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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was: delete. MER-C 16:21, 24 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Global issues

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Portal:Global issues (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

An unavoidably WP:POV set of random topics, on which there will never be a stable consensus.

The head article Global issues is a mess. The lede defines the scope of the topic by reference to a single book by a single author, and the rest of the page is just a list of topics. There is no attempt to explain who chooses what is defined as a "global issue" and what isn't, or how this is done, or even any acknowledgement that such choices might be controversial.

After the short lede, the rest of the page is a just a summary of 8 separate topics, without any explanation (let alone sources) to explain why they are identified as global and others are not. The list currently consists of:

  • Artificial intelligence arms race
  • Global catastrophic risk
  • Need of disarmament
  • Global warming
  • Human impact on the environment
  • Nuclear proliferation
  • Weapons of mass destruction
  • Potential for World War III

It's a trivial exercise to make a case for excluding several of these items. Depending on your POV,

  • artificial intelligence may be anything from a benign and liberating technological development to a path to to global serfdom and robot wars.
  • Disarmament may be seen as anything from a moral crusade to stop slaughter, to a sinister plot to deprive nations and people of self-defence
  • Human impact on the environment can be seen as anything from a threat to human survivability to an ideological opposition to human economic development
  • Debates over nuclear proliferation can be seen as anything from attempts to avert human catastrophe, to an attempt by the existing nuclear weapons states to protect their monopoly of WMDs against newcomers such as India, Pakistan and North Korea. Not to mention the complex permutations of stances taken around Nuclear weapons and Israel.

It is equally trivial to construct cases for inclusion of a wide range of other topics as "global issues":

  • Capitalism, which according to one POV is the ideological motor for environmental destruction and human oppression, but to another POV the only proven framework for human prosperity
  • Socialism, which its opponents denounce as a failed but not dead ideology which reduces people to slavery and poverty
  • Abortion, which is viewed by opposing camps as anywhere between a fundamental right of women and a global slaughter of the unborn

And so on for a vast swathe of topics such as Islamic fundamentalism, Terrorism, women's rights, LGBT rights, human migration. On all of them, there's a well-defended case to be made to label them according to taste as global menace/global virtue/not global. Take whatever POV you want on any of those, and you'll find that that there are many widely-held and well-reasoned alternative views on both the merits and the significance, and also on whether these are local or global issues.

Wikipedia is a work in progress, and the article global issues is clearly in the very early stages of development. That's fine; the article will be improved if and when editors turn their attention to it.

But even if we hope that we will some day have a vaguely stable, NPOV list of "global issues", the current mess is a terrible basis for a portal. Per WP:Portal, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects" ... but in this case, we have an ill-defined, deeply POV set of diverse subjects.

The result is that the portal is built off an eclectic subset of topics. Look at the topics:

  • the DYK section is built by the following code: {{Transclude selected recent additions | ecological collapse | overpopulation | artificial intelligence | globalization | global catastrophe | global warming | nuclear | months=36 | header={{Box-header colour|Did you know... }}|max=20}}. Note the omission of many topics listed in the head article, and the eclectically non-global set of results such as:
    • that Huang Xuhua, the "father of China's nuclear submarines", spent two years raising pigs?
    • that the archives of the British civil nuclear industry are housed alongside historical documents dating to the 16th century?
    • that the Northwest Cannabis Solutions Satsop facility is operated by the largest grower of legal cannabis in the U.S. state of Washington at the site of a canceled nuclear power plant?
  • Here's the list of subtopics, which bears little resemblance to the list in the head article. That's unsurprising, because the head article is so poor, but the result is an unsourced selection which reflects the subjectivity of whoever builds such a list:

I don't think the creator of this portal did a bad job in how it was built. The problem is that is unfixable because it is conceptually flawed, so the only remedy is to delete it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:48, 17 April 2019 (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 page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.


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