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 keep. Sandstein (talk) 16:22, 23 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No reliable third party sources, only in-universe view, only fan fiction as source. --Pjacobi (talk) 11:13, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment - I'm not sure. There is a serious verifiability problem, and science doesn't get much more fringe than this, but Searl's claims do have some presence on the internet, and increasingly that it being cited as a justification for retaining this kind of article. Perhaps merge with John Searl? LeContexte (talk) 11:57, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. The article could certainly be improved, but I can't see any justification for bringing it to AfD. --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 21:21, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep as per above. -- Loukinho (talk) 09:14, 21 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Speedy keep. Alas, this isn't fiction. I guess it must be notable as free energy devices go, since it seems to be 50 years old. So keep. Ben Standeven (talk) 03:29, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep (what the heck is a "speedy" keep?) - this is a well-known "energy" device. The article could be improved, but the current lack of improvement isn't a reason to delete. I agree with LeContexte above, both Searl Effect Generator and John Searl are short enough articles that they could be merged, although I'd probably merge the bio article into the device article, not the other way round, because the device is what makes Searl notable. I have therefore initiated a merge proposal on Talk:Searl Effect Generator. =Axlq (talk) 03:50, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Read Wikipedia:Guide to deletion#Shorthands. Uncle G (talk) 13:59, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My original deletion rationale seems to be too terse. Let me elaborate a bit. Perpetual motion devices are fiction. As such, they are only in so far relevant to us, as they left significant traces in the real world, e.g. some million dollars from gullible investors vanished or a good enough publicity stunt by the inventors to get mainstream media coverage. It is not our business to mirror Free Energy websites like http://www.americanantigravity.com/, http://www.peswiki.com or the Naudin site. Even with constant purging of the most offending ones, we now again have more than 70 links to http://www.americanantigravity.com/! Isn't it mentioned in our policies to use unreliable sources only -- if at all -- in articles about themselves? The typical example given on policy pages tends to be stormfront.org, but in terms of unreliability americanantigravity.com is second to none. --Pjacobi (talk) 18:37, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

But are we better off having no article, or a short article which reflects the mainstream view that these things are bunk? In either case, trolls and the gullible will regularly reintroduce offending articles or content. LeContexte (talk) 22:22, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

But we don't have reliable sources to debunk this nonsense specifically. It didn't get enough attention to produce any citable source specifically targetting it. If you, as a Wikipedia author, try to inject rationality into articles about such non-famous nonsense, you are always an easy target for the hardcore NOR/CITE faction -- which by now has managed to turn NOR a full 180 degrees compared to the reason it was invented a long time agon --Pjacobi (talk) 23:50, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The same is true for a significant number of articles propounding fringe theories of science, history, religion, politics (and, in all likelihood, pokemon). So, what do we do? LeContexte (talk) 13:52, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Abort, retry, ignore? as a leading operating system phrases it? Wikipedia has grown tentacles into non-encyclopedic topics. we can ignore them, or we can we try and try again to fight it, or we can think about a fork. --Pjacobi (talk) 14:18, 17 December 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.