Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2012 September 10

Category:Ancient Jewish Roman history (talk|edit|history|logs|links|watch) (XfD|restore)

Overturn decision (that renamed the original category Category:Ancient Jewish Roman history to the new name of Category:Jews and Judaism in the Roman Empire) because of 1 Insufficient WP:CONSENSUS to change this key parent category. 2 The original nomination was hasty with little input from WP:EXPERT editors and displayed a very poor grasp of the total scope of the WP:Category tree in place here, their structure and their purpose: 3 We are dealing with different super parent categories. Thus Category:Jewish history (that deals not just with "Jews and Judaism" but with many other events) is not the same as Category:Jews and Judaism (that deals almost exclusively with the Jews and their religion Judaism). 4 The long-standing parent category for the category in question was and remains Category:Ancient Jewish history with the main sub-categories being Category:Ancient Jewish Egyptian history‎; Category:Ancient Jewish Greek history‎; Category:Ancient Jewish Persian history‎, and Category:Ancient Jewish Roman history should be here, and not be renamed to something it was not meant to be. 5 The category contains many sub-categories and articles that are legitimately part of Jewish history but are not part of "Jews" per se and have nothing to do with "Judaism", such as Category:Roman governors of Syria‎ and most of Category:Jesus and history. 6 The current name makes errors about historical facts essentially transgressing WP:VERIFY, such as: 7 The contact between Rome and the Jews in history was not just related to the period of the Roman Empire (see article:) "The Roman Empire = 27 BC - 476 AD" -- whereas the Jews of ancient Judea were interacting with ancient Rome centuries earlier -- and that is covered by the correct name Ancient Rome ("a thriving civilization that began growing on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC" ! So the nominator confused things by coming up with the title of only one period of Ancient Rome's history. 8 There were three CfDs above the one here, all by the same nominator to rename topics, that dealt with relatively minor topics that were not renamed, see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2011 July 14#Category:Jews of Roman Alexandria; Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2011 July 14#Category:Roman-era Alexandrians; Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2011 July 14#Category:Roman era Jews, that were mercifully spared, but unfortunately, the most important one of all in the 4 he nominated was changed. 9 Not just that, but it was decided by a tiny group of 3 votes while the rest of the Judaic editors had no chance to be informed of this vote at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Judaism#Categories. 10 No notification was posted at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Judaism that would have drawn in more expert editors but it's obvious that the WP pieces of good advice such as WP:COMPETENCE and WP:EXPERT were not in display. Finally The closing admin was previously contacted, see User talk:Timrollpickering/Archive 16#CfD closure RE: Category:Ancient Jewish Roman history, and informed about this DRV [1]. I have also informed the original nominator of this DRV [2]. Thank you, IZAK (talk) 22:18, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Judaism-related deletion discussions. 22:36, 10 September 2012 (UTC)IZAK (talk) 22:36, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• List at CfD to reverse the rename. Nothing improper was done. There is no deletion to undo. Speedy close as out of scope of DRV. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:40, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• In support of the "speedy close", the nominator makes many valid points, but each speaks a reason for a "relist", and none, even collectively, would justify a straight "overturn" from DRV. Therefore, it may as well go straight back to CfD now. To debate the nomination points here would be to duplicate what should be said at CfD. Yes, DRV reviews the CfD process, but looking at the discussion and close I see no great fault of process. Perhaps more notification should be done. ie. Notify, or it gets relisted on protest? Well, someone here complains, so let's relist. Please be sure that sufficient notification is made. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:43, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Hi SmokeyJoe, thanks for your observations, but hope you realize that the original CfD that I am bringing here to DRV took place over a year ago in July 2011, see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2011 July 14#Category:Ancient Jewish Roman history. There were only three users involved in the discussion then. Do you propose we contact them? The nominator User Chesdovi (talk · contribs) also had a somewhat scatter-shot approach the way he went about things on WP, and while I have let him know about this DRV, he is presently on a self-imposed Wikibreak due to hurt feelings about the way he's been treated on WP all around. At any rate, I am requesting this DRV based on the fact that the decision was wrong in that it breaks the WP categorization in this instance, needed more discussion and input from those who have worked on this set of categories, and it was hasty, misinformed and unhelpful. I am not asking for merely a rename (that's already happened and caused the problem I am trying to fix, and what would be the point of asking to "rename" a category that was wrongly renamed?) I am asking that the rename decision be overturned, i.e. for review and overturning of the decision to rename in the first place and to restore the original name of this category, all fully explained in my nomination above. Thanks for your interest. Sincerely, IZAK (talk) 20:49, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Comments

1. The decision made at an XfD is within scope here, whatever it is, and CfD process includes disputed renaming. The DRV process is one of the few WP processes that provides a single, reasonable, and swift appeals mechanism without undue bureaucracy, and we should not try to limit it in this manner.
2. I agree the CfD process lends itself to over-rapid and unrepresentative decisions. Too few people can pay attention to it. It works best as a consultative not contentious process, and this benefits from wider participation.
3. We have too many WP processes, and we should try to combine as many as possible. But that is a more general problem.
4. Notification on all deletion processes is inadequate, and biases things towards deletion by not notifying all likely interested editors, or in the other XfDs, limits things to a small circle. But this too is a more general problem.
5. Izak asked me to comment. I support a change from the previous title. The terminology used before was entirely artificial, and, quite frankly, I would not have known what was intended. The new one is better, but imprecise, and it should be possible to improve it further. I agree with him that the relevant history begins in the Roman Republic; I think the first significant interaction was in the second century BCE when the Romans opposed Antiochus. Perhaps: Jews and Judaism in ancient Rome & the Roman Empire. or the Jews & Judaism in Roman history. I'd make similar changes in the others also, e.g. to Jews and Judaism in ancient Greece. So I suppose the place to discuss this is a second CfD. Here's not the place to decide the actual issues. DGG ( talk ) 17:49, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• So the first question is "is this in scope for DRV"? The fact it wasn't deleted is irrelevant ("if someone believes the closer of a deletion discussion interpreted the result incorrectly" doesn't require deletion). However, because it's really hard to argue the closer misinterpreted a unanimous discussion, DRV's purview is pretty limited. That said, DRV has asked for things to be relisted because of flaws in the discussion. In this case we've got what seems like a huge change in scope of the category (from "Rome" to "Roman Empire") with out the discussion indicating this was intended. We've also got the running problem that awareness of a CfD often doesn't reach involved parties to the extent one would like. It may well be that his rename is the right thing to do and wider discussion may end up supporting that, but I think relist is the way to go for now given the identified flaws in the rename discussion and I'd personally lean toward undoing the rename during the relist. Hobit (talk) 09:27, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hi Hobit, as it stands, right now, the Rosh Hashanah Jewish new year celebrations are about to start (eve of 16th September to Tuesday night 18 September, 2012) and then the other Jewish holidays come in close pursuit, so the closing admin can either wait to advise how to move on, or just wait for another week, and we'll take it from there. Thank you, IZAK (talk) 05:49, 16 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Relist as closer. Others above have already covered the process side of things and I think many of the points made fall under the scope of "significant arguments not deployed at the time" and consideration of them is beyond the scope of DRV but they'd be best handled in a fresh CFD discussion. Regarding notification there is no actual requirement for notifications of particular users or projects in discussions and recent proposals to make this mandatory for CFD discussions have come been rejected. However there is a good automatic system of alerts that lists all the discussions for articles within particular projects and makes for easy tracking of them. (It also uses good neutral wording; not that that's an issue here.) Unfortunately the category talkpage in question hasn't been tagged with any WikiProject banners but instead with an unusual category tree template that doesn't appear to link in with the alerts system. Timrollpickering (talk) 03:09, 17 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Endorse original closure. There was no procedural error, and the nominator correctly weighed the (very limited) discussion which took place. Many discussions XfD have very poor participation and do not cover a lot of the relevant issues, but that does not invalidate them.
  However, there is clearly a lot of further info which could be presented at a new CFD, so any editors want to present that new evidence should simply open a CFD discussion on a proposal to reverse the move. A DRV decision is not needed to achieve that, so this DRV review is a pointless diversion.
  On a sidenote, if the arguments at DRV are similar to the points made in this quest for review, I hope that they will not be set out as one big wall of text. Wiki markup makes it very easy to lay out the case in a legible fashion, and doing so makes for better discussion of any points raised. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:55, 20 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]