Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Postcolonial anarchism

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 merge‎ to Contemporary anarchism#Currents as a reasonable ATD. Owen×ばつ ☎ 13:58, 20 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

Postcolonial anarchism (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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Two and a half years ago, Czar raised the article's synthetic scope over on the talk page, pointing out how the article was a "hodgepodge of various concepts [...] rather than any unified coverage of a singular concept". When I came across it, I concurred with this assessment, after finding that more than 2/3rds of the article was stringing together different concepts based on sources that never mentioned the subject.[1]

I think this is yet another "x anarchism" article from an older era of Wikipedia, when attempting to create new tendencies/philosophies out of passing uses of a term (or even just wholesale making shit up) was all the rage. Searching through sources about this term, I've only found passing references to Roger White's book Post Colonial Anarchism (see further reading section), none of which are substantial enough to even remake this article into one about the book.

As I'm not sure how to fix the scope of this article, as it doesn't appear to meet notability criteria and as I can't think of a suitable redirect target, I'm nominating this article for deletion. Grnrchst (talk) 10:59, 13 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Philosophy, Politics, and Social science. Grnrchst (talk) 10:59, 13 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]
• @Grnrchst , what about the Further reading citations in the article? czar 13:51, 13 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

  @Czar: I think Ramnath's chapter of the Palgrave Handbook has the most to draw from, but even then her discussion of "postcolonial anarchism" is limited to two or three paragraphs. Unless there's something I'm missing, I think the most that could be gained from this is a perma-stub that could well be merged into the article on postcolonialism. --Grnrchst (talk) 14:00, 13 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

  It sure looks to me like "postcolonial anarchism" is a Thing in the sense that someone can say it's the focus of their research, and I think there's enough in these citations to give us some interesting stuff, but I don't see anything that indicates that "Postcolonial anarchism" is a Thing in the sense of it being a tendency in anarchism that belongs at this title in Wikipedia. That is, I think having an article here is probably a mistake, since it reifies something that appears to just be a normal adjective + noun combo. -- asilvering (talk) 21:42, 14 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

• It may also be worth pointing out that the term "postcolonial anarchism" seems to have been absent from scholarly literature before this article was created in 2007.[2] --Grnrchst (talk) 14:05, 13 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]
• Delete: this is a classic example of WP:SYNTH. Bearian (talk) 04:17, 14 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

  @Bearian, any thoughts on the merge suggestion below? -- asilvering (talk) 18:05, 16 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

  • I'm almost always down for a Merge in lieu of deletion Bearian (talk) 20:11, 16 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]
• Merge to Contemporary anarchism#Currents. In agreement with the above analysis that there isn't enough reliable, secondary source coverage about this standalone concept to do justice to a standalone article. But I do see this as a likely search term, even if only covering the fact that there are people who self-identify or write at this topical intersection. I was originally going to recommend redirecting to Postcolonialism#Approaches, where it has an unsourced mention, but it looks like that mention is only there to link between the two articles. The Ramnath chapter generally reduces the concept of "postcolonial anarchism" to non-Western anarchism and its contested definition, each of which is already covered in dedicated anarchism by country/region articles, and doesn't describe a singular field of study. Page 679 has a brief mention of how the concept loosely works as a contemporary current. As a suitable alternative to deletion, we could source a few sentences from that in the relevant section rather than having no mention at all. czar 13:25, 15 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

  I think this is a suitable alternative to deletion. --Grnrchst (talk) 16:36, 15 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

• Merge per czar. That's a good location; I was hesitant about putting it in postcolonialism. I think the text will need some massaging to fit (I don't think we want to call it a "tendency"?), but it could even be expanded a bit there. -- asilvering (talk) 18:04, 16 December 2024 (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.