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 delete. The most common arguments for delete were
WP:NOR and
WP:NPOV, but the strongest argument was that while this is tied to a reliable source, it's a single source, and thus puts
WP:UNDUE emphasis on a single source's point of view. --
RoySmith(talk) 12:45, 15 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Notice: the corresponding articles on Chinese Wikipedia created by the same user are either deleted or nominated for afd. The user is currently blocked on Chinese Wikipedia.--
Jsjsjs1111 (
talk) 14:09, 3 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Delete - It's a pretty map, but GIGO. First off, the word "dictatorship" is tendentious and undefinable. Are we talking about a unitary leader? A clique or junta? A single-party state? A bourgeois state with a rigged political system offering a choice between a
Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich every four years, thereby empowering a single ruler to spy and launch wars and govern by executive orders? Not so easy, eh? And: the concept "dictatorship" — which is really out of vogue among serious academic historians and political scientists alike and has been for several decades — overlooks the very real decision-making processes and lower level authorities in even political systems topped by a unitary leader, such as, for example, the Soviet Union in the 1930s or North Korea today. There are a multiplicity of political actors exerting very real power in even the most tightly cloistered one party state. Essentially, this is a POV essay pushing the notion of a dichotomous world in which "we're good" and "they're bad." As such, it is a violation of the policies of
WP:NPOV and
WP:NOR.
Carrite (
talk) 18:39, 3 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Delete, basically per Carrite.
Parsecboy (
talk) 19:43, 3 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Keep, While I am sympathetic to
Carrite's personal political views (as I am myself left-libertarian who criticizes the pitfalls of states), this deletion discussion should not be about exchanging persoal political views among editors.
I agree that definition of dictatorship and its selection is understandably challenging for academic researchers, and a job that should never be done among Wikipedians per
WP:NOR.
However, I will remind @
Carrite: and @
Parsecboy: that no value judgement is made by editors (currently mainly me in this article) to present major findings from the political science literature. I did not and will not argue that these two datasets are the most authoritative, but rather asks other editors to consider
WP:SUBSTANTIATE by adding more datasets and/or comments on the
reliability and
validity of these regime-classifying schemes and the datasets they produced, if these critical comments are also well-sourced and published in reliable sources. So clearly, there is no
WP:NOR for this article. As for potential violation of
WP:NPOV, this alone should not suffice for an Afd.
Carrite said, 'the concept "dictatorship" — which is really out of vogue among serious academic historians and political scientists alike and has been for several decades'. May I ask if recent "vogueness" among academic research a criteria for Afd? Please try Google scholar dictatorship
[1](not sure if your localized version will produce the same results). I see the "Democracy and dictatorship revisited", the same author who produced the
DD index published in 2010 with at least 548 citations. I am not sure how can one measure academic vogueness even I use scientometrics and webometrics concepts and tools for my research on Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia, but I believe that this provides enough evidence for the academic attention on the dataset, along with it, on the concept and measurement of dictatorship, as being done by
democracy index,
Polity data series, etc.--(
comparingChinese Wikipedia vs Baidu Baike by
hanteng) 03:50, 4 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Special note to other editors: See
m:User:Hanteng/personal_attacks_by_some_Chinese_Wikipedians, I am currently blocked in Chinese Wikipedia not for any subjects on
Dictators and
Dictatorships, as
Jsjsjs1111 implied in this Afd. You are warmly reminded that
Jsjsjs1111 was previously checked (and confirmed) by CheckUser to have registered an account with the same derogatory name that was used to attack me personally (one other Chinese Wikipedian was blocked and another was warned). Normally this deletion discussion should not discuss this. However, I am afraid that the way
Jsjsjs1111 proposed this Afd has misrepresented some important facts, and thus the clarificatoins made here. --(
comparingChinese Wikipedia vs Baidu Baike by
hanteng) 03:56, 4 April 2014 (UTC)reply
You are blocked on Chinese Wikipedia because of edit warring on multiple articles, including those about
Dictatorships. The admin did mention it in block log saying that you are blocked because of both violating
WP:3RR and "long time edit warring", the latter which covers dictatorships-related articles. So please don't lie. And as for so-called "personal attacks" on you, it's unrelated to this afd.--
Jsjsjs1111 (
talk) 07:45, 4 April 2014 (UTC)reply
You can ask the admininstrator 乌拉跨氪 if you don't agree with me. In fact you are blocked for two reasons: one is "long-time edit warring" (长期编辑战), the other is 3RR on
zh:联合国地理方案. And please refrain from conjuring allegations against me or other editors, it's unrelated to this discussion. If you continue to do so I'll seek help from
WP:ANI--
Jsjsjs1111 (
talk) 15:53, 5 April 2014 (UTC)reply
I didn't notify some of the discussants because they are either indefinitely blocked
[8][9] or inactive
[10][11] when I first quickly sent out the messages. I guess good will from
Jsjsjs1111 is lacking towards me. I also sent a couple of the same messages to those that I have missed . --(
comparingChinese Wikipedia vs Baidu Baike by
hanteng) 09:09, 6 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Delete -- I was lobbied to participate as a result of participating in a previous AFD. The problem is of how one defines what is a dictatorship. Another problem is that some of the countries concerned maintain a facade of democracy, so that there is a grey area, where it is a POV issue whether it is a dictatorship or not. The present article is a list of counties quoting an index that is not expalined in that article, from one (probably academic) source, and for 2008, not 2014. If kept it should be
List of 2008 dictatorships.
Peterkingiron (
talk) 15:27, 6 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Keep What is a dictatorship? Is it a grey area? Is it tendentious and undefinable? Awesome questions to chat about at the pub, but not here as editors. Here we should just stick to what reliable sources state about the issue. Now, since it seems that there are indeed reliable peer-reviewed sources in the political science area that do such a classification, we can and ought report that. --
cyclopiaspeak! 12:08, 7 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Delete:
WP:OR and
WP:POV. Wikipedia should not be used to give highlight to the results of one or several scholars, especially when it comes to political problems that involve actual ideological controversies. There is no clear and universal criterion of dictatorship. Thus Wikipedia should not accept one as orthodox and make a list from it. --
Snorri (
talk) 15:48, 7 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Keep. No policy-based reason for deletion.
WP:EDIT does not allow labeling certain topics as "too difficult to write, intrisically POV, cannot be ever made neutral etc." How can we have a
list of titles used by dictators, if we cannot know who is a dictator and who is not? Note that
list of dictators was finally deleted after a really under-participated AfD and before that because a certain leftwing troll admin (now banned) had a crusade to whitewash WP with his POV.
jni(delete)...just not interested 20:14, 8 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Delete. (content deleted) so I strongly support him. Wikipedia should not be used to give highlight to the results of one or several scholars, no matter how many times the source has been cited or how popular it is. Wikipedia also should not be used to give a list in grey area, although I can't see anyone mentioned any citation that mostly contradicts to those listed in the article. And if there is, this article still should be deleted rather than list various opinions. I consider an article's neutrality according to handsome Wikipedia editors like (content deleted) rather than reliable sources, so it's a very tendentious article. --
The Master (
talk) 12:52, 9 April 2014 (UTC)reply
sarcasm won't help achieve consensus. --
Snorri (
talk) 15:07, 9 April 2014 (UTC)reply
I'm very sorry if it created irritation, annoyance or distress to you, so I removed the content about you. I was just intend to express my real feeling.--
The Master (
talk) 01:31, 10 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Keep Could use some cleaning up, and when that happens, it could be a very useful article.
Adamh4 (
talk) 18:28, 11 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Delete, the point is that the question of "what is a dictatorship" is an inherently subjective one. And, if we look at the contents of the article, we see that even in cases where we restrict ourselves to published sources, there can be disagreement (see, for example, the entry for Botswana). A more accurate title for the article as it currently says might be "List of dictatorships according to a couple of think tanks", because there are no agreed criteria for what is and is not a dictatorship. As such, I think the current article under its current title is misleading and should go.
Lankiveil(
speak to me) 23:53, 11 April 2014 (UTC).reply
Delete largely per Carrite and Lankiveil. The cited groups are not fringe groups, but their opinions do not necessarily reflect the broad scholarly consensus either. Some of the entries may be controversial (e.g. labelling Russia as a "dictatorship" which has elections and opposition represented in the Duma, even though there are severe limitations in the freedom of media and speech as well as an awfully powerful president). It is far from clear that all countries can be classified as either being a "democracy" or a "dictatorship", and by presenting the issue as if it were like that, we are giving implicit endorsement of that view, in violation of
WP:NPOV.
List of freedom indices broadly overlaps this subject and is a better way of doing this.
Sjakkalle(Check!) 15:36, 12 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Keep. Given the title, I expected to find original research, but the list is sourced to two apparently reliable political science databases and is transparent about its inclusion criteria. Evidently, what constitutes a dictatorship is a controversial issue, but that alone is not a reason not to have a list or an article about it - it's why we rely on reliable sources rather than our own opinions. As such, I see no policy-based reason to delete the list. Sandstein 07:21, 13 April 2014 (UTC)reply
Delete or merge to
DD index or
List of regimes — The
WP:NPOV policy violation becomes more apparent when you look at
List of regimes (
latest as of this post), which is the non-selective version. This article is a culled, otherwise
WP:A10 version of that. The
WP:OR policy violation stems from the
Polity data series in no way using the term "dictatorship;" it simply ranks on a sectioned, continuous scale from
autocracy to
anocracy to
democracy. The only thing that makes the assertion of "dictatorship" is
DD index. So, by combining "autocracy" with "dictatorship" to round to "dictatorship," the list is asserting and advancing a conclusion for the reader and using the assertion of "autocracy" as a way of backing up the assertion of "dictatorship." To take it even further, because that assertion of "dictatorship" rests solely on
DD index, we then have on our hands something between a
WP:POVFORK and
WP:UNDUE, especially when taken in concert with
List of freedom indices. --
slakr\
talk / 04:16, 15 April 2014 (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.