- Obama administration health care proposal (talk|edit|history|logs|links|watch) (article|XfD|restore)
<new information, and admin misinterpreted the debate>
Reasons in chronological order:
Prior to the AfD, a series of deletions reduced the article to a straw man.
Then, the AfD began with an incorrect statement that the President had no plan and, therefore, there was no basis for an article. In reality, "The President Plan" is listed on the White House website[1] and reported by major news media.[2]
I was traveling at the time, and so my reply was delayed. By the time I could restore the content and add sources, some 'votes' had already been cast for deletion. (Stated reasons included that the article presented counter-arguments from secondary sources responding to The White House arguments in favor of the plan; the counter-arguments were published in reliable sources but some editors said they were "debunking the White House" and made the article seem biased.)
User:Jayjg then deleted more than 20 nominated articles including this one. I requested a second look, and User:Jayjg replied as follows: "I can only interpret the consensus of the AfD discussion, and the consensus was clearly to delete. If you want to contest this deletion, please feel free to do so at WP:DRV."
Since then, President Obama went to Massachusetts to help the Senate campaign of Attorney General Coakley, who had promised to vote for his plan. She lost by seven points, to a Republican who promised to provide the 41st vote against the President's plan; it's the first time Massachusetts has elected a Republican senator since 1972.[3] Nationally, the Congressional bills that reflect The President's Plan are trailing by 17 points,[4] i.e. 10 points more than the margin that defeated Coakley.
WP currently has no article on The President's Plan; the AfD was based on the misstatement that he has no plan. It is covered briefly in the more extensive article on the Health care reform debate in the United States, but that article is so long WP is automatically suggesting it should be broken into smaller articles. The article on The President's plan linked to 22 sources, including 19 secondary sources, and would contain more if it were there to add to. In my opinion, anyone who thought the article biased against the plan could simply have added more arguments in its favor, e.g. from The White House website. The fact that Americans, by a 17-point margin, think the arguments against the plan stronger than the arguments in favor, is not really the fault of the article. Deleting the article simply creates a gap in WP.TVC 15 (talk) 03:37, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Endorse Looking at the AfD, the closing admin made the correct decision, the delete arguments were all based on policy that where never adequately refuted. The notability was never an issue, the facts that the information was covered elsewhere and that this article violated WP:SYNTH and WP:NPOV were the issues. If TVC 15 wants the article userfied to address the WP:SYNTH and WP:NPOV issues I would see no reason to object. J04n(talk page) 04:52, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- I didn't create the article or add most of the content, but seeing it userfied to address perceived issues would be better than losing it entirely. A list of specific examples of WP:SYNTH would help in that regard. As for WP:NPOV, the issue with covering a debate is that the arguments on one side may simply be stronger than the arguments on the other. A fair trial does not always result in a hung jury.TVC 15 (talk) 19:25, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Endorse: DrV request has little to do with whether close was proper, which it appears to have been, i.e., a proper reading of consensus not in conflict with wikipedia policies. I have no clue what Martha Choke-ley has to do with this.--Milowent (talk) 20:06, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- If nothing else, let's at least agree what WP:DRV says: "Wikipedia:Deletion review considers disputed deletions and disputed decisions made in deletion-related discussions and speedy deletions. This includes appeals to restore deleted pages and appeals to delete pages kept after a prior discussion." So, this does appear to be the right forum. Wikipedia policies were indeed cited in the discussion, but that does not mean they were applied correctly. A purpose of WP, I think, is so that people who "have no clue" about a topic can get one, or preferably more than one. Attorney General Coakley, who had campaigned successfully for statewide office and should have been able to do so again, lost largely because she underestimated the deep unpopularity of The President's Plan; she actually polled much better than his plan does, even though she promised to vote for it, while her opponent (who signs autographs as "41") promised to provide the 41st vote against it.TVC 15 (talk) 21:49, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Endorse closure After a lengthy debate, the consensus was clearly to delete. Only one participant voted to keep, and while his arguments should not be disregarded entirely, the consensus in the debate was clearly against them. Voters in the AfD instead generally felt that the article was a WP:CFORK, WP:NPOV violation, or WP:SYNTHESIS. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 20:51, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- The debate was not really as "lengthy" as it might appear, because the first half was about a straw man and the debate on the repaired article was only allowed two days. When people are returning from (or catching up from) holiday travel, and do not have much time to devote to hobbies like WP, two days is not "lengthy." Given the excessive size (according to WP's KB count) of the main article, the WP:CFORK point could best have been addressed by transferring content from the main article to the now-deleted article, instead of leaving the main article too long and no article on the clearly notable President's Plan. There were no specific examples of WP:SYNTHESIS cited; to the contrary, the first half of the debate labored under the misimpression that the President had no Plan and therefore the whole article must be synthesis. The WP:NPOV arguments consisted mainly of wanting the debate to come out differently; if proponents had better arguments available, they could simply have added them, instead of deleting. A better result might be userfication, as was suggested above, so that there is an opportunity to identify and address specific issues (see WP:HEY).TVC 15 (talk) 22:05, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- If the changes were so drastic that they may have persuaded the original voters to vote for keeping the article, you probably should have alerted them to the changes on their talk pages and asked them to reconsider their votes. That said, those who did participate in the AfD during the last two days still supported deleting the article as a WP:SYNTHESIS and POV fork. My impression is that the final version of the article was, in the minds of the voters, a synthesis of the president's plan and arguments refuting various aspects of the plan. The NPOV arguments therefore did hold water, and the consensus was against you. I've no problem with userfying and then returning to the mainspace so long as the issues raised in the debate are resolved. If you continue to assert that there were no issues, even in the face of consensus that there were, then that's probably futile. I sincerely wish you the best of luck in trying to replicate the Heymann standard. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 03:48, 22 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks for the suggestion about talk pages - in retrospect, I should also have alerted the people who had edited the article previously. Also, I accept your point about futility; it isn't enough that I personally thought the article should (and did) present both sides of the debate, it needs WP:CONSENSUS, although that is difficult when some editors insist on deleting arguments that they disagree with. Any article on a debate must include both sides, in this case the President's Plan and arguments for and against it; WP:SYNTHESIS and WP:OR might apply to original arguments not presented by either side, but not to direct quotes from reliable sources (WP:RS). That distinction did appear lost on the voters for deletion, but if the article is userfied, I will invite them to point out specific examples of perceived WP:SYNTHESIS in case phrasing needs to be narrowed to match sourcing or more sources need to be found. (In the healthcare reform debate article, one editor decided to 'balance' a negative statement about the current bills with some verbiage about Obama passing a stimulus package, even though it had nothing to do with the healthcare debate; some people do seem to see every policy debate involving the President as a forum to attack or defend him personally, rather than a substantive debate about a specific policy.)TVC 15 (talk) 19:24, 22 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Endorse - "I disagree with the closing" is not a valid DRV filing reason. Closing admin appear to have made no errors in judgment or violated any policy in closing. Tarc (talk) 03:33, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The subject of the article is obviously notable, and WP now has no article on it. Since consensus appears to be towards endorsing closure, I suggest userfication and including restoring the revision history so that contributors to the article and its talk page can be invited to participate. As I recall, the nominator for deletion had never provided any discussion on the article's talk page.TVC 15 (talk) 04:24, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- endorse and incubate' the arguments for deletion were all that this article had a POV problem. The debate made it plain that the parent article was too large and so a NPOV version is reasonable. Also the previous version may have had less of a POV issue. Let the user try to fix it outside of mainspace (rather than restarting such a huge task from the ground up) and let others keep an eye on it. Once it's in good shape, all reasons for deletion expressed in the AfD will have been solved. Hobit (talk) 22:24, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Not exactly. The primary argument was not that the article had POV problems (which it did, it read like some "refuting Obama" blog) but that it was a content fork of an article that already exists. If that article grows too large (it is still within reasonable limits), then summary style would be to bud off a section from that article into a new article. Summary style is not an excuse to keep an article that should otherwise be deleted. Userification would just create the same problem all over again. --Loonymonkey (talk) 00:03, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Looneymonkey's "refuting Obama" comment above is an example of a basic flaw in Loonymonkey's analysis: refusal to distinguish between (a) the President personally, and (b) the President's Plan. Public approval of the President's handling of healthcare has dropped from 57% to 36% [5] because people disagree with the Plan and the arguments for it. (Loonymonkey also denied that the President had a Plan, but that's a different problem.) Meanwhile, the President's overall job approval is around 50%. Either 40 million people were brainwashed by a biased Wikipedia article, or they see something Loonymonkey refuses to see. Perhaps the best way to address Loonymonkey's comment above is to put the text and sources of the deleted article into the debate article, notifying the editors of the deleted article where to find it. Either way, writing about a debate requires including arguments from opposing sides - if one side is actually more convincing than the other, that doesn't imply biased POV in the article.TVC 15 (talk) 07:18, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Reality may vary one way or the other, but my reading of the AfD is that the POV issues were the largest (NPOV content fork) and that the parent could stand to be split was also largely undisputed as far as I can tell. I think it would be ideal if the main article had a short paragraph or two on the subject and that an article with this title be linked to. Can we really get there? Not sure. That's way I've suggested this happen outside of mainspace. Hobit (talk) 14:27, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Undisputed, perhaps, but only because there was just one person was raising those objections repeatedly and not every one of their posts could be answered before the AfD was closed. If the other article is too large, it should be budded off to a daughter article, but that's no reason for another article to exist as a fork (and a highly POV one at that). As for the subject, one of the big problems with this deleted article is that it wasn't really about anything. When it was pointed out that there wasn't actually any "plan" described in the article, the same editor cut and pasted a series of general FAQ bullet points from the Whitehouse website and then "refuted" each one with various anti-Obama quotes. Not exactly the basis for a proper Wikipedia article. Obviously, Obama's position on this needs to be described on Wikipedia along with notable criticism, and it is, in several places. But as for a single "plan," that's a moving target as the political winds shift. If the article were about a specific speech or position paper outlaying a plan, that would be one thing. But it wasn't. It was just a collection of quotations, and was entirely redundant to better text in the other article. --Loonymonkey (talk) 04:04, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- As noted above, "The President's Plan" is listed on the White House website[6] and reported by major news media.[7]. Also, the article's revision history would show that the article was created with arguments from the White House website, the counter-arguments were added later, and the actions attributed above to me were mostly by other editors. (I did, however, restore their work after Loonymonkey's deletions turned the article into a straw man.) It is unfortunate that the deletion of the article's history would become an opportunity for a deleter to revise that history, and I hope that anyone with access to it will take a moment to check on that.TVC 15 (talk) 07:20, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- I'm not seeing a problem with inclubation. Does anyone doubt the subject meets our inclusion guidelines? Does anyone seriously argue that the parent page isn't too large? Does anyone argue that a previous version of the article was fairly POV free (though sourced to primary sources)? It's fixable. Let's just not let it come back into mainspace without a DrV. Hobit (talk) 15:47, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- I don't believe I ever saw a version that could be called POV free (or even that conformed to the most minimal of Wikipedia guidelines). As for this repeated accusation that the article was "turned into a strawman," I and other editors removed some terrible, terrible soapboxing and tendentious editing. Anyone with access to the history should take a look and make their judgements as to whether they feel the prior versions were appropriate. The article was bad when it was deleted and even worse in earlier versions, not that it matters because it wasn't the content but the fact that it was a content fork that got it deleted. None of this really matter here, though. This isn't a do-over of the AfD. --Loonymonkey (talk) 22:31, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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