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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Canadian mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

: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 to Mining industry of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. WP:UNDUE emphasis on the Canadian aspect. King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 07:01, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

=[[Canadian mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo]]=

:{{la|Canadian mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo}} – (View AfDView log)

:({{Find sources|Canadian mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo}})

My initial prod was disputed, so I'm bringing this to full AFD instead. The core issue here is that fundamentally, this isn't so much an encyclopedia article as it is an exercise in public service journalism; the article's creator readily admitted on my talk page that they created it in response to an online debate about whether the Canadian business community should or shouldn't divest itself of natural resources investments in the Congo. What the article fails to do, however, is to demonstrate that "Canadian mining companies operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo" actually constitutes a uniquely encyclopedic class of thing that's identifiably distinct from what other countries' mining companies are or aren't doing there; instead, the point seems to be to collate original research into a journalistic source that can inform and contribute to an active political debate in Canada. Which, admittedly, is a valuable project to take on — but given that we're an encyclopedia, not a public journalism hub, Wikipedia isn't really the place for it. I still believe it's a delete. Bearcat (talk) 00:47, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

  • Keep The author may have a point of view, but the article largely avoids that issue and AfD isn't the place to deal with NPOV issues anyway. Certainly, the subject of this article is a detailed topic, but I don't see a huge distinction between this and a hypothetical article on, say, Democratic Republic of the Congo-Botswana relations. It's somewhat esoteric yes, but it doesn't seem unencyclopedic. Furthermore, WP:OR doesn't prohibit research; we do research all the time when writing articles. What it prohibits is research not backed by reliable sources and synthesizing sources to make a point. I don't see either happening here. The article doesn't set out to prove a point; it sets out to describe Canadian mining interests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. To the extent that it does prove some kind of point, that's an NPOV issue that can be addressed through editing. Zachlipton (talk) 01:45, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

::This article is synthesizing sources to advance a point not already established in existing research: the idea that "Canadian mining companies operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo" constitute a distinct class of thing, with a unique and distinctive context as a separate topic from the DRC's mining industry as a whole, that warrants independent attention in an encyclopedia. Saying that we need a separate article about this, essentially, is like saying that red M&Ms constitute a distinct topic, warranting their own independent article, from other colours of M&Ms. An article on mining in the DRC, absolutely. Maybe even a separate omnibus article on international investment in DRC's mining industry. But the fact that some of the companies that are doing it happen to be Canadian doesn't make those companies a distinct topic from the ones that are American or the ones that are British or the ones that are French, because there's no properly sourced evidence that they're doing anything differently than other countries' mining companies are. It's dividing the topic on a distinction that isn't relevant to the topic's encyclopedic value. Bearcat (talk) 18:05, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

  • Keep: per Zach - Ret.Prof (talk) 02:26, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Merge, what is salvageable minus the POV issues, to Mining industry of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the governmental Canada/Congo relations to that appropriate page. I agree with the nom that the article doesn't prove why Canadian mining companies/issues in the Congo are notable enough to have their own page, when they can just as easily be covered on already existing pages (that have slightly less NPOV issues). Ravendrop (talk) 04:12, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
  • Given the amount of purely factual content in Canadian mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, wouldn't such a merger pollute Mining industry of the Democratic Republic of the Congo with too much information about Canadian interests? Such a merger would have to strip most of the content in order to avoid giving undue weight to Canada, so a merger would essentially be a de facto deletion. Canadian mining in the DR Congo is apparently notable enough to produce 25kb of readable encyclopedic prose with copious references. Zachlipton (talk) 04:48, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

::I guess my disagreement with this, is that most of the info on the page is useless/unencyclopedic anyway. For example, the entire Canadian & Multilateral Public Investments section as presented in tables, the quotations section, most of the listing of the extremely detailed info of what compnay bought what and did with what when in terms of mineral exploration, etc. Ravendrop (talk) 04:56, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

  • Keep I am a mining correspondent, specialising in Africa and I found this rather an interesting read. I fail to see how the information contained is "useless" or represents someone's point of view or constitutes original research. If any content with in the article is judged to be one of these three things then why not simply remove it, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater and deleting both good and bad. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.132.54.90 (talk) 14:59, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

::The core inclusion criterion for Wikipedia content isn't whether it's interesting, but whether it's encyclopedic. And I never said the information was "useless", either; I said that Wikipedia isn't the right place for it. There's certainly a place for this information on the web — Wikipedia just isn't it. Bearcat (talk) 18:05, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

: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.