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, but will add an unreferenced tag to article W.marsh 18:30, 23 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

List of political flops[edit]

Delete as yet another inherently POV "flop" list, many of which have been deleted lately. List of miscellaneous commercial failures was deleted about a week ago. Like the other pages I have listed, this list descended from the now-deleted page, and shares its same problems. (This was originally part of a a mass AFD, which I withdrew due to consensus that the articles weren't similar enough for a mass AFD.) szyslak (t, c) 20:19, 17 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletions. -- SkierRMH 05:09, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete This list includes quite a number of items but there is not even one citation, no sources at all. This is purely original research and POV and the topic itself seems to be inherently POV. --The Way 08:33, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strong Keep The following comments should not be taken as saying anything negative about the two editors just above, just respectful disagreement: I have to confess to being irritated by the attitude that no matter how potentially serious the subject of a Wikipedia article may be, we need to squelch it because the article as written has flaws. Serious subjects belong in Wikipedia. Serious treatment of unserious subjects even belongs in Wikipedia if a serious purpose can be shown for studying it. If these last two sentences can't be found in Wikipedia policy, then they need to be put there. (I'd even go further and say that subjects that are unserious and where the serious purpose for reading them is slim would still belong in Wikipedia if there's citable proof they are of obvious enduring interest to a large number of people, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.) Maybe the real reason we disagree about deleting this article is because I'm inclusionist and want to keep articles that can be improved and the above editors are deletionist and want to destroy articles that might be replaced later with something of higher quality, but I'm speculating about that. My answers to above objections:

UNSOURCED: You could fell a forest to come up with the printed pages of journalistic and historical sources for political flops, so the lack of sources is reason for a citation notice, not deletion.
INHERENTLY POV': If multiple, neutral journalistic sources or multiple historians say something is a flop, it's not POV. And that should be the standard when we don't have an election or other, similar fact to hang our hats on. The item about Howard Dean in the U.S. part of the list cites The Economist cover and Dean's third-place showing in Iowa. That's an utterly solid assertion of a flop. And cited.
PURELY ORIGINAL RESEARCH Anyone who has ever read political news and magazine articles should know after a bit of reflection that this list could cite sources saying "-----'s campaign was a flop". There are countless articles out there that say just that, and it's the same with historical sources. It is harder to imagine that there are NO such sources out there for anything on that list than to imagine that there IS a source that the editor(s) just didn't go out and find.

Additional comment: The subject of this article is too broad, since you could do a political flops list for every democracy and quite a few governments that aren't democracies. In the U.S. you'd eventually have to split the list up. Noroton 15:29, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Keep and tag for cleanup/improvement. The term "flop" has been applied to political campaigns plenty of times. The state of the article is very poor, but everything there is easily sourceable. This is surely not OR (a few single items may be questionable, but they can just be removed). Also, POV? Huh? Against or for whom? -- Black Falcon 18:23, 23 February 2007 (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.