Wikipedia - POV in progress

I'm proud of Wikipedia. I'm an active contributor to the website. I edit vandalism, and moderate the deletion of articles and categories. In their phrasing, I'm "deletionist." Sort of the same terminology that the political world uses for "capitalist." I've decided to try a little experiment on Wikipedia just to see how "neutral-point-of-view" it really is.

I dug through the political peat of Wikipedia and found - lo and behold - a user category of sorts. Wikipedians, as part of a system of categorization, entered themselves in certain sets of categories to distinguished their encyclopedic preferences - that is, stances on interests, politics, projects, etc.. I found a category that said, in plain terms, "Wikipedians who are skeptical of anthropogenic global warming." To those who don't speak PC, it's the sane people left in this world who believe that global warming isn't actually manmade.

As a deletion moderator, my job is to remove categories that are redundant, all-inclusive, ad-hominem, or unencyclopedic. The AFD debate consists of a nominator's rationale. From that point on, people join the discussion establishing consensus as to whether or not it should be deleted, kept, merged, etc.. A debate is not determined by majority vote (though some people still do vote, as history has proved in the past that a head count can swing a debate no matter what). So, as a Freudian experiment, I put it up for deletion.

Here is the debate in a nutshell as of April 30, 2007, 4:51 PM EST.

NOMINATOR'S RATIONALE :

This is clearly a NOT (all-inclusive) category, which is prohibited by precedence based on previous user categories. Why deny fact, anyway?

• Delete as nominator.--WaltCip 04:02, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
• Delete of course. YechielMan 17:32, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
• Delete, category does not help encyclopedia building. VegaDark 19:01, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
• Delete a "not" category. Not useful. 00:12, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
• Delete as "not" category. Although "Fact" is not proven - a strong correlation, yes - and skeptic does not mean deny. Barfbagger 17:38, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. I'm not sure what a NOT category is, but "denying fact" is simply not what this category is (see the non-trivial list at Scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming). It's also worth noting that skepticism and denial are not the same. If we allow Category:Global warming skeptics to list notable people who are skeptical, why not allow an analogous category for users? This category is easily encyclopedic as there are many articles that the skeptics could collaborate on (the one listed above, and the pages of leading skeptics like Khabibullo Ismailovich Abdusamatov). Also, I've used this category to get help in talks/discussions trying to keep Global Warming and related articles non-POV, because the skeptics tend to get railroaded in those discussions. Oren0 20:16, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

• Please do not use Wikilawyering and WP:ILIKEIT to foster your arguments.--WaltCip 20:51, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

• Delete per Oren0's reasons. It seems to be used as a tool for POV-pushing. --Stephan Schulz 20:38, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Note canvassing by OrenO, BTW [1] and [2] William M. Connolley 20:35, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. Is Wikipedia really that "neutral-point-of-view"? Is this exercise in deletion merely business as usual, or is it a chance to squash the "nonbelievers"?

I'll keep this updated. I'm liking it every minute.