Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Housing First for Homeless Families

: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. Closing this discussion is a bit difficult, but the debate has been open for three weeks, and I don't think further discussion will make the result much clearer. Ironically it is because people have behaved and discussed the issues here, instead of just asserting opinions and votes that closing this has been tough. I have had to review the article as well as the points made here in order to evaluate the merits of the arguments made here. In the end, I find that deletion is the option which best reflects consensus, although creating a new article on the same topic, written in a more neutral manner may be a possibility.

On "vote count", there is the nomination and ChildofMidnight voting for deletion, and Pink Bull supporting inclusion. In addition Floydian makes a comment supporting inclusion but rewrite, while Abductive makes a comment indirectly in support of deletion. Nerdseeksblonde's comment is somewhat ambiguous as to whether the article should be kept or not, and appears to suggest the possibility of a merge, but at present there is no way to do that.

On arguments, I find the WP:NOTDICTIONARY policy citation a bit spurious; the article does not look like a dictionary entry. I do find the concerns over conflict of interest as particularily grave. Also, the question of notability appears to be of some merit because the sources listed appear to be from advocacy groups, and lack the level of independence to prove that the subject (i.e. "Housing First", not "homelessness" in general) is of wide interest. The awards mentioned by Pink Bull need to be independently sourced in order to contribute to notability.

In closing this way I have taken into account the fact that nobody has wanted to keep the article in its present form due to the promotional/essay-like tone of the content. While this may appear to be a surmountable problem (WP:SURMOUNTABLE), the tone of an article as an advertorial piece rather than an encyclopedia article indicates a fundamental problem with the article, where mere cleanup will be insufficient and rewriting will involve removing most of the content. The presence of articles not written in an unbiased manner, and with a conflict of interest to boot does harm Wikipedia's standing as an unbiased and neutral encyclopedia. Problems of this nature are more urgent than routine clean-up operations, (which are more about presentation than content) and apart from some formatting changes, there have been no improvements to the article.

Based on policy, the article's violation of the WP:NPOV policy is too gross for me to close a debate like this one in a manner which keeps the article online. The lack of independent, secondary/tertiary sourcing also causes a problem with notability guidelines which have not been sufficiently addressed.

If any of the involved editors, or anyone else, believes the content may be of value as a basis for producing a new article, or because parts of the content should be incorporated into another article, please feel free to contact me or any another administrator so that the article may be provided to you. Sjakkalle (Check!) 12:11, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

• Addendum: After closing this, I have noticed that Wikipedia has an older article entitled Housing first, which covers the same concept but in a more neutral manner. I recommend anyone who wants to contribute to this topic to look at that article. Sjakkalle (Check!) 12:17, 29 July 2009 (UTC)