Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cat flap

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 keep. 1ne 06:05, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

cat flap and doggie door

Wikipedia is not a pet magazine. The articles have alot of unverified claims. Hardee67 00:39, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment These are 2 different articles, I for one will not make one vote for 2 articles, these delete votes need to be separated. Keep Cat flap, delete doggy door. There can be no justification for deleting cat flap or yuou would open the door to a thousand and one other deletions, no encyclopedia would ignore such a subject and it could be argued this is mopre US POV pushinmg of anything that smacks of not being American in the encyclopedia, SqueakBox 00:45, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Comment — Someone re-nom these per how to list multiple related topics. Unrelated. SynergeticMaggot 01:01, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
  • They are related. Both are different types of pet doors. Hardee67 01:05, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Yes but 2 people want you to separate them so there is no reason not to, SqueakBox 01:21, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Keep both. Useful subjects. Georgia guy 01:18, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Speedy Keep Doggie door exists separately as the Cat flap community is keen on the article remaining under the name 'cat flap'. Cat flap is majoritively well sourced, and doggie door can be easily sourced. These exist in the real world and are rather common, hence appropriate to have in wikipedia. LinaMishima 02:34, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
  • comment original nominator did mark articles as AfD, but rather understandably, this was removed as suspected vandalism. Recommend being lenient to the remover, as their reasoning is very understandable. LinaMishima 02:38, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Keep, AFD is not for fixing content for you - subjects would seem to be obviously notable and have been around for quite some time. Kuru ^talk 02:46, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Strong keep, Although I do strongly agree that Wikipedia is not a pet magazine. AdamBiswanger1 02:50, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Strong keep both types of doors a well known and I don't see why they should not be here. A few articles on these subjects also does not make Wikipedia a pet magazine. --Edgelord 03:05, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Keep, So the articles have a few things needing citation, that doesn't qualify them for deletion. Dinosaur puppy 03:05, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Comment without prejudice to outcome. Is there no generally accepted inclusive term? Pet door, perhaps, which currently serves as a disambiguation page linking to the two articles at hand? Having the cat and dog versions listed seperately when they seem to be fundamentally the same thing seems, well, forkish. Serpent's Choice 05:16, 12 August 2006 (UTC) (but see extensive comment below)
  • It seems not. Pet door appears to be an Americanism. This has been discussed at length on Talk:Cat flap. Yesterdays demerges and AfDs, could be seen as just another attempt to move the page against concensus. -- Solipsist 05:29, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Keep there were five redlinks for cat flap before I created the article a year ago and there are many more links in today. There were no links for 'Pet door' nor 'Doggie door' when doggie door was created as a one line stub last October and put up for delete/merge in November. However, merging doggie door with cat flap has caused no end of trouble. There have been four page move requests, all rejected, and several page moves against concensus. Cat flap is the correct, original term, despite what American authors and dog owners think (see Talk:Cat flap for arguments ad nauseum). Nevertheless we might as well keep the two articles demerged to avoid further bickering. Personally I am getting more than a little tired of putting up with people disrupting Wikipedia to prove a point over this. -- Solipsist 05:26, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Comment and it looks like the nominator, User:Hardee67, is acting in bad faith. -- Solipsist 06:50, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Cat flap, weak merge Dog door into Cat flap. The constant pressure to Americanize any articles that have UK-variant names is irritating and harmful. Splitting out dog door from cat flap looks very much like another manoevre along these lines, rather than a good faith topic split, as the many attempts to rename cat flap to an Americanism have otherwise failed. — Matt Crypto 07:50, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

§Yikes! I wasn't aware at all of what I was walking into before reading that Talk history. Nevertheless, this POV fork (and that is what it is) has been opposed and defended by tendentious editing on both sides. Fundamentally, it is a dialect debate, with cat flap the admittedly UK-dominant term and doggie door the more familiar for US audiences. Based on the Wikipedia Manual of Style, the burden is to produce a single article under some name. The manual prefers a single, neutral article title where that is possible, such as stevedore for the docker/longshoreman issue or fixed-wing aircraft to end the aeroplane/airplane debate. Where it is not possible, the first non-stub entry is to take precedence (and the alternative reduced to a redirect), such as the petrol redirect to gasoline.
There is no debate that the cat flap article is the first authored. The question is, or should be, whether that is the appropriate final location. I have lingering concerns from reading the talk page that the repeated consensus regarding the pagemoves has been flawed. Why do I make the bold assumption that the topic has been argued in bad faith? Because the talk pages admit as much. All of the following are from the discussion regarding the original move request, which quickly brought up the suggestion to move to pet door per the manual of style (each from a different author, to avoid overly selecting one person's viewpoint):

"Which could well be the nub of the problem. If it is a British English / American English thing, it should stay at the British English naming — a) for the priority choice of English, and b) since Cat flaps were more than likely invented in England."

"So another page using a British term was lost through American intransigence to seeing "foreign" terms. We ( the non-USians) have to put up with literally thousands of them on the Encyclopaedia."

"I also think removing the American systemic bias is a very important task within wikipedia. There may be other issues than the purely English-American differences in this case that should also be considered but I would describe voting on the basis of removing that particular systemic bias from wikipedia as being responsible voting."

Are there actual cultural differences? Yes, apparently due to large differences in pet culture -- Americans are more likely to have fenced yards and allow dogs easy egress, while British cats are far more likely to be "outdoor cats" with their own access independant access. But, just as the example stevedore article explains the differences in use in the two dialects, a single article under a neutral name could do that here. Way back in that first move debate, User:Waterguy provided at least some evidence that UK companies manufacturing these devices are cognizant of pet door and use it in at least some of their advertising material. The presence or absence of dictionary entries has been the primary sourced justification for preferring cat flap (with the talk on its page grudgingly allowing the parallel construction of dog door after it was resurrected by deletion review), but Wikipedia does not consider dictionaries to be the sole determiners of term validity. After all, Wikipedia's not one of those. Other arguments (on both sides) have been based on frequency of use, but neutral, technically-inclusive terms would seem to take precedent -- both for encyclopediac value and in observation of precedent (such as the fixed-wing aircraft issue).
Clearly, this AfD is specious, bad-faith, and out of process ... but the purpose of AfD is to produce better articles. Surely there is a way to resolve this that won't fan the fires of national language furor? In its current state, I can see no future for this bifurcated article that does not involve a path to RfC or mediation... Serpent's Choice 08:15, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

• Keep NCurse _work 14:37, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Keep per above. -AMK152 15:21, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Keep' cat flap, merge doggie door to cat flap. The cat flap is a very important concept and needs to be covered in Wikipedia. JIP | Talk 18:36, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Merge doggie door into cat flap. Both items are certainly of British origin, and article name should probably reflect that. (Though I'm not sure it would be considered a "very important concept")  :) -- Huntster ^{T • @ • C} 21:09, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. Personally, I would happily delete doggie door and merge into cat flap, but the controversies over the differences are too much of a minefield. Nominating both for deletion, however, is ridiculous. -- Necrothesp 22:11, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Keep per above. I will merge them after the AfD. — Reinyday, 22:14, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Obvious keep How is it even up for AfD? Clean up articles, but these things obviously factually exist and are verifiable. rootology (T) 23:29, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Speedy Keep User:Hardee67 is a suspected sockpuppet and has since been indefinately blocked for rampant vandalism. --Jersey Devil 00:00, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
• Keep This is obviously being brought up time and time again by a few agitators. SillyWilly 01:34, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
• Merge both into Pet door and make Cat flap and Doggie door as re-directs. — Michael J 17:59, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Keep Wikipedia is not a pet magazine. It is not a Star Trek episode encyclopedia. It is not an American trainspotting magazine. And yet we have articles about all these things. Why? Because Wikipedia is, ideally, the sum of all human knowledge.--Zaorish 02:31, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Keep, if there's a content problem, improve rather than delete. Karwynn (talk) 17:13, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
• Merge and Keep as redirects to pet door per Michael J. Regionalization should be dealt with inside the article, as the two topics are not 'precisely' the same, but definitely related and there would be way too much duplication in two different articles. -- nae'blis 17:50, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
• Merge both into pet door, but the notion that these should be deleted is absurd. JDoorjam Talk 20:17, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
• OK enough of this. To reiterate. This AfD is in bad faith. You have been trolled. The nominator is most likely a sockpuppet of User:Helicoptor (and quite probably other accounts too). They have previously been involved in moving the Cat flap article against concensus and have caused a significant amount of American POV trolling on othe articles too. The conclusion of this AfD should be to restore the article to the state it was in on the 11 August. -- Solipsist 20:25, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

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.