 | This discussion was subject to a deletion review on 2014 February 19. For an explanation of the process, see Wikipedia:Deletion review. |
- 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 merge (all of these) to Constitution Party (United States). This was a long and complicated AfD, not just because of the number of contributors to the discussion and the volume of text written, but also the large number of articles it affects. I thus felt it worthwhile to write a longer closing statement than usual.
There's several basic questions here. First (and, admittedly, out of scope of this AfD), Is the national party notable enough to get an article? Clearly, it is. I don't see any suggestion in any of the discussion below that would hint that it's not. Next, Is there material in the individual state party articles which is (for lack of a better term) encyclopedic? Again, I think the consensus is yes, at least for some of states.
That brings us to a more complicated question, which is, What's the best way to present this material? My gut feeling is that for people who come to the encyclopedia to learn about the party, the most likely thing they're going to type into a search box is constitution party. We best serve their needs by consolidating all the information about the party into one central place. Ultimately, I think that's what this is all about; how do we best serve our users? Of course, typing constitution party into a search box gets them to Constitution Party, not Constitution Party (United States), but at least from there they can quickly navigate to Constitution Party (United States).
Looking over many of the individual state articles, it is obvious that there is a lot of boilerplate duplication between them. This means added work to maintain these articles as the future of the party unfolds. For example, many of the articles say, The party takes very conservative stances on social and fiscal issues. What happens if, in the future, the party also decides to take a stance on environmental issues? Somebody has to go update 50 individual articles to reflect this new platform. Pointless busywork.
OK, so now we're down to the mechanics. Some of the state articles have material which is worth merging into the main article. Some don't. Figuring out which is which is not going to be easy, and might possibly be contentious, but this seems like a task best left for the individual editors who are most familiar with the subject matter. A lot of the material will be best presented in tabular form, but again, that's up to the individual editors who work on the merges.
My last comment is that usually, these sorts of merges happen pretty quickly, within a day or so. Given the number of articles involved, and the complexity of the job, I would urge everybody to have a bit of patience if the task takes longer than that.
I recognize that this close is unconventional. I plead WP:IAR. -- RoySmith (talk) 01:48, 19 February 2014 (UTC)