abused and twisted. IZAK (talk) 20:53, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• • So will you be nominating the other Lists of Jews while you're at it? It seems to me that your nomination reasons are just as applicable (or not) to those lists as well. Jheald (talk) 21:01, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    • If at all possible, yes, and I have made no secret of it for a long time, see User:IZAK/Deleting lists and categories of Jews, but for now we need to strike a balance between mass listings that defy WP:NOT#DIRECTORY etc and those who like these kind of things and imagine that they have some real use. IZAK (talk) 06:40, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Rename it and refocus your efforts on an attainable task. Since lists of jews rightfully exist today, this one has a right to exist too. But it must be renamed as a list, and the proponents of this list should really weigh their capabilities to compile a wholesome, worldwide view on the subject. Right now there's an arbitrary pick of US businesspeople, plus the inevitable Shylock - and no prospects of a balanced worldwide presentation. I'd be quite comfortable with List of Jewish-American entrepreneurs or something like it, provided that each individual is properly, individually referenced (right now there's a single source for dozens of people, with a dead web link). NVO (talk) 21:48, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Indeed it's a large task because the subject is pretty big. You may be right that it's better to narrow it. However, adding a third intersection, nationality, would be limiting and perhaps arbitrary because the issue is Jewish culture, not Jewish culture in America. Presenting the worldwide view is usually preferable to writing yet another America-centric article and adding "In America" to the title. As it stands a number of examples are given from Asia, Europe, and the Americas - it's a worldwide subject. Regarding sourcing the article is simply in its early stages. I added enough that, I thought, notability and the article's existence would be unimpeachable. The link isn't dead, at least not on my computer. You might have to page down a couple times to find the article. The source establishes the notability of the subject and relevance of the intersection. I could add more but I would rather edit in due course rather than doing backflips on cue for this silly deletion exercise. In the meanwhile the Wikipedia article and that source mention a number of scholars, commentators and others who have written about the subject throughout history so indirectly they establish notability as well. 18:03, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

• Delete. I can't think of any utility this list would have, other than subtly perpetuating the negative stereotypes involving Jews and money. --Quartermaster (talk) 21:53, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Delete Quartermaster sums my thoughts up exactly Sceptre ^(talk) 23:40, 14 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
• This deletion discussion was closed early by User:Wikidemo, a non-administrator. As per the guidelines at WP:DPR#NAC, I, an administrator, am cancelling this early closure and reopening the debate. Note that the withdrawal of the deletion nomination would not result in this AFD being closed as there have been other delete opinions. Stifle (talk) 08:36, 15 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Delete the nominator's rationale is sound and reflects policy and the wider consensus that represents. Guy (Help!) 10:34, 15 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Moved discssion regarding closure and reopening to talk page. --82.7.39.174 (talk) 15:45, 15 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Speedy close (without prejudice) - the process is so messed up that any deletion result is flawed. I would simply recreate the article and we would be in AfD again if anyone cares to nominate it. Let's start again the proper way so we can have a legitimate discussion about the merits of whether there is an intersection between Jewishness and the practice of business. There are many books on the subject, academic and otherwise, so notability is hardly the question. There is no coatrack, overcategorization is not applicable here, and any complaint that the article is biased or crufty is simply speculation on what might happen, nothing about the article in its present state. Wikidemo (talk) 11:02, 15 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Hi Wikidemo: Just to clarify, at no point did I withdraw the nomination, with my last edit I had meant to to bring it back to the version it was at before I tried editing it and then nominated it for deletion which Wikidemo seems to have misunderstood. I followed procedure and should have checked to see the result of my last edit, which has now been clarified. Sorry for any unintended confusion. IZAK (talk) 06:36, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
• Delete Another randomly slapped-together, non-scholarly, non-encyclopedic essay. Wildly incomplete, unfocused and a bit peculiar in parts (who let Shylock in?). Ecoleetage (talk) 01:43, 16 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
• Delete per items 1-4 and 9 at WP:LC. Stifle (talk) 11:43, 16 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
• Keep and rename, or else turn into an actual discussion of the topic, not just a list. I am certainly aware of the possibility of ethnic prejudice for articles of this type, but proper NPOV handling can deal with it. But as a list, the entries are sourceable and significant. DGG (talk) 00:23, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Hi DGG: I have no objections to well-researched articles of any sort but in this case Jews in the history of business is just a rambling and confused list and not much else. There is a serious problem with definitions here as well, what to call "business" (should characters from Dickens also qualify?) since it's not defined, and it can't really be, because the selling and buying of anything could be called "business" and how is that different to trade, commerce, industry, sales, etc? IZAK (talk) 06:36, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    • I think I'm a pretty good Wikipedia editor, and there's a reason the material is in the state it's in. It's a very large, important subject that lost its set-up as a Wikipedia category. Speaking with the deleting administrator I was encouraged to create a more focused article. As it is, I assume this article is going to get deleted, basically for being a skeleton article that nobody has improved and that can't be brought up to standards during a 5-day deletion discussion (nor would I want to make the effort given the initial hostility to the subject). So that leaves me scratching my head for another approach that avoids whatever the final reasoning when this article is (likely) deleted. There isn't any real question whether Jewishness and business are related to each other. Anyone who thinks otherwise is going to have a bit of a row with tenured professors in history and ethnic studies departments whose life work is on the subject. It would meet any notability criterion here: hundreds of books, probably thousands of articles, many scholarly endeavors, philosophers, religious tennets on the subject, museum exhibits, and lots of interest from the public in reading about the subject. Amazon.com's Jewish business category has 934 titles:[1]. The real question is how to address all that material in an encyclopedic fashion. One could probably take it in smaller chunks and write a dozen more narrow articles on the subject. Dealing with the material constructively to find out how to best present it would have been a lot better. It just seems a little pointless to go about improving the encyclopedia this way. Instead of arguing about racial prejudice, overcategorization, ethnic sensitivities, who is a "real" Jew, etc., all quite hypothetical concerns (none of those are present in this article), it would be more productive to actually help figure out how one can write about Jewish business culture. Wikidemo (talk) 07:11, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]
• Delete per Non-notable intersections by ethnicity, religion, or sexual preference as IZAK says, and per Quartermaster's astute point as well. --MPerel 05:32, 19 August 2008 (UTC)Reply[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.