Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Symbols and conventions used in welding documentation Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Symbols_and_conventions_used_in_welding_documentation
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.
Speedy Keep The nomination seems to be advocating merger rather than deletion. The topic here is notable — see Welding Symbols, for example. The main article about welding says nothing about symbols and notation. Our editing policy is very clear, "Even poor articles, if they can be improved, are welcome.". Warden (talk) 09:51, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - There is no valid reason for a speedy keep put forth here and, to save you the trouble, it's clearly not snowing either. - SummerPhD (talk) 23:51, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
WP:SK#1 is "the nominator ... fails to advance an argument for deletion—perhaps only proposing a non-deletion action such as moving or merging..." Q.E.D. Warden (talk) 23:45, 9 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Struck my delete as thanks to a number of wikipedians it's becoming an article (still think it might have been better to start from scratch though and not sure it's notable for its own article).DexDor (talk) 16:32, 9 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You've asked the massed clueless of ARS to dive in and "rescue" it. One of the articles affected by this same IEP project is Aircraft design process, and we can see from the history and AfD of that article just what a hideous mess you and ARS made of it. Yes, you, and there's a paper trail that shows this before you go bleating off to NPA.
These are technical articles. They require technical knowledge and understanding to write them. Whilst there's no reason why "a layman" can't acquire that necessary level of knowledge by some background reading beforehand, that's not something that has ever been demonstrated by your approach or that of ARS. This is a simple enough article after all, and being based on documenting public standards and conventions it's unusually easy to reference.
Do we have any welders with time on their hands? Maybe - and if so, they'd be welcome to sort this article out. Sadly we seem to have lost Wizard191 lately, someone who'd have been ideal at this.
There does seem to be a recent consensus that the IEP experiment has failed, is recognised to have failed, and it's now time to clean up, not to leave it around any longer. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:42, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It is a core principle of Wikipedia that anyone can edit. If you would prefer that technical topics are owned by subject matter experts then you should try a project such as Scholarpedia. The Indian student(s) in this case seem to be studying the topic(s) in question and they seem to have more difficulty with the difficult Wikipedia format than with the technical details of their topic. I am reasonably familiar with both. I have a qualification in engineering drawing and reasonable familiarity with terms such as butt joint and fillet. Please give an example of an important detail about welding notation which you consider is beyond us and so makes work upon this article impossible. Then please cite a policy which supports your argument that the article should be deleted to prevent further work. Warden (talk) 13:41, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
WP:COMPETENCE also applies. You and your ARS recue tag will turn up for the deletion of the very worst of articles (and DreamFocus will doubtless soon be along too), yet you never seem to apply any such WP:COMPETENCE to fixing them, just a scatter-gun smearing of random google-droppings. If you want to fix this article, be my guest. If you want to argue that bad articles should be preserved as they are, despite, then you make yourself part of the problem. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:48, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
WP:COMPETENCE is not a policy and you do not give any reason why this particular article or topic requires more competence than the general mass of Wikipedia articles, which mostly require more work too. Your position generally seems to be a counsel of despair - that we should give up all technical topics for lack of competent editors. It's a reasonable point of view but it's not the way that Wikipedia works, as specified by its editing policy which explicitly welcomes poor starts to a topic in the optimistic expectation that they will be improved in the fullness of time. Warden (talk) 13:57, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete If we could miraculously remove all of the copyvios, I doubt there would be much left. One thing that wouldn't be left is an encyclopedic topic. - SummerPhD (talk) 23:57, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The topic is discussed in detail in encyclopedia such as the Encyclopedia of Engineering Signs and Symbols and The Welding Encyclopedia. This claim is therefore false. Warden (talk) 14:16, 9 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I have just removed most of the content as copy vio. See [1], [2], and [3]. This is not my area at all, so I won't comment on whether what's left should kept, deleted, or merged, although what is currently left seems to be material copied from existing Wikipedia artcles, an uncontextualized list of abbreviations, and one unreferenced factoid about the Indian Bureau of standards. However, I will say that if the ARS is serious about trying to "rescue" these IEP articles, then they should minimally find and remove the copyvio to give an accurate picture of what's left. Voceditenore (talk) 11:23, 9 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The topic requires graphics and sorting out copyright for such is challenging and so it's not surprising that the IEP finds this difficult. Fortunately, I have some facility in this area and so have reworked using a US Army source which, being a Federal Govt document, is public domain. This should enable us to make reasonable progress within the timescale of AFD. The symbols are not especially difficult though - I might hand-draw some examples myself when I get a moment. Warden (talk) 23:51, 9 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. It's unfortunate that the project's editors have inserted so much copyvio, and fortunate that Voce has removed it here. But the presence of copyvio is not by itself a reason to delete an article. The copyvio project people have rescued hundreds or maybe thousands of articles by severely pruning them. Because as long as it can be shown that the topic is notable, even the shortest of articles can stay after being cleaned, and merge proposals then can and should take place at its talk page rather than here. This topic is definitely notable. How else would construction projects get done? There are dozens of these symbols at an American Welding Society page [4]. Novickas (talk) 16:56, 10 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Keep The information is useful and notable, the article is well documented with inline citations, and copyright violations are gone. --DThomsen8 (talk) 21:40, 12 October 2011 (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.