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Race and intelligence

• Articles for deletion/Race and intelligence
• Articles for deletion/Race and intelligence (3rd nomination)
• Articles for deletion/Race and intelligence (4th nomination)
• Articles for deletion/Race and intelligence (Comparison of explanations)
• Articles for deletion/Race and intelligence (history)
• Articles for deletion/Race and intelligence 2
• Articles for deletion/Race and intelligence in the United States

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Race and intelligence (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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This is a serious and considered question as to whether this article should exist at all on Misplaced Pages.

The article Race and intelligence appears to be a notable subject because it is contentious and many people do talk about it. Indeed many people talk about this article. Nevertheless the notable aspects of the debate are twofold and are synthesised in this article to produce a debate on a contentious subject where all the information can be found elsewhere.

The two notable subjects are Race and genetics and the Heritability of IQ. Both those are notable subjects, but "race and intelligence" is a synthesis of the two. Because it is controversial it has WP:UNDUE visibility. It seems unlikely that anyone would argue that an article about "Race and prostate cancer" nor even "race and sickle cell disease" are notable articles, because although it is known that certain human populations have higher instances of these diseases, that fact is adequately covered in articles on the diseases themselves or asides elsewhere. Moreover in those two cases, the link between genetics and the disease is known and understood. In the case of intelligence, there is simply no evidence of a genetic link between race and intelligence. The very existence of this article appears to take sides on the issue - making a question out of an issue that is a non question. See for instance, Stop talking about race and IQ.

The article itself is written as bi-pole argument between two extremes, and all editors of the page appear to be broadly in agreement that this is not correct (even though they are not in agreement as to what to do about it). There have been recent edit wars as some want to remove clearly WP:UNDUE material at once, and other editors believe that would leave the page unbalanced and WP:POV and argue a complete rewrite is necessary instead. Editors from both sides of the debate have mooted deletion of the page as a possible solution as per this talk section. In view of the highly problematic article structure, which contains a lot of WP:UNDUE weight on just two extremes of the debate, there is no salvageable or mergeable content and WP:TNT is called for.

An objection to the above argument may be that the above is true, and yet there is a notable disagreement as demonstrated by the Rushton and Jensen material in the article, and that this gives the article notability. However there is heavy WP:UNDUE here, and we already have an article that discusses the debate, which is "Scientific Racism". See particularly section Scientific racism#Interbellum to World War II and on to the end of the article. This fully covers, and in a much more balanced manner, the notability aspect of the debate. That is, it discusses that there is a debate, and describes what it is.

Redirects are WP:CHEAP so I believe deletion and a redirect to Heritability of IQ would be the best solution here, or else a redirect to either Scientific racism or Race and genetics. A disambiguation page would also be a suitable solution. Sirfurboy (talk) 06:44, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. Sirfurboy (talk) 06:44, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Social science-related deletion discussions. Sirfurboy (talk) 06:44, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

• Comment - Although automatically listed as a 4th nomination, there is no record of a 2nd nomination (unless the multiple page nomination that included this page and many others is counted). The proposer of what is listed as 3rd nomination was in error, so this is, in fact, the third nomination I believe. -- Sirfurboy (talk) 07:02, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

• Delete The title suggests that there's a causal connection between someone's race and intelligence, a claim that contradicts scientific consensus. Perhaps because of the title, the article is a magnet for people who wish to use Misplaced Pages to give credence to sources that push scientific racism. The article was mentioned by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an example of bias on Misplaced Pages, caused by the dominance of white male Americans among active editors and by the growth of the alt-right in America. Note that the article Scientific racism, which covers the topic, is compliant with WP:NPOV and WP:FRINGE and has none of these problems. NightHeron (talk) 12:08, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
• Delete per NightHeron - the title presumes a link, it's a magnet for cranks and POV-pushing white supremacists, and scientific racism is the version that is reality-based. Redirect to scientific racism, probably, but any of the nom's suggestions are good - David Gerard (talk) 13:22, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
• Delete per nom and NightHeron. Whatever NPOV may be put into the article text, the page title itself is not neutral (by analogy: "XXX suprematism" is a NPOV-topic, "Inferiority of ZZZ" is not). Redirect to the NPOV-page scientific racism is a good solution. –Austronesier (talk) 14:03, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
• Delete per nom and all above. Unencyclopedic and harmful to the project. The WP:UNDUE and WP:NPOV violations are baked in by the title. Unclear that there ever could be an appropriate article at this title even in theory, and after all these years it's pretty clear that there never would be one. Support either salting or redirecting to scientific racism. -- Visviva (talk) 14:38, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
• Comment - Is anyone reading the earlier deletion discussions? I hadn't previously been aware that three past deletion attempts were all closed as keep, but that shows something about whether the article's topic is notable as a topic that's distinct from scientific racism. I find the comments in the third deletion discussion, in which almost everyone voted keep, especially informative. If the topic was notable in 2011, then it's notable now.

The reason I'm not voting either way yet is that I think the WP:TNT argument might be compelling. (I'm not sure yet.) Virtually everyone agrees that the article has major problems, but we haven't been able to agree on a course of action to address them. Instead of trying to get a consensus to update the article one section at a time, a simpler solution might be to just delete it and start over from scratch. I need to think about this for a while. 2600:1004:B168:C80E:5DF3:894E:7AC0:5C79 (talk) 15:01, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment and for considering carefully. I reviewed the previous discussions but the thing we must always remember in deletion discussions is that deletion is not a vote. It is the arguments that are made that are important. You can have 10 "delete per noms" and one good "keep" based on policy and the result is keep (or vice versa of course). Thus those previous deletion discussions are relevant only inasmuch as the points made then are pertinent and point to policy based reasons to keep. I reviewed all the keep comments in that AfD and they all boil down to "subject is notable" or "nomination does not make sense". It is for you to judge whether my nomination makes more sense, but you will see I have addressed notability in the nomination. The subject is notable for mention in an article, but I don't think it is notable for this article. Scientific Racism covers this, and as long as it does so adequately, this article is not required. It does not add anything because we already have a place for all the notable information. Once again, thanks for taking time to comment. -- Sirfurboy (talk) 15:45, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Delete Seems like a good solution, seeing as most of the arguments coming from the "the article is written from a WP:FRINGE" are in fact based around the topic of the article itself and the readers' possible interpretations of said topic. These arguments, in turn, lead to opinions such as that there is no need to mention the fact that IQ differences between ethnic groups exist (which both sides of the debate seem to agree is the scientific consensus) in the lede, which is now problematic for the other side.

Deleting the article and summarising its contents elsewhere will resolve this problem, which seems to be what's causing most of the disagreement on the Race and Intelligence article. However, the contents also need to be summarised adequately; for example, in the article "scientific racism", it is claimed that "a connection between race and intelligence" is "unsupported by available evidence", according to "critics", even though the scientific consensus is that there is good evidence for differences in IQ scores (a valid and reliable measure of intelligence) between self-identified races and ethnicities. As long all the relevant information pertinent to the topic of race and intelligence and notable enough to be mentioned is summarised adequately (which may entail creating a section on race and intelligence on the "scientific racism" article), I see no good reason why the article should be kept, given that it clearly causes more problems than it resolves. _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 16:20, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

• Delete - POV fork, already covered neutrally at History of the race and intelligence controversy. –dlthewave ☎ 17:31, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

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