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 Keep. —Quarl ^(talk) 2007-03-09 10:10Z

New Utopia[edit]

No independent, third party sources (except for two short notices in Wired and Business Week online, but the article doesn't match at all, what's written there).

Non-notable scam.

Pjacobi 11:41, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy keep. Given that this is perhaps the best known micronation scam after Dominion of Melchizedek, I can only conclude that this AFD listing is some sort of joke. There are dozens of third party sources available, including reputable newspapers and US court records. --Gene_poole 11:50, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Are we talking about different articles? Our shamefull article defines New Utopia as ... a project to create a new country on a manmade island, with a government based on libertarian principles. -- do you agree to this definition and do you have sources substantiating this claim? --Pjacobi 12:01, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  - Try looking at the references already in the article. Scamdog, as one example, is a reliable third party source. I'm pretty sure the United States Securities & Investment Commission also qualifies as a reliable source. --Gene_poole 12:33, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    - An encyclopedia article, as a first necessity, has to give a correct definition. If New Utopia is a well known investment scam, an article covering it has to start ... was a now famous scam of the 1990s or the like. ---Pjacobi 12:42, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
      - So why don't you just do that? We don't delete articles for being badly written. --Gene_poole 12:48, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
        Deletion is the most effective measure of quality control. It's much less effot to delete crap, than to try a complete re-write. If someone is interested in this topic, a blanmk edit field is not worse than the existing article. --Pjacobi 12:51, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
        That is specious nonsense unsupported by any Wikipedia policy. An article with multiple reference sources already in it is not "crap". --Gene_poole 12:58, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Seems like a fake nation to me and this website supports this http://www.quatloos.com/fake-nations.htm --PrincessBrat 15:10, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Keep as AFD is not clean-up. If you have problems with the content, either fix it yourself or tag it with one of the many templates. However, since this project, scam or otherwise, has gotten in the news, it shouldn't be deleted. FrozenPurpleCube 17:22, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per FrozenPurpleCube. This is an inappropriate nomination. AFD is not a tool for clean-up. In the amount of time it took the nom to list this article at AFD, s/he could have easily added "was a now famous scam of the 1990s" to the article intro and subsequently improved it or tagged it for cleanup. -- Black Falcon 22:03, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Do you have any respect for the idea that the first priority of an encyclopedia should be, to hold correct information? I'm not in the business of researching investment scams which are old new by 7 years. I just want to get the crap out of Wikipedia. --Pjacobi 13:25, 5 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  - This encyclopedia is a wiki -- something which anyone can edit at any time. Anyone can change an article so that it presents false information--if we simply discarded everything that was misleading or out of context without even trying to correct it, we'd have no encyclopedia. Perhaps you should have some respect for that! And if you're not in the business of building the encyclopedia (of which research is a critical component), I am confused as to why you're even here. -- Black Falcon 17:42, 5 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    - This exchange becomes a bit lengthy and off topic here. Some clarification and (if I can restrain myself) a last word on this: Micronations and investment scams aren't just the area I'm contributing here. Occasionally I stumble over articles in this area (perhaps doing interwikis etc) and in a small percentage of these accidents I find the article just that bad, that I'd prefer it deleted. Anyway, now that I'm involved, and anticipating a keep outcome, perhaps I myself will do the cleanup, stating up front in the article that it is an old scam and cut out all the "micronation folklore" with an axe. But I fear, as long as the article doesn't get deleted, it's random walk in quality space will always lead back to micronation folklore. --Pjacobi 18:11, 5 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    - Well, when you run across bad articles, and you don't feel like taking the time to fix them, for whatever reason, there are plenty of options besides deletion. Even a simple cleanup might be appropriate, though there are other, more specific options, that might be better instead. Now as regarding this case, if you do believe there's going to be an on-going problem as to this page being misleading, or mis-used for some purpose (such as to support the "reality" of the scam), that would be something that ought to be addressed, but I don't think deletion is a better solution even in that event. After all, deletion doesn't prevent there being false information out there, either on Wikipedia or the Internet, it just means there is one less source for the truth. FrozenPurpleCube 23:08, 5 March 2007 (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.