Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of riots

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. Skomorokh 03:39, 10 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

List of riots[edit]

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This article has been noted as being statistically skewed, incomplete, and even inaccurate.

While the idea is perfectly acceptable (a listing of a type of event) the sheer magnitude of incompleteness makes the article functionally less useful than no article at all and depending on the Wiki user to find the information they want w a more complex search than just going to one article that implies an accuracy it does not have. Nomination fixed for Aaaronsmith (talk · contribs); no position on the merits myself. Tim Song (talk) 01:26, 3 September 2009 (UTC) [reply]

Delete per nom. Article is unmanageable and mostly uncited – who knows if many of these really happened, and if they were of any historical importance. Bullet format conveys little useful information for the (many) 'riots' without an article. --CliffC (talk) 02:21, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, impossibly huge list if it were to be inclusive. Not user friendly, mixes riots by place. Also, categories handle this better, see Category:Riots by century. Abductive (reasoning) 05:37, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

categories do not handle red links at all and this list has many. See WP:CLS for more reasons why categories do not supersede lists. Colonel Warden (talk) 16:43, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Strong keep, a lot of work has gone into this. A lot of the riots have Wikipedia links, there are also some that do not but that have references. Perhaps some more citations would be helpful but I really think that deleting this would be helping no one. This is not listcruft, this is also, I think, fairly manageable. Tris2000 (talk) 15:06, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- I think this would be a more appropriate to-do list for a WikiProject than an article in mainspace. Abductive (reasoning) 16:56, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Strong Keep. If our sole criterion for deletion were "skewed, incomplete and even inaccurate", we'd have a lot less articles. Riots exist and have a clear definition. I can point to them. Thus, a list for them is not unreasonable. If it's poorly written, rewrite it. If it's unsourced, look for sources. If it's inaccurate, breathe fact into it. If it's too long, subdivide it by century, location or type. But don't delete it because it's "unmanageable" (which can be said for much of this project) or "impossibly huge" (which indicates the need for subdivision, not deletion). --Hemlock Martinis (talk) 20:43, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. There is not a clear definition of what constitutes a riot and list without constraints is not a list that wikipedia should have. Googlemeister (talk) 21:04, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Perfect is the enemy of good. This is a good start on a list covering notable incidents for which we do or should have articles. The list will assist creation of the articles where they do not exist and navigation to them when they are done. Colonel Warden (talk) 16:41, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Not a vote, I'm the guy who requested the AfD. I'm not expecting perfect. I expect "adequate" to actually being useful. If we could also not push someones political POV, that would also be nice. By my own estimate (based on published crime statistics, an article in Time, and just plain noticing what is reported in the US press that never makes it here) this article is coming up short as much as 100 riots PER DAY in China only. Leaving out current events, historically it is short a few million or so. The point is that this article makes about as much sense as as a listing of barroom brawls. There's a lot, not all are reported, not all are accumulated, not all have names, the ones in the classy joints are over reported, the ones in a town (country) trying to pick up tourist trade are suppressed, etc. I will continue to be against this type of listing until someone can show how a completely incorrect and politically biased list, that LOOKS like it might be accurate, is better than no list.

By the way Colonel Warden, if you want a list of "notable incidents for which we do or should have articles" how about we put it somewhere so it doesn't pretend to be informative to the general user? Please.Aaaronsmith (talk) 17:37, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Our approach should be like that for all other lists - that we focus upon the entries which are notable, i.e. the riots which have been reported and written about. Scholars have already compiled lists of historical riots - see sources - and our job is to summarise their writings. If we leave out mundane and commonplace disturbances this is fine and in accord with our policy that Wikipedia is not the news. Colonel Warden (talk) 17:59, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Sigh. Unfortunately, I see your point. Wiki is full of "lists" where someone w an agenda is trying to show the evils of one group or another. Usually by creating a list that reports both sides, but is heavily skewed. I consider that such poorly done (whether or not deliberate) are counter productive. One possible solution would be to do a really good job of 1) Title 2) Disclaimer as the first sentence at the top. If we have a list of "riots" somewhere (and I prefer the dead center/top/all caps/bold) we need our defintion of what we are listing, inclusion criteria, and the articles incompleteness/weakness. As it is, most Wiki list just let that pass by default and the reader has no idea what they are getting (on the other hand, this is very common on the web).Aaaronsmith (talk) 18:09, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Then tell me, how many people constitutes a riot? How much damage do they have to do? How long does it have to last? Otherwise, how are you going to differentiate between a riot and say a gang war? Googlemeister (talk) 19:56, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

We use reliable sources as we do for everything else. Colonel Warden (talk) 20:02, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Precendent We previously had a discussion on a similar unbounded list. See archived discussion http://wiki.alquds.edu/?query=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_megafauna Googlemeister (talk) 20:12, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If you're going to look at WP:OTHERSTUFF, you should choose more similar cases such as

Historical sources suffice for these and riots are no different in character. Colonel Warden (talk) 21:23, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep per Colonel Warden. Ks0stm ^(T•C) 00:47, 5 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per above dml (talk) 18:21, 5 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Being "skewed and incomplete" can not be a reason for deletion. That was a lot of good work. Such list is obviously better than nothing.Biophys (talk) 14:33, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep There is no legitimate reason to delete this. It is a perfect valid Wikipedia List page. It helps show all the notable riots in history, with links to their Wikipedia articles for those who want to read more about it. Dream Focus 14:52, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. It's a list of notable riots, nothing wrong with that. If it is missing notable riots, add them. If it gets too big, split it. If you're worried about too many red link, write the articles to fill them in. Fences&Windows 15:31, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Not a vote, I'm the guy who requested the AfD. Having started this AfD, I'm trying to remain fairly neutral. I will point out that the arguments to keep because "a lot of work has gone into it" is meaningless. A lot of work has gone into a lot of mistakes. "It's a valid listing of events" is legite, but applies to many other article in Wiki w exactly the same problems - impossible size, extreme potential for abuse for any editor w an agenda, non existent functional definitions. It especially has a weakness shared by other articles - which of the 10 or so I am aware, no one has successfully fixed - of a complete failure of definition. (The most successful fix I know of is changing "list of massacres" to "list of events named massacres". That solved a lot of problems for the editors, but the article is now a joke). It is assumed everyone knows "what is a riot". This isn't even legitimate in as limited a venue as the US where different political precincts (down to the level of city) have different defintions and riot is not even a crime by the laws of the federal government.

Allow me to explain by giving an example (artificial and exaggerated for demo purposes only). If I started a Wiki list of "atrocities" and structured it the same as this article (and many other questionable articles in Wiki), and listed only "events" under the British Raj, we would have at least two problems. 1) What is an "atrocity"? We could discuss this for weeks so I won't go further here than to note: It is perfectly acceptable for the article to contain a definition "for the purposes of this article". 2) The fact that the article is horrifically biased against the British is acceptable to some people, because "if you think it is incomplete, research, correct, expand". This immediately puts the reader (IF they catch the mistake) in the position of researching, correcting, expanding - essentially writing an article in which they have no interest (or maybe even expertise) other than they have noticed it is a "really bad article".Aaaronsmith (talk) 23:07, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The way to fix that list would be for another editor to add events from other places & times -- for example, atrocities committed against Native Americans. Any list will unfortunately be incomplete, because individual editors have incomplete knowledge about most categories like this one -- which is why aggregating our knowledge ends up creating a stronger product. And while this list is incomplete (Late Ancient & Early Medieval Papal elections usually involved at least one riot, for example, & none seem to be included in this list), there is nothing that one or more reasonably dedicated editors couldn't fix here. -- llywrch (talk) 17:12, 8 September 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.