Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mass killings under communist regimes (4th nomination)

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 no consensus to delete the article.

Background

The discussion ran for the standard period of seven days^{[note 1]} and drew extensive participation; indeed, it is reportedly the largest 'articles for deletion' in Wikipedia's history. Its purpose was to determine whether the topic covered in the article mass killings under communist regimes meets our project's criteria for inclusion. It was not a discussion about whether the regimes mentioned in the article committed atrocities, nor about their scale, but rather whether a standalone article on "mass killings under communist regimes" is the appropriate way to present such information in an encyclopaedia.

The article, in its various iterations, has previously been nominated for deletion five times. The first three of these discussions led to "no consensus" and the most recent two found a consensus to "keep" the article. However, as the last was over a decade ago, these prior discussions have not had a significant bearing on our assessment of the consensus today.

Discussions on Wikipedia are not mere votes. We make decisions through a consensus model that seeks to incorporate all editors' legitimate concerns, including those expressed in our standing policies and guidelines. Unanimity is not required and the number of participants on each 'side' is not the primary consideration. Instead, after a discussion has run its course, an uninvolved editor (or in this case, a panel of editors) assesses the balance of relevant arguments and concludes whether a rough consensus has been reached. If there is no consensus, our policy is to maintain the status quo. In a deletion discussion, this means that the article is not deleted.

This discussion has been widely publicised across Wikipedia's internal discussion forums, as well as outside the project in social and news media, drawing an exceptionally large number of participants. Unfortunately, the majority of the outside coverage has falsely portrayed it as a politically-motivated attempt to 'cover up' or otherwise remove the history of left-wing political violence from the encyclopaedia. Whilst all editors in good standing are welcome to join discussions on Wikipedia, when this kind of non-neutral coverage encourages large numbers of people with a particular point of view to take part in a discussion that they would not otherwise participate in—known as 'canvassing'—it severely distorts our consensus-based decision-making process. Canvassing is also more likely to bring inexperienced editors whose arguments are not consistent with Wikipedia policy or otherwise unsound, and consequently not afforded weight in the closing assessment of consensus.

Assessment of consensus

We cannot know the exact extent to which canvassing has distorted this discussion, but it is evidently significant, and canvassed editors were disproportionately in favour of keeping the article. For this reason, we have placed little weight on the raw 'headcount' of participants falling on either side of the debate. By our count, this was approximately 145 in favour of keeping the article versus 35 in favour of deleting it. There were also a handful of arguments in favour of merging the article with another, reverting it to a draft, as well as several neutral comments. Even before examining the strength of arguments, and allowing for canvassing, this 4:1 ratio strongly suggests that there is no consensus to delete the article.

In order to assess whether there is, conversely, a positive consensus to keep the article in its current form, we must examine the strength of arguments with regard to existing policy. For a topic like this, concerned with an emotive and contested historiography, our guiding principles are neutrality and verifiability. We aim to write articles that summarise the range of significant views present in reliable sources on a topic, e.g. mainstream scholarly literature, taking care to give due weight to these views based on their prominence.

The principal argument for deletion is that the article collects together incidents of mass killing by communist regimes that reliable sources normally treat individually, not together under the umbrella of "communist mass killings". Wikipedia editors are not permitted to 'synthesize' disparate bodies of information in this way, because it is considered original research that violates our commitment to verifiability and a neutral point of view. Those in favour of deletion also contended that the individual incidents covered in the article can be—and often already are—more appropriately covered in individual articles (e.g. Cambodian genocide); that the criteria for inclusion in this article are unclear; and that the present state of article is generally low quality and has remained so for many years, despite repeated discussion of its shortcomings. They generally considered the arguments for keeping the article to be undermined by canvassing, subjective assertions lacking a grounding in policy, and unfounded accusations of bad faith.

The principal argument for keeping the article is that the topic meets the 'general notability guideline', our basic criteria for including a topic in Wikipedia as a standalone article. They contend that there are reliable sources which discuss the article topic in a cohesive fashion and that these are prominent enough within the scholarly literature that basing an article on them is not undue weight. In rebuttal of the arguments for deletion, editors in favour of keeping the article argued that it is normal for coverage of related topics (i.e. the individual incidents included in this article) to be duplicated across related articles; that if the title is problematic, it can be renamed rather than deleted; and that issues with the quality of the current version can be addressed through other processes. Many other points were raised (that deletion of the article has already been discussed, that a lot of work went into writing it, that if this article is deleted others should be too, that it has a high readership, that the deletion nomination is allegedly ideologically motivated, or an attempt at censorship) but we did not consider these to align with established policies and guidelines.

To the extent there were substantive attempts to engage between the two sides, the discussion centered on whether the references given in support of the article actually represented a significant, mainstream view in reliable sources, or were 'cherry-picked' examples from a non-significant, 'fringe' minority. A subsidiary debate concerned whether the sources presented were correctly interpreted. In our analysis, these questions represent the core of the dispute, and are critical to deciding whether the article should be deleted. Unfortunately, we can find no consensus on them, and consider it unlikely that further discussion in this forum will produce one.

Conclusions

In summary, the Wikipedia editing community has been unable to come to a consensus as to whether "mass killings under communist regimes" is a suitable encyclopaedic topic. While the raw headcount shows that a majority oppose deletion, considering the large number of poorly-argued comments, the unquantifiable but significant disruption caused by biased off-wiki coverage and canvassing, and most of all the failure of either camp to decisively refute the arguments of the other, we have reached the disappointing conclusion that we cannot call this a consensus to keep the article either.

Before this deletion discussion started, an attempt to mediate the disputes around this article was begun on the dispute resolution noticeboard (DRN). There was agreement across all the parties to that process that the current version of the article has significant content problems - observations echoed by many participants in this discussion, on both sides. We therefore strongly recommend that the DRN process be resumed and pick up the attempts at source analysis carried out in this discussion, which show promise in breaking the deadlock. If nothing else, the failure of more than 200 editors to reach any actionable consensus in this discussion shows that there is an urgent need to better define and refine the core elements of this dispute into a more manageable set of questions, if they are to be put to the wider editing community.

Signed:

18:30, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Notes

Mass killings under communist regimes

Mass killings under communist regimes (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

And under its previous name:

Communist genocide (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log) (moved at start of process of second AfD to "Mass Killings")

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

The article begins:

<!-- Introduction, criteria, and their criticism -->Various authors have written about the events of 20th-century communist regimes, which have resulted in excess deaths, such as excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Some authors posit that there is a communist death toll, whose death estimates vary widely, depending on the definitions

… that is, the title is not in bold, it is explicated. The title is a synthesis, a pat answer to any tangentially relatable proposition. The proposal is that the page be deleted, with any verifiable facts that are not borrowed from the other articles be moved there. Some notes, more as I remember, but will argue they support deletion: the article has existed in one form or another for many years; a series of previous AfDs have been proposed [10+ years ago]; that article traffic is significant; there is currently another open dispute resolution underway; personally have every reason to despise Communist regimes [as I define them]. ~ cygnis insignis 14:22, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Adding a note that the lead has now been rewritten,

Mass killings under communist regimes occurred throughout the 20th century. Death estimates vary widely, depending on the definitions of the deaths that are included in them. The higher estimates of mass killings account for the crimes that governments committed against civilians, including executions, the destruction of populations through man-made hunger and deaths that occurred during forced deportations and imprisonment, and deaths that resulted from forced labor.

In addition to "mass killings," terms that are used to define such killings include "democide", "politicide", "classicide", and "genocide."

updated ~ cygnis insignis 09:03, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete as synthesis, and a violation of WP:NPOV policy. There is no doubt that 'communist regimes' as defined in the article have perpetrated many atrocities, but that isn't the issue. The question that needs to be asked is whether 'Mass killings under communist regimes' is a legitimate subject for an encyclopaedic article. And I would have to suggest that the article in question does little to justify that claim. A few writers have certainly seen it as a legitimate subject for discussion, but by and large, credible mainstream histography tends to neither lump all 'communist regimes' together as a subject for scrutiny when discussing 'mass killing' or to treat them as some sort of special case requiring unique analysis. Proper historiography discusses events in context, and without simplistic presuppositions that events are driven by any specific ideology. As the endless disputes on the article talk page make entirely clear, the article, and what exactly it is that it is supposed to be discussing, has long been a subject of contention amongst Wikipedia contributors. Raththan citing credible histographic sources on such subjects, the debate has instead revolved around exactly what constitutes a 'mass killing', or a 'communist regime'. Debate almost invariably focussed on contributors own arguments and opinions, since sources discussing this are sparse, and generally on the fringes of histography. It is absolutely imperative that Wikipedia covers mass killings, regardless of who perpetuates them and what their motivations were, or are, but this article, with its loaded title and its endless wars over what exactly Wikipedia contributors can or cannot include as a 'killing' is exactly the wrong way to go about it. What Wikipedia should be doing is covering, in relevant articles about specific subjects, such atrocities, sourced to mainstream academia, and written in a manner that does not spoon-feed readers over-generalising and ideologically-driven conclusions that the sources concerned do not themselves support. Let the facts about individual events speak for themselves, and let readers decide for themselves whether they wish to blame 'communist regimes' for such crimes, or to instead blame them on the broader fallibilities of a humanity that was perpetuating such atrocities long before 'communists' arrived, and may well, if a more enlightened discourse isn't available, be perpetuating similar atrocities long after such 'regimes' have gone. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:00, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Addendum to the above: a few hours ago, I wrote that "Rather than citing credible histographic sources on such subjects, the debate has instead revolved around exactly what constitutes a 'mass killing', or a 'communist regime'. Debate almost invariably focussed on contributors own arguments and opinions". For further evidence of how such endless going around in circles to arrive at a synthesised compromise can't work, one only need to look at this AfD discussion, and at how it is once again going over exactly the same ground, with the same mind-numbing consequences. I might dare to suggest that even if it were theoretically possible from Wikipedia to create a policy-compliant article on the subject matter (I still contend it isn't), per common sense, and possibly WP:IAR, we should give up trying, since in practice it is never going to happen. Or at lest, not until the last 'communist' and 'anti-communist' has been long dead, buried, and forgotten. There are plenty of other topics to write about, or even to waste time arguing over, and leaving this one for future generations might be best for all concerned. AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:17, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Addendum 2: To expand further on my point regarding disscussing events in context, it clearly needs to be emphasised that in regard to the subject matter under discussion, Wikipedia already does this. For example, there is already an article on Crimes against humanity under communist regimes. There are articles on Political repression in the Soviet Union, along with multiple articles on Red Terror, Soviet famine of 1932–1933, Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and many more, covering events in the Soviet Union. Likewise, in regard to China Wikipedia has a article on the Chinese Civil War, on the Great Chinese Famine and the Great Leap Forward, a List of massacres in China, an article on Mass killings of landlords under Mao Zedong and many more. Our coverage of Cambodia likewise has many articles, starting with Cambodian genocide and the Killing Fields. We have similar multi-article content on East Germany, on Poland, on Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and other European topics. On Cuba, on North Korea, and Vietnam. On Afghanistan. On Ethiopia. And no doubt more besides - I've not done an exhaustive search by any means. None of those articles are being proposed for deletion, and it would be grossly improper, in my opinion, to do so. Some articles are better than others. A few probably require significant work to bring up to the standards that such significant topics deserve. My objection is not to covering any of these topics, it is the way this one specific article has done so: by focussing on a simplistic one-dimensional analysis of 'communism', and on arguments put forward by proponents of this one-dimensional analysis, it has decontextualised everything to an extent that the victims have become mere statistics to be argued over endlessly by a few Wikipedia contributors trying to reach a 'compromise' that can never come - or if it ever does, can only be arrived at by synthesis built around the contrubutors own opinions rather than anything the 'reliable sources' we are supposed to be reflecting have to say. The article we are discussing here is based on a questionable premise, is based around the opinions of a narrow few writers, and is constructed in a manner that can never give the proper in-depth perspectives that the events being discussed - and the victims of such events - deserve. Wikipedia can do better than this - by covering events properly, rather than treating them as mere data in a facile numbers game. AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:18, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there are a lot of other articles. That's not a reason for deletion. This article serves two purposes, both as summary article that links these other articles together and also to represent what RS discuss in regard to the common causes, which isn't addressed in the individual articles. When a reader searches "communist mass killings" where should they be directed? Clearly this article serves as an entry point to explore all those other articles. Readers will see mass killing numbers on news sites, blogs, etc, so what better place to explain to reader the true situation via this article. Any issue with respect to consistency is a content issue best resolved via DR, not AfD. --Nug (talk) 21:58, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

summary style requires that each section should be a summary of each daughter article. Obviously, the overall context is also supposed to be adequate. Are you sure that is the case for, e.g. Great Chinese famine?

And, do you really think that by pushing outdated and obviously false Rummel's data, the article provides a reader with a correct information? Paul Siebert (talk) 22:09, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete in sum per WP:SYNTH, as explained in some great detail in the nom, the above !vote, the long talk page discussions, and the prior AFDs. I am looking for multiple RS that give significant coverage to (1) "mass killings" (and not "excess deaths" or anything else) under (2) "communist regimes" (and not "Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot"; not some communist regimes, not "totalitarian states", but "communist regimes"). I do no believe there is enough RS that exists that covers this topic. Rather, the article is based on sources that talk about death in communist regimes generally, or mass killings by specific regimes that called themselves communist (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot). But to combine it by ideology, without sources that explicitly do so, is SYNTH. At bottom, the view that the ideology of communism is somehow inherently violent is WP:FRINGE anti-communist POV pushing. Levivich 15:47, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well, I think that there are some of these sources listed below in the discussion. I also don't think that materials which primarily focus on Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot as the largest mass killings under communist regimes are out of line; the Great Purge, Cultural Revolution, and Cambodian Genocide are probably the three largest examples of this phenomenon. Reasonable sources would probably put these in the forefront and the focus of the most of their discussion given that they are the largest in scope. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 23:43, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Only Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's fit the most widely accepted definition of mass killing (50,000 killings within five years), so your arguments support a comparative analysis of those three regimes only, as is done by Karlsson 2008. Davide King (talk) 00:33, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • Are you telling me that North Korea is not somehow engaged in mass killings through starvation? — Mikehawk10 (talk) 00:47, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • Are you telling me there is consensus among scholars that man-made famines are mass killings? This is contradicted even by the long-standing version of the article having a section devoted to this. In Red Holocaust, Steven Rosefielde does discuss North Korea, alongside Vietnam and the Big Three, but he considers them to be excess or mass mortality events, not mass killings, compare "Premature Deaths: Russia's Radical Economic Transition in Soviet Perspective". Davide King (talk) 00:54, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
          • Sure, there is no consensus among judges about geometry of our planet either, but criminal cases are subject to criminal investigation, and vice versa. In case of Holodomor (1932-1934, USSR), criminal investigation was conducted in Ukraine and passed court: https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/holodomor-is-a-genocide/ . Vlisivka (talk) 19:58, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • That North Korea is even 'communist' in any meaningful sense is a subject of frequent debate, given its deviation from orthodox Stalinism and towards a militarised ultranationalist quasi-religious ideology (Juche). They don't claim to be 'communist' any more, and Wikipedia certainly shouldn't simply take at face value assertions that they are. Not if the object of that exercise is to lump them together with other regimes just to add to the a total concocted according to arbitrary criteria by Wikipedia contributors. The crimes of the North Korean state need to be described in context, in appropriate articles, rather than thrown out of context into an article that refuses to acknowledge the complex issues and questionable premises it is built around. AndyTheGrump (talk) 01:10, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
          • If you want to exclude the killings by North Korea after they stopped calling themselves Communist, then surely that would imply that the killings by North Korea when it was still Communist should be taken into account. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 06:49, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
            • Nice straw man there. I was responding to Mikehawk10's post linking to a 2012 article describing "State-Induced Famine and Penal Starvation in North Korea", which he cited as evidence that north Koriea is still "engaged in mass killings through starvation". An article which quite explicitly discusses current anything-but-communist Juche ideology in North Korea, details its official introduction in 1970, and describes it as " perpetuat[ing] a mythology that its hereditary rulers represent “the will of both heaven and earth". Of course the crimes of the North Korean political establishment, and of their 'hereditary rulers' should be 'taken into account'. In articles that actually put it into context, rather than in a rag-bag conconction cobbled together from disparate sources according to arbitrary critera arrived at (or rather endlessly argued over) by the few Wikipedia contributors willing to engage in this decade-plus-long exercise in POV-pushing and synthesis. Any proper dicussion of North Korea needs to describe its history, and the broader context in which its crimes could be perpetuated, rather than to engage in an exercise in propaganda-by-numbers that reduces the victims to a points score on a leaderboard. That is what Wikipedia articles on the subject should be doing, and what the article being discussed here can never do, built as it is around the obvious premise that readers are too stupid to figure out for themselves who the bad guys are without them being spoon-fed decontextualised pap that reduces it all to 'communism is evil'. And thus conveniently fails to note that evil has been and is being done by communists (or people who describe themselves as such), non-communists, anti-communists, and people who's claims to being communist change as and when it suits their interests, as long as they can stay in charge, in heaven and on earth. AndyTheGrump (talk) 10:04, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
              • That Juche is not communist anymore b/c the 2nd NK despot declared it isn't does not pass the laugh test. Of course apologists for Communism of the "No True Scotsman" variety will always come back to this, to say NK is not Communist. But of course, the big payoff is that if you succeed in classing out the NK's as "not Communist" then you get to take off a couple of million snuffed human lives from the global Communist butcher's bill. A grotesque business this is, of trying to define-out Communist flavours.XavierItzm (talk) 13:16, 26 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• In case anyone doubts Levivich's statement of "the view that the ideology of communism is somehow inherently [emphasis mine] violent is WP:FRINGE anti-communist POV pushing", it is backed by this snow close in regards to communism categorization. Davide King (talk) 22:15, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Levivich, if you didn't know already, you're in The Telegraph:[2] Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 06:52, 28 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep, it is a notable topic and there are enough WP:RS sources out there written on the subject: most notable probably the books on the subject Red Holocaust (2009 book), The Black Book of Communism (published by Routledge and Harvard University Press respectively). Also Helen Fein's chapter on Soviet and Communist Genocides and Democide, the chapter Communist mass killings by Benjamin Valentino and Alex Bellamy’s chapter Communist Atrocities where he discusses the massacre of millions by communist regimes during the Cold War. R. J. Rummel also makes the the connection between communist regime type and mass killings (which he terms communist democide) in his widely cited Death by Government. Rummel has had some critics, his connection of regime type and numbers is defended by Wayman&Tago. Not to mention usual searches: "Communist genocide" alone gives 441 returns on google books and 75 on google scholar. The topic is certainly meets WP:GNG and the article was titled "Mass killings under Communist regimes" as a compromise descriptive title derived via consensus, see Talk:Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes/FAQ —Nug (talk) 20:40, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Addendum, these reasons have been addressed else where on the page, adding here so they are not lost in the noise:
    • "The topic is SYNTH": that argument is truly deprecated when the topic becomes a university course, according to this published syllabus, because WP:SYNTH states: Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any source
    • "The title is SYNTH": This is a content issue best discussed via WP:MOVEREQ. The title is a descriptive title per WP:NDESC: ”However, non-neutral but common names (see preceding subsection) may be used within a descriptive title. Even descriptive titles should be based on sources, and may therefore incorporate names and terms that are commonly used by sources.”

      The terms "Mass killings" and "communist regimes" are both terms commonly used in the sources related to the topic, with 1090 hits for “mass killings” compared with 108 hits for “excess deaths”, for example.

    • "The authors/books (Valentino/Black Book, etc) have their own articles, so why do we need this article": that's like arguing we have The Communist Manifesto so why do we need an article on Marxism.
    • "The article is a POV/content fork": The claim is that this article is a fork of the various sub-articles, as there is no consistency. The article intends to serves two purposes, both as summary article that links these other sub-articles together and also to represent what RS discuss in regard to the common causes, which isn't addressed in the individual sub-articles. The Great Chinese Famine is often cited, so let's examine that:

1. Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes#Great_Leap_Forward_and_the_Great_Chinese_Famine is a single paragraph, with three sentences mentioning the Great Leap Forward as cause, two sentences about the death toll, and two sentences about Mao’s personal culpability.
2. Great Chinese Famine has a section on causes, giving most weight to Great_Chinese_Famine#Great_Leap_Forward, with smaller subsections Great_Chinese_Famine#More_policies_from_the_central_government and Great_Chinese_Famine#Power_relations_in_local_governments (which are all communist regime related anyway) and a fourth subsection Great_Chinese_Famine#Natural_disasters.

There isn't any egregious "unfixable POVFORK" issue here, adding phrase about other government causes and a sentence about natural disaster would fix it, there may be other fixes in the sub-article too. It’s not huge.

More to follow, --Nug (talk) 01:11, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Well, let's see.

  • We all can discriminate blue and black, and, since The Black Book of Communism in your post is blue, it already has its own article. What is a reason to have two articles on the same subject? Our policy allows only a very limited number of exceptions;
  • Similarly, Red Holocaust (2009 book) already has its own article. What is a reason to have another one? In addition, Rosefielde writes not about "Communist mass killings" as a separate topic, but mostly about three separate cases (Pol Pot, Stalin. Mao). We already have articles about each of those events, so this article provides no additional information, but contains a lot of synthesis.
  • Fein does not separate all mass killings in Communist states into one category. In addition, she does not include the most deadly events (famine) into the "Communust genocide" category. In other words, she is writing only about a small subset of events described in the article that we discuss. See Mass killing article for Fein's database of genopoliticides.
  • As I already explained, Valentino's core idea is that regime type is not a good predictor of mass killing's onset, so there is no significant linkage between mass killings and regime type. The full name of the chapter of his book is "Communist mass killings: The Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia" and it includes the analysis of just three cases. Valentino is not making generalizations that you ascribe to him. A note to the closing admin This information has already been explained to Nug previously, but he pretends he never heard it.
  • Instead of this search, which yields too many non-scholarly sources, you were supposed to do this search. The first reference is to the article by Dulic, which contains a severe criticism of Rummel's methodology.
  • What you forgot to do is this and that. It is easy to see that the search returns references mostly to Wikipedia mirrors or the article that cite Wikipedia. That means the current article has a great potential for citogenesis. Paul Siebert (talk) 01:06, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• I will let Paul Siebert address most of those points because I think they can explain it better our disagreement, but there is something about the Great Chinese Famine that may be relavant. You do not seem to have noticed that for the Great Chinese Famine MKuCR uses Valentino (not a Chinese specialist) and Dikötter (who has been criticized by many Chinese specialists), both of which can be used but are clearly minority/not the best source to use. Ó Gráda (famine specialist) is the best source so why he is not used? We are using Newsweek but not Ó Gráda. Perhaps because he does not describe the event as a mass killing, or MKuCR, and does not link it to communism generally; hence by adding him it would be OR/SYNTH; yet, by not adding him we are violating NPOV (which is not negotiable) of presenting minority and/or non-specialist views as majority. Surely, if it is a summary style as you claim, we should be relying on country experts and specialists, who are the best sources for this, and the majority views, which do not engage in ideological body-counting and/or making generalizations, and are more nuanced in keeping in mind the societal context. Davide King (talk) 01:54, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Our policy allows only a very limited number of exceptions This is not true: see WP:PAGEDECIDE, which gives us considerable leeway. JBchrch talk 21:18, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Those sources aren't WP:SIGCOV of this topic, "mass killings under communist regimes", they are SIGCOV of different topics. Levivich 01:15, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • There's quite the possibility that Nug has heard it, hasn't found your arguments convincing (I surely don't), and is continuing to make their arguments in good faith because they don't accept the characterizations of the sources that you're putting forward. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 02:48, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I just wanted to comment that this is a very bad argument. Finding sources that use the phrase "[adjective] genocide", or similar terms, is extremely easy. Besides "Communist genocide", there are also hundreds of Google Books results for "Capitalist genocide" [3], "Conservative genocide" [4], "Liberal genocide" [5], "Republican genocide" [6], "Democratic genocide" [7], "Right-wing genocide" [8], "Left-wing genocide" [9], or even (to use a different kind of adjective) "European genocide" [10]. But Wikipedia doesn't have a page called Mass killings in Europe for example, despite the fact that mass killings certainly HAVE happened in Europe and there are even books about them. Like this one for instance: "The Holocaust and Genocides in Europe" [11] (a book grouping together the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, mass killings in the Soviet Union, and the genocides in the former Yugoslavia). You can find scholars grouping together genocides and mass killings in all sorts of ways: by ideology, by continent, by cultural area, by religion, by historical period, and so on. The fact that a few have grouped Communist mass killings together is as relevant as the fact that others have grouped European mass killings together. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1007:B10A:57E1:9F22:2779:2686:A340 (talk) 23:41, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The first source you cite is a chapter of a book entitled 'Genocide: A Sociological Perspective', and as such rather illustrates my point regarding how mass killings are generally discussed in academia - mass killing as a general topic, rather than one partitioned by the ideology of the perpetrators. As for Valentino and Rummel, these are the same authors that have been repeatedly cited for many years in discussions over the disputed article, and the fact that they are being cited yet again surely illustrates just how isolated from mainstream historiography they have become. And as for what the article FAQ says, that isn't even remotely relevant to an AfD discussion, for far too many reasons to be worth explaining... AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:37, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Note to Admin: User:Levivich, who !voted to delete, appears to be blocking any attempts to improve the article[12]. It is entirely permissible for those who support keep to attempt to improve the article while it is under AfD. On the other hand, edits during an AfD by those who support deletion is disruptive as it can be construed as WP:GAME to make an article worse to facilitate deletion. --Nug (talk) 21:31, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Please don't disrupt this discussion with claims about other contributor's behaviour elsewhere. Raise it at ANI or whatever if you like, but not here. AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:41, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It is a valid concern that is correctly called out here on what is and is not permissible. --Nug (talk) 21:54, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If it is a 'valid concern', it would surely make more sense to raise it somewhere where an admin might see it in a timely fashion. Though before doing that, I'd recommend reading up on talk page procedure, and on who is or isn't permitted to edit articles being discussed at AfD. AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:09, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Reverting to a lead from two months ago, which has serious VERIFY issues (stating all events were mass killings as fact, etc.), and has been acknowledged as problematic at WP:DRNMKUCR, are by no means an 'improvement.' Plus, the AfD is about this stable version, and it makes no sense whatsoever to edit while the AfD is ongoing. Davide King (talk) 22:12, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The AfD isn't about any specific 'version'. It is about whether the topic (if there actually is one, outside of Wikipedia and a few marginal writers) should have an article at all. AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:15, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, but I wanted to point out that is the current version addressed in the AfD and we should not edit the article in the meantime, and is my view that you are correct and Nug did a wrong thing by doing that edit/revert, with the AfD ongoing. Davide King (talk) 22:20, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Nug: I'll give a full response after you finish a work with your addendum. Meanwhile, let me tell you that if you present such "sources" as Sperling's course as an argument, that just confirms my thesis that you no strong arguments and source to support your claim.

Thus, a brief look at the Clark University's website shows that Sperling is an expert in Putin's Russia, and she authored no publications on Communism, which raises a question bout her expertise in that topic. I doubt an abstract of a course is a reliable source for such an article as this one. To seriously propose this source as a core source in such a high traffic article means to discredit Wikipedia, and an indication of a desperate luck of good sources for that topic. And, I love see a plural "universities" in your post.

However, I am grateful to you for presenting so weak sources and arguments. That significantly facilitates by job.

I can analyze (and debunk) you other evidences too, but I give you a chance to re-work them and make more logical and well substantiated. I'll return in a couple of days and see what you presented. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:45, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

 Comment: Not 'voting' yet, see my rebuke of Nug's here. Davide King (talk) 22:04, 22 November 2021 (UTC) One of the reasons why such an article has been kept for so long (three no consensus, two keep) is perhaps because "per source" arguments are taken too much at face value, and in my link I will show they do not support MKuCR and/or misread, failing basic VERIFY, which is even worse than NPOV. [Edited to add] Davide King (talk) 22:25, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep. I must say that the current version of the article appears to be in a rather sorry state, but the topic easily passes WP:GNG. This version of the article from January 2021 appears to be significantly better with the exception of the lead being rather short. In any case, the coverage in other sources contained in that January 2021 version is much more than enough for notability of the topic. And, since GNG is based on substantial coverage in multiple independent reliable sources. I'll give three:
  • Stéphane Courtois; Nicolas Werth; Jean-Louis Panné; Andrzej Paczkowski; Karel Bartošek; Jean-Louis Margolin (1999). Mark Kramer (ed.). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674076087.
  • Valentino, Benjamin A. (2013). "Communist Mass Killings: The Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia". Final Solutions. Cornell University Press. pp. 91–151.
  • Fein, Helen (1993). "Soviet and Communist Genocides and "Democide"". "Genocide: A Sociological Perspective". Sage Publications. pp. 75–78. ISBN 0803988303.

Many more sources are listed above, in the article currently, and are available more generally. Per WP:SOURCETYPES, [w]hen available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources. I really am shocked at the lack of a WP:BEFORE on this; the topic clearly passes WP:GNG to the extent that a plenitude of high-quality academic works reference it. And, the fact that the article has been muddled up and its quality has been degraded over the past ten months or so isn't a valid deletion reason. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 23:33, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Please, see here for my analysis of sources as to how they do not, in fact, support the currently structure article. Take a look at possible topic's restructuring or rewrite, such as this one, or the possibility of turning this article into a broad and general analysis of mass killings in the 20th century, which is precisely what most genocide scholars do, rather than categorize it by political ideology, which is OR/SYNTH, and is not what sources do, other than Rummel. Davide King (talk) 23:58, 22 November 2021 (UTC) As noted by Levivich here, those sources are not WP:SIGCOV of MKuCR but of different topics. [Edited to add] Davide King (talk) 01:33, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

There are serious problems with your rationale.

First, Courtois views are already described in Black Book of Communism article. The policy requires us to have just one article on a given subject should.

Second. The chapter of the Valentino's book discuss not "Communist mass killings" as a separate category, but mass killings in Stalin's USSR, Pol Pol's Cambodia and Mao's China. The main conclusion of the author's analysis of mass killings (in general, not only of those three cases) is: regime type does not matter, the main reason of mass killing is leader's personality. In other words, the key author's point is that there is no intrinsically murderous regime types, and by eliminating certain leaders from power it is possible to convert a murderous regime into non-murderous without considerable changes in its political structure.

Third. I am familiar with some Fein's works, and never saw that she outlined Communist mass killings/democide as a separate category. Sometimes, she may group them together, but that does not imply much. I also saw many authors group all genocides in Asia (communist and non-communist), does it mean we have to have the article about that too? Paul Siebert (talk) 00:09, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Do you mean like Genocides in central Africa? I do think that if there's a broad set of scholars who are presenting a bunch of historical events together as a related group that our encyclopedia should reflect that group, and include relevant criticism of that grouping. Should we delete all articles because they involve grouping? The answer is yes if we're making the group ourselves, but we're simply not doing so here; the grouping of mass killings committed by communist regimes is indeed the subject of scholarly study and the subject of many lengthy works. If scholars debate the relationship between regime type and the propensity to commit mass killings, then that might well be worth including. However, we should not pretend that there aren't a substantial amount of scholars that group things this way. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 01:01, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am curious about Siebert's response, and I prefer you discuss this with him, but if I understand you correctly — Genocides in central Africa is not a good example to bring in support of MKuCR (if that is what you meant to prove), considering the same tags since 2018. By giving undue WEIGHT to those scholars who do the grouping, even though has been criticized by other scholars, and recognized by Robert McClenon at WP:DRNMKUCR, we are ... well, giving undue weight to those who the grouping (Courtois, Rummel) as if it was a scholarly consensus. I support a grouping under this topic, which would keep the article but rewrite it and changing the name, e.g. Communist state and mass killing, discussing the link, not the events, which can simply be linked when mentioned. Davide King (talk) 01:15, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Mikehawk10:, that is a reasonable argument. To decide if it is strong, we need to figure out the following: (i) check how many good sources discuss, e.g. genocides in Africa as a separate category, (ii) check how many sources discuss separate African genocides in a context of different events, (iii) check how many sources discuss each genocide separately, without references to the group (i) sources. If the group iii sources are majority, there is no reason for discussing genocides in Africa as a single group. Paul Siebert (talk) 01:26, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Also, the notion that WP:NPOVFACT somehow precludes The Black Book of Communism from being cited elsewhere on Wikipedia for use for facts is rather strange. That book's article isn't a splinter of an article regarding mass killings under communist regimes, but instead is an article on a notable book. We don't have to describe literally every point of the book in detail, but the argument that you're making in that respect would seem to indicate that books that have their own articles should be extremely sparingly used for facts elsewhere; I see no basis in policy for that sort of claim. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 01:06, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that work is not even about MKuCR. According to historian Andrzej Paczkowski [who gave a positive review], only Courtois made the comparison between Communism and Nazism, while the other sections of the book "are, in effect, narrowly focused monographs, which do not pretend to offer overarching explanations." Paczkowski wonders whether it can be applied "the same standard of judgment to, on the one hand, an ideology that was destructive at its core, that openly planned genocide, and that had an agenda of aggression against all neighboring (and not just neighboring) states, and, on the other hand, an ideology that seemed clearly the opposite, that was based on the secular desire of humanity to achieve equality and social justice, and that promised a great leap of forward into freedom", and states that while a good question, it is hardly new and inappropriate because The Black Book of Communism is not "about communism as an ideology or even about communism as a state-building phenomenon." (Paczkowski 2001) Davide King (talk) 01:20, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

WP:NPOVFACT does not preclude citing. The Black book article reproduces main points of Courtois' introduction. I see no problem to use that book as a source in Wikipedia, but it must be done in accordance with NPOV. Concretely, the very controversial nature of this source must be clear from the context. Currently, it is not. Paul Siebert (talk) 01:35, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And, please, keep in mind that your arguments refer to WP:V, whereas the main reasons for deletion is NPOV/NOR violations. I suspect the closing admin will ignore your vote. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:19, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect the closing admin will realize that my explicit references to WP:GNG are indeed references to WP:GNG, which requires non-trivial coverage in multiple independent RS. My point in bringing up the the RS guideline is perfectly in line with the GNG claim. What are you talking about, Paul Siebert, when you say the closing admin will ignore this argument? Are they supposed to ignore GNG-based arguments? — Mikehawk10 (talk) 00:55, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am talking about the following: if the article is nominated for deletion because it has severe NPOV/NOR problems, voting to "keep" because the topic is notable is neither productive nor correct.

With regard to general notability, take a look at this and that. Yes, some (most) events described in this article are quite notable. However, they already have their own WP articles. Therefore, the question is how notable is the narrative that links ALL those events together under a category "Communist mass killings" or variations thereof? The answer is: not at all. There are few books (most of them already have their own WP articles) and several newspaper/magazine articles. Besides that, various authors do comparative analysis of Stalinism and Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism, Cambodian and Rwandian genocides, and so on, but virtually nobody combines all mass mortality events (including war, famine and disease deaths) in all Communist states in a single category and provide universal explanations. Even worse, attempts to propose such a concept face severe criticism, which is really notable. The fact that the article says almost nothing about that is an additional proof of its non-neutrality. Paul Siebert (talk) 01:18, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

With due respect, my argument is that the narrative that links those events together under the category of communist mass killings is exactly what I think these sources say. You're wholly ignoring that claim; I'm saying that this is not WP:OR because there are indeed scholarly works that link them together and provide that historiography. In other words, the topic is notable owing to significant coverage from multiple reliable independent sources. It's not Wikipedia making the topic up in this article. Please read my argument before dismissing it all as me confusing core Wikipedia policies that I have the competence to understand the difference between. My response to the NOR arguments is to bring up sources that do exactly the sort of thing that this article sets out to do. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 01:24, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Your argument is mostly wrong. Actually, virtually no sources say that. They make partial claims, and the article combines them in such a way that an impression is created that its content is well sourced. Thus:

Valentino does not link Communism and mass killings; moreover, he concludes that majority of Communist regimes were not engaged in mass killings;

Fein does not include the most deadly events in the "mass killing" category, and she makes no strong link between Communism and mass killing;

Rosefielde focuses on three regimes only. He makes no generalization (and he is an expert in Russia mostly);

If you analyse other authors, you will come to similar conclusions: each of them discuss either a broader or more narrow category, but virtually none of them speaks about "Communist mass killings" as a separate topic. Paul Siebert (talk) 01:45, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The narrative is, in fact, the "victims of communism" narrative, which is another topic and is a NPOV version (although the name may appear to be POV, it is a COMMON NAME) of MKuCR (Ghodsee 2014, Neumayer 2017, Neumayer 2020, Dujisin 2021). Davide King (talk) 01:38, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Paul Siebert and Davide King: I guess we just read the literature differently. It seems like there's a real grouping that's relatively mainstream where the mass killings committed by Communist states is discussed together. There are chapters of recently published books dedicated to Communist atrocities during the cold war, which would be even more expansive than the current title of this article would have us include. And, it's not the true usefulness of a characterization that makes an article worthwhile, it's that a topic has drawn enough coverage as a topic (this is why we have articles like race and intelligence that have each repeatedly survived deletion efforts). Anyhow, I don't see any real way to read the literature except to say that this grouping is a real thing that's covered in great depth by multiple reliable independent academic sources. Unless there is some construction of the phrase "mass killings under Communist regimes" that doesn't say that the topic is "the group of mass killings that were committed by a communist regime"—which would be the natural reading of the descriptive title—I don't see any way to go with any option but keep. If there are specific content issues regarding scope, then we should recall deletion is not cleanup and it shouldn't be used to wage content disputes.— Mikehawk10 (talk) 02:42, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I obviously disagree but I think Siebert can explain this better than I could, and I try to move on from conflict to compromise. Can you at least even consider as a possibility a rewrite/restructing under this topic as summarized by Siebert? Because it is not as easy as 'Keep'–'Delete' — the article could be easily kept if such issues were addressed. As long as Mass killing, and other articles, and MKuCR contradict each other, such issues will not be solved, and MKuCR will remain a giant NPOV/OR/SYNTH mess in light of such contradictions. Davide King (talk) 02:50, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Mikehawk10: Yes, I am reading literature more attentively. Look, your source (Bellamy) says: " A conservative estimate would put the number of civilians deliberately killed by communist regimes after the Second World War between 6.7 million and 15.5 million, with the real figure probably much higher." Obviously, since no large scale mass killing (>50,000) took place in USSR during Cold war (and no mass killings after 1953), this figure includes Cambodian genocide, Chinese civil war (including Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries), Chinese Cultural revolution, Afghan war, and few other events. Obviously, Great Chinese famine is not included, otherwise the figure would be >50 million.

That is close to what I say: Bellamy says quite non-contraversial things, namely, that there were mass killings in Communist states. However, teh claim he is making is much less expansive then the claim made in the article that we are discussing.

If you looked at the last AfD, which was in 2010, you may notice that I raised several concerns and proposed a plan to fix those problems. I didn't vote for deletion 11 years ago. And what happened during those 11 years? The situation became worse. That is why I am coming to a conclusion that any attempts to fix problems face efficient opposition, and it is quite possible that deletion may be a solution. I haven't voted yet, but I am becoming more and more convinced that deletion may be the only possible solution. Paul Siebert (talk) 03:13, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Come on Paul, you have dominated the talk page discussion in the last 11 years, the state of the article is in large measure due to your guidance over the years. --Nug (talk) 04:18, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Those sources also aren't WP:SIGCOV of this topic, "mass killings under communist regimes", they are SIGCOV of different topics. "Keep" voters in this and prior AFDs are pointing to sources about other things and suggesting they are about "mass killings under communist regimes". I'm asking for page citations where someone uses the phrase "mass killings" and "communist regimes" and devotes significant coverage to the connection between the two. Things like, for example, Soviet+genocide or China+famine are not the same as mass killings+communist regimes. Levivich 01:23, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

As I will note, Bellamy actually does articulate that there are unique things about mass killings under communist regimes, in his paper published by published in Human Rights Quarterly shows. The text from the bottom paragraph on page 949 up until the sentence The end of the Cold War helped persuade the world’s remaining communist governments to shift away from the communist doctrine of selective extermination first developed and practiced by Stalin on page 952 is particularly illustrative of this. Bellamy sees the killings as a communist doctrine in states practicing real socialism, not as something that's accidentally occurred under communist regimes. In fact, this seems to be exactly the sort of claim that affirms that this sort of grouping is a topic that's discussed in academic literature. — Mhawk10 (talk) 07:37, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Are you arguing that sources that provide WP:SIGCOV of genocide committed by communist regimes as a group are not actually providing significant coverage of mass killings? I'm a bit confused here. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 01:36, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Mikehawk10: Sources that provide SIGCOV of a genocide committed by a government that called itself communist is not the same thing as sources providing SIGCOV of mass killings under communist regimes. Same with sources that provide SIGCOV of three such governments. The key words in the title, and thus the scope, are "mass killing" and "communist regime". A comparison of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot is not the same thing as "communist regime". Famine caused by poor policies is not the same as "mass killing". Etc. Levivich 03:29, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, they are not, two out of those sources are providing a coverage of a few Communist regimes out of dozens and dozens. The other, The Black Book of Communism, is not about MKuCR. Davide King (talk) 01:48, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep Again? We've been through this several times already. Well sourced, notable etc etc etc. Volunteer Marek 23:35, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  You are too experienced user to pretend you don't understand that. Conflating WP:V with WP:NPOV/NOR is unacceptable. And, by the way, the article managed to completely distort even the core source it is based upon (Valentino's "Final solutions"), so there are severe problems with WP:V too. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:22, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Youre right, I am an experienced editor and as such I know - and you should too - that WP:NPOV concerns even if justified (and they’re not, here) are NOT grounds for deletion. WP:NOTABILITY is. We’ve been through this sooooo many times by now that it’s exasperating that the same fallacious arguments that were made TWELVE YEARS AGO are still being repeated simply because some editors just WP:IJUSTDONTLIKEIT the topic of this article. Volunteer Marek 01:36, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete The problem with this article is that it's entirely indiscriminate, the holodomor, Tiananman square, the killing Fields, and 5,000 deaths in Cuba over twenty years are not all the same. Separately the death toll got East German is 80k-100k, unless you read the second paragraph where it could just be 40k. A symptom of this having become a giant coatrack. ActivelyDisinterested (talk) 23:45, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Wouldn't the solution to it being that the article be written in summary style and only lump in the mass killings referred to in reliable sources as part of the group? I don't think that improving the article's content as an alternative to deletion would be better if the topic itself is notable. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 23:48, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  That is one possibility that were discussing during the suspended DR. The problem is that some users claim that the article is already a summary style article, and no serious changes are necessary. Paul Siebert (talk) 23:54, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  I think it likely that a ladder will be removed, than meaningful improvements will be made to this article. ActivelyDisinterested (talk) 10:57, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

 Comment: I briefly looked through the previous AfD discussion, and, a comparison of the quality of arguments shows that the current discussion is very superficial. Maybe, it makes sense to summarize the arguments of the previous AfD and check how the situation has changed during last 10 years? If the situation improved, this AfD should be speedy closed. In contrast, if it has worsened, and the problems outlined 11 years ago became even more severe, we should seriously think about the deletion. If you agree, I can summarize this section and add the analysis of the article's current state. Keeping in mind that the closing admin acknowledged serious problems with the article (it its 2010 version), we cannot just say "The article survived three AfDs, so there is nothing here to discuss." That is not correct. If people do not mind, I can perform the analysis of the last AfD discussion and outline fresh facts, sources and changes that may serve as pro et contra for deletion. It may take several days. If somebody wants to join me, please, let me know.--Paul Siebert (talk) 23:53, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per WP:ATD-E as a content (POV) fork and coatrack article of discussed individual articles and events, and of Mass killing in general, and insuperable and unworkable issues, such as NPOV, mixed with OR/SYNTH, WEIGHT, and even VERIFY issues (e.g. contradiction with Mass killing and all individual events that are not described as mass killings by majority sources, excess mortality and mass death events conflated as mass killings, etc.). I have no prejudice in a full/future rewrite that is NPOV, in full respect of our policies and guidelines (NPOV is not negotiable), and a clearly agreed and defined topic, such as this one. Merely stating "per source(s)" does not mean anything, especially if you do not address our legitimate concerns, as set by precedent at Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence. To read my full rationale, see sandbox (less than 4,000 words).
  Davide King (talk) 00:19, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• [Edited] Davide King (talk) 15:22, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep per Nug, Mikehawk10 and Volunteer Marek. This article which, as of this writing, consists of 313,629 bytes, is as strongly sourced as any English Wikipedia article can possibly be. In comparison with the much-shorter related article, Crimes against humanity under communist regimes, which has 33 inline cites and a 9-entry bibliography, this article boasts 302 inline cites based on a bibliography of at least 280 individual titles, most of which are books, plus 25 additional titles under "Further reading". The amount of effort invested in producing such output was enormous and cannot be replaced with any other Wikipedia entry. It provides a treasure trove of research for those engaged in academic study of this subject and its deletion would constitute an irreplaceable loss of historical knowledge presented in one compressed outline. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 02:19, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Again, you are using references to WP:V to justify NOR/NPOV violations.

  And, please, take a time and read a discussion of usage of some of those 302 sources: many key sources have been blatantly misused or directly misinterpreted in this article. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:29, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  None of this address our arguments for why, despite this, the article is so problematic to warrant such a strong solution; WP:VERIFY is but one policy, WP:NPOV is another, and so on. It shows how problematic and grave the situation is that so many sources are misunderstood, including core sources like Valentino, who gave this article the name. The article is an example of WP:REFBOMBING, which gives a misleading picture, as if there is a whole scholarly literature about it, when situation is much different — Siebert and I have proposed time and time again a rewrite, rather than deletion, but the other side did not even attempt at coming close to us.

  "Not only does citation overkill impact the readability of an article, it can call the notability of the subject into question by editors. A well-meaning editor may attempt to make a subject which does not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines appear to be notable through quantity of sources. Ironically, this serves as a red flag to experienced editors that the article needs scrutiny and that each citation needs to be verified carefully to ensure that it was really used to contribute to the article." [empashis mine]

  Davide King (talk) 02:30, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Again, we have a user making an argument that the topic itself is covered by multiple independent reliable sources. The pointing to sourcing is clearly a WP:GNG arguments made in light of WP:N, which is the relevant policy if we're discussing deletion. Deletion is not cleanup and attempts to delete the article because one views the article to be non-neutral or contain material not core to the original topic are not warranted. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 02:45, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  I do not necessarily disagree that it is not notable, we disagree about the topic, and if we cannot agree on the topic and article's structure, how can we improve the article, reach a consensus, and solve such NPOV and related issues? The only notable topic, which can respect NPOV, is this one and the perfectly summarized structure. Davide King (talk) 02:53, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  @Roman Spinner:, take a look at this. I picked one subsection, and I found that, out of 8 or 9 sources cited in that text, just one barely supports the claims. Thus, the source for Goldhagen's views is the article that was published several years before that author started to publish his works. That means the source technically incapable to support the ostensibly "well sourced" claim. Other sources (e.g. Valentino) appeared to be directly misinterpreted. Some sources do not discuss the topic at all. It seems sources were picked randomly in attempts to create an impression of a "well written" article. I realize you couldn't know that when you were !voting. However, now you have been duly informed about that problem. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:49, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  How exactly is Valentino being misinterpreted? He defines a Topology of Mass Killing, listing six types: Communist, Ethnic, Territorial, Counterguerilla, Terrorist and Imperialist on page 70.

On page 71, he felt the need to explicitly note the role of Ideology in Dispossessive Mass Killings:

Several of the cases categorised in this book as dispossessive mass killings have been described as ideological mass killings/genocides by other authors. Indeed, few scholars who have studied genocide and mass killings have failed to comment on the central role that ideology has played in some of the twentieth century’s bloodiest mass killings. In particular, the ideology of the ruling elites played a central role in the mass killings of communist states such as the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia and of explicitly racist states such as Nazi Germany.

In describing Communist type mass killings, he further writes:

The most deadly mass killings in history have resulted from the effort to transform society according to communist ideology. Radical communist regimes have proven so exceptionally violent because the changes they have sought to bring about have resulted in the nearly complete material dispossession of vast numbers of people.

--Nug (talk) 02:53, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This is cherry picking from a a primary source. Reviews at Benjamin Valentino and Mass killing clearly disagree, and you have failed to gain consensus for your proposed changes, therefore yours remain allegations. Even if you were right, Valentino's Communist mass killing category is applied only to three out of dozens Communist regimes, therefore the scope of this article must be significantly reduced. Davide King (talk) 02:57, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

How is Valentino a primary source in that context? If that's his own analysis, then surely it would render it to be a secondary source for the topic as a whole. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 02:59, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Valentino is a secondary source. Primary sources are things like death certificates and census data. Valentino applies it to eight Communist regimes, including Bulgaria, East Germany, Romania, North Korea and North Vietnam. --Nug (talk) 03:06, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Obviously, you did not get my point. This is yet another problem of the article, namely than rather than use secondary/tertiary sources to summarize for us what those authors think and posit, we cite it with few exceptions (e.g. Rummel), to the authors themselves ("he sad, she said"), which has caused their views to not be fairly and properly represented, e.g. Valentino does not propose MKuCR but Communist mass killing, which is not the same thing. As showed by WP:PRIMARY and WP:SECONDARY, Valentino is a secondary source about the events and a tertiary source about estimates but a primary source in regards to his own views (e.g. causes) about the events, is this more clear? Davide King (talk) 03:09, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"Communism has a bloody record, but most regimes that have described themselves as communist or have been described as such by others have not engaged in mass killing. In addition to shedding light on why some communist states have been among the most violent regimes in history, therefore, I also seek to explain why other communist countries have avoided this level of violence." (Valentino 2013, p. 91.) The bolded parts are obviously missing and not reflected in either Nug's cherry picking and MKuCR. Davide King (talk) 03:14, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Much to the contrary, it actually provides a differential analysis of Communist regimes with respect to mass killings. This seems to support that he was indeed talking about the group of mass killings performed by Communist regimes as a real phenomenon that deserved an explanation. There seems to be an underlying assumption in arguments made by several delete !voters that this should be deleted if there isn't a causal relationship between Communism and mass killings. I don't think that's in line with our practice of keeping race and intelligence or vaccines and autism as articles. If the complaint is that the information on the difference between Communist regimes that engage in mass killings and those that don't is not in the article, WP:SOFIXIT would apply. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 03:26, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

A link is necessary because it is not sufficient that some events under Communist regimes were mass killings, there needs to be a clearer link than the regimes being nominally Communist. Are you aware that despite my 'Delete' vote, I have actually proposed a 'Keep' by rewriting MKuCR precisely on such articles, e.g. discussing the link between Communist states and mass killings, which would be the article's title? If the 'Keep' side agree with this, we may call it quits and work together. Davide King (talk) 03:32, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, I don't quite understand what you mean by we may call it quits and work together, inasmuch as I'm not involved in the content dispute that apparently is a chief force in the AfD. I don't think that the article should be limited to an analysis on the causality—it's important, but it's not the whole thing. The whole topic, in my view, is the group of killings that has been discussed in multiple reliable sources as communist mass killings. In my view, a summary style article would include the noteworthy mass killings discussed in reliable sources, as well as academic reactions to the grouping of them as a phenomenon. The genocide-related article I'm most familiar with is Uyghur genocide; for a very long time (from its inception as a class project until a few months ago), the classification section was relatively high up in the article. Truth be told, it was because my classmates and I were struggling in Fall 2019 with figuring out whether to call it an ethnocide or cultural genocide, or plain genocide, and we decided to list all the noteworthy opinions. My understanding is that that same basic thing is what WP:NPOV calls us to do here. A summary style article that describes the various abuses noted to be in the category of communist mass killings by multiple reliable sources, complete with a section discussing the various views that academics and other RS have about the category as a whole, seems to be a perfectly reasonable topic. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 03:46, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I meant that if we can agree for a rewrite/restructuring, deletion can be avoided. The problem of summary style is that MKuCR does not summarize the events in NPOV, e.g. not all views are provided (mainstream country experts who completely ignore genocide scholars are not used to summarize their views of the events). Siebert and I have have repeatedly proposed to keep the article, while restructuring it to add country specialists — but one user (AmateurEditor) dismissed relying on country specialists as SYNTH, and attempts at rewrite/restructing to incorporate this have been rejected by other side, even though it was a compromise on our part. Siebert can better explain you this, e.g. majority sources (country specialists) who do not describe many of those events as mass killings (again, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot fit, not all Communist regimes, so under Communist regimes is misleading, since it does not even discuss majority of them). Another issue is that most of those events are discussed individually, or separatively by majority scholarly sources, so why whould we give minority (genocide scholars) the controversial grouping WEIGHT? Keep in mind that AmateurEditor, strong 'Keep' defender acknowledged that such sources were a minority but qualified them as significant, and as long as they are attributed, they are fine. It still fails NPOV and WEIGHT for not providing majority sources (country specialists) the much greater WEIGHT they warrant. Davide King (talk) 04:03, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Again, a rewrite is probably needed if we're going to make the article better along the lines that I lay out above. But, that's totally aside from the question of whether or not this is a notable topic. Per WP:N, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article. Notability is presumed when

1. A topic passes its relevant notability guideline (WP:GNG or an WP:SNG); and
2. A topic is not excluded under the What Wikipedia is not policy.

Notability is not dependent on the current state of the article's sourcing, but instead dependent on the fact that the sources exist. And, if we're willing to entertain that the sources exist but are simply being misued in a manner that's generating issues with WP:NPOV, then that's separate; the topic of "mass killings under communist regimes" is not made non-notable owing to the present state of its article. While I'm totally on board modifying the manner in which the article describes the characterizations of the usefulness of the grouping, it would a mismatch to say that the current state of the article in some way has a bearing on whether or not this topic fails to deserve its own article or should be deleted. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 04:44, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

As if it is not clear enough, if some quotes from Valentino may appear that he supports ideology as a link with mass killing, it is made irrelevant by the fact academic reviews of his work say ideology and regime type is not as important, and Valentino's emphasis is on the leaders and their motives, which are not necessarily ideological. Davide King (talk) 03:18, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Nug, cherry-picking from a source is dangerous. You picked one quote, and DK picked another, both quotes from the same source. Do you sincerely believe we have no access to that source?

Let's rely on interpretations made by professionals.

"Disagreeing with Rummel’s finding that authoritarian and totalitarian government explains mass murder, Valentino (2004) argues that regime type does not matter; to Valentino the crucial thing is the motive for mass killing (Valentino, 2004: 70). He divides motive into the two categories of dispossessive mass killing (as in ethnic cleansing, colonial enlargement, or collectivization of agriculture) and coercive mass killing (as in counter-guerrilla, terrorist, and Axis imperialist conquests). A complication in his work is that one of Valentino’s three main categories of killing is ‘communist’ mass killing (Valentino, 2004: 70), so he brings in regime type, after all, and so ends up a bit closer to Rummel than one would have expected at the outset of the book." (Wayman&Tago)

"a bit closer" is not even "close". From your previous comments I conclude that you are perfectly familiar with that source. Paul Siebert (talk) 03:24, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't the statement that one of Valentino’s three main categories of killing is ‘communist’ mass killing proving Nug's point? Surely this is evidence that the categorization is actually undertaken by academics, even if they don't embrace ideology as the causal factor. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 03:28, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

But Valentino concludes that only Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes fit the Communist mass killing category, while Bulgaria and other case studies do not, yet the article's structure treats it as if the latter fit the category too. Davide King (talk) 03:38, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

First, we are talking about a different point: the MKuCR article claims Valentino believes that ideology plays a significant role. In reality, he does not.

Second, with regard to a separate category ("Communist mass killings"), yes, he grouped three regimes together, and that is natural, because they all were implementing deep social transformations. If I were writing that book, I would combine them together too, because they had more in common with each other than with, e.g. Guatemala or Afghanistan. However, the main Valentino's theoretical conclusion is that leader's personality is a key factor in mass killings, and the regimes, including Communist regimes that have no such leaders do not commit mass killings. And from that, he makes " an extremely useful conclusion: The best strategy for prevention is to remove those leaders likely to commit mass murder." (Gregory H. Stanton, Source: The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), Autumn, 2004, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 116-117).

Again, the author who claims that several Communist leaders were primary culprits and cause of mass killings in some Communist states is not a good source for generalizations made in this article. Paul Siebert (talk) 03:46, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) That is also just one review about Valentino's work, other academic reviews emphasize his lack of focus in regards to regime types, e.g. Ikenberry 2004 ("In this astute and provocative study, Valentino argues instead that leaders, not societies, are to blame. In most cases, he finds that powerful leaders use mass killing to advance their own interests or indulge their own hatreds, rather than to carry out the desires of their constituencies. This 'strategic' view emerges from a review of mass killing in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia; ethnic killing in Turkish Armenia, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda; and counter-guerrilla killing in Guatemala and Afghanistan.") Davide King (talk) 03:52, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And, yes, that type categorisation is made in several sources, but the question is how strong it is? How frequently and how extensively "communist mass killings" (I mean not just a subset thereof, but a whole set, starting from Cuba and ending with North Korea) are being discussed as some common phenomenon, and how frequently those events are grouped in different ways? What is more frequent: discussion of Cambodia in context of Communist mass killing or in a context of Asian genocides? And how many sources emphasize country-specific aspects? That is a question we should answer to start speaking seriously. Paul Siebert (talk) 03:53, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Valentino says available evidence suggests these other communist states fit the Communist mass killing category too, but there is insufficient documentation to make a definitive judgement. Wayman&Tago states that Harff's database shows mass killings occurred in a quarter of communist regimes, while Rummel's database shows that mass killings occur in three-quarters of communist regimes. Wayman&Tago then did a comparative analysis of the two databases and concluded that Rummel's database is entirely consistent with Harff's, with Harff being essentially a subset of Rummel's. The authors find that important regime effects either appear or disappear depending on the dataset used, with regime generally having a significant effect on onset of democide, but not having a significant effect on onset of geno-politicide. --Nug (talk) 04:04, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I will just say you have tried to push this at Mass killing (you were reverted and did not discuss it further) but have failed to gain consensus for this view so far. It is pointless to further discuss this, let's all leave some space for other users to express their views in regards to 'Keep', 'Delete', 'Whatever.' Davide King (talk) 04:32, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You still haven't satifiactorily explained how text properly attributed to its authors is "information presented as fact". --Nug (talk)

Mikehawk10, Nug, and Paul Siebert

Rather than engage in an endless dispute about sources, should we not perhaps take Valentino at WP:NORN/WP:RSN and ask whose 'reading' is 'correct'? I am pretty confident in Siebert to prove that we are right on this. The same can be done for other sources. If they are found not to be related to the topic or misread by MKuCR (e.g. Levivich's and others' point), they should not be used in support for 'Keep'; vice versa, I will stop using this argument for 'Deletion.' This seems to be the only solution to move forward.

Davide King (talk) 04:19, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, wouldn't that just be outsourcing this discussion to another board? I don't see how WP:RSN is going to be helpful in this case; I don't think anybody is questioning the reliability of the author or publisher. And, if the purpose of going to WP:NORN is more or less to evaluate a source with respect to its usefulness in a deletion discussion, I don't think that's really the purpose of the board. If it's the case that different editors are reading the same exact source differently as it pertains to the source's relevance to the topic's notability, then I don't see why the other boards would help in this case. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 04:22, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Then whoever is going to close this AfD must scrutinize sources, and each argument in regards, and not take them at face value. In addition, if you think this, it is pointless to further discuss this — I agree with AndyTheGrump's comment here, which the closer should seriously consider as an argument in favour of deletion — I hope the closer will be able to analyze sources and find what rational argument is more persuasive and better reflect what sources say. Davide King (talk) 04:28, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

WP:IAR thus delete is not a very... sound way to approach deletion. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 04:44, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Mikehawk10: Do you realize we were in the middle of WP:DR discussion when this AfD has been opened? Among other things, we were discussing the article's topic. It could be either "summary style" article about the events, or it could be a discussion of views that links Communism with mass killings. Currently, it is a weird hybrid of both: it pretends to be a summary style article, but it is written from the perspective of predominantly those sources that link Communism and mass killings. Even worse, it used the works of some country experts, but it is doing that is such a way that a totally false impression is created that those author share the views that some generic Communism was a primary cause of each of those events. It is not a good place to reproduce the whole dispute, just go to the DR page and read it. Paul Siebert (talk) 04:53, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am aware of that. I'm not really sure what the bearing is upon the notability of this topic; that seems to be separate from how to weight the sources in making the article. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 05:07, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

How can we discuss notability of the topic if we even don't know the notability of what we are discussing? If, e.g. The Great Purge or Cambodian genocide are notable topics, that doesn't mean the narrative linking these two is a notable topic per se. Paul Siebert (talk) 14:48, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete I must say that the current version of the article appears to be in a rather sorry state Well, if it's not going to get fixed after ten years then we might as well blow it up per WP:TNT, the current topic is unworkable as WP:SYNTH, as has been demonstrated by numerous talk page discussions. It is better that the article does not exist at all than it does in this state. Deleting an article because it has unfixable issues with synth and NPOV is a valid deletion rationale, see Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence_(2nd_nomination). Hemiauchenia (talk) 04:53, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • My pointing to it being in a better state was earlier this year... — Mikehawk10 (talk) 04:56, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Ironically the lede mentioned by the nominator[13] was actually inserted by one of the participants !voting for delete [14]. In fact the current state of the article is largely due to his efforts since August. —Nug (talk) 05:14, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • Of course, this lead, which makes no mention of controversy, criticism, does not address which those Communist states are, etc., is much better (sarcasm). If they think I did it on purpose to make the article worse, they are nuts and I take it as a personal attack — I have simply tried to better contextualize what sources say, e.g. Valentino, and finally have a bloody topic sentence and attempting a summary of the body. Davide King (talk) 05:34, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • @Nug: The lede was quoted as I found it, because I thought it a succinct way of demonstrating inherent problems with a licensed premise, however, wehn I checked the history to find any other attempt at a more conventional introduction I overlooked the diff you quoted. I would add that comparision that to my comments above, having omitted my own thought experiments as looking pointy and sarcastic, unless there is another example that introduces the page's topic that is supported by those expressing keep sentiments. ~ cygnis insignis 15:58, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • Pardon, the diff I was looking at was quoted by Davide, not Nug, but the request for any alternative to the first one or two sentences (with the title in bold?) would be welcome. ~ cygnis insignis 16:11, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
          • Looking at the recent history of the article - which used to be much better (if not perfect - no article ever is!) - it does seem like the process here has been “Step 1, make the article horrible by stuffing it full of bad writing and irrelevancies. Step 2, go running to AfD saying ‘look at how bad the article is!’ Yeah, like Mikehawk10 says above, just return it to its earlier state. Volunteer Marek 01:45, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
            • I doubt a process like that would be possible with this page's extensive history and attention. It would not have influenced me when considering the nomination and, as it now needs to be denied amidst the noise, I haven't edited the article. I am, however, still concerned by views that the current state is not considered representative of its possibilities. Is there a version that approximates a better state? ~ cygnis insignis 13:08, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, a notable topic with a myriad of reliable sources to show both context and notability. A previous version of the article was more refined, before large editorializations and undue weight -- mainly by the pro-deletion editors here -- imbalanced the content. Certainly some of the caveats and controversies need mention as many of them already were mentioned. One important point: The article isn't titled "Mass killings under communism". It's titled "Mass killings under communist regimes". The pro-deletion participants keep reiterating on this page that it is 'not fair to communism' to group all communist leaders together because they were not 'true communism'. Whether this the case, that is the function of the key word 'regimes', all of them are grouped by their official, formal and historically attested declaration of themselves as communist, they are referred to by their regimes specifically, and many of these regimes historically known to have performed mass acts of state violence, as recognized by historians on all sides of the political spectrum, as cited in this article and others. Rauisuchian (talk) 05:28, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This is clearly a strawman — none of us is resorting to such 'no true communism' nonsense. Check The Black Book of Communism for scholarly criticism of such "generic Communism" grouping (Mecklenburg & Wolfgang Wippermann 1998, Dallin 2000, David-Fox 2004), which has been acknowledged as controversial, and certainly not as straightforward as the 'Keep' side may claim, by DRN moderator Robert McClenon here. Davide King (talk) 05:40, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am seeing some book reviews that criticize The Black Book of Communism for overly focusing on the death count, but even this review would indicate that The Black Book of Communism does indeed talk about mass killings under Communist regimes as its main lens. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 06:02, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Is the death count really relevant beyond a section discussing estimates? Whether it is 100 million, 10 million or even 1 million, it's still a mass killing by Valentino's accepted criteria of 50,000 over 5 years. --Nug (talk) 06:08, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, when thet body count is used to push the view that communism killed 100 million people, which lacks context and nuance. Apart from Courtois and Rummel, genocide scholars and many other (if not majority) historians do not agree with this simplicitic view, and those like Valentino focus on leaders, not ideologies or regime type. Davide King (talk) 02:57, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This review is also saying that The Black Book of Communism revealed the unprecedented cruelty and scale of communist genocide and that, according to Aron, communism was responsible for numerous cases of mass genocide. Seems pretty clear to me that this book is actually talking about mass killings under Communist regimes as a group. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 06:14, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And, this review states that regardless of their noble claims and pretenses, communist regimes in Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, North Korea, postwar Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Africa, and Latin America engaged in systematic mass murder. The authors of this book argue that murder was inherent in communist attempts to mold society, as was their dehumanization of enemies and their refusal to accept the legitimacy of civil society-especially in war-torn nations bereft of democratic traditions and institutions. Once again, it seems awfully like The Black Book of Communism is indeed talking about mass killings under Communist regimes as if it were a group. I don't really see where the arguments are that this book would not contribute towards the notability of this topic. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 06:17, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I cannot access to the first one but one of them is a conservative magazine (The National Interest), and that does not change the fact majority of academic reviews I have read say it is more about Communism and criminality than Mass killing or MKuCR as put in this article, or even more about a Communist death toll, which includes many events that are not proper mass killings and famines, than anything. The Black Book of Communism is clearly valuable as is controversial (unlike notability,1 NPOV is not negotiable), and one of my arguments for deletion is that all NPOV, OR/SYNTH, and related issues, after well over a decade by now, simply cannot be solved, keeping the article as it is may act as citogenesis, and be more harmful than helpful (Conservapedia and Metapedia are appears to be the two other 'encyclopedias' to discuss MKuCR as we do2 — so citing a controversial work, including its controversial grouping, when scholars disagree, to imply it is a scholarly consensus (scholars disagree) is not helpful, is misleading (e.g. many of those sources used do not write within the context of Communist grouping but within that of individual states, and Jones 2011 separates Stalin and Mao from Pol Pot; have you checked Siebert about type sources (1)?

Notes

1. "This is not a guarantee that a topic will necessarily be handled as a separate, stand-alone page." — WP:N
Hence, Levivich's and other users' argument is still valid and sound, otherwise it would have been a snowclose; Siebert and I agree it is a notable topic but exactly what topic? Not MkCUR and its NPOV, OR/SYNTH issues, among others, but the view that Communism was the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century.

"In my opinion, the really notable topic is the discussion of the view that Communism was the greatest mass murderer in XX century. Who said that? Why? What was the main purpose for putting forward this idea? How this idea was accepted? Who supports that? Who criticise it and what the criticism consists in? How this idea is linked to recent trends in Holocaust obfuscation? And so on, and so forth. This would be a really notable topic, and that can save the article from deletion. However, that will require almost complete rewrite of the article." — Paul Siebert

2. I am not opposed to an article that focuses mainly on theory rather than discussing the events, which can simply be linked either when mentioned or through See also. Changing MKuCR to Communist state(s) and mass killing(s) would be a better way to put it. Davide King (talk) 10:41, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Davide King Not intended to be a strawman. The "not true communism" argument has also been made by, for example, historians criticizing historical communist regimes as part of a thesis of totalitarianism. Separately, even if the argument of "incomparable communisms" is made, which is one view and not common, the grouping of regime is still valid, in terms of a categorizational role. The point is if the historical regime called itself communist, had a Communist Party, and historians generally refer to it as that then it is of relevance. I would echo Cloud200's point here in the same thread. The extensive excerpts and notes section has been criticized as part of this discussion (the quotes are probably too long), but plainly illustrates the variety, notability, and non-dogmatic nature of grouping this topic given the diversity of the scholars cited. Yes, the caveats and controversies need mention, however that is not a full deletion reason, that is a revise parts of the article reason. Rauisuchian (talk) 07:40, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

See above comment. You say "however that is not a full deletion reason, that is a revise parts of the article reason", yet all attempts at compromise by us at such revision have been ignored — NPOV is not negotiable, and if we cannot have a NPOV article (it has been well over a decade, that is more than enough time), it should be deleted and we may start over. Siebert and I have identified a notable topic that, if properly written and structured, can be in full respect of NPOV and NO OR. Davide King (talk) 10:55, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

NPOV is not negotiable, but your perception of NPOV certainly is up for discussion, or are you infallible like the Pope?. I've not yet seen you conceed one single point during the course of the discussions, so you claim "yet all attempts at compromise by us" is not really true. --Nug (talk) 17:15, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That may be fair but I never claimed to be the Pope, and I admit the possibility of being wrong (can you say the same about yourself?); it goes both ways, and it equally applies to you, who is ignoring that moderator ruled there is a negative consensus that there are issues (I do not deny that you think there are issues, e.g. current lead), so I kindly ask you to not deny us. The article fails NPOV precisely because it presents only one perspective, that of authors who have discussed some mass killings under Communist regimes, which is different from MKuCR. Karlsson, a cource that you appear to support only when it suits you, says Courtois and Rummel are controversial, therefore MKuCR fails NPOV not because of some 'no true communism' nonsense but because that is the only perspective, that of a minority of genocide scholars and one-sided historical/historians views. Davide King (talk) 18:18, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This is really splitting hairs to the point that the argument uses utility if we're saying that authors that discuss mass killings under communist regimes is somehow different from MKuCR. Using an abbreviation as a pointer to some topic that is apparently different than the topic referred to by the descriptive title of this piece doesn't help to clarify things at all. — Mhawk10 (talk) 02:01, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Then can you please simply answer this — what is the main topic and its scope? (1) List of Communist mass killings (e.g. events — summary style), (2) Link between communism and mass killing (e.g. theory — events should simply be linked rather than use summary style), and/or (3) both? My understanding is that this article has attempted to do 3 for its whole life — the NPOV issue is that those disagreeing with such links, many of which are scholars who holds much more WEIGHT than popular press authors and/or not specialist, are basically not discussed at all, and is SYNTH because it provides only the perspective of such link being true and/or those who propose a Communist grouping for mass killings. Davide King (talk) 02:42, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - Excellent points by Levivich and AndyTheGrump. Better to cover individual events in appropriate context. TrangaBellam (talk) 06:50, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - The article is certainly not a POV-fork, because it discusses an unique topic of the link between communist ideology and mass-scale extermination of people in order to achieve the objectives of the ideology with examples and comprehensive academic and political discussion. Arguments that "other syrestems also killed people" are non sequitur and whataboutism for the purpose of this discussion. The link between Marxism-Leninism and violence is WP:NOTABLE and well documented in the article using numerous W:RS, beginning from the concepts of dictatorship of the proletariat, class war and "violent revolution". The rest of the article describes cases when the theory has been applied in practice, leading to extremination of thousands of people in the name of collectivization, "eradication of bourgeoisie as a class", central planning or simply suppressing resistance against communism. Some authors disagree with that link, and these views are also prominently displayed in the article, using other WP:RS, preserving WP:NPOV. Also, as explained in the DRN discussion, there is no single "majority" view on these topics as view from US or Western Europe are very different from views in Eastern Europe or Asia, even though they are all based on pretty the same sources and facts, but interepret them differently - but once again, this diversity of views is well represented in the article. Ultimately, if there's someone out there wondering if an ideology that obsessively pivots around "violent revolution" could possibly have any impact on human lives or not, this article provides a pretty objective, well-documented and quantified answer. Cloud200 (talk) 10:38, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  While comparisons with other systems may have been an argument on the talk page, it has not been cited here as the reason for 'Delete.' It would be helpful if the 'Keep' side at least understood our arguments and reasoning, as I do understand and can respect theirs, even if I disagree and feel that is not sufficient for writing a NPOV article, which is not negotiable. Davide King (talk) 10:44, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  You are countering every single Keep vote here with lengthy tirades, countering any arguments provided by the people voting to keep the article, and simply flooding the discussion in a Gish gallop style, which you have also done with Siebert for years in the article's talk page, in the DRN and in individual editors' talk page. Your name in this discussion already appears 33 times, but regardless on how much text you write, this won't make the victims of Marxism-Leninism mass killings magically go away, disappear or get forgotten. Cloud200 (talk) 10:54, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Not my fault you do not understand our reasoning. Your emotional appeals will not make NPOV, OR/SYNTH issues, recognized by the moderator at DRN, magically go away, either. As you can see here, Siebert and I have actually identified and proposed a clearly notable topic that may fix such issues and that the 'Keep' side has completely ignored, and clearly shows we are no hardliners. Davide King (talk) 11:04, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  I would note that Mikehawk10 told me the article is not about any link (in contrast to what Cloud200 cited above as reasons for 'Keep'), so how can the 'Keep' side be taken seriously when even they disagree about the main topic and its structure? That is not counting also our own disagreement. When it has been over a decade we disagree on what exactly the main topic is (mass killings vs. mass mortality), whether it is about a link or the events themselves, and/or both, can the 'Keep' side explains this? That would require a RfC about it, and if we cannot reach a consensus there, we are back to this here.

  P.S. I am not asking a RfC now, it is just an example, but may be necessary even if the article is kept. Davide King (talk) 11:15, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Personalising discussion is unhelpful at best, but suggesting that others are attempting to "… make the victims of Marxism-Leninism mass killings magically go away, disappear or get forgotten" is getting beyond silly. ~ cygnis insignis 11:28, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  You might have a different view on this if you spent two months responding to five page tirades in response to every single comment on improving the article, written by just two users, who continuously switch between "we're just proposing a neutral academic approach" and "Stalinism wasn't intrisically genocidal" hats[15], and rewrote ~10% of the article in that spirit. In any case, I have cast my vote and explained my reasoning. Cloud200 (talk) 12:50, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Perhaps, in fact I can think of when I have been both positions, but my approach here strongly implies a view that investing in the article was not a good use of editor's time and I recognise that will be offensive to those who acted differently. ~ cygnis insignis 15:06, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep - covers WP:GNG. Plenty of third party sources as well. I see also that the article has been through three AfDs before with a Keep result. BabbaQ (talk) 13:04, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Please excuse the blunt questions: What is meant by "covers GNG"? What third party sources are there and how do they have a bearing on this discussion? There are more than three AfDs noted in my proposal, if that is not a rationale in itself then what part is persuading a quite cursory vote of keep? ~ cygnis insignis 15:22, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  I think that the !voter is saying that there are multiple independent reliable sources that significantly cover the topic of mass killings under communist regimes. That seems to be the plain reading. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 15:52, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  No. The plain reading is that there are multiple sources that cover each subtopic separately from each other, and there are just few sources that cover this topic as whole. These sources are written from different perspective, and the whole article conveys this minor POV. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:07, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Crimes against humanity under communist regimes – Research review (Karlsson 2008) is the only tertiary source and general source that I can concede it covers WP:GNG — however, it prefers crimes against humanity over mass killings, genocides, or other terms (meaning MKuCR and Crimes against humanity under communist regimes should be merged), is mainly a comparative analysis of Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes (three very specific periods in three different regimes out of dozens and dozens of Communist regimes, which can be discussed individually elsewhere), says that killings were the result not of communism per se but were carried out as part of a policy of an unbalanced modernization process of rapid industrialization (Karlsson 2008, p. 8), and more importantly describes as controversial Courtois and Rummel, whom MKuCR heavily relies on. Davide King (talk) 16:29, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  "Crimes against humanity" is a superset of mass killings, in involves crimes like deportation and enslavement in addition to mass killings. The controversie around Courtois is related to his estimate, that isn't really relevant since whether it is 100 million, 10 million or even 1 million, it's still a mass killing by Valentino's accepted criteria of 50,000 over 5 years. --Nug (talk) 17:08, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Wrong. The controversy of Courtois is not only his numbers, but his concept as whole. Paul Siebert (talk) 18:23, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  See here, and you are completely wrong if you think the only issue with Courtois is estimates, just like with Rummel that is not the sole issue.

  At p. 54, Karlsson 2008 says:

  Bearing in mind the charged nature of the subject, it is polemically effective to make such comparisons, but it does not seem particularly fruitful, neither morally nor scientifically, to judge the regimes on the basis of their 'dangerousness' or to assess the relationship between communism and Nazism on the basis of what the international academic community calls their 'atrocities toll' or 'body count'. In that case, should the crimes of all communist regimes, in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and other countries where communism is or has been the dominant party, be compared to the Nazi regime's massacre of six million Jews? Should the Nazi death toll also include the tens of millions of people who the German Nazi armies and their supporting troops killed during the Second World War? Not even Courtois' analytical qualification, that ranking the two regimes the same is based on the idea that the 'weapon of hunger' was used systematically by both the Nazi regime and a number of communist regimes, makes this more reasonable, since this 'weapon' on the whole played a very limited role in the Nazi genocide in relation to other types of methods of mass destruction, and in relation to how it was used by communist regimes.

  Davide King (talk) 18:25, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Also, isn't the fact that the article has survived so many attempts to delete it actually evidence that it is notable? I am a bit confused as to the implication that treated lay surviving deletion attempts is evidence against notability, Cygnis insignis. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 15:52, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  The first three AfDs were all ruled as No consensus, and the last one acknowledged that issues remained and to work together to find a solution. Over ten years later and such a solution to fix issues has not been found. Davide King (talk) 16:14, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Making the proposal to delete does strongly imply that I took the view that previous AfDs were not evidence of notability. What is confusing about that? ~ cygnis insignis 16:52, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  We cannot seriously discuss notability, because there is even no agreement on what is the article's topic: is it a story of mass killings, or a discussion of their connection to Communism?

  Depending on concrete topic's definition, the topic may be quite notable, so if your AfD is based primarily on notability, it is a weak AfD. There are other reasons for deletion, and these reasons are quite serious. Notability is not the most serious reason. Paul Siebert (talk) 18:22, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak delete - while it is important to talk about mass killings and atrocities commited by people like Stalin or Pol Pot, we already have Crimes against humanity under communist regimes, and both seem to be attempting to create a synthesised correlation between socialist states and mass killings. A lot of these states had very different, even conflicting policies and ideologies, and even were in conflict with eachother. We could easily talk about mass killings in general in the 19th and 20th century that were happening at the same time and end up including several different countries (capitalist Indonesia, Bengal famine of 1943, Greek genocide, Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Jeju massacre, the Wola massacre etc. etc.) BeŻet (talk) 16:21, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Karlsson, Courtois, Valentino and Rummel all make that correlation, so WP:SYNTH is no longer an argument. Nug (talk)

Crimes against humanity under communist regimes covers a microscopic fraction of what Mass killings under communist regimes is covering and is generally much more poorly sourced. If anything, the former should be integrated with the latter, not the latter deleted. Also, the correlation is not synthesised - Marxism-Leninism contains numerous calls for "revolutionary violence" in order to physically get rid of "bourgeois class" which has been happily picked up by people like Lenin and Stalin (whose writings are thus WP:SECONDARY on Marx and Engles), and of course also later authors referenced in the article. Lenin and Stalin did not diverge from the course set by Marx, they directly followed it. Cloud200 (talk) 17:22, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Karlsson has showed that Courtois and Rummel are controversial, and Karlsson himself treats the topic as a single one, so it is OR/SYNTH to imply they are two separate topics. Again, that "Lenin and Stalin did not diverge from the course set by Marx, they directly followed it" is one of many interpretations of Communism — MKuCR provides only this, which is why it fails NPOV, not because of some 'no true communism' nonsense but because it fails this: "Neutrality requires that mainspace articles and pages fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources.[3] Giving due weight and avoiding giving undue weight means articles should not give minority views or aspects as much of or as detailed a description as more widely held views or widely supported aspects." — WP:NPOV Davide King (talk) 18:08, 23 November 2021 (UTC) [Edited to add] As all attempts to fix such NPOV issues have failed, and we have had over a decade to do it, deletion (with most of the content already covered in other articles, so nothing would actually be lost) seems to be one clear solution, unless the 'Keep' side either agree on a clear main topic (list of Communist mass killings, link of communism and mass killing, etc.) or is willing to support a rewrite or restructuring to address the issues. Davide King (talk) 19:07, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Nug: First, if some authors make a statement, and other sources are added to create an impression that they support that statement, it is still SYNTH. Second, Valentino sees no strong connections, and that was explained to you several times.

Cloud200, your interpretation is deeply ahistorical. The XIX century, when Marx and his supporters were calling for revolutionary violence, was a century of national revolutions, so that was a normal rhetoric. Many, if not majority of modern European nation-states (France, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Netherlands etc) formed as a result of revolutionary violence, and Marxists had no relation to that. Importantly, a significant part of Marx&Engels writings was devoted to national revolutionary violence, which, according to them, was pawing a way for proletarian revolution. Currently, those bourgeois revolutions (a.k.a. independence movements) are seek quite positively by most authors, so your attempts to present those writings as a theoretical foundation for mass killings look totally artificial. Paul Siebert (talk) 18:09, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"modern European nation-states ... formed as a result of revolutionary violence, and Marxists had no relation to that" - that's classic non sequitur. It's one thing to have short-term violence in order to remove occupational forces, which then quickly settles down, but completely different to have an ideology that postulates continued state-level violence (dictatorship of the proletariat, class war) in order to achieve an utopian goal of "eradication of bourgeoisie as a class", which due to its vague character can be dialectically continued forever, which is precisely what was happening in communist states. But you know that, we had this discussions for a month in the article's talk page, you just chose to ignore that. Cloud200 (talk) 09:23, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Arbitrary break

• Neutral From a policy and guideline standpoint this should be a "keep". But the compound criteria title has made and will make this article a hopeless and eternal mess. And what it is about? Allegations and studies of whther or not a country being under a communist regime tends to cause or enable mass killngs? I made this suggestion under which the article has hope, and that is my suggestion. . Or is it also coverage of mass killings that have occurred under communist regimes? In this case the scope is gigantic and a duplicaiton of other articles. Without the suggested focus being accomplished, a "delete" would relieve the editors here of their past and future misery. North8000 (talk) 19:13, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• This is a good comment because it concisely explains what we have been arguing this whole time about the topic, where notability is useless without respecting NPOV. The biggest problem and why I am arguing for such a drastic solution (deletion, even though most content is not going to be lost, due to being covered elsewhere) is that the article attempts to do both things (hence violates NPOV), which makes the "gigantic and a duplicaiton of other articles" (COAT/POV FORK/OR/SYNTH) from the second topic even worse. Davide King (talk) 19:23, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Thanks. As a clarification on one point, my comment was not based on NPOV grounds.North8000 (talk) 21:09, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep This is an extremely notable topic that has been covered by countless historians and sources. I am honestly baffled by the large amount of people advocating in favour of deletion. If we're going to delete this article, then we might as well do the same for this article too. X-Editor (talk) 19:30, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

In fact, that article should be deleted on the same OR/SYNTH grounds, which is something you completely ignored — notability is useless when there are serious issues of NPOV and OR/SYNTH. Anti-communist mass killing(s) is used to describe the Indonesian genocide, so it should simply redirect there. I would delete both on the same grounds, and support a rewrite of this article if we can actually agree on the topic's scope (per North8000). Davide King (talk) 19:40, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• You have already !voted for deletion, do you need to continually restate your case all over the page? --Nug (talk) 19:48, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes, if the 'Keep' votes continue to act as if there are no issues, which is contradicted by what moderator Robert McClenon said at WP:DRNMKUCR (1, 2), which the closure should keep in mind when weighting each side's argument. Davide King (talk) 19:53, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Editors are entitled to their opinion, there is no need to WP:BADGER those that disagree with you. --Nug (talk) 20:00, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• That's literally what you're doing Nug, quit being such a hypocritical jackass.Shadybabs (talk) 14:42, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Read WP:NPA. Maybe also remove that comment. — Czello 15:04, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes, and that is not my intention, but it would be good to provide core sources for the topic and sources in support of the argument, as has been done by other users (indeed, you did that and I thank you for it, why should not others do the same?), e.g. I cited sources criticizing the Communist grouping, which shows is controversial and not agreed among scholars — it is also equally true that countless of historians completely ignore the topic, e.g. Michael Ellman and Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote about excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, not MKuCR, and did not write about Communism in general; this is one issue of SYNTH because both of those two scholars, among others, are actually discussed but it gives the misleading impression they support the Communist grouping or that they are writing within the context of Communist mass killings in broad terms and grouping. Davide King (talk) 20:10, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Anti-communist mass killings are repressions against communists or leftists. The underlying intentions behind the killings are clear. On the other hand, mass killings under communist regimes talks about different situations that are not, despite some people's opinions, simply "in the name of communism". Some of them were class based, some on racial grounds, some on political grounds etc..BeŻet (talk) 21:30, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete After reading through all of the discussion that has sprung up on this page and reading some of the past AfDs, it seems to me that this topic could be notable. Unfortunately, the issues raised in previous AfDs (which were explicitly pointed to as needing to be addressed) are the same issues raised now, and it's not as if no attempt has been made to fix them in the intervening decade. This article is forever doomed to be a mess, and only serves as a synthetic coatrack duplicating content from elsewhere to create a maybe notable grouping, one that is very fraught as discussed ad nauseam above and in discussion previously. It either needs a complete rewrite, or to be permanently deleted with what little orginal content it has dispersed to the relevant pages. Either way, time to WP:BLOWITUP. BSMRD (talk) 19:36, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

WP:BLOWITUP is just an essay, valid policy reasons for deletion are found in WP:DEL-REASON. --Nug (talk) 19:42, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It is absolutely a valid reason to delete an article, see Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence_(2nd_nomination). Hemiauchenia (talk) 21:15, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

However, this AfD had interupted an ongoing DR dicussion (see the collapsed discussion about suspending AfD above). It kind of seems disrespectful to those editors who are prepared to put in the effort. --Nug (talk) 21:39, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If you are going to cite WP:DEL-REASON, please take note of what it actually says: "Reasons for deletion include, but are not limited to, the following..." As for 'respecting' people participating in the endless debates over this article, there doesn't seem to be a great deal of respect for the broader community involved in what appears to be attempts from several of them to claim some sort of authority over how this AfD should be run. AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:51, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Multiple editors involved in (and the moderator of) the DR have agreed to let the AfD take precedence, which could very well result in the whole article going up rendering the DR moot. To appeal to the DR is effectively WP:MERCY. BSMRD (talk) 23:13, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comments - I probably will not !vote on whether to delete, in order to remain as nearly neutral as I can in order to resume the DRN if the article is kept. I have some comments and will try to make each of them concise:
  • • Be concise. The back-and-forth discussion has become too long, difficult to read. Before posting a really long comment, please ask who is the intended audience, the other editor, the closer, the community, yourself?
      • • The other editor? How likely is that an overly long post will change the mind of another editor?
        • The closer? The closer will be assessing strength of arguments. Do you really think that an overly long argument is more persuasive than a short one?
        • The community? Do you really think that third-party and fourth-party editors are going to read lengthy posts? If they do, do you think that they will be persuaded rather than annoyed? If you have a lengthy, well-organized post that is relevant, write an essay and link to it.
        • Yourself?
    • There is a "negative consensus" that the article currently has major neutral point of view issues, and possibly verifiability and original research issues. Something needs to be done. I would suggest that each participant should ask whether they think that a consensus can be reached as to how to correct the article. If it is unlikely that the article can be made compliant with the second pillar of Wikipedia, then it should be deleted. If it can be improved, then it should be improved.
    • There are major inconsistencies between this article and other articles. As a result, this article isappears to be a content fork and a POV fork. Inconsistencies between articles are not allowed.
    • There have been at least three ideas for how to restructure the article:
      • • Cut it down to a disambiguation article.
        • Rework it into a summary style, breaking the listing of mass killings down by events, corresponding to the existing articles on each event.
        • Rework it into a discussion of what scholars and authors say about mass communist killings overall.
    • Be concise. It needs restating.

Robert McClenon (talk) 22:22, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Robert for your input and I hope we can resume the interrupted DR process. An !vote by you would compromise your position as moderator.

• The negative consensus is in regard to the current version, one half of the participants believed a previous version had no major NPOV issues.
• There there may well be some issues of consistency between MKuCR and some sub-articles. I noticed there was an issue with Mass killing, the inconsistency appears to be due to neutral point of view issues in Mass killing, however the DR process was interrupted before that could be explored further.
• I don’t think we have explored all the possible solutions. For example, a combination of fixing some of the sub-articles and reworking the article to be both summary style and a discussion of what scholars and authors say about mass communist killings overall. I don’t see it as needing to be a binary choice between summary style versus discussion of scholars.
• I totally agree that concise discussion of one issue at a time is the key to resolving this, overly long replies that continually bring up mulitple issues only derail any progress.

Thanks again Robert. —Nug (talk) 23:00, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Robert McClenon: Cool. (I'm asking you this because you are the main hope regarding this:) But could you clarify with "what scholars and authors say about mass communist killings overall"..did you mean 1. A possible relationship between the two. i.e. communist regimes (or something that goes along with them) might cause more prevalence of mass killings? or 2. That plus coverage of such killings themselves, not necessarily related to examining that possible correlation. (I presumend that #1 is inevitable with the title/topic) Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 22:44, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

User:North8000 - The proposal was to discuss in particular a relatively small group of sources that discuss "Communist mass killing" as a single concept. These are being referred to as Type 3 sources. The proposal was to discuss only these sources, and not those who discuss specific events, or genocide scholars who discuss and compare events in countries. Since this information is not in other articles, it does not need to duplicate other Wikipedia articles. (talk) 14:47, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Robert McClenon: If this is kept, I think that would be a good plan. Including saving the editors here from eternal misery. North8000 (talk) 18:51, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The question is not only if some scholars say that, but if those views are generally accepted. Currently, the article creates an impression those views are mainstream. However, even a brief search demonstrates that that is not the case. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:12, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Paul Siebert: I think that you misunderstand the point of my post, which is easy to do because it is rather structural / abstract. In essence I was saying that an article with its current title will inevitably be covering that question, and that, if an article suvives under the current title, that the actual open question is whether or not it should expand beyond that. North8000 (talk) 02:18, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Taking into account that this article is under 1RR, and any attempts to fix its problems face severe opposition, your abstract questions seem too abstract. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:34, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Robert, according to WP:DEL-REASON, if an article is a POV-fork, that is a reason for its deletion. That means, by saying "This article is a POV-fork" you de facto voted for its deletion. Are you sure your intention was not to vote? Paul Siebert (talk) 00:16, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

User:Paul Siebert - I am not de facto voting for deletion. I agree that a POV fork is a reason to delete, if it cannot be resolved. I also said that the article should either be deleted or improved, and that the decision on whether to delete should be based on whether the NPOV issues and other issues can be resolved. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:53, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Robert McClenon: To be fair, your assertion that "As a result, this article is a content fork and a POV fork." does comes across rather strongly, and I had the same impression as Paul of an implicit !vote. Given that the DR process could well resume, do you want to moderate that statement with a "may be a" rather than an "is"? --Nug (talk) 01:54, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Robert McClenon:, yes, usually the statement "the article is a POV-fork" is more an indication of a problem. However, there is a big differences between "Hey, I've just noticed that this article appears to be a POV-fork. Let's fix it!" and "This article is a POV-fork during last 11 years, and all attempts to fix that problem meet a serious opposition". In the first case, it is premature to speak about deletion, but in the second case it seems to be the only option. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:33, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Per @Robert McClenon:, I am seriously thinkig about restarting this RfC. The main reason is as follows. An owerwhelming majority of Keep posts cite just one criterion listed in WP:DEL-REASON. That is not a convinsing argument, and those votes may be easily rejected if the AfD results will be appealed. This, a user who voted "Keep", because the topic is notable totally overlooks other reasons for deletion. I see at least three reasons that are applicable to this case.

• A reason #5 (Content forks)
• A reason #8 (Articles whose subjects fail to meet the relevant notability guideline)
• A reason explained in WP:ATD-E (If an article on a notable topic severely fails the verifiability or neutral point of view policies, it may be reduced to a stub, or completely deleted).

Each of those three reasons may be a sufficient reason for deletion, but the AfD request does not articulate them clearly. Therefore, only those "Keep" votes should be taken into account that address all three reasons. So far, almost none of participants have done that, which means their arguments can hardly have serious weight. In connection to that, I support Robert's proposal, and I can propose a draft of a new AfD.--Paul Siebert (talk) 00:02, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• User:Paul Siebert - I have not heard of an AFD being restarted while it is running. If you present arguments for deletion that you think were not properly presented when the AFD was written, you can present them, which is what you are doing. If you think that your arguments have not been addressed by the Keep proponents, you can ask the closer to Relist, which does not mean that the closer will Relist it. I don't think that presenting more arguments is likely to change any Keeps to Deletes. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:53, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• In order:
  1. Per WP:POVFORK, POV forks generally arise when contributors disagree about the content of an article or other page. Instead of resolving that disagreement by consensus, another version of the article (or another article on the same subject) is created to be developed according to a particular point of view. Simply put, I don't see that in the current article; I could not possibly see an argument that a summary style article that serves as a nexus for a group of mass killings itself constitutes a point of view. If the argument is that the grouping does not make sense or is not notable, we can see that there is plenty of academic literature among social scientists in the relevant fields that would push back on such a claim. And, if this were an inappropriate content fork, then the appropriate response would be to upmerge the contents, not to delete the article.
  2. I think the WP:GNG arguments have been discussed to death already and the arguments show that they are sound. I see no reason to repeat these points here.
  3. Regarding WP:ATD-E, the article simply does not severely fail verifiability or NPOV to such an extent that it needs to be stubified or completely deleted. As I laid out above, a summary style article that:
     1. begins discussing the classifications of mass killings and the various academic takes on whether this is a useful grouping;
     2. contains jumping off points to those mass killings committed by communist regimes that are characterized in reliable secondary sources as mass killings (or some sub-group thereof like "genocide" or "democide"); and
     3. within each section provides due weight to the various ways that reliable sources describe the scope, intentionality, and cause of particular events labeled as mass killings.

  I don't think we're actualy that far from this; the biggest problem in terms of getting this resolved appears to have a now-revoked ArbCom editing restriction that more or less made it literally impossible to edit the page for about eight years as well as particular editors disagreeing over how to interpret particular sources. The now-revoked sanction is moot, while the lattermost thing is something that can simply be resolved by issuing a series of requests for comment should informal disussions and directed mediation fail to attain a clear consensus.

— Mikehawk10 (talk) 01:43, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Re 1. Please, provide an example of sources that consider Communism as a primary cause of all of those 85 million deaths. The sources I am aware of are limited with Courtois (Werth, a main contributor to the BB, publicly disagreed), Rummel (conditionally), and few others. I don't think that is "plenty". Please, provide a proof that those sources represent majority views.

Re 2. We need to discriminate notability of the events and notability of the narrative that links those events together. There is a couple of sources that make that connection, and each of them have their own article. That is not a reason for having one more article.

Re 3.1. various academics use different grouping, and this article cherry-picks just one grouping to support one POV.

3.2. ... and ignores the sources that do not describe them as such

3.3. "providing a due weight" would mean all those theorisings are moved to the bottom to the "attempted generalizations" section.

And, yes, we are very far from this, because during last 11 years the article became worse. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:08, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It's a straw man argument, in my opinion, to say that only sources that assign communism primary blame for X number of deaths are acceptable. All that are required for this to be a unique topic are for there to be multiple reliable sources that cover the topic in-depth and draw some distinction between communist mass killings and other sorts of mass killings. A brief list, taken from the prior deletion discussion this diff, is below:

1. "Communist regimes have been responsible for this century's most deadly episodes of mass killing. Estimates of the total number of people killed by communist regimes range as high as 110 million. In this chapter I focus primarily on mass killings in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia - history's most murderous communist states. Communist violence in these three states alone may account for between 21 million and 70 million deaths. Mass killings on a smaller scale also appear to have been carried out by communist regimes in North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and Africa." ..."Communism has a bloody record, but most regimes that have described themselves as communist or have been described as such by others have not engaged in mass killing. In addition to shedding light on why some communist states have been among the most violent regimes in history, therefore, I also seek to explain why other communist countries have avoided this level of violence." ..."I argue that radical communist regimes have proven such prodigious killers primarily because the social change they sought to bring about have resulted in the sudden and nearly complete material and political dispossession of millions of people. These regimes practiced social engineering of the highest order. It is the revolutionary desire to bring about the rapid and radical transformation of society that distinguishes radical communist regimes from all other forms of government, including less violent communist regimes and noncommunist, authoritarian governments."
   - Benjamin Valentino, Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, in a chapter called "Communist Mass Killings: The Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia" in his book "Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century", published by Cornell University Press.
2. "All accounts of 20th-century mass murder include the Communist regimes. Some call their deeds genocide, though I shall not. I discuss the three that caused the most terrible human losses: Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. These saw themselves as belonging to a single socialist family, and all referred to a Marxist tradition of development theory. They murderously cleansed in similar ways, though to different degrees. Later regimes consciously adapted their practices to the perceived successes and failures of earlier ones. The Khmer Rouge used China and the Soviet Union (and Vietnam and North Korea) as reference societies, while China used the Soviet Union. All addressed the same basic problem - how to apply a revolutionary vision of a future industrial society to a present agrarian one. These two dimensions, of time and agrarian backwardness, help account for many of the differences." ..."Ordinary party members were also ideologically driven, believing that in order to create a new socialist society, they must lead in socialist zeal. Killings were often popular, tha rank-and-file as keen to exceed killing quotas as production quotas. The pervasive role of the party inside the state also meant that authority structures were not fully institutionalized but factionalized, even chaotic, as revisionists studying the Soviet Union have argued. Both centralized control and mass party factionalism were involved in the killings." ..."This also made for Plans nurtured by these regimes that differed from those envisioned in my sixth thesis. Much of the Communist organization of killing was more orderly than that of the ethnonationalists. Communists were more statist. But only the Plans that killed the fewest people were fully intended and occurred at early stages of the process. There is no equivalent of the final solution, and the last desperate attempt to achieve goals by mass murder after all other Plans have failed. The greatest Communist death rates were not intended but resulted from gigantic policy mistakes worsened by factionalism, and also somewhat by callous or revengeful views of the victims. But - with the Khmer Rouge as a borderline case - no Communist regime contemplated genocide. This is the biggest difference between Communist and ethnic killers: Communists caused mass deaths mainly through disastrous policy mistakes; ethnonationalists killed more deliberately."
   - Michael Mann, UCLA sociologist, in a chapter called "Communist Cleansing: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot" from his book "The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing" published by Cambridge University Press.
3. "Dynamics of destruction/subjugation were also developed systematically by twentieth-century communist regimes, but against a very different domestic political background. The destruction of the very foundations of the former society (and consequently the men and women who embodied it) reveals the determination of the ruling elites to build a new one at all costs. The ideological conviction of leaders promoting such a political scheme is thus decisive. Nevertheless, it would be far too simplistic an interpretation to assume that the sole purpose of inflicting these various forms of violence on civilians could only aim at instilling a climate of terror in this 'new society'. In fact, they are part of a broader whole, i.e. the spectrum of social engineering techniques implememted in order to transform a society completely. There can be no doubt that it is this utopia of a classless society which drives that kind of revolutionary project. The plan for political and social reshaping will thus logically claim victims in all strata of society. And through this process, communist systems emerging in the twentieth century ended up destroying their own populations, not because they planned to annihilate them as such, but because they aimed to restructure the 'social body' from top to bottom, even if that meant purging it and recarving it to suit their new Promethean political imaginaire." ..."'Classicide', in counterpoint to genocide, has a certain appeal, but it doesn't convey the fact that communist regimes, beyond their intention of destroying 'classes' - a difficult notion to grasp in itself (what exactly is a 'kulak'?) - end up making political suspicion a rule of government: even within the Party (and perhaps even mainly within the Party). The notion of 'fratricide' is probably more appropriate in this regard. That of 'politicide', which Ted Gurr and Barbara Harff suggest, remains the most intelligent, although it implies by contrast that 'genocide' is not 'political', which is debatable. These authors in effect explain that the aim of politicide is to impose total political domination over a group or a government. Its victims are defined by their position in the social hierarchy or their political opposition to the regime or this dominant group. Such an approach applies well to the political violence of communist powers and more particularly to Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea. The French historian Henri Locard in fact emphasises this, identifying with Gurr and Harff's approach in his work on Cambodia. However, the term 'politicide' has little currency among some researchers because it has no legal validity in international law. That is one reason why Jean-Louis Margolin tends to recognise what happened in Cambodia as 'genocide' because, as he points out, to speak of 'politicide' amounts to considering Pol Pot's crimes as less grave than those of Hitler. Again, the weight of justice interferes in the debate about concepts that, once again, argue strongly in favour of using the word genocide. But those so concerned about the issue of legal sanctions should also take into account another legal concept that is just as powerful, and better established: that of crime against humanity. In fact, legal scholars such as Antoine Garapon and David Boyle believe that the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge is much more appropriately categorised under the heading of crime against humanity, even if genocidal tendencies can be identified, particularly against the Muslim minority. This accusation is just as serious as that of genocide (the latter moreover being sometimes considered as a subcategory of the former) and should thus be subject to equally severe sentences. I quite agree with these legal scholars, believing that the notion of 'crime against humanity' is generally better suited to the violence perpetrated by communist regimes, a viewpoint shared by Michael Mann."
   - Jacques Semelin, professor of political science and research director at CERI-CNRS in Paris and founder of the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, in his chapters "Destroying to Subjugate: Communist regimes: Reshaping the social body" and "Destroying to eradicate: Politicidal regimes?" in his translated book "Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide" published in english by Columbia University Press.
4. "The modern search for a perfect, utopian society, whether racially or ideologically pure is very similar to the much older striving for a religiously pure society free of all polluting elements, and these are, in turn, similar to that other modern utopian notion - class purity. Dread of political and economic pollution by the survival of antagonistic classes has been for the most extreme communist leaders what fear of racial pollution was for Hitler. There, also, material explanations fail to address the extent of the killings, gruesome tortures, fantastic trails, and attempts to wipe out whole categories of people that occurred in Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. The revolutionary thinkers who formed and led communist regimes were not just ordinary intellectuals. They had to be fanatics in the true sense of that word. They were so certain of their ideas that no evidence to the contrary could change their minds. Those who came to doubt the rightness of their ways were eliminated, or never achieved power. The element of religious certitude found in prophetic movements was as important as their Marxist science in sustaining the notion that their vision of socialism could be made to work. This justified the ruthless dehumanization of their enemies, who could be suppressed because they were 'objectively' and 'historically' wrong. Furthermore, if events did not work out as they were supposed to, then that was because class enemies, foreign spies and saboteurs, or worst of all, internal traitors were wrecking the plan. Under no circumstances could it be admitted that the vision itself might be unworkable, because that meant capitulation to the forces of reaction. The logic of the situation in times of crisis then demanded that these 'bad elements' (as they were called in Maoist China) be killed, deported, or relegated to a permanently inferior status. That is very close to saying that the community of God, or the racially pure volksgemeinschaft could only be guaranteed if the corrupting elements within it were eliminated (Courtois et al. 1999)."
   - Daniel Chirot, Professor of International Studies and Sociology at the University of Washington, and Clark R. McCauley, Professor of Psychology at Bryn Mawr College and Director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, in the chapter "Why Genocides? Are they different now than in the past?: The four main motives leading to mass political murder" in their book "Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder", published by Princeton University Press.

On another note, the article has become worse is an argument to make a reversion to a previous version of the article where things were better (I have pointed out one such version in my comments above), not to delete an article. I think Volunteer Marek summarizes the vapidity of this argument well in comments posted above. — Mhawk10 (talk) 03:09, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If the article is a "summary style" article about several events, then, yes, all sources about that events are acceptable. However, to transform the article into "summary style", we need totally rewrite it based on majority views. I proposed that 11 years ago, but since then the situation hasn't improved. Paul Siebert (talk) 03:22, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

How much of a total rewrite is required? The summary style portion can be structured as:

1. Classification of mass killings (something that describes the various terminology)
   1. Disputes in classifying mass killings (something that describes the disputes in how mass killings are classified, for example the Holodomor)
2. Relationship between communism and mass killings (various authors on whether there's any causal effect, with subtopics)
   1. Scope of mass killings committed by communist regimes (analyzing the number and types of people killed by communist regimes, with various authors giving different opionins)
3. Mass killings in the Soviet Union
4. Mass killings in the People's Republic of China
5. Mass killings in Cambodia
6. Mass killings under other communist regimes

This seems to be a feasible outline, and I see a path forward that involves a bunch of RfCs to determine how to weight content of the first two sections, but this seems like it would reasonably summarize the topic area. If the issue is the current content in some sections, then that is something that the request for comment process is made for; protracted WP:DR seems to be running into the same shortcomings of the WP:Mediation Cabal. — Mhawk10 (talk) 03:38, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

As a starting point, please, do the following.

1. Using a neutral search procedure (not google, use google scholar or similar search engine), find sources that describe such events as Stalinist repressions, Great Chinese famine, Cambodian genocide. Provide links to your search result (that will allow me to make sure your search procedure was neutral and unbiased)

2. Select top sources (10-15, with greatest number of citations), and read what they say. It is also helpful to read the sources that are cited in those articles, and the sources that cite the sources found by you. Google scholar allows you to do that.

3. Now repeat the same procedure, but add such phrases as "Communist genocide" and variation thereof to the keywords list.

4. Compare these results with your previous search results. Do you see a significant intersection?

5. Compare what the first type sources and second type sources say.

To save other people's time, I propose to continue on my talk page.

If you do all steps 1-5, that may save a lot of our time. Paul Siebert (talk) 04:00, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure what your point is, I could find many scholarly articles published in reputable academic journals that claim that dark energy isn't real, or that traditional chinese medicine is effective, though these views are not supported by the majority of scholars. Presenting a selection of sources that agree with a particular viewpoint does not demonstrate that this represents neutral point of view. Hemiauchenia (talk) 03:25, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Appeals to WP:MEDRS topics are red herrings; there's a whole different means of analysis in that realm. With respect to the analogy to "dark energy isn't real", I don't think there are any authors out there that seriously dispute that communist regimes committed mass killings... — Mhawk10 (talk) 03:38, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think anybody disputes that communist regimes committed mass killings. The question is, is an article like this linking various atrocities committed in various times in various places over the 20th century simply because the governments that committed them shared to some extent the same ideology useful? We already have articles for all of these atrocities individually. So the question is, what is this article for? Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Currently, the article is just massive WP:SYTNH of various sources documenting different atrocities and their relation to each state that commited them, but the sources generally do not compare the regimes to each other. The notability of the underlying topic is not demonstrated. That is, the link between communist ideology as a whole (not just that of individual states) and mass killings in the 20th century. Blowing it up is the only realistic option, it's time to cut the gordian knot. Hemiauchenia (talk) 04:13, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

MEDRS is not relevant. That is a universal procedure. Imagine you don't know anything about Cambodian genocide and Great Purge, and you want to know what is the mainstream view of causes of those events. If you do this, you get one subset of sources. If you do that, you get totally different sources. Now a question arises: which sources represent majority views? If we agree that "the sources that I like" is not the answer, then another approach is: "the sources with greater number of citations, published by reputable publishers and authored by renown experts" is a correct answer. Now try to do that exercise, and let's see what you obtain. Paul Siebert (talk) 04:07, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Rummel's book Death by Government is cited 1572 times. --Nug (talk) 04:18, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The summary on T&F reads: Rummel discusses genocide in China, Nazi Germany, Japan, Cambodia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Pakistan. He also writes about areas of suspected genocide: North Korea, Mexico, and feudal Russia. His results clearly and decisively show that democracies commit less democide than other regimes. The underlying principle is that the less freedom people have, the greater the violence; the more freedom, the less the violence. Thus, as Rummel says, "The problem is power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom." that seems like Rummel is making a link between authoritarian regimes and mass killings, not communist ones. Hemiauchenia (talk) 04:24, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The summary shows the source is about Authoritarian government and mass killing and/or Mass killings under authoritarian regimes — we already have Democide for that, but of course you 'Keep' side would not support such articles, even though you should because there are sources, wouldn't you? Neither article should exist. Davide King (talk) 04:39, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Rummel defined regime type: communist. --Nug (talk) 04:57, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That does not mean we should, too, or we may as well create an article about mass killings under aurthoritarian and totalitarian regimes, which includes Communist (merge). Tago & Wayman 2010 say: "Disagreeing with Rummel's finding that authoritarian and totalitarian government [which includes Communist, not separates it] explains mass murder, ... ." Davide King (talk) 05:04, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Why not? If there is relevant scholarship from genocide scholars that passes WP:GNG, wouldn't those be appropriate articles? — Mhawk10 (talk) 05:18, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

In such a case, I would favour a merge and prefer they to be discussed together in a general article, e.g. while Courtois may be considered to focus mainly on Communism (The Black Book of Communism), Rummel does not discuss Communism as a separate topic (Death by Government) — many sources about Communist mass killings are boks about genocide and mass killings either in general or during the 20th century (e.g. Mass killings in history that may not fit Genocides in history category). Davide King (talk) 05:40, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

WP:TERTIARY says: "Reliable tertiary sources can be helpful in providing broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources, and may be helpful in evaluating due weight, especially when primary or secondary sources contradict each other." "If we had such sources, then we could write a neutral article. But we don't." Davide King (talk) 03:31, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding if we had such sources... well I mean here's one one-hundered eleven page tertiary source on crimes against humanity under communist regimes that certainly deals with the largest mass killings, and here's a tertiary source that compares and contrasts the various authors on how they conceive "genocide" (note that the review does indeed group the mass killings under communist regimes as the "communist cases" throughout). That second tertiary source reviews sources that include many that have been mentioned in this AfD: the Mann source, the Valentino source, and the Sémelin source all appear therein. These sorts of tertiary sources sorts of sources are the sorts that can help with establishing what constitutes due weight in this context as well—it's a matter of editors actually using these sorts of sources to weigh different authors—which is exactly what a good discussion on how to weigh specific content would include. — Mhawk10 (talk) 04:34, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Do you realize that same source, written at the request of Sweden's conservative government with the objective of "elucidating and informing on communism's crimes against humanity", says Courtois and Rummel (who have been cited in support and are extensively relied in MKuCR article) are controversial or minority? See further comments about the source here. Davide King (talk) 04:44, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

On a separate note, there's also no requirement that WP:TERTIARY sources exist for an article to exist; Wikipedia isn't limited to what other encyclopedias and review articles of secondary sources have published (though the existence of other tertiary sources does certainly help with clarifying proper weighting). — Mhawk10 (talk) 04:34, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Then we are not going to solve WP:NPOV issues because tertiary sources would help us determine majority, minority, and fringe views (WP:WEIGHT). Davide King (talk) 04:47, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The Living History source notes that it was explicity created at the direction of the Swedish government who tasked Living History with elucidating and informing on communism’s crimes against humanity, that's hardly an impartial basis start writing a report. Hemiauchenia (talk) 04:43, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And? When you write a review of crimes against humanity under commmunist regimes, you're not going to try to document them not for the purposes of taking the book and putting it in a safe deposit box for the rest of eternity—you're writing it to document the historical facts and explain it to your reader. Klas-Göran Karlsson and Michael Schoenhals are both highly respected in their fields and it's not in line with WP:RS to argue against this work in that manner. — Mhawk10 (talk) 04:54, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. The 1st paragraph summarizes the whole article. None of the sources are supporting the contents of this summary. Therefore, the sources are not supporing the synthesis. Moreover, the rest of the article duplicates what's already covered elsewhere in a more neutral way. Dr.KBAHT talk) 00:04, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Dr.KBAHT, this is the previous version that some 'Keep' voters say has no NPOV, OR/SYNTH, and/or related issues. I think your comment applies to both versions (e.g. duplication), with the previous lead failing WP:LEAD (no topic sentence or summary of body, no mention of criticism and/or controversy, acts as though there is consensus among scholars, etc.) and even basic WP:VERIFY (all events as mass killings, compare the Global database of mass killings), whereas only Stalin's Mao's, and Pol Pot's fit the most accepted Mass killing definition. Davide King (talk) 00:16, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Davide King, the old version is purely OR because it consolidates multiple sources on "intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants" and claims that this concept has to do with communist regimes in the 20th century without any RS supporting this claim. Dr.KBAHT (talk) 00:41, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• No, Karlsson, Courtois, Valentino, and Rummel all make that correlation, so there are certainly RS to back that claim. Many of the !voting to delete dispute that, and there was an interrupted DR process to resolve that. The problem with Global database of mass killings is that it gives undue prominence to one database (even though the title is plural), and ignores another databases used by this tertiary source on this Genocides in the 20th Century website affiliated with Oxford University. Another problem with Mass killing definitions is that it also gives undue prominence to one definition comprising of genocide + politicide, while other definitions are given equal prominence also on the same tertiary source. So there are significant unacknowledged NPOV issues with the Mass killing article. --Nug (talk) 01:07, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  I already explained that Valentino does not make that connection. You perfectly know that, what is a reason to repeat false statements? If you want to include Courtois, the opinion of his critics (including Werth) must be presented too.

  With regard to two databases, I already explained that Rummel's data are obsolete (except for Cambodia, where they coincide with other estimates). In addition, Rummel was criticized by at least two scholars. However, I may be wrong, so, please, demonstrate (using some specialized search engine) that Rummel's database is being cited as frequently as Harff's.

  You are repeatedly ignoring my counterarguments and present the same arguments again and again. That is becoming a conduct issue. Be cautious, you are considered as duly warned about DS. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:25, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Paul, I have access to Valentino and you are telling not to trust what I read with my own eyes? As been pointed out to you previously (Wayman&Tago) writes: "Disagreeing with Rummel’s finding that authoritarian and totalitarian government explains mass murder, Valentino (2004) argues that regime type does not matter; to Valentino the crucial thing is the motive for mass killing (Valentino, 2004: 70). He divides motive into the two categories of dispossessive mass killing (as in ethnic cleansing, colonial enlargement, or collectivization of agriculture) and coercive mass killing (as in counter-guerrilla, terrorist, and Axis imperialist conquests). A complication in his work is that one of Valentino’s three main categories of killing is ‘communist’ mass killing (Valentino, 2004: 70), so he brings in regime type, after all, and so ends up a bit closer to Rummel than one would have expected at the outset of the book." So the regime type classification is still made. Harff's database is a subset of Rummel's database and used for different purposes, and usage isn't an indicator of reliability. Wayman & Tago essentially defend Rummel's dataset and his conclusion with respect to regime type. The Mass killing article cites the two criticisms but is silent on the support, hence it is POV. --Nug (talk) 03:37, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You just quoted the same text that I did a couple days ago. Read this quote again. It says:

1. Valentino concludes that the regime type does not matter. Importantly, he is a genocide scholar, so the main focus of his study is: how to prevent genocides/politicides? That is why the core point of his theory may be derived from his main practical conclusion. And his conclusion is: leader's personality is the main factor, so by eliminating few persons from power it is possible to prevent mass killings. That is his main conclusion, the core idea: regime type does not matter.

2. However, as Wayman&Tago note, Valentino partially modified his concept and admitted that mass killings in Communist states had something in common. Therefore, he admitted that, to some degree, regime type matters.

And now, please, answer my question: "What is the main conclusion Valentino made: that there is a significant linkage, or that the linkage is, by and large, not too significant? Paul Siebert (talk) 03:52, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

So you haven't eventually read The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism by Russell, have you? Because if you did, you would likely understand that the conclusion you're attributing to Valentino might be actually true on both these aspects - revolution executed by the recipe of Marxism-Leninism brings a very specific kind of leaders to the power, by means of natural selection. People who are, by Russell's first-hand observations in 1920's Russia, cruel, fanatical and merciless, almost religious in their willingness to commit mass-scale atrocities in order to achieve the utopian goal of the ideology. Which is precisely why he saw specific type of leaders and "something in common" among all these countries. Cloud200 (talk) 10:30, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Cloud200:, can you please explain me the following: how could Russel see something in common between the events that haven't happened yet? Correct me if I am wrong, but the text you are referring to was published in 1920.

With regard to the rest, don't you think you put a horse before the cart? In reality, most "Communist" regimes that committed mass atrocities came to power in the societies where huge social tensions already existed. Khmer Rouge came to power not in some idyllic and peaceful rural Cambodia, but in a country where a rural Khmer population was desperately poor, and their hatred towards a relatively wealthy urban population, which was mostly Vietnamese and Chinese, was extremely high. This, as well as extreme Khmer nationalism and revenge culture (historically specific to Khmer), converted teh society to the barrel of gasoline. Pol Pot's Maoism was such a spark the ignited that fire.

Now explain me what is in common between this event and Stalin's deliberate program of extermination of his political opponents (a significant fraction of whom were Communists)? Many authors, including David-Fox (whom we are currently discussing at the article's talk page) maintain that the "generic Communism" theory this article is pushing is flawed and ahistorical. Have you read the David-Fox's article? Paul Siebert (talk) 15:34, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not going to step into the same river again as I've explained that to you probably 20x already over the last 2 months, which has been duly ignored. I'm very well aware of your bias in ignoring Red terror and War communism as causes for "excess mortality", as you like to call it. Russell didn't - he saw mass-scale killing and state-induced famines first-hand as they were happening 1917-1920, and he linked them to the fanatical and utopian conviction that extermination of "reactionary" classes is just a logical step in a "natural" process of transition towards communism as determined "scientifically" by Marxism-Leninism. Moreover, he correctly predicted - already in 1920 - the escalation of violence in Soviet Russia, negative selection among the Bolshevik leaders and their attempts to "export the revolution" globally, all of which happened. Russell obviously couldn't have been writing about China or Cambodia, as you are trying reductio ad absurdum here, but he correctly predicted the general trend in Marxist movements worldwide. Which wasn't that difficult after all, if you actually have read Marx, Engels and Lenin even in 1917. Cloud200 (talk) 10:31, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It seems your problem is that you take all information from google and popular books or websites. I myself was surprised to see how different are the results if you search sources using google and google.scholar/jstor. Fortunately for me, my employer provides me with access to majority of top rank scholarly journals, and, in contrast to 99% of people who !vote here, I bothered to go to my library, take Rummel's book (which appeared to be surprisingly small) and read it in full. His sources for the USSR are awful and desperately outdated, and all his numbers for USSR have nothing in common with modern consensus figures. Guess why no scholars (except Dulich and Karlsson) criticized him? Because real experts in Soviet history almost completely ignore him. That is easy to check: just try to find how frequently his figures and his theories are cited by such experts Soviet history.

To this end, do the following: open the text of the Black Book of Communism (sic!) and read Werth. Unfortunately, this document is a scan, so I cannot use search tools, but a brief look at the list of references demonstrates that Werth cites almost all good authors I myself am using for editing Russia related Wikipedia articles. Therefore, we may consider those authors as main experts in history of Soviet Russia. However, I couldn't find Rummel among them. How do you explain that fact? How do you explain the fact that "democide" concept is never mentioned?

Cross-references are a very important tool, because the authors that belong to the same or closely related school of thought are interconnected by a dense network of cross-citations. The lack of references to Rummel is an indication that he represents a scholl of thought that is totally isolated from the community of experts in Soviet history. That raises a very serious question about relative weight of these two POVs.

One more note. These authors frequently cite the name of Courtois. However, usually, this name appears because they cite Werth (and Courtois is mentioned because he was an editor). Werth's opoinion on Communism and mass killings is totally different: in his introduction, he explained that tensions were growing in Russia long before Communist came to power, and Bolsheviks resorted to violence only after they realised that they plans face a severe opposition. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:00, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep - while I'm glad this has finally been taken to AfD - I've long argued it should be. However, I would have rather let the DRN play out, as there are some good restructuring poposals that have been brought up. Nevertheless, the fact remains that this is a remarkably notable topic. The number and breadth of sources is remarkable by our standards. That alone is enough to get it over our hump. In my view, previous versions of this article are far superior to the one that exists now. I also agree that the lead as it is currently constructed, has major problems regarding matching the article. However, this does not change the fact this is a real topic and a notable topic. Participants on the talk page know my views in some detail. I will not be drawn into a debate with them, nor will I respond to anyone's wall of text. schetm (talk) 02:14, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  @Schetm: I understand that you are busy in RL, but the last time when you wrote that the article is well sourced, I decided to check this your assertion and made analysis of sources in the "Ideology" subsection. The results were awful: the sources barely support 10% of all claims. Please, read that. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:38, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep - the article clearly describes numerous incidents of importance, and Genocide of indigenous peoples is also an article specifically, in addition to numerous other specific genocide articles listed in Genocides in history. This article makes sense to exist as well. Bill Williams 03:14, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:37, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:37, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Cambodia-related deletion discussions. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:37, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of China-related deletion discussions. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:37, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Russia-related deletion discussions. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:37, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been advertised at WP:NPOVN and WP:FTN. Levivich 03:10, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep this page was full-protected from November 2011 to May 2018, and has seen massive activity since then. To delete it would need a compelling argument, and I don't see one. Nug demonstrates there is substantial coverage, and the rebuttal (that the books on the topic already have articles so this article is unnecessary) is laughable. POVFORK is mentioned, but I'm not sure what article it is duplicating. And the solution to content disputes (and the requests for TNT deletion are largely claims "other editors" are preventing improvements) may be another 7 years of full-protection. User:力 (powera, π, ν) 06:26, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Another fact I was unaware of, editing the page was sysop only for that period. ~ cygnis insignis 12:33, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete car crash of an article, car crash of an AfD. Sigh. The conflation of death with killing, the unending cherry-picking of sources, the complete misconstruing of the consensus among independent (ie non-state-sponsored) professional political scientists, historical sociologists and historians. An article that is a perfect definition of SYNTH and COATRACK. Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 08:51, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • "conflation of death with killing" - this is not a problem here, as RS's attribute deaths to specific policies of communist regimes. It's not our job to judge that. Wookian (talk) 14:02, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep: Rather significant historical events. There seems to be plenty of available sources to write a decent article. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 09:31, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep This is not merely notable, this is one of the most notable topics in history per RS's. It would be obscene to delete this for political reasons, although that would be gratifying to some powerful political interests (e.g. China) that want to see Wikipedia censored to protect their national pride or whatever other reason external entities want to see Wikipedia censored. Wookian (talk) 14:02, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Still waiting for a keep !voter to identify one source that provides SIGCOV of "mass killings" and "communist regimes" (with page numbers please). Everybody says there's lots of sources, but none seem to use those words... Levivich 14:21, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Seriously? People who continually claim that WP:SIGCOV doesn't exist despite it being shown to them a gazillion times now, ought to be topic banned for being disruptive. --Nug (talk) 15:55, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete or significant rewrite: While there is a lot of well sourced information in the article on mass killings that occurred under various comunist regimes, the majority of experts cited do not link these deaths together and ascribe them to communist ideology specifically. (like the 1932-33 famine in the USSR and the mass starvation in Cambodia have anything in common, given the former has been attributed to colossal mistakes by a regime industrializing ruthlessly and at breakneck speed, whereas the latter was the exact opposite: a bizarre regime - hardly “communist” but an abomination created by the Cold War by my estimation - that emptied cities at gunpoint to completely restart its civilization. But yeah they are both simply “communist famines”. LOL!) The sources that do are some of the weakest and are often non-experts on these regimes, including fringe libertarians like Rummel (who should have been laughed out of academia when he asserted in his 1990 work Lethal Politics that the USSR was responsible for 62 million "democides"), rabid anti-comminist ideologues like Courtois (who was denounced by the strongest authors of the same work for his outrageous introduction, which is what is used here to link these killings together, not so much the other chapters of the BBoC), and Valentino who is a non-expert on any of these regimes, and to my knowledge not a Sovietologist or a Sinologist or anything of the sort, yet his work is cited throughout this article as if he is the most prominent expert on these issues. Some of his numbers seem to be pulled out of thin air, like in the Other regimes section. To my knowledge he does not elaborate in his 2004 book how he reached these numbers.

The other issue is that a huge number of deaths attributed to communism here come from events that are not mass killings at all according to many experts on these regimes, such as famines in particular (see S.G. Wheatcroft, J. Arch Getty, Mark Tauger, etc.). Getty in particular notes in the text that famine deaths make up roughly half of the deaths under communism. This makes this article very different (and flawed) when it is compared to the article Anti-communist mass killings, as the events listed there are all deliberate killings, and there is no doubt that the killings were motivated at least in part by anti-communism, as several sources there make clear.--C.J. Griffin (talk) 14:38, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep Per WP:AFDNOTCLEANUP. The subject is highly notable thus deletion would make no sense. desmay (talk) 14:50, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep: The topic is obviously notable, and being in need of improvements is not a reason to delete.  Mailman9  (talk)  15:02, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep This article is extremely important and removing it from the Wikipedia is the worst possible outcome. Both sides of political spectrum have strong feelings about this topic and removing the article won't solve any problems - just make them worse. If you think that the article is badly written then you should absolutely try to improve it. Maybe add a box saying that this is controversial issue. But removing it has too strong connotation with censorship and will solidify notion that Wikipedia is biased towards far-left. Removing things we don't like is not the solution. Gumaaaa (talk) 15:04, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• We have repeatedly tried to do that and fix such issues (NPOV/OR/SYNTH/WEIGHT) and controversies (for over a decade now) but no progress has been made since the last AfD. Reducing our legitimate arguments and concerns, which have been unaddressed and hence deletion/full rewrite seems to be the only solution, to "I don't like it" is absurd. Davide King (talk) 15:10, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• That is simply untrue. The article was stable until you started massive changes on August 5th and these contentious edits have continued relentlessly in the last three month, accounting for almost 80% of all edits during that short period. It is your edits that precipitated this current round of disputation. —Nug (talk) 15:43, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• You and everyone else were free to revert my edits at that time, and then discuss them individually, but you did not. Acting as though before my edits the article was perfectly fine, which I can accept as your personal view but not as a fact, as discussions on the talk page demonstred, is disingenuous to say the least. Davide King (talk) 15:58, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• People have attempted to revert your edits, including contentious edits ([16],[17]), inpropriate tagging ([18],[19],[20]) and apparent gaming of the article's 1RR [21], but you ploughed on regardless of there being no talk page consensus. —Nug (talk) 16:14, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• The latest version with this lead did not include the primary tags (it included NPOV/SYNTH tags, as we were discussing them, so I thought that it was fair), and while you may think it was the same as this, it is not exactly the same (we have disagreement and understanding about the topic and its scope), and this version attempted to summarize the body (e.g. mentioning Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes extensively discussed in the body).
• Both versions included some mention of criticism and controversy, which your preferred version did not mention and/or discuss at all (contrary to WP:LEAD). The moderator at WP:DRNMKUCR showed no consensus on whether to revert in toto (if they said it should have been reverted, I would have respected it), and some of my edits have since been reverted while the AfD was, and still is, ongoing — I did not revert back before the page was protected. Davide King (talk) 16:41, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep per Nug, Mikehawk10 and Volunteer Marek. This topic's notability has been decided on 4 times already. Some folks seem to have an ideological aversion to the topic. but it is still a notable topic. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:46, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep (Redacted) 50.89.97.148 (talk) 15:45, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep More than enough proof of sources and importance listed above. No need to reiterate. Wikipedia is not made better by the deletion of this article. Also, 4th nomination? There needs to be some sort of limit to the number of attempts to try and remove something someone doesn't like. -- Me^Holla! 16:19, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep The initial argument here for deletion is that the article violates WP:SYNTH and at the time of proposal the title was explicated from the content. A follow-on argument is that the article additionally violates WP:NPOV. However, wikipedia as a whole is full of articles of this nature. Consider Genocides in history, Donald Trump sexual misconduct allegations, or Public image of George W. Bush. All of these articles lack the title in the initial paragaph, all of them explicate their subject, all of them are inherently contain collections of incidents that wikipedia editors are choosing as connected. The issue here is the existence of these sorts of articles as a whole. As much as some fellow editors would choose to dismiss the works of Valentino and Rummel, those works (and others) exist and document at least one scholarly line of thought which has drawn a direct correlation between communism and democide. Therefore, the topic of "Mass killings under Communist regimes" exists and is debated in academia. The bigger issue to me is this type of article as a whole. I believe we are not served by editors attempting to shine a light one-by-one on articles they disfavor, instead a committee should consider the larger question of how to handle all articles of this type and deal one way or another with the class as a whole. - Hoplon (talk) 16:27, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Follow-on to my above comment. I also agree with those who point out this has been proposed multiple times in the past. Opponents to the article should not keep getting "another kick at the cat". Wikipedia treats passed votes for deletion as overwhelmingly hard to reverse, passed votes against deletion should be accorded the same respect. - Hoplon (talk) 16:30, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong keep This was a traditional topic of historical literature, and a subject in academia. It boggles the mind that it is up for debate, let alone deletion. Dahn (talk) 16:28, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep The article is well sourced and has survived 3 previous nominations, if it was determined to be fine the last 3 times, then we should leave it at that Xander11012 (talk) 16:37, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep This was one heck of a read, but I haven't seen an argument here any more substantive than the three previous attempts to delete. This isn't synth any more than any single page on wiki is synth. Is the amalgamation of various RS. Obviously notable topics and no material objections to the sources. The thrust of the delete feels a bit more akin to "I don't like the two topics being connected" or a no true Scotsman fallacy. But those are the connections the sources make, not us. Squatch347 (talk) 16:43, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep This information should not be memory-holed. If something is incorrect, change it, but history should not be hidden or deleted for ideological reasons. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Volatile.memory (talk • contribs) 16:50, 24 November 2021 (UTC) — Volatile.memory (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]
• Keep - Loads of scholarly research on this specific topic cited in the article, clearly indicating it is not synthesis, regardless of issues that may exist with the lead. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 16:58, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete The topic does not exist in reliable sources. There are of course studies of individual cases: Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China and Pol Pot's Kampuchea, which are sometimes grouped in genocide studies. But there is no literature that connections Communism and mass killings. For the same reaaon, we don't have an article about mass killings under capitalist regimes, where the Holocaust and American genocide of aboriginal people are connected as a result of having capitalist systems in both countries. TFD (talk) 17:01, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep - The allegation that deletion is warranted I notice only comes from persons who are interested in socialist topics. I question whether their motive is as pure as they frame it. Even if it is, the notable bias and prejudice they have subconsciously should be taken into account. Moving to my point of why this is a strong keep, the article is sourced by several notable papers and articles that focus on the atrocities committed throughout history. E.g., Barbra Harff; Daniel Goldhagen. A criticism I hear is that they don't call it "communist mass killings," But if you were to read the literature, rather than the title, then you would see that they specifically note communist regimes when they discuss those regimes' atrocities. Additionally, this article has more if not the same amount of sources as the "anti-communist" mass killings. Furthermore, the allegation that there is no literature here is empirically untrue, and to deny is to cover one's ears. You have made your appeal, but don't base it on illogical foundations. Arguing as the user above me is fruitless, there is no article about mass killings from capitalist regimes because that hotly-debated literature is specifically placed in the Anti-communist mass killings article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ChronosTruth (talk • contribs) 17:40, 24 November 2021 (UTC) — ChronosTruth (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]
• Strong Keep Enough is enough, really, this article is 12 years old, about extremely important topic, especially now when we can observe rebirth of communist ideology worldwide, and was already RfD'd three times. Not to mention the work of many contributors that should be respected. Not only it should be kept, also the further RfDs shouldn't be proceeded as this is ridiculous. Platyna (talk) 17:11, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep per Dahn, Platyna, Mikehawk10, Volunteer Marek, and many others. And yes, I do think there are some bad-faith WP:IDONTLIKEIT arguments going on here. — Czello 17:14, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per too many people that I'm too lazy to type out on a keyboard that doesn't work half the time. Wilh3lm^{Go here to trout me if I do a stupid} 17:19, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep per Mikehawk10 and others. PS. Number of mass killings under those regimes is extremely high. Officers from my own country were murdered in Katyn by the NKVF. Qba0202 (talk) 17:22, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep This is a topic of the utmost importance to have available on a free, universal encyclopedia, especially in times like these, especially when it passes both WP:V and WP:GNG; censorship isn't a solution. Since this is the fourth time some apparently heavily indoctrinated subjects desperately want to get rid of this specific page, it should be stopped from getting nominated for deletion, to save everyone's time in the future OmegaPog_(smalltalk) 18:52, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• (edit conflict) Keep per Volunteer Marek and others. The complaints in the nom do not appear to be so troubling as to require deletion rather than cleanup. WP:TIND and WP:AFDISNOTCLEANUP. A glance at the recent talk page activity suggests that this is an escalation of a long-term dispute rather than a typical AfD situation, which further illustrates why this AfD is a poor move. NPOV issues are important, but for deletion to be appropriate under these circumstances, the parties calling for its deletion need to demonstrate that there is no possible article on this subject which could satisfy NPOV. I see no convincing case that this standard is met. 69.174.144.79 (talk) 17:57, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep: Seems to easily pass WP:V and WP:GNG, if the article needs work, and I agree that it does, that work needs to be put in. AFD isn't for removing articles you think are bad, it is for removing articles that don't meet inclusion criteria. SamStrongTalks (talk) 17:57, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep This article is more important and relevant now than it has ever been since 1991. Communism is experiencing a massive growth in poplarity, and the idea that this article should be deleted is doubtlessly borne of some misguided desire to make communism itself seem acceptable, but that is not a good enough excuse to delete what is clearly a relevant and important article. An article called mass killings under capitalist regimes would be equally important and relevant. Johnathan 2001 (talk) 17:59, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep unless we also remove the pages for "Mass killings under colonial regimes" and "Mass killings under anti-communist regimes." All three need to be tagged for deletion together, or none of them. Delhatch (talk) 18:09, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Just as a note Mass killings under colonial regimes is a (IMO rather poor) redirect to Genocide of indigenous peoples while Mass killings under anti-communist regimes redirects to Anti-communist mass killings. While both redirects are questionable, neither article they lead to has substantive issues and regardless, as redirects, they should be discussed at WP:RFD. BSMRD (talk) 18:17, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep The last step of genocide is rewriting history. Communism killed 70 million directly and hurt billions beyond that. Whoever suggested deleting this should be banned. Smilingbandit (talk) 18:13, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Whoever suggested this has 100 times more edits to Wikipedia than you have, and, unlike you, has not been canvassed here by a liar on an external site.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:21, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I’m a Strong Keep !vote but something definitely happened here. Volunteer Marek 18:43, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

What happened here is the consequence of thoroughly-misleading canvassing on 4Chan, and probably elsewhere too. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:48, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I was informed of how Fox News sites have exploited this page's hot-button marketabilty, perhaps I should be embarrassed, crawl under a rock, and "be banned". ~ cygnis insignis 19:05, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Not only you are breaking the rules of this discussion, you also disseminate the false notion that users with many edits can't do foolish things. RfDing this article for the fourth time, instead of spending the time to improve it, was a foolish move. Platyna (talk) 18:40, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• I am not "breaking any rules" and I am not "disseminating false notions". I happen to be an uninvolved administrator, and I do not find your participation on this page constructive.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:55, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Calling people liars? Ad personam? Are not these rules infractions? Seriously nobody cares how many edits X or Y has, not to mention that quality over quantity is what counts. What matters is what the person says - if they have a valid point or not. And do not spam my talk page with...no idea what was that...mod threats? I am not afraid. My family fought with murderous regimes since hundreds of years. Platyna (talk) 21:08, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per WP:TNT Communism is evil does not justify setting aside WP:OR and WP:Synth to make a WP:Coatrack. This is a collection of disparate topics being treated as homogeneous to make a point. Slywriter (talk) 18:29, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do you really believe that the article's content is useless (including all the versions in history) but the title might be useful, then delete the content to help encourage a new article, as WP:TNT describes? The current state of the article isn't how TNT is actually weighted; if there's a better version of the article (and several editors seem to have pointed out that there was), then a WP:TNT claim would actually need to show why that revision of this page would also need to be deleted. I really don't see any strong argument for TNT that incorporates the whole history of the article and proceeds to say that it is wholly and entirely useless for the purpose of an encyclopedia. — Mhawk10 (talk) 19:10, 26 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep per Johnathan 2001, OmegaPog and many others. As a person who was born in a communist country, I strongly object to deletion. Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Tomek Mrugalski (talk) 18:30, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep The page is imperfect but it provides a good way to group all these atrocities. There is no reason to delete the page – it is a good collection of data. Someone doing this research would need to start from scratch. Is the page imperfect? Yes. Does it need to be deleted? No. — Redderc (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. The preceding unsigned comment was added at 18:35, 24 November 2021 (UTC) (UTC).[reply]
• Weak delete, or refocus article I don't buy the synthesis arguments, but the page as a whole is too long (larger than the main communism article, for example) and could grow and grow. I think it would be better to refocus it to just the parts that contain scholarly discussion of the topic as a whole, as the rest is found in other articles. RoseCherry64 (talk) 18:36, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  It is as long as the list of communist artocities. Platyna (talk) 18:40, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It isn't "as long as the list of communist atrocities" because it's not about "communist atrocities", a term that appears zero times in the article. It's not as long as the "list of communist mass killings", because it's not in list format and instead is in encyclopedic form and is severely bloated because there doesn't seem to be an end to how much you can put into an article with a loose umbrella topic like this. RoseCherry64 (talk) 18:53, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"There were no communist atrocities because there is were no such word used in the article. Got it. Platyna (talk) 00:56, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Changing my vote from weak delete to delete. The repeated pattern of the opposition to this AfD derailing in baseless accusations of any editor not voting keep doing so because they want to deny anything bad communist governments have ever done, like above, convinced me. RoseCherry64 (talk) 16:27, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep, I oppose deletion because it has already been considered 5 times with the results being to keep or no consensus. Good faith or not, it should not be allowed to renominate an article for deletion over and over until the nominators finally get the outcome they want. JD Lambert^(T|C) 19:00, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Draftify Is the subject notable? Probably. Is the article fit for mainspace? I believe the consensus here and what I agree with is definitely no. The article is a dumpster fire, just like with this AfD, the DR, and the right-wing people who are trying to canvass keep votes onto the article, which combined probably have many more words written than what's in the actual article. Draftifying this while the DR process moves on and the article re-worked seems like a good compromise solution. I would like to note though that arguments to keep based off how old the article is or that this article has survived 5 AfD's arn't relevent, the AfDs were 10 years ago and standards were different back then. Jumpytoo Talk 19:05, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep, if only because it is an oft-discussed subject. Many articles on here describe narratives that are debatable. This is a frequently discussed narrative. I happen to agree that there is a need to address the pattern of mass killings in communist states, but also agree that narratives I don’t believe in should also receive coverage if they are mentioned frequently in reliable sources. Deletion arguments (as have some of the the keep arguments) seem questionably partisan. ~ Pbritti (talk) 19:07, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep in accordance with WP:AFDNOTCLEANUP. Not impressed with a nakedly political attempt to censor history. FunkyDuffy (talk) 19:10, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Anyone else find it odd how many long-dormant accounts keep popping up on this discussion, or is it just me? clpo13_(talk) 19:13, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This disucssion has been ruined. The amount of SPAs and canvassed accounts has completely disrupted it. I see us hurtling towards "No Consensus" at a breackneck speed. BSMRD (talk) 19:15, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

When a AfD proposal is so blatantly bad that it forces people to return, there’s a problem with the proposal, not the editors. ~ Pbritti (talk) 19:17, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Or may be cross out canvassed accounts and ignore what they say?--Ymblanter (talk) 19:19, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Ymblanter:, what is a reason to ignore fresh arguments? I would love to see fresh strong arguments in support for "keep". As soon as admins are not counting !voted (they are not supposed to, aren't they?) everything should be quite ok. Paul Siebert (talk) 21:19, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Editors are free to tag comments/!votes they think were canvassed with the template mentioned at the top of the page. Same with SPAs. I'm sure the closing admin will consider all arguments and concerns when closing. SamStrongTalks (talk) 19:22, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That may open a can of worms. Do you really believe that is falsifiable? Paul Siebert (talk) 21:22, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

My main point is that is it more useful than complaining about the discussion being ruined. I mean, they could restart this discussion again in a few months, but a 5th AfD seems like a poor idea. SamStrongTalks (talk) 21:26, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep This just feels like Wikipedia:JUSTDONTLIKEIT, this is an often discussed and well established topic, while it's true that the article needs extensive improvement, deletion is not the solution.TheFinalMigration (talk) 19:25, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• @Clpo13: This isn't a valid argument, assume good faith, in addition there is no prohibition against lapses and going dormant in editing before returning. This is all very well established Wiki policy, when a deletion discussion this embarrassing exists you should expect a return of inactive accounts TheFinalMigration (talk) 19:25, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And how should they know this discussion is here, pray tell? Certainly, there's nothing wrong with a lapse in editing activity, but when someone's first act in a year or more is to come straight to this discussion when their editing history doesn't show previous engagement in the article or topic area, it sets off some WP:CANVASSING alarm bells. clpo13_(talk) 19:28, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Clpo13: I'd imagine it is due to the fact that this discussion has received coverage in media. you're correct this does raise concerns of canvassing, But I've yet to see any specific evidence of recruitment or attempts to convince editors to participate in this discussion. And then there is the difficulty of establishing which editors may have been canvassed based on only hunches. I do want to make clear that I am not attempting to engage in disruptive or argumentative discussion but simply attempt to contribute to this discussion and am hazy around the specifics of canvassing and the appropriate response to it, especially in regards to what action should be undertaken to make a decision in this discussion. TheFinalMigration (talk) 19:50, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. I didn't support deletion during the last AfD, but recent events forced me to reconsider my opinion.

With regard to a potential canvassing problem, I see no problem with canvassing at all if a closing admin will analyse arguments, not count !votes. Not only that will eliminate all negative effects of canvassing, that wil be in an agreement with our policy, which says that consensus is not achieved by voting. I respectfully request admins to ignore, at least, for a while, any accusations of canvassing, because canvassed users may bring fresh arguments. So far, I see not many strong arguments in support of keeping. Below, I summarize the most important ones, and supplement them with critcal analysis. I respectfully request the closing admin to take into account arguments strengths, not the number of voter. Of course, I am not neutral in that dispute, but, please, keep in mind that I didn't support deletion during the last AfD. If I missed some important argument, please, let me know, and I add it to the list

A summary and criticism of arguments in support for "Keep"

• "The topic is notable". By that time, at least 13 users put forward this argument. This argument addresses the reason for deletion #8, and the rationale is typically as follows: "The article tells about important events, so its removal from Wikipedia is unacceptable" This argument has at least thee major flaws.

• First, this argument implies that by deleting this article we remove some significant information from Wikipedia. That is not true. In reality, almost every piece of information presented in this article already exists in Wikipedia (in such articles as Great Purge, Soviet Famine of 1932-33, Great Chinese famine, Red Terror, Democide, Mass killing, Criticism of Communist party rule, and many, many others. Therefore, deletion will not result in removal of any significant information from Wikipedia; this part of the argument is obviously false, and it should be disregarded.
• Second, if some other information (in addition to the abive mentioned) exists in the article, than what is that information about? An obvious answer is: the article may be notable because it contains a narrative that links all events ("mass killings") to Communism as a major common cause. Is this narrative notable? The question is not obviuous, because we already have the articles about Rummel's Democide and Courtois's introduction to The Black Book of Communism, and there is no reason to have one more if no other sources exist. What other sources cover that topic? @Piotrus: tried to address this issue during one previous AfD, and he provided this list, which contains references to stories to separate individual events. That is not an argument. To prove that the topic is notable notable, we need to demonstrate that a large body of scholarship exist that (i) discuss a linkage between Communism in general and mass killings, and (ii) that are linked by a dense network of cross-references with the works by historians who study each event separately. I made several google.scholar searches in attempt to find those sources, but I didn't find much. Of course, you can find sources using google, but they are mostly newspaper op-eds or links to some private web sites, or popular books. I found no serious scholarly sources so far: this, this returns mostly irrelevant sources, or the sources discussing mass killings of Communists. My other attempts were not encouraging either, and everybody can repeat them and make sure I am doing my best to be as neutral as possible. Keeping in mind that the Black Book, which makes such a generalization, caused a storm of criticism and support, I conclude no serious sources existed on that topic before its publication. I am honestly trying to continue digging, and if anybody finds a reasonable amount of well cited peer-reviewed publications on that subject, kindly let me know. Until then, I respectfully request a closing admin to ignore !votes claiming that the topic is notable.
• Third, I can imagine only one option that will allow us to speak the article meets a notability criterion: the discussion of linkage of mass killings and Communism, which would include a comprehensive analysis of opposite opinia may be a notable topic. However, that requires a complete re-write (and possibly rename), and during last 11 years we failed to achieve a consensus about that. Therefore, I have no illusion that this way to save the article may work. The first reason for deletion is the criterion #8. The article's "added information value" is negligible, and therefore, it must be deleted as non-notable.

• The article is not a content fork This argument addresses the reason #5, and it is less frequent. Frankly, the users who say that provide not much explanation, usually they just claim everything is ok. Others say that no example of POV-forking was provided, which is blatantly false, because I already provided several examples. Thus, Great Chinese famine, which tells about the same event that is discussed in this article using different words, different sources, and comes to different conclusions. That is an obvious POV-fork. Another example are the articles about Soviet famines. Cambodian genocide discusses many factors that caused that mass killings, whereas this article implies Communism and its ideology was a primary one. Mass killing tells a neutral story about genocide studies, but this article implies that they are preoccupied with "Communist mass killings". I can provide more examples, but these examples are sufficient to claim that the article should be deleted as a huge POV-fork.

Initially, I was not a proponent of deletion, and I invested a lot of my time in attempts to convert the article to something reasonable. One possibility would be to make a true "summary style" article. However, that would require a global rearrangement of its structure, and that faced a severe opposition of those who believes this article is always a "summary style", and there is nothing to fix there. Therefore, the second and separate reason for deletion is the criterion #5. The article is an unfixable POV-fork, and therefore, it must be deleted.

• "The article is well sourced. It seems these votes are trying to address WP:ATD-E, but, alas, they are flawed either. During this discussion, I provided examples of severe and blatant misuse or direct misinterpretation of sources, but my voice seems to fall in deaf ears: people seem to ignore my proposal to check those sources or my analysis. If the argument of that type will be accepted by a closing admin, that may create a very dangerous precedent: that may mean that a community can, by merely !voting, and ignoring any analysis of sources usage, just conclude "everything is ok", and keep seemingly well sourced misinformation for decades. That may be a very dangerous precedent, and I am seriously pondering about addressing to ArbCom if that happens. I am sure Arbitrators will take that case, because that aspect of thsi AfD is not a content dispute.

My conclusion is: the article must be deleted per WP:DEL-REASON ##5, 8, and per WP:ATD-E. All claims that these three reasons are not applicable to this case are weak and poorly supported. I am open to fresh arguments, and I am waiting for fresh arguments is support for keeping the article.

• There is one additional reason to delete the article. This reason is that. The list is full of Wikipedia mirrors and derivative works, which increases the risk of citogenesis.--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:41, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

As an additional demonstration of my point, try to do a thought experiment: imagine, the World War II article was deleted. That immediately creates a yawning abyss in Wikipedia, because almost every source puts a story about every individual battle of theatre of war into a more global context, in a context of WWII. We have a lot of fundamental books, from Churchill to Overy, who draw a global picture, and these general books are being widely cited by experts in more narrow fields. Operation Bagration is discussed in a context of D-day, Battle of Kursk is usually linked with Operation Husky etc. All sources form a well defined hierarchy, from more local events to the global conflict as a whole.

Now, please, answer, can you name a set of sources about "Communist mass killings" that even remotely resemble an ensemble of WWII sources? Do you sincerely believe I myself was not trying to find anything before coming here? With exception of a couple of controversial books (each of which already has their own article, and, importantly, even barely cite each other) no such sources exist. And that is not because each of those subtopics has not been studied: there is a lot of sources about each event taken separately, but they form many separate domains that are poorly connected to each other and some "global Communism" Paul Siebert (talk) 20:27, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

hope I'm adding this right, but I think its as simple as "Articles on historical events should never be removed no matter how dark or tragic they are" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.221.31.92 (talk) 19:38, 24 November 2021 (UTC) — Note: An editor has expressed a concern that 71.221.31.92 (talk • contribs) has been canvassed to this discussion. [reply]

• Strong Keep, As many others have pointed out this article easily passes WP:GNG criteria, additionally disagree with the synthesis argument as any article that lists multiple events with common factors would likewise fall victim to this argument. Finally the WP:IJUSTDONTLIKEIT vibes are strong here. Raitchison (talk) 19:48, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Give me an example of such "any" article, and I'll tell you why it will not. Paul Siebert (talk) 19:55, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You don't need to WP:BADGER people. --Nug (talk) 20:18, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep, Page needs some work but the AfD proposal is weak and reeks of WP:IJUSTDONTLIKEIT. Airplanegod (talk) 19:54, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Please, read my post and answer. Paul Siebert (talk) 19:58, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You don't need to WP:BADGER people. --Nug (talk) 20:18, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Should I understand it as you accuse me of misbehavior?--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:31, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No, just a friendly reminder that you do not have to convince every keep !voter, just the closing admin. --Nug (talk) 20:49, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Good. Because otherwise it looked suspiciously close to a personal attack. Paul Siebert (talk) 21:04, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Knock it off, both of you. Paul Siebert, you don't need to rehash the same argument that you've been having for the past few days with every newcomer to this discussion. Nug, you are not the right messenger for badgering concerns in this discussion, and doing so repeatedly, in subthreads that are in sight of each other on the page, is, well, quite funny if I'm being honest. But Paul, even if it is mildly tendentious, it's not a personal attack. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 21:08, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Rosguill, as you can see, this newcomer made their post few minutes after I presented convincing evidences of NPOV violations. It would be quite natural to inform him about this my post, because they couldn't see it when they were writing their post.

Actually, it seems I presented all my arguments, and, since there seems to be no significantly fresh arguments, I will be watchlisting this page just occasionally. Paul Siebert (talk) 21:14, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And, maybe you didn't see that, but there is a message on the top of this page that informs everybody that that is not a vote, but a a discussion among Wikipedia contributors. It does not say I need to convince an admin, it says we should try to convince each other. Therefore, an attempt to intimidate other users may be seen as a disruption of the process. Please, don't do that anymore. Paul Siebert (talk) 21:10, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am trying to keep two of the only editors in this discussion that have made substantive arguments from pointless bickering, no more no less. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 21:15, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Don't worry, Rosguill, we both are experienced opponents, who are in a conflict during last 13 years, and we both are too cautious to give each other a pretext for AE. I apologise for distracting you with all that b/s.  :) Paul Siebert (talk) 21:28, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Reminding other editors of policy isn't disrupting the process. Doing so repeatedly isn't particularly helpful though. SamStrongTalks (talk) 21:18, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep - notable topic with sufficient sourcing as already mentioned previously by Nug and Mikehawk10. I also don't see any particularly egregious NPOV violation here. Obviously there is always room for improvements, but state of article doesn't look so bad at all. Not to mention that if one compares the state of article during the last AfD in 2010 [22], to what it is now at the time of writing this comment [23], improvements have been very significant.--Staberinde (talk) 20:40, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep per most of the above but in particular AFDISNOTCLEANUP. Anyone seriously suggesting that this topic is not notable would cause me to have serious doubts regarding their competency to even discuss the subject. I also have to agree with some others that there is more than a whiff of IDONTLIKEIT in this nomination and discussion. -Ad Orientem (talk) 20:45, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Wikipedians can n't write history. We cant pick a book on Stalin, another book on Mao, etc, and build an article combining all of them. It is Synth. Cinadon36 20:48, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia's rules against synthesizing research here falls under the banner of WP:No Original Research. For this to be the case, there would have to be a dearth of third-party, reliable reporting on the article's subject. This is not the case, as revealed by the simple Google search of the relevant terms. Even if the article was poorly written, the topic merits retention on the basis of its notability and verifiability. ~ Pbritti (talk) 22:15, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep, I will reiterate the words of another commenter with whom I agree "As many others have pointed out this article easily passes WP:GNG criteria, additionally disagree with the synthesis argument as any article that lists multiple events with common factors would likewise fall victim to this argument. Finally the WP:IJUSTDONTLIKEIT vibes are strong here." Especially with regards to relentless editing where none was needed. (my opinion of course) to the point where the current article is inferior to an earlier revision. rocket in the sky (talk) 20:45, 24 November 2021 (UTC) — rocket in the sky (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]

• Comment I strongly encourage everyone citing WP:IJUSTDONTLIKEIT to actually read that essay, as well as the examples provided at WP:IDONTLIKEIT, and then compare with the actual rationale cited for deletion. To reduce the arguments of the pro-deletion camp to "they just don't like the article" is grossly reductionist and inaccurate. BSMRD (talk) 21:35, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The fact someone has a different opinion does not mean they didn't read it. Current rationale for deletion is flawed and considering this is 4th RfD of 12 years old, large and actively edited article, this is ridiculous and clearly WP:IJUSTDONTLIKEIT. I am amused and annoyed at once.Platyna (talk) 21:51, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ironically you and every other editor who just posts "this is ridiculous and clearly screams/smells/whatevers of WP:IDONTLIKEIT" is in effect saying WP:ILIKEIT. Making vague (and at this point very reptitive) aspersions about the actual arguments for deletion is not in fact sufficient rationale to keep the article. BSMRD (talk) 22:53, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yes, you got me, I love communist genocides, especially the names of my family members shining on Katyn massacre memorials. I have a suggestion - how about you will start abiding to the goal of this discussion and actually comment about the article, not the participants? Platyna (talk) 00:56, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Once again, please click the things people link to. WP:ILIKEIT does not mean that you like the content of the article, rather that you like the articles existence or think the subject "deserves" an article and that is the whole of your argument. I could also point to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS for similarly applicable guidelines. I'm getting tired of personal attacks rising from a failure of reading comprehension. BSMRD (talk) 01:45, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak Keep. I am not voting, and am hesitant to participate at all, because I may qualify as having been WP:CANvassed. I noticed (though was not the intended audience for) canvassing on this topic on Twitter, which piqued my curiousity. I've read the current AFD discussion and agree that it reeks of canvassing, so I really hope that my comment isn't seen as adding to that problem. If I could vote, I would vote weak keep, and if someone who seems to know what they're doing tells me I am allowed to vote, I will do so. My reasoning is as follows:

This article is not a POV fork. Several deleters have suggested that the initial keep response engaged only with notability and failed to address other rationales for deletion, especially the argument that this article is an unfixable POV fork. Some of those keepers have responded to that criticism already, but I wanted to share my own view.

First, it seems to me that the question of whether this article is a POV fork is inextricable from the question of whether this article's topic is sufficiently WP:Notable to justify its own article. There is no article on this topic except for this one (with the possible exception of Crimes against humanity under communist regimes, and this article clearly is not a POV fork of that one). There are, as Paul Siebert has pointed out, articles of broader scope (for instance, Mass killing and Communism) and articles of narrower scope (Paul mentions the Great Chinese Famine article) than this one. But this particular topic is not "mass killings" or "communism," nor is it any of the individual incidents that are cited as examples. So if the topic is sufficiently notable to merit an article, then this article is not an impermissible POV fork—merely an effort, however imperfect, to discuss a notable topic that would not otherwise have its own article. For that reason, I regard the discussion of POV-forking as a distraction.

Second, on the merits, I do not see how this article can be considered a POV fork. Any given assertion in the article could, of course, be challenged on NPOV grounds, but the sense I get is that some deleters feel that the existence of this article itself expresses a POV by implying that there is a causal link between communist ideology and mass killings. That does not seem right to me. Whatever definition of "mass killing" one uses from the WP:RSes, I think we have to agree that there have been mass killings under communist regimes, which is all the article title says. The article goes on to discuss explanations that have been offered for those mass killings, some of which involve communism directly and some of which do not. All of that seems in-bounds to me.

This topic is notable. I was persuaded by Mhawk10's | post, which quotes several sources that quite plainly consider the relationship between communist regimes and mass killings as a discrete topic. Paul argues that there are not enough sources that (a) consider communist regimes on the whole rather than one or a handful of specific regimes and (b) take the position that communism was a major factor in the mass killings by those regimes. But sources that argue for and against a link between communism and killings both help establish the notability of the topic, which is mass killings under communism, because both of those categories of sources are about that topic.

This article does not suffer from egregious NPOV or verifiability failures. As I said, any specific assertion in this article could, I'm sure, be challenged as biased. But the WP:ATD-E policy governing deletion for NPOV problems is for "severe" NPOV or verifiability problems. Maybe I've missed it, but I don't really think anyone has shown that such failures exist or that they warrant deletion (offending articles "may" be deleted). The closest I saw to a compelling argument on that front was that the article was noted to have problems 11 years ago, and since then it has not improved. 11 years is a long time for an article to be bad. But it turns out the article spent about 8 years of that time under sanctions that prevented it from being edited, so the repeated appeal to "11 years ago" strikes me as disingenuous.

Just my thoughts, for whatever they're worth. Cedric Contra (talk) 22:11, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Cedric Contra: In answer to your concern about the validy of your vote, being linked here from elsewhere doesn't disqualify you from participating, especially if you have a well-nuanced answer (and you do). As the canvassing box at the top of the page says, However, you are invited to participate and your opinion is welcome. — Czello 22:21, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Czello: Thank you for pointing that out. Cedric Contra (talk) 22:44, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak Keep. Relatively poor quality article but important subject. Remember that secondary sources are likely to be biased in a particular way on this subject, and NPOV does not mean "copy the POV of reliable sources". Eldomtom2 (talk) 22:17, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  I'd dispute this, as worded. NPOV means that we represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources. I read that to mean that we do indeed copy the viewpoints of reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of those sources. If it doesn't mean that, what does it mean? Make up our own ideas about which viewpoints are to be given prominence, in disregard to the reliable sources, and just have circular, unsourced arguments until someone gives up? MarshallKe (talk) 22:41, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep. First, this article provides a good summary of information that would otherwise be disbursed among multiple Wikipedia pages. Better to keep all the information in one place. Second, many of the comments for Delete claim that that article is a mess; that may be the case. The solution, however, is to fix the article, not delete it. — Coulson Lives (talk) 22:31, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Why do you think that voting twice is ok? Do you also vote twice at the elections in your country?--Ymblanter (talk) 22:37, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Read the beginning of the page, this is not an election, it's a discussion, he probably just cloned the paragraph by mistake. Fixed it. Your comment is not exactly a WP:PA, but has the same problems as one. Please keep the discussion productive. 191.136.193.249 (talk) 22:46, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep. Example of WP:IJUSTDONTLIKEIT with people getting paid to gang up against the article. Shove your 300 up yours! Disgusted by people twisting WP like this. — al-Shimoni (talk) 22:33, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Very curious if there is any evidence of the conflict of interest alleged here, since I have not seen it mentioned elsewhere in the discussion. Terminator 2 really happened (talk) 00:21, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep. Total WP:IJUSTDONTLIKEIT claim hided between pretty words. The "poor quality" is only used to minimize the true intention burning of this information, cause we all know a poorly made article ins't enough to delete the whole thing. 191.136.193.249 (talk) 22:38, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. The arguments are clear and well defended. The article currently presents a conflagration of events only loosely connected. Each of those events can be notable enough, but it makes tno sense to have articles like this. Pointing out a connection between them is flirting with original research.--Freddy eduardo (talk) 22:41, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Either Keep or (less preferably) Merge with Crimes against humanity under communist regimes. I will note that there has been significant coverage of the link between communist states and mass killings/crimes against humanity. Also there definitely has been a significant amount of pro-communist pov-pushing in this topic recently. But, regardless, there's clearly a link between these two topics, there's been extensive coverage of it, and this same article has been put up for deletion three times before. This is re-raising old arguments for the simple purpose that they disagree with the article. A merge is understandable, especially if the article is such a mess (although it seems okay from my perspective) - and it does seem to be a subset of the more general crimes against humanity article. (Also, as a side note, this AFD has gotten rather long and its making it rather hard for me to edit it. My computer is reasonably powerful, so I'd say we should do something about that. Maybe split it up? Unsure.) ThePlatypusofDoom (talk) 22:58, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  @ThePlatypusofDoom: Thanks, I fully understand whom you meant, right? That is a direct personal attack, and a very silly attack, because I am building my arguments almost exclusively no not cherry-picked English peer-reviewed sources. So, your post contains a direct personal attack. I suggest you to choose one of two options: you either present solid arguments demonstrating that I am a civil POV-pusher. If the arguments will be convincing, will change my vote from "Delete" to Support", if you fail to provide strong arguments, you withdraw your vote, and vote to "Delete". Another option is that you submit AE request against me. I am considered duly warned, so the admins will accept it. In your report, you will accuse me of civil POV-pushing, and I will request for WO:BOOMERANG. Deal? Paul Siebert (talk) 23:09, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You assume that I was referring to you. Also, you've made responses to a very large number of keep !votes in this AfD. However, it was probably a bit too aggressively phrased, so I have changed it slightly. ThePlatypusofDoom (talk) 23:23, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Paul Siebert: probably should ping as it's a busy AfD ThePlatypusofDoom (talk) 23:29, 24 November 2021 (UTC) [reply]

Sorry, but I am not satisfied. Now, instead of offending just me and another user, you insulted many users. You should either explain what exactly you see as civil POV-pushing, and support your claims with ironclad evidences, or withdraw your vote completely.

Alternatively, you still may provide evidences (you may use my talk page) of alleged massive coverage. Paul Siebert (talk) 23:32, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• The arguments that I accept are as follows: You demonstrate that majority of peer-reviewed sources with a large number of citations support the claim that there is a strong and significant linkage between Communism (as an ideology and a political system) and mass killings, and this factor is a primary reason that allowed them to discuss different mass killings events in a context of each other rather than is a context of other events. You also should demonstrate that majority of well cited peer-reviewed scholarly sources see Great Chinese famine and most other famines as "mass killings" ("genocide, politicide, classicide etc") Paul Siebert (talk) 23:13, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep The arguments against this being an encyclopedic topic are a sad commentary on people restricting what they consider reliable sourcing to only things that match their own viewpoint. NPOV issues are AFDISNOTCLEANUP, GNG is met, IDONTLIKEIT seems to be the strongest delete argument, etc. etc. This is pretty much SKYISBLUE territory, actually, and the number of editors thinking that deleting this is OK suggests we have a serious lack of historical context. Is holocaust denial OK now? Just checking, because the fact that this is being taken seriously suggests it might be. Jclemens (talk) 23:00, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep. Per Volunteer Marek. BasedMises_{Mont Pelerin} 23:04, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Keep. I don't see consistent reasons to delete this page. Facts like these are documented in museums in countries that were under Communist control (eg Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Ukraine, Czech Republic, among others), and this cannot be deleted from people who want to research this subject on Wikipedia. Unfortunately there is a tendency to rewrite history, with several attempts to hide the bad reputation of certain groups that these people are sympathetic to, and that is why situations like this have become more common. If there is any irregularity in the article, let it be corrected and not deleted. Egtj (talk) 23:07, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong Keep. Philosophers like Arendt, Orwell, exposed how violence, fear, propaganda, executions are intrinsic characteristics of totalitarian regimes. Historians like Courtois, Paczkowski, Werth, exposed not only the total death toll (in millions) of those regimes, but how the same patterns repeated everytime, everywhere, leading to the conclusion that mass killings are a logical consequence of those regimes. Others like Sternhell established a strong causality through Sorel between the failed marxian prophecy and the birth of violence and political myths as valid ways to gain power and change society. The will to rewrite history, to change terms definitions, to manipulate emotions and truth is not only a strong component of these ideology but one of this core design. And the first step toward the road to serfdom (Hayek) and the control of thoughts and later the killings. As shown here on Wikipedia this will is still very active particularly among far-left academics who keep repeating history.

Men who address revolutionary words to the people are bound to submit themselves to high standards of sincerity, because the workers understand these words in their exact and literal sense and never indulge in any symbolic interpretation. When in 1905 I ventured to write in some detail on proletarian violence I was fully aware of the grave responsibility I assumed in trying to show the historic bearing of acts that our parliamentary socialists try to cover up with so much skill. Today I do not hesitate to declare that socialism could not continue to exist without an apology for violence.

It is through strikes that the proletariat asserts its existence. I cannot be persuaded to see in strikes something analogous to the temporary rupture of commercial relations which is brought about when a grocer and his supplier of prunes cannot agree about the price. The strike is a phenomenon of war; it is therefore a serious misrepresentation to say that violence is an accidental feature destined to disappear from strikes.

The social revolution is an extension of this war in which each great strike is an episode; this is why the syndicalists speak of this revolution in the language of strikes; for them socialism is reduced to the conception, the expectation of and the preparation for the general strike, which, like the Napoleonic battle, is to annihilate completely a condemned regime.^[1]