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. and improve  Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 01:52, 19 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Used car (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)

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I'm sure I'm opening a can of worms with this one but this article is a total mess. Its biggest problem is it vastly violates WP:NOTGUIDE. Beyond that, if you follow its history, its been a dumping ground for spam links. Short of a total rewrite, I don't think this "article" works as a wikipedia entry as its not really encyclopedic at all. —ASPENSTI—TALK—CONTRIBUTIONS 04:11, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep and improve, which it certainly needs. There are 100s of entire books about the subject from various viewpoints, see for example Worldcat so it should be possible to write a proper article. (And this might be one of the cases for an exception to our rule on not using plurals for article titles. ) —Preceding unsigned comment added 05:38, December 12, 2009 by DGG

• Keep - There's enough there right now. Although this is articles for deletion, not titles for deletion, there's enough here, even as badly written as it is, to build on. Throw some of those tags on it, and do any cleanup you can. If that means slashing out stuff that's not salvageable that's ok too. Shadowjams (talk) 05:47, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Note - This article used to be pretty useful in some earlier versions. I haven't quite identified where it went wrong, but someone started blanking out useful info and putting in their own version. I'll reincorporate the good parts of those old ones on the cleanup I'm doing. Shadowjams (talk) 06:00, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Most of those edits were from Sept 2008 from one user. Shadowjams (talk) 06:03, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep - Agree with the others. When there's a badly written article of a notable topic, the case should be made to improve the article - placing an improvement tag for instance. Deleting the entire article is throwing out the baby with the bath water. Also, some users interpret WP:GUIDE to mean articles can't have guide elements when in fact they can be used in an encyclopedic framework (climate stats in city articles, for example). If the article was simply a Kelley Blue Book listing of car prices, then WP:GUIDE would be an appropriate application. --Oakshade (talk) 20:57, 12 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep: Passes WP:N. Joe Chill (talk) 00:02, 13 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• Note - I agree with all of you. I felt the articles topic/title was certainly notable. Its overall existence wasn't really my gripe. I really wasn't sure how to go about it though. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't feel the article should be deleted, I just feel all of its content as its written is terrible and that it needs to be completely rewritten to be more of an encyclopedia article than a guide to purchasing used cars. Its just full of links to different websites and a bunch of instructions to purchasing cars, rather than an article describing what a used vehicle is. Not to forget that its a constant dumping ground for spam links, but I guess that comes with the territory. I'll do my best to contribute to a new article but I feel less than 10% of it is salvagable the way it is and I didn't want to just blank it and write a new article without a consensus. —ASPENSTI—TALK—CONTRIBUTIONS 01:01, 13 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Per WP:BOLD you can do that. I've blanked and re-written articles many times. Sometimes I've re-written it just as a stub, but that's still better than a large terrible article. --Oakshade (talk) 01:19, 13 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed that was what I wanted to do, but I felt the need to get an opinion of other editors before I did so. Like I said, I really didn't want to delete the article, I just wanted to delete all the text in it. It seems though since I've brought this to the other editors attention that the article has been improved upon greatly. —ASPENSTI—TALK—CONTRIBUTIONS 01:57, 13 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep "Used cars" have been notable for at least a century. The yearly sales volume has to be in the billions of dollars, and many large companies like CarMax (6.97 billion U.S dollars 2009 revenue) are devoted to the used car trade, as are dealers and used car lots, besides private party used car sales. Newspapers have many pages of ads for used cars every day. If there are problems with the current state of the article, then use the available sources to improve it. See Google books (1650 results) [1] and Google News (356,000 results) [2], many of which pertain to this article. For instance, here is a 1907 result on how to improve the salability of a used car by detailing it (p 276). Here is a 1916 article on the value of a used car. Its likely service life was said to be (200,000 miles in 1916)!!!!). Here(p 573) is a 1917 article on buying used cars, and what tricks to watch out for. Some things never change Edison (talk) 03:43, 13 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, as the subject is undoubtedly notable. Shadowjams, can you find a diff of the pre-spam version of the article? I'd suggest that we either 1) mass-revert back to September 2008, or whenever we can find a clean, spam-free version of the article, or 2) Wipe down to a stub and start over. There are sources here that would serve to build the article back up. It's a big task, but if some are willing I think it's the best option. UltraExactZZ ^Said ~ Did 15:06, 15 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  I did effectively that. I've selectively restored those sections, and tried to tone down what that series of edits added. I've tagged it appropriately (since that info's at least a year old now). It needs more work but I think it's in a much better place now. Shadowjams (talk) 03:01, 17 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep rewrite if you must, but this article meets WP:N. Cerebellum (talk) 16:24, 16 December 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.