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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Global storm activity of late 2010

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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. It seems to me that this needs some work and that this should be tried first and that unless this is intended as a precedent for deleting all kinds of articles like this some form of meta discussion about their scope and desirability would be preferential to just heading straight to the delete button. Obviously if improvments proves difficult another listing would likely have a different outcome. Spartaz Humbug! 03:40, 23 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Global storm activity of late 2010

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Global storm activity of late 2010 (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)
Global storm activity of mid 2010 (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
Global storm activity of early 2010 (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
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The article attempts to be reaching too broadly. I attempted a discussion on the purpose of the article, but I didn't get any answers. To quote myself, "what is the scope of this article? ... just a long, sprawling list like this does no one any good." I'd like to point out that Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, nor is it a directory. The article is a jumbled mess trying to contain every storm in late 2010, which it doesn't even appropriately define; "late 2010" could just as easily refer to September - December as it would for just November and December. There are categories to link articles together, not 186 kb of poorly-organized prose.

I'll give an example about how the article fails by examining the "October 1 and October 2" section. The first paragraph, grammar and tense issues aside, doesn't give any indication on the location other than "the United States of America" until the reader hopefully recognizes New York City. It is rife with MOS violations, such as starting sentences with numbers, and referring to days of the week without indicating the date. The second paragraph (which starts in lower-case) refers to flooding in Pakistan; it is totally missing any context, as the 2010 Pakistan floods had been ongoing for months and were the worst in the country's history. The third paragraph (one of many without sources) details a tropical storm, and is one of three separate paragraphs in the overall section on that storm. Without feeling the need to go on, the article is first of all poorly-written, and secondly it is impossible to complete. Right now it already stands at 186 kb of information, and yet it wanders between focusing on tropical cyclones and (in the very first paragraph) on: "couple of thunderstorms have developed and are heading to impact the region beginning on Thursday morning". I honestly feel that there is no other course of action but deletion.

There are two previous articles in this series. They were all originally the same article, but they were all split. This deletion nomination also covers Global storm activity of mid 2010 and Global storm activity of early 2010. Hurricanehink (talk) 06:58, 15 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep and rehaul. The original article was Winter storms of 2009–2010. That article, in turn had been edited well over a thousand times even before the page was split into two, then three separate articles and now we have this directory-like poorly-written mess. The purpose of these storm articles, which were originally winter storm activity articles that were transformed into a collection and listing of all-season storm events. Although the articles now are barely legible, they remain a necessary collection of storms that impact people worldwide. This includes the 2010 floods, 2009 floods, 2008 floods, etc. We have complete articles on every tropical cyclone season in every basin we can cover, so articles on global non-tropical winter/summer storms should prove equally encyclopedic. The problem here is that mostly inexperienced editors are adding innapropriate refs, leaving superfluous and red links, adding bare urls and refs without titles, creating unencyclopedic tone, adding tables that should not be there, creating unreadable text, inconsistencies in style, major spelling errors, grammar confusion, and other errors. This can still be fixed, however, and does not require the deletion of all such articles.
The originally winter-only articles were reasonably written and had a long history on Wikipedia before they were converted to all-season articles. If fully kept, they need to exclude storms such as tropical cyclones and heat/cold waves. Unfortunately, the wholesale deletion of all global storm activity articles would constitute the removal of some ten thousand (or so) edits. These articles are now lists, and that alone is not a problem, but the "list" items all need to have references and proper grammar. There are a few articles elsewhere that contain this information, for example the ones on specific winter storms (Carmen, Xynthia, Emma, etc.). The only problem in recent worldwide storm articles is that they get too long, and too poorly organized without maintenance. Thus, the still-inexperienced editors who spend the most overall time on these articles split them into seperate pages that still get cluttered. To avoid creating an indiscriminate directory, I suggest trimming all non-notable occurrences (minor snowfalls, street-level flooding, uneventful thunderstorms, etc.) and irrelevant information and superfluous listings. Refrain from adding a casualty table until the article is fully referenced and of good quality, and wait until after the coverage period has ended. Please pay special attention to the congruency between present and past tense and maintain this consistency after the coverage period ends. Many of these tables included "the sad death count finally stood at-"—this is not encyclopedic wording.
The articles are currently as much of a disaster as the storms that they cover. I still suggest cleaning up the pages section-by-section, instead of the deletion of all these articles because they look too trashy for experienced editors to even touch. As for all the regional season articles, they should be kept balanced and concise. There is another problem that involves the copypasting of all the see also links from these global articles and incorporating many irrelevant links into articles on other seasons or individual flooding events. Obviously, as the scope of the global storm articles is narrowed down, the articles would be possible to maintain in an organized manner and the reader accessibility would improve. Only then could the articles serve as a non-directory list-like collection of non-tropical storms at standards comparable to that of the tropical cyclone articles. Yes, the systemic bias toward recent events could be problematic, but those are the years for which we have the best referenceable source coverage. Wikipedia is not Wikinews and the storm-related articles should not be written as such, but they can still include near-current information. All that's needed is a major revamp of all recent yearly global storm activity articles. ~AH1(TCU) 03:25, 17 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Break down into articles dealing with non-tropical storms (blizzards, windstorms, etc), severe weather (Tornadoes of 2010, Significant hailstorms of 2010, etc), and tropical cyclones to fall under WP:NTROP, WP:SEVERE, and WP:TROP respectively. As it is, the articles are a conglomerate of too much information about too many things, and could do with separating into different articles. The articles nominated for deletion here could then be combined into one disambiguation page, Global storm activity of 2010. Ks0stm (T•C•G) 04:05, 17 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Break down along the lines put forward by Ks0stm. The Info is good, but the style is crappy, dislocated and bitty. Themed subpages like (Tornadoes of 2010, would be a better chose than a total 'delete'.

--Wipsenade (talk) 11:23, 17 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Note It started off as wintery storms in the Americas and Europe in 2006, then became wintery storms in the Western World, then storms in the Northern Hemisphere, then storms in general and finally compete anarchy by August 2010.--Wipsenade (talk) 11:29, 17 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Notice A case with a death in it is not of the 'hyperbolie' and superfluous types of pages. --82.27.25.62 (talk) 16:13, 18 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete & Revert to Separate Articles - Don't fix it if it's not broken...the standard is to have separate articles on winter weather, tornadoes, tropical cyclones etc. for the given year. This is a gigantic mess of information and pretty much ruined the standard and efficient articles we do every year on winter storms; now that I look at it somebody has been changing all the winter weather articles into these "Global Storm" articles, which only clutters the encyclopedia. Remember what this encyclopedia is not and all will be well. -Marcusmax(speak) 23:06, 20 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, somehow, but overhaul it. Needs some decent work. I note, too, that this page doesn't cover anything since last week (December 18, 2010), in which heavy rains inundated the state of California - can somebody fix that? =) --Dennis The Tiger (Rawr and stuff) 16:02, 22 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. I'm working on updating all these articles in the coming days. I suggest splitting them into "winter storms", "summer storms" and "tornadoes". ~AH1(TCU) 16:59, 22 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
But what are "summer" and "winter" storms? That is the problem in the first place, there being a lack of a defined title. ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 17:01, 22 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Summer storms
      • Flash flooding events
      • Slow floods
      • Unusual monsoons
      • Hailstorms
      • Derechos
      • Microbursts
      • Squall lines
      • Tropical storm remnants
Winter storms
      • Nor'easters
      • Snowsqualls and blizzards
      • Ice storms
      • Ice jam floods
      • European windstorms
      • Cold waves carrying precipitation
      • Winter flooding patterns
Also, it would be a good idea to include an overview in these articles to enhance reader navigation. ~AH1(TCU) 17:17, 22 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
First of all, do you realize that when one hemisphere has summer conditions, the other has winter? That alone means it wouldn't work. Also, you can't quantify something like "unusual monsoons", since "unusual" is subjective. "Tropical storm remnants" shouldn't be in there, since it's similarly hard to quantify since there are already hurricane season articles. Derechos and hailstorms can occur any time of year, and likewise flooding can. The only one of those that I think should be its own article is the "European windstorms". Any others are too trivial/hard to qualify to put into a lump article. That is why such grand articles like these, with little to no definition, should be deleted. ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 17:24, 22 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

-

  • As I said above, winter occurs twice a year on planet Earth, what floods are notable enough to be put into a generic "floods of 2010" article, and what defines "severe" enough for there to be any rhyme or reason what goes in there? ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 17:36, 22 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would also like to point out, once again, that Wikipedia is not "lists or repositories of loosely associated topics". I certainly think this article, and even the proposals for splitting the article, fall under that category. Just because two floods occurred in the same year doesn't mean an article should contain both of them, if they weren't related at all. ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 18:08, 22 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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