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. Consensus is that this is a valid topic but that the content needs editing, as has partially been done already during this AfD.  Sandstein  07:50, 7 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Prehistory of Transylvania (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log) • Afd statistics

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Please refer to the multiple issue tags. It looks like an essay compiled from several technically unverifiable sources. The article has been unpatrolled for 30 days and no one knows what to do with it. Perhaps an expert on the subject could merge it somewhere. Would the community please decide. Kudpung (talk) 10:27, 30 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Romania-related deletion discussions. -- Kudpung (talk) 10:29, 30 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. -- Kudpung (talk) 10:29, 30 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Question -- Do we have anythign else similar? I would certainly prefer to see this broken up into articles on the various successive periods, but that is difficult when we only have a bibliography. I would suggest that this is a weak keep, but it certainly needs the attenion of an expert, if we can find one. Peterkingiron (talk) 10:39, 30 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• There's some evidence that an expert's already paid it attention. The author, User:Roteadan, seems to be Mihai Rotea of the Transylvanian History Museum. I'd strongly urge not deleting this material out of hand, and in conducting this debate we should be mindful of expert retention. I think our best way forward would be to introduce the author to the relevant editing guidelines for subject experts, and our guidelines about autobiographies as well. Let's be particularly careful to use clear, plain English with a minimum of alphabet soup.—S Marshall T/C 11:01, 30 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete, but be nice as others have said. My take on it is that there was no Transyvania in prehistoric times. The material should be covered in more general articles on European prehistory. Steve Dufour (talk) 13:54, 30 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - the article as it stands is clearly not ready for mainspace, and this is not a case where the editing process will help much — we need a complete revamp including citations with page numbers, language understandable by laymen, etc., and the only ones capable of providing that are the Rotea brothers, who have the sources at hand. I suggest userfying and having someone explain a little about Wikipedia policy to the authors. - Biruitorul ^Talk 03:06, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Rewrite There certainly can be an article on the subject, as for other regions in Europe. Europe even in that period was not one homogeneous mass. But I agree with Biruitorul that it will need to be written from scratch, unless the author can be persuaded to rewrite, as S Marshall suggests; if he has published it previously & owns the copyright & he can donate it to us, or if it is wholly original here, it nonetheless is not encyclopedic in our sense and will need a total rewrite,with more helpful sourcing-- there are good references in English available,. If he does not own the copyright, it would need to be rewritten all the more. I might offer to do so, except that I would not be able to incorporate the sources used, as I would not be able to read most of them. A good deal could be done for clarity with simple copyediting, but it will still not deal with the sourcing. DGG ( talk ) 03:31, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep and edit. Transylvania is not really a political entity; it's a geographic feature defined by the Carpathians, and as such has always been there. Its prehistory can be discussed as a meaningful unit, and in fact was inhabited by a succession of interesting and identifiable cultures. It would be nice to have endnotes, but until someone comes forth with facts suggesting otherwise I'm going to assume that the list of sources in what appear to be Romanian scholarly sources do in fact verify the article's contents. - Smerdis of Tlön - killing the human spirit since 2003! 15:26, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - Thank you all for your input. There has now been a message today from the author at Talk:Prehistory of Transylvania. I think we should userfy and help him to bring the article's presentation up to Wikipedia standard. --Kudpung (talk) 11:19, 3 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment. The readability of the text is sharply improved by adding paragraphs, which were in the original text, only not the Wikipedia way. I took the liberty of adding them. I also started wikifying the text, which leaves much to do. I also took the liberty of trying to supply a brief introduction, and added a map. I would add that references from reliable sources in Romanian are perfectly adequate sources. English sources are not required or even preferred, although accessible English language sources do increase the ability of other editors to help add inline references. - Smerdis of Tlön - killing the human spirit since 2003! 19:32, 3 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong keep. Clearly a valid topic and an excellent article start that just needs editing. It certainly does not look anything like an "essay" but is a more or less straightforward, chronologically ordered, descriptive account of the subject, exactly as one would expect in an encyclopaedia article. I don't understand what the nominator means by "technically unverifiable sources"; many of the sources require a knowledge of Romanian, but that is to be expected with a subject such as this one, and several other sources are in German or French, which make them verifiable to a large number of users around here. --Hegvald (talk) 17:30, 5 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• I'd be willing to read and verify the French and German sources, but unfortunately I'm not getting much on google books. The first German source is available in snippet view, but that's totally unhelpful for this kind of task.—S Marshall T/C 23:45, 6 November 2010 (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.