User:BeanieFan11/olympicclose

From the beginning of March until just being closed, a discussion was held on whether to move to draftspace a group of nearly 1,000 historical athletes who had competed in the Olympic Games from 1896 to 1912 created by Lugnuts. After around two months of discussion and a count of approximately 68 support–45 oppose (60%–40%), it was closed by Bradv as no consensus; his close was taken to the administrators' noticeboard for discussion and eventually he re-opened his close. It was re-closed by GRuban with a consensus to draftify. I disagree that this was the correct closure, and am bringing it here for review as such. Below is GRuban's close, with notes containing my commentary on why its wrong:

The motion carries, WP:Consensus to move the listed articles to Draft space. Note that the motion allows, and even encourages, editors to edit and improve the articles so they can be returned to main space. Not mass, or batch, or automated moves back to main space. As long as the editor sincerely believes they have improved a given specific article enough to pass Wikipedia:Notability, they may move it back to main space; at worst, that way it will face an individual WP:AfD, not 900+ all at once! Until then, or even instead of that, editors may make similarly individual and considered redirects in main space to replace some articles. Redirects will generally need to pass a lower bar, the main concerns are that the redirect will be a reasonably likely search term, and there is an obvious target article. Again, at worst, that way they will face specific WP:RfDs.--GRuban (talk) 01:40, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
I'd like to thank all those who participated in this discussion, over 100 people, all of whom remained civil, and many of whom brought up very insightful points. I'd also like to thank User:BilledMammal for making the proposal, User:Bradv for closing it the first time, and User:FOARP for convincing him to reopen. I'm trying to fill some pretty big shoes here; I'm an experienced editor, and have closed maybe 100 RfCs, but Bradv is not only an experienced editor, but also an experienced administrator, so it takes quite a bit of hubris to think I can do a better job, and I won't be surprised if there is another thread on WP:AN after this asking that my close be also reopened. But I am still trying hard so that there is not.
So, the decision. I counted a noticeable majority of voices in support of this proposal than opposing it here; something like 68 to 45,^[a] and even more if we consider the ones who agreed that the articles should be removed from main space, but wanted redirects instead of draftification (which, as above, will generally be individually allowed). I might be off by one or two in my count, but I am not off by 10. Now as people say, correctly, RfC is a matter of stating arguments, citing policies and guidelines, not a matter of counting votes. The closer does not just count votes. But when I close and judge arguments, I try to remember that the editors stating them are as much editors as I am, many even more experienced than I am, and if many experienced Wikipedians are all saying something, it's definitely worth considering that they just might be right.
So, those arguments. The "support" side mainly said that these articles are stubs that are essentially database entries, and cited only to one or two specific databases, violating WP:GNG,^[b] WP:SPORTCRIT,^[d] and WP:NOTDB.^[f] I looked at a randomly selected subset and they were all of the exact form: "(Name) (born–died) was a (nationality) (sportsman). He competed in the (sport) event at the (year) (season) Olympics." Exactly those two sentences, no more text, and cited as stated. The support side has a point. There are a number of people on the "oppose" side that said that the articles aren't hurting anything, there is WP:NODEADLINE, so they might be expanded, Wikipedia is WP:NOTPAPER, so we have the space, and that at the time that Lugnuts wrote the articles, WP:NSPORT said that just participation in an Olympics, even without winning a medal, was an indicator of notability. Unfortunately, I have to discount those arguments; we have a long and time-honored precedent of deleting articles that are not actually hurting anything, but just because they don't meet Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not and Wikipedia:Notability; and those policies don't have a "grandfather clause" that say that articles that were made before the policies were written are forever acceptable.^[g] We can work on not-harmful articles that don't quite meet standards in our user spaces, or in draft space, but until they do, we don't allow them in main or article space.
Many others of the "oppose" side, maybe even most of them, said two related things: that mass moving articles to draft space is basically deletion, as very few people will ever find them there; and that deletion is not something that can be decided at the Village Pump, that's what we have WP:AfD for. That is basically the argument that Bradv found in his close that there was no counter-argument against; he cited WP:DRAFTIFY and this previous Village pump discussion that articles shouldn't be moved to draft space as a back door to deleting them via AfD. Now Bradv had a good point as well; he's a very experienced and respected editor. Many on the "support" side, at least implicitly agreed that moving these articles to Draft space would be close to deletion; some said they were only supporting draftification because they really wanted the articles deleted, and while others said they supported draftification to avoid deletion, and that the text would still be there for people who wanted to improve them, they admitted there would be a real possibility that no one ever would. However, the "support" side said that that this many articles would be too much for AfD, which only handles one or at most a few articles in a single discussion, not hundreds as here, and especially not the thousands of Lugnuts's similar stubs, which many on both the "support" and "oppose" sides agreed would likely soon be brought up a similar discussion.^[h] In questioning Bradv's close, FOARP said that this Village pump discussion was essentially similar to WP:AFD, so should be allowed to draftify articles if the decision went that way, and this was eventually successful enough to get Bradv to withdraw his close.^[i] This similarity to AfD was actually brought up in this discussion earlier, by PerfectSoundWhatever: "Wikipedia isn't a burocracy, so I don't think its a problem to do this process here instead of AfD if enough editors come to a disagreement. Different room, same discussion." Now I wouldn't always agree with that in many cases, AfD is where it is for a reason, it's a high visibility forum, many editors specifically go there to decide the fate of articles, if this were a lower visibility discussion I would not consider it a sufficient substitute for AfD. But in this case, there were over 100 editors actively participating, including many very experienced ones. Very few AfDs get that level of participation. I think per WP:IAR, and WP:NOTBURO, we can consider this a sufficient venue, as PerfectSound wrote.^[j]
Finally, the redirect option. A noticeable number of people were opposed to draftification, for all the above reasons, but preferred replacing the stub articles with redirects to existing articles on the Olympics of that year or the competitors' countries, because that way at least the redirects could be found by readers; even more would accept redirects equally with draft space, or as a compromise. However, several were explicitly opposed to redirects, because it wouldn't be always clear which article to redirect to, and in any case, over half the participants didn't mention redirects one way or the other. So I can't see a consensus for redirect, even as a compromise. However, I can point out the initial term of the proposal, "5: Editors may return drafts to mainspace for the sole purpose of redirecting/merging them to an appropriate article, if they believe that doing so is in the best interest of the encyclopedia". So if someone believes they know a good redirect target, they can feel free to make a redirect; if others disagree, they can discuss or at worst nominate it for WP:RfD. As long as it is one thoughtful redirect at a time, and not a mindless batch or automated process, I believe the community will accept it. User:Valereee even suggested doing draftification and redirect replacement simultaneously.
Personal note: Personally I'm not much of an editor of articles about Olympic competitors (arguably if I were I wouldn't be a suitable closer here!). However I've run into Lugnuts here and there - with all his edits it's hard to imagine an experienced editor who hasn't. I had always looked at his many short articles, not just on sportspeople, but on the many, many topics that he wrote about, and thought: these are not my cup of tea, but I'm glad we have him. I'm sad that he's gone. I'm even more sad that he went like this, with a statement that he intentionally added copyright violations and incorrect information. That several people in this conversation think he was lying about this, and just saying it "to piss off all of those who did not like him" doesn't really make it much better.^[k] What we're doing here by building the Wikipedia is a 90%+, maybe even 99%+, a very good thing. If I'm ever this angry at the <1-10% of what this project does that I don't agree with, I hope I can leave without deliberately acting to damage the project as a whole. A sad thing all around.

Notes

^ I calculated this to be just over 60% support.
^ Actually, for many of these this has been shown to be incorrect. WP:GNG specifically states that A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage (emphasis added). The content of the article is not what determines whether or not an article passes/fails the general notability guideline, but rather, the mere existence of significant coverage; during the discussion, I went through numerous articles listed and easily found SIGCOV (e.g. Albert Bechestobill, who had full-page coverage in major newspapers, or some of the ones I expanded significantly: Fred Narganes, Herbert Gidney, Garnett Wikoff, etc. – not to mention that this is only through the very limited resources which I have; books, foreign newspapers, etc. which are offline are also very likely to contain significant coverage of some of these athletes, as they were among the best athletes of their era and many were national stars).
^ –BilledMammal: "I've created Template:No significant coverage (sports) to give editors an alternative to immediately [removing from mainspace] articles lacking significant coverage."
^ This also in some of the cases is incorrect – Olympedia, one of the "databases" that was used in the majority of the listed articles, contains for many of the Olympic athletes (especially those from the United States, England and Canada) in-depth profiles (example) which could be argued as WP:SIGCOV, satisfying SPORTCRIT's requirement (one user, Blue Square Thing, went through many of them and came up with a list of those who, based on their Olympedia profile, appeared very likely notable, possibly notable, or likely non-notable). Additionally, even for the ones who do indeed presently fail SPORTCRIT, mass draftification is not the appropriate solution. For one, the policy on draftification itself specifically states in bold: "Older articles should not be draftified. As a rule of thumb, articles older than 90 days should not be draftified without prior consensus at AfD" (and this is not AFD). Secondly, there are many more appropriate and more beneficial ways for which these should be dealt with; among them: putting on the appropriate maintenance tags, including Template:No significant coverage (sports) which was made for the sole purpose of having to not mass remove articles,^[c] nominating them for deletion (through WP:PROD or WP:AFD), redirecting them, or, of course, improving them (I had also proposed making an Olympic stub cleanup project, although that didn't receive much discussion).
^ Pretty much all of the data in the Olympian articles under discussion is explained – they're cited to independent sources and the information is put into context – I honestly don't see how anybody would not be able to understand Beanie Fan was an American athlete. He participated in the 100 meter running event at the 1912 Olympics, coming in tenth place.
^ WP:NOTDATABASE seems to often be cited as a reason to remove articles like these, but in many of the cases, including here, it doesn't apply at all. NOTDB states that To provide encyclopedic value, data should be put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources^[e] and it lists the things that would violate it: (1) Summary-only descriptions of works – which clearly does not apply here; (2) Lyrics databases – which also clearly does not apply here; (3) Excessive listings of unexplained statistics – at least this one is remotely close, but it still does not apply as the vast majority of the articles are not full of statistics (and those that do have statistics have them explained); there's also a fourth listed, Exhaustive logs of software updates – but this does not apply either.
^ A few things here: first, in my view, discounting the oppose !voters for the reasons listed whereas keeping the support !voters at full strength despite the reasons being incorrect (as I showed in a prior note) seems to be directly contradicting an earlier statement by the closer and showing a bias in favor of draftification (But when I close and judge arguments, I try to remember that the editors stating them are as much editors as I am, many even more experienced than I am, and if many experienced Wikipedians are all saying something, it's definitely worth considering that they just might be right.) – secondly, GRuban says that There are a number of people on the "oppose" side that said that the articles aren't hurting anything, there is WP:NODEADLINE, so they might be expanded, Wikipedia is WP:NOTPAPER, so we have the space ... I have to discount those ... [because] we have a long and time-honored precedent of deleting articles that are not actually hurting anything, but just because they don't meet Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not and Wikipedia:Notability – I actually showed that many of these passed Wikipedia:Notability and none of them actually meet Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not, so this is not a valid reason to discount the oppose !voters. Also, There are a number of people on the "oppose" side that said that ... at the time that Lugnuts wrote the articles, WP:NSPORT said that just participation in an Olympics, even without winning a medal, was an indicator of notability ... those policies don't have a "grandfather clause" that say that articles that were made before the policies were written are forever acceptable – while I agree this is correct, I think many will agree that if a long-standing notability guideline is abolished, that does not mean to get rid of articles previously passing it by the thousands without any sort of effort to see if they're notable!
^ Taking the articles to AFD is not the only option. You could also PROD them, or you could redirect them (rarely have I ever seen a redirect for an Olympian contested, and many times the PRODs have gone uncontested as well), or you could, of course, improve them, as is possible with a large amount of them.
^ Actually, this was not why Bradv reverted his close. He said he reverted it because of many bad faith and (in my opinion) rather ridiculous comments leveled against him at the review: I am appalled by some of the accusations and assumptions of bad faith leveled in this thread. I closed this discussion because I felt I had something to offer ... Over the weekend I spent several hours reading every comment in that thread, keeping an open mind and considering both sides of each argument in order to determine consensus. And then I posted what I thought would be a comprehensive close, showing that I considered the arguments presented while attempted to provide helpful advice on how to move forward ... I was expecting a review at AN, but I was expecting the conversation to be focused solely on the merits of the close. I was not prepared for whatever this was ... the conversation at AN had gone completely off the rails. To be clear, I did not revert my close because I agree with the critics or find merit in their arguments, but because it was getting personal and I don't need this drama.
^ I find citing WP:IAR (If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it) as a reason to approve a close discussion (60-40%), that otherwise would not pass, on effectively removing 1,000 articles (that will additionally set the precedent to do so for tens of thousands of others) a bit absurd, and rather scary as well, especially since this would hugely increase WP:SYSTEMICBIAS and WP:RECENTISM (all of them are the earliest participants in the biggest sporting event worldwide, and the majority are from foreign (non-US, GB) countries).
^ While I agree Lugnuts should not have said that/left that way, I do think there's a difference between his claiming that and it being actually true. I have gone through many, many articles written by him and very rarely have I ever found errors (and a pretty large chunk of the very few that do have errors only have them because of updates on SR/Olympedia (sometimes they find for the early competitors that, for example, they were born in Philadelphia rather than Pittsburgh, or that they were born on June 7 rather than June 17) – as for the copyvios, an investigation was performed on his creations and the investigating editors concluded that that statement was false (also, I don't see how it would be possible considering that most of his work was on stubs like the ones being discussed here).

In conclusion, based on the notes above, I believe that closing this discussion as having a consensus to draftify is incorrect and suggest that it be overturned to no consensus.

[1] I calculated this to be just over 60% support.

[2] Actually, for many of these this has been shown to be incorrect. WP:GNG specifically states that A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage (emphasis added). The content of the article is not what determines whether or not an article passes/fails the general notability guideline, but rather, the mere existence of significant coverage; during the discussion, I went through numerous articles listed and easily found SIGCOV (e.g. Albert Bechestobill, who had full-page coverage in major newspapers, or some of the ones I expanded significantly: Fred Narganes, Herbert Gidney, Garnett Wikoff, etc. – not to mention that this is only through the very limited resources which I have; books, foreign newspapers, etc. which are offline are also very likely to contain significant coverage of some of these athletes, as they were among the best athletes of their era and many were national stars).

[3] –BilledMammal: "I've created Template:No significant coverage (sports) to give editors an alternative to immediately [removing from mainspace] articles lacking significant coverage."

[4] This also in some of the cases is incorrect – Olympedia, one of the "databases" that was used in the majority of the listed articles, contains for many of the Olympic athletes (especially those from the United States, England and Canada) in-depth profiles (example) which could be argued as WP:SIGCOV, satisfying SPORTCRIT's requirement (one user, Blue Square Thing, went through many of them and came up with a list of those who, based on their Olympedia profile, appeared very likely notable, possibly notable, or likely non-notable). Additionally, even for the ones who do indeed presently fail SPORTCRIT, mass draftification is not the appropriate solution. For one, the policy on draftification itself specifically states in bold: "Older articles should not be draftified. As a rule of thumb, articles older than 90 days should not be draftified without prior consensus at AfD" (and this is not AFD). Secondly, there are many more appropriate and more beneficial ways for which these should be dealt with; among them: putting on the appropriate maintenance tags, including Template:No significant coverage (sports) which was made for the sole purpose of having to not mass remove articles,^[c] nominating them for deletion (through WP:PROD or WP:AFD), redirecting them, or, of course, improving them (I had also proposed making an Olympic stub cleanup project, although that didn't receive much discussion).

[5] Pretty much all of the data in the Olympian articles under discussion is explained – they're cited to independent sources and the information is put into context – I honestly don't see how anybody would not be able to understand Beanie Fan was an American athlete. He participated in the 100 meter running event at the 1912 Olympics, coming in tenth place.

[6] WP:NOTDATABASE seems to often be cited as a reason to remove articles like these, but in many of the cases, including here, it doesn't apply at all. NOTDB states that To provide encyclopedic value, data should be put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources^[e] and it lists the things that would violate it: (1) Summary-only descriptions of works – which clearly does not apply here; (2) Lyrics databases – which also clearly does not apply here; (3) Excessive listings of unexplained statistics – at least this one is remotely close, but it still does not apply as the vast majority of the articles are not full of statistics (and those that do have statistics have them explained); there's also a fourth listed, Exhaustive logs of software updates – but this does not apply either.

[7] A few things here: first, in my view, discounting the oppose !voters for the reasons listed whereas keeping the support !voters at full strength despite the reasons being incorrect (as I showed in a prior note) seems to be directly contradicting an earlier statement by the closer and showing a bias in favor of draftification (But when I close and judge arguments, I try to remember that the editors stating them are as much editors as I am, many even more experienced than I am, and if many experienced Wikipedians are all saying something, it's definitely worth considering that they just might be right.) – secondly, GRuban says that There are a number of people on the "oppose" side that said that the articles aren't hurting anything, there is WP:NODEADLINE, so they might be expanded, Wikipedia is WP:NOTPAPER, so we have the space ... I have to discount those ... [because] we have a long and time-honored precedent of deleting articles that are not actually hurting anything, but just because they don't meet Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not and Wikipedia:Notability – I actually showed that many of these passed Wikipedia:Notability and none of them actually meet Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not, so this is not a valid reason to discount the oppose !voters. Also, There are a number of people on the "oppose" side that said that ... at the time that Lugnuts wrote the articles, WP:NSPORT said that just participation in an Olympics, even without winning a medal, was an indicator of notability ... those policies don't have a "grandfather clause" that say that articles that were made before the policies were written are forever acceptable – while I agree this is correct, I think many will agree that if a long-standing notability guideline is abolished, that does not mean to get rid of articles previously passing it by the thousands without any sort of effort to see if they're notable!

[8] Taking the articles to AFD is not the only option. You could also PROD them, or you could redirect them (rarely have I ever seen a redirect for an Olympian contested, and many times the PRODs have gone uncontested as well), or you could, of course, improve them, as is possible with a large amount of them.

[9] Actually, this was not why Bradv reverted his close. He said he reverted it because of many bad faith and (in my opinion) rather ridiculous comments leveled against him at the review: I am appalled by some of the accusations and assumptions of bad faith leveled in this thread. I closed this discussion because I felt I had something to offer ... Over the weekend I spent several hours reading every comment in that thread, keeping an open mind and considering both sides of each argument in order to determine consensus. And then I posted what I thought would be a comprehensive close, showing that I considered the arguments presented while attempted to provide helpful advice on how to move forward ... I was expecting a review at AN, but I was expecting the conversation to be focused solely on the merits of the close. I was not prepared for whatever this was ... the conversation at AN had gone completely off the rails. To be clear, I did not revert my close because I agree with the critics or find merit in their arguments, but because it was getting personal and I don't need this drama.

[10] I find citing WP:IAR (If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it) as a reason to approve a close discussion (60-40%), that otherwise would not pass, on effectively removing 1,000 articles (that will additionally set the precedent to do so for tens of thousands of others) a bit absurd, and rather scary as well, especially since this would hugely increase WP:SYSTEMICBIAS and WP:RECENTISM (all of them are the earliest participants in the biggest sporting event worldwide, and the majority are from foreign (non-US, GB) countries).

[11] While I agree Lugnuts should not have said that/left that way, I do think there's a difference between his claiming that and it being actually true. I have gone through many, many articles written by him and very rarely have I ever found errors (and a pretty large chunk of the very few that do have errors only have them because of updates on SR/Olympedia (sometimes they find for the early competitors that, for example, they were born in Philadelphia rather than Pittsburgh, or that they were born on June 7 rather than June 17) – as for the copyvios, an investigation was performed on his creations and the investigating editors concluded that that statement was false (also, I don't see how it would be possible considering that most of his work was on stubs like the ones being discussed here).

[a]

[b]

[d]

[f]

[g]

[h]

[i]

[j]

[k]

[c]

[e]