Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wife selling (2nd nomination)

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. (non-admin closure) Alpha_Quadrant ^(talk) 03:45, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

I've been reviewing this article as per a discussion about this particular closure, and comments regarding how it was possibly inappropriate. I have reviewed this AfD, and find the AfD was closed correctly as a keep. The arguments I have seen below seem to revolve around the actual definition of "Wife selling" and what is included in that and not, and also geographic locations where this occurred, and sexism + WP:NPOV in this article. I won't pretend like I understand it all 100% absolutely, but it seems to me that even if a group did it or not ('not' being individuals practicing all over the place), it still has occurred from what looks like to me in several places none the less, and doesn't challenge it's notability. Whether the sources are all correct or not, I think is beyond the scope of possible discussion here and short of us getting an expert, is the best we can do. The possible sources to back up and support certain parts of the text I think is still up for discussion and should continue, but as said below we are here to improve the encyclopedia, not just delete it. I also see some points below that shockingly have some editors losing civility and I don't endorse that with this discussion, and should be averted. But the general consensus on this article, and the arguments reaching for and against, turn to be a keep. Also remember, NPOV and Notability can be fixed, and are not primary reasons to delete or turn an article to a dab. As for the original research and the synthesis of sources, again this is something that can be discussed and fixed. I am not blowing them over, they are important in themselves, but at the moment I would have to go to a library and pull out a book and look at it to tell whether this is happening, and administrators are not here to 'moderate' content per what they think a book says, the editors should be able to do this themselves. If needed this can go to Dispute resolution or another relevant noticeboard and get community comment, not just one administrator. Also as should be clearly obvious this is not an endorsement of the current article, but as an editable article that can be improved, as any other Wikipedia article should be viewed. -- DQ (t) (e) 14:00, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Wife selling

AfDs for this article:

• Articles for deletion/Wife selling
• Articles for deletion/Wife selling (2nd nomination)

Wife selling (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

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This is not an article and never could be. It is simply a collection of original research, synthesis and perhaps asides in some feminist books. The fact that various legal systems have treated women as property is not relevant, unless there are scholarly historical sources discussing the practice of "wife selling". There is to my (somewhat educated) knowledge, no record of this in antiquity. The whole "Schmidt" quotes about the Judeo-Christian tradition treating woman as property is true, but irrelevant. Sexism is not "wife selling". The whole things seems to be original research either of the creator or of one German scholar.

Please disregard the first nomination which seems to have been a joke. Scott Mac 00:05, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

The first nomination was for a different article, now renamed wife selling (English custom), which attracted some controversy after being the April 1 TFA, not this article. Malleus Fatuorum 00:37, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Well can we redirect this article to wife selling (English custom) until such times as someone writes a competent general article (if that ever happens).--Scott Mac 00:40, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

No, I'm afraid we can't as someone wrote wife selling (Chinese custom) to make a point. The only two options are to revert this article to the disambiguation page it was or to write a proper general article on the subject, which this clearly is not. Malleus Fatuorum 01:08, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

OK< either works for me. Shall we close this and revert for now?--Scott Mac 01:40, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm afraid that would cause all sorts of problems as well. For some reason this has become a bit of a battleground. Malleus Fatuorum 02:29, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Sexuality and gender-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:53, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

• Revert to disambiguation page. It may well be possible to write a general article on this subject, and I have made some suggestions as to how that might be done, but this article is not it. Malleus Fatuorum 02:29, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

• Keep (I'm the principal editor of the current revision):
  • The article is based on secondary sources and is not original research, synthesized, or based on a source's trivial content. Speculating that it must be without pointing to anything in particular does not help me address any concern.
  • No source author made anything up, to my knowledge, that is relied on for the article.
  • If anyone believes any statement in the article violates any standard, please point to it. The article's talk page is available for that.
  • Wife selling occurred long ago, with dating in the article where found in sourcing. The article is not limited to a time period and doesn't say "antiquity" or contain the string "antiqu", so the nominator's doubts are not necessarily contradicted.
  • Feminist sources have been part of scholarship for decades and are accepted for Wikipedia.
  • I agree that "[s]exism is not 'wife selling'", but that was not in the article. However, the opposite, that wife selling is sexist, is true within Wikipedia's definition of sexism, and supplying sourcing to show that is a legitimate part of Wikipedia. If anyone has found a source showing that wife selling is nonsexist, please post it. If sourcing supports both views, both can and should be stated in the article.
  • The property concept underlies the sexism, so a discussion of people as property is relevant to wife selling as sexist. (I'm not sure what one could sell that isn't property. Even the sale of someone's service means the service is property.)
  • The article would normally be much more comprehensive except for a decision that the English custom should be in a separate article and then that the Chinese article should also be separate (I'm not questioning that decision set here). Since wife selling has also been reported as having occurred elsewhere in the world and the topic is notable, the wife selling article (then a disambiguator page) was the most fitting place for it, and it still serves to disambiguate, too.
  • I did include some history which an editor deleted prior to nominating the AfD; that part of the complaint is therefore irrelevant, even though the deletion remains appropriate for discussion on the article's talk page.
  • It is not our practice to delete articles so editors can write replacement articles on the same subjects. Instead, we should edit existing articles within existing standards.
  • All sources that fit Wikipedia's standards are acceptable for this article. Later, if and when content gets unwieldy and the article length limit is nearly reached, a narrower consensus may be developed, but doing so now would be premature. The full range of acceptable sources should be considered.
  • To encourage editors to add content, the article has already been marked as a stub.
• Nick Levinson (talk) 08:05, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

• • You are right that a redirection, or change to disambiguate, could have happened on the talk page. Nevertheless, that's what needs to happen. The article as it stands is almost all simply the research of one source: Schmidt. Is he notable enough for his views to be recorded in an encyclopedia? The point about antiquity, is that there was a whole lot of stuff about women being regarded as property in Roman Law. That is true, as it is for many legal systems. However, it belongs in an article on Roman Law, or possible "Woman as property" or maybe "sexist" (although that looks like a POV boo word) it does not belong on an article on "Wife selling" unless there's some scholarly evidence that Romans sold their wives - to my knowledge there is not. Other than the national specific articles, is there any evidence of wife selling, or any discusison about it other than in the work of Schmidt?--Scott Mac 12:56, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
    • The other problem here is that the intoductions says we are talking about wives sold by their husbands to new husbands, whereas it is not clear that some of the instances cited are not references to wives being sold into slavery or serfdom - which slightly different.--Scott Mac 13:52, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

• Turn into a dab page Some parts of the article are concerning. Taking the example of the Romans and manus before it suggests there may be issues of coatracking. It didn't explicitly mention wife selling, just that a woman who married with manus were in the power of her husband. As such, it raises issues of WP:OR and WP:SYNTH, unless Schmidt went into greater detail and mentioned the Romans selling their wives, in which case it was poorly written. Nev1 (talk) 16:50, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

• • Reply by the principal editor:
    • Three sources are now provided; two were there before the nomination, although Schmidt's was and is the main one so far. We don't bar single-source articles that otherwise qualify, although we prefer more sources, and that's partly why two more are in the article.
    • If we globalized the article, as is normally expected in Wikipedia, the sources in the nationally specific articles would be counted as well. Wikipedia is not primarily organized by nation, but by notable subject, and wife selling wherever it happened is a notable subject, as shown by the roughly a dozen sources cited in the three articles on the subject. Wife selling based on national/nonnational customs other than those of U.K. and China is part of the phenomenon of wife selling, thus warranting an article, with which subarticles that are nationally specific can be provided.
    • No source author has to be notable; otherwise, most Wikipedia content would be gone. Schmidt is a sociologist and the source is secondary and substantial and meets Wikipedia's standards.
    • All of the sources are accurately quoted or paraphrased; nothing needed for the article was omitted and all citations are provided. The contrary conditional charge is speculative and serious; if anyone believes it applicable, please quote the source believed misrepresented.
    • The nominator had already deleted the Roman text before the nomination and I did not propose restoring it, because I thought the case for the material could be made either way: it's foundational history (Roman history and law strongly influenced Europe) but another article could cover it and be linked to. At any rate, its deletion prior to nomination and its being a focus of the nomination is contradictory because article deletions are not based on content that used to be in articles, or most Wikipedia articles now standing would now be gone.
    • Whether sexism is a POV word has already been settled by Wikipedia's decision to maintain a category for it, even after a discussion. The article as a whole has to be neutral and categorizing it into sexism or misogyny doesn't make it not neutral; indeed, categorization in all appropriate categories is expected. It is not required, or generally possible, for every statement in an article to be neutral; rather, statements are to be balanced according to a balancing of sources. If a source says the practice was nonsexist, that should be added, but if there's no such source that can be cited then we still report what is sourced and categorize accordingly, and the article is still then neutral.
    • On occurrence in another country cited to other than Schmidt, it's in the article since before the nominator's last post. I added a report about India, about which case I only recently learned. It's a journalistic report that, in addition to providing direct interviews, mentions an Indian government report.
    • With your point about the lede that wife selling could have occurred to other than new husbands, I agree, and right after reading your comment I corrected the lede accordingly. Thank you for bringing it up.
  • Nick Levinson (talk) 19:26, 16 October 2011 (UTC) (Corrected grammar and replaced "cites" with "mentions" for a government report: 19:44, 16 October 2011 (UTC))

• Regarding coat-racking: I wasn't disputing that the information was not in the sources, it was after all quoted, just the relevance. Does Schmidt say the Romans practised wife selling? Nev1 (talk) 20:19, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

• I supplied the Roman content (on the husband's power over his wife and his right to repudiate her without her having a corresponding right against him) as history relevant to wife selling. I had no intention of extending what Schmidt said on point to something he did not say within his attribution and did not; rather, I supplied it as background. It was not important enough to retain in the article, but, as it did not deneutralize the article, it was not coatracking. Since it was deleted before the nomination and, to my knowledge, has not been proposed by anyone for re-adding, its relevance to this AfD is unknown. Nick Levinson (talk) 05:19, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

• It was an example of the problems with the article since its inception. The way the information was presented gave the impression that the Romans practised wife selling rather than conveyed as background detail. Another example is the final sentence of the criticism section. How does Schmidt relate "sexist theology" to wife selling? Does he suggest that wife selling was inevitable under sexist theologies? Nev1 (talk) 11:35, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

• The article was never a celebration of Schmidt; Schmidt is a source. The more relevant question is what is known about the subject of wife selling. Schmidt contributed to that knowledge with a citable source, and I don't apologize for providing it, but also don't object to its past deletion. If only a rephrasing would have provided better clarity, as your comment hints, that is a better and more frequent solution than article deletion. An example consisting of content deleted before nomination is not relevant, since probably most articles have had worse content that was later deleted, such as vandalized articles, and we don't delete articles because they had been vandalized and then reverted to good content.
• The Criticism section clarifies (as of when you posted) that wife selling is sexist because of the property relationship. Inevitability is not necessary. An average person doesn't inevitably get cancer from smoking tobacco but its relationship is important nonetheless. Normative sexism is relevant to wife selling (absent husband selling, of which, for the English custom, source author Thompson found no more than 5 cases compared to some 400 wife selling cases). Arguably, the last sentence could be moved up within the section.
• Nick Levinson (talk) 16:03, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

• I asked what the relevance of "sexist theology" was and you have failed to address the issue. As well as avoiding the matter, you seem to have misunderstood my point. I was not stating that inevitability was or had to be involved, I was asking for Schmidt's explanation of the link between sexist theology and wife selling and proffered an (unrealistic) example. Serious concerns about the construction of the article remain. Nev1 (talk) 17:39, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

• The subjection of wives to sale by husbands was, according to Schmidt as given in the article, "a consequence of her being a man's property", based on a religious Commandment and accompanied by religious believers' "produc[ed] ... 'sexist theology'", and inferiority and inequality are "'negative'". Since that is about the subjecting of wives to sale by husbands, that describes wife selling, at least in Hebrew/Christian communities. If wife selling is criticizable as sexist, that criticism may be given, and Schmidt made a citable connection. Nev1, if you were proferring that example in your post as an "unrealistic" example, your intent was reasonably misunderstood, and hopefully you'll choose better examples in the future. Any other concerns with the article can be addressed, as they have been when identified. Nick Levinson (talk) 15:42, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

• Wives were never "property" (res) in ancient Rome; in the Archaic period, a wife as well as a man's SONS and daughters were subject to the male head of household's absolute legal power (paterfamilias). But this is not the same as being "property" as slaves were, and wives were not "sold" (unless you count these shenanigans or nexum, debt bondage). Theoretically, the paterfamilias could sell his children into slavery, and presumably his wife, but this was, um, frowned upon among respectable families. In the period we most often think of when we hear "ancient Rome" (2nd century BC–2nd century AD), women had clearly delineated legal rights, could own property and conduct business, retained their own property when they divorced, and were considered part of their original birth family, never subject to their husband's absolute authority. Cynwolfe (talk) 21:54, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

• An exchange is no less a sale because payment is by debt relief. It is studied differently in history because debt characteristically differs from cash, but a wife sale is not limited to cash sales.
• The Holy Roman Empire, of roughly a millennium-plus later, may be more relevant.
• A conflict among sources justifies citing all significant views in the article. If one good source says wife sales occurred in a community and another says they did not, both can be reported. If an editor trusts some sources more than others, that the latter meet Wikipedia's standards means both sets of sources can and should still be cited, with the key differences in views stated. Please provide the citations for the positions.
• Frowns among the respected are not the same as sales not occurring. The respected in many cultures were often people with more financial security and thus less likelihood of selling wives if that option was known. The English custom was practiced among the working class and not generally the aristocracy, who had other choices.
• Marcia's case seems too uncertain for use. If nexum was for self or son only, then it probably doesn't belong in the article, although related.
• Nick Levinson (talk) 05:19, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

• Keep. I've merged in Wife selling (Chinese custom) and added a summary from Wife selling (English custom). This is standard article organization per summary style and would have been followed from the beginning, except for the obstinacy of the editors at Wife selling (English custom) (previously Wife selling) who refused to either integrate content from other cultures or re-title their article until I created Wife selling (Chinese custom) to force the issue. Kaldari (talk) 20:32, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
  • Quite. You created a rubbish article to make a point, as I said earlier. Malleus Fatuorum 21:02, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
    • What's wrong with the article I created? Do you really believe that Wife selling was only a custom in England? Kaldari (talk) 04:27, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
      • I don't agree with Malleus's characterization of the article as rubbish, but what he "believes" is beside the point anyway. I would focus on "custom": even if scattered incidents can be documented elsewhere, that doesn't constitute a socially approved "custom". If men sold their wives (or children) because of financial pressures, as with debt bondage, this is an issue of poverty and class inequity. (That seems to be the case in the India section.) Men sold themselves into indentured servitude as well. "Wife selling" is a custom only if an identifiable group practices it regularly. RS indicate that wife selling is an identifiable practice in China, because the Qing code addressed it, for instance. The parts of the article not about England and China so far don't stand up to scrutiny. Cynwolfe (talk) 13:01, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
        • I referred to it as a practice, rather than as a custom, except for the English and Chinese customs. I erred earlier, in the lede, and corrected it before your post about it.
        • Being a practice and not a custom, while a valid distinction for study, makes wife selling no less notable for Wikipedia.
        • It was a class/poverty issue, but that doesn't deny that it was wife selling, and if wives were sold far more often than were husbands then sexism is also an issue, whether starting at the point of sale or earlier leading to wife selling. The only husband selling I know of is in the English custom, with a frequency of just over 1 percent.
        • Husbands selling themselves is qualitatively different from wife selling in that one is about selling oneself and the other is about selling another person. When sales of selves are almost always of husbands and sales of spouses are almost always of wives, the former is relatively autonomous and the latter is not, disadvantaging the wives, thus it's a sexist practice.
        • You have more sources that illuminate the subject. Feel free to add them. All significant views are reportable. In other words, there is not a duty to arrive at just one view or the other. If a view is that of a significant minority, it is supposed to be reported along with the mainstream view, with an eye for due weight to each view.
        • Nick Levinson (talk) 16:03, 19 October 2011 (UTC) (Minor correction: 16:54, 19 October 2011 (UTC))
• Keep, following improvements (globalization) by Kaldari. Binksternet (talk) 21:34, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
• Revert to dab. So far, I'm not finding evidence that "wife selling" exists as an identifiable topic outside the English and Chinese customs (there are RS for each of these), if you exclude bride-buying; since the English and Chinese customs are culturally independent, I see no reason to consolidate them. The India section conflates debt bondage with "wife selling." The section Wife selling#Criticism says that Pope Gregory VII condemned it, but the source I've found on this indicates that his remarks were directed at the English custom. It says the Church at times supported wife selling, but it doesn't say where or when or how the wife selling occurred. I also question whether the ancient Germans sold their wives to the Romans; I can't find a source for this, and Tacitus contradicts this explicitly in Germania 8. At the same time, I'm extremely weary of the claim that "neutrality" requires us to deny the existence of sexism or misogyny. What neutrality requires is that we not impose our own political views on the sources we use, and instead represent them accurately. Still, I'm not able to verify this topic. Cynwolfe (talk) 21:54, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

• If the Papal critique was limited to the English custom (I don't have that information), then it probably should be moved to the English custom article. If his critique was of anyone else's practice with or without the English, then it should stay. If you have a source that changes the essence of his critique, then we should post it, probably alongside the present citation, for balance in understanding the Papal position.
• The Tacitus information may belong in the article. If that can be provided in a form suitable for posting, please do; it can go alongside existing content.
• We're not trying to say that an author said the practice was sexist when the word wasn't used by that author. Categorizing does not depend on attribution to a person as asserting category membership. If what sources describe fits the definition of a word, then the word may be used (without quotation marks) for that description.
• Other points were addressed above.
• Nick Levinson (talk) 05:19, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

You haven't addressed my points at all, and I'm disappointed that you think so. (The thing about Marcia was a jest; clearly she was in on the scam.) In one article I worked on, I've had to revert the deletion of the word "misogynistic" three times. The phrase was "misogynistic slang" to describe a particular Latin word for "prostitute." Now, Latin has dozens of words for "prostitute"; some are meant to be degrading and contemptuous, some are neutral, and some are playful or even affectionate. The modern scholarship I cited (which was on law and linguistics, and not from the perspective of feminist theory) explicitly labeled this word "misogynistic"; an ancient Roman would've understood that he chose this word for "prostitute" instead of one of the others available to him because it expressed contempt. When some WP editors see the word "misogyny", however, they automatically censor it. Androcentric scholarship needs to be balanced by feminist criticism. And yet when you abuse scholarship in order to make a political point, you only bolster the misogyny-deniers, and make it harder for those of us who do women's history from a neutral point of view with the goal of understanding and representing women's lives in the past. Apart from the English and Chinese material, the article on "wife selling" simply lacks sufficient scholarship. It relies far too much on Schmidt. I can only find one source that mentions Gregory's letter to Archbishop Lanfranc on "wife selling" (which for all I know is where Schmidt gets this crazy notion that the ancient Germans sold their wives to the Romans),[1] but yes, it's in reference to England. Wikipedia does not publish the assertion of a single scholar that cannot be confirmed by either primary evidence or other scholarship; that's most certainly fringe at its finest. Cynwolfe (talk) 13:01, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

The words misogyny and sexism are indeed inflammatory in Wikipedia, but they're the words we have for categorizing. In other contexts, we can use a phrase or a paragraph and that might be either more or less inflammatory, but that option does not apply to categorizing. The denials are in error and effectively create a demand for research and clarity to show what already fits the definitions of the two terms, and even that might not be enough; the wife selling (English custom) article already had content sufficient for either category and yet a few editors are against both categories.

I didn't abuse scholarship. I used what was available and within standards and did so accurately. Publishers may each have different standards; Wikipedia has one set. A physics journal may not accept many citations to medical journals and both of them may reject press citations, but those journals serve different purposes. Wikipedia draws on a wider range of sources. I used Schmidt because his work was available; I'm happy to use more when available. For frequently-published points, citing more sources is feasible, but if only one source is available then we can still cite that one.

For where Schmidt got his information about the Germans, I don't know if you used n. 4 in this article revision (preceding your post). Since he cites something with a title that appears to be in German, I assume the cited work is itself in German; if so, I'm not qualified to read it, but we can accept his judgment of the cited work, that being a norm of Wikipedia on secondary sources and the analyses and evaluations they contain.

Whether the Papal letter was on the English custom was not my question; whether it was only on the English custom was. The "only" mattered for deciding which article should reference it. For example, if the letter was about the practice anywhere even with special attention to that in England, then it was not only on England and therefore should be referenced in the global article.

WP:FRINGE applies to that which is contrary to the mainstream. In this case, silence is the mainstream, not necessarily because of a plot but more likely because studies tend to focus on current phenomena and those in history that are relevant to the present day. That a subject is studied by only one source does not make its content fringe.

Nick Levinson (talk) 16:03, 19 October 2011 (UTC) (Minor corrections: 16:54, 19 October 2011 (UTC))

• Keep Kaldari has done a great job at improving it and I think when you compare it to other subjects that probably have Wikipedia articles about them, with less quality citations, isn't fringe. The page that exists is one of the best resources online for this subject, which is really wonderful in itself. Of course the article can be improved, and that will happen with time, as with all articles, but, to delete it would of course disallow that. It's also another historical form of possible slavery and/or human rights concerns, like bride-buying, which has its own article. I am interested if there is any evidence about wife selling in Indigenous cultures of the Western hemisphere? Looking forward to seeing this article being kept and improved. SarahStierch (talk) 13:52, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

OK, name one society other than England and China in which "wife selling" was a documentable practice among an identifiable social group, and describe both (A) what the modern scholarship says and (B) what kind of primary evidence they're using. That is what I'm not seeing in the current article. This is no diss of Kaldari, whom I admire and respect. Pace Nick above, for "wife selling" to exist as a practice other than debt bondage or indentured servitude, it has to be shown that there was a particular and regular practice of a husband selling his wife that can be distinguished from poor, desperate or depraved people selling themselves or members of their family in general into forms of servitude (within which I would include sexual servitude or prostitution). Nobody seems able to point to these societies, other than Schmidt's vague assertions (which are demonstrably false unnuanced in the case of Roman law, and contrary to the ancient testimonia in the case of the Germans). Again, it is indeed "fringe" if only one scholar says it. Cynwolfe (talk) 14:10, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

To cite a secondary source does not require us to cite the primary sourcing upon which it relies; indeed, a statement in a secondary source can be secondary even though not easily traceable to a primary source. It is, for Wikipedia, under WP:PSTS, secondary because it is at least one step removed from primary sourcing, meaning it can rely on primary sources or on the author's analysis and evaluations of primary sourcing. In practice, as a courtesy, I often cite the sourcing on which a source relies, but that could be said to be redundant, since a Wikipedia reader presumably can retrieve the main referent without knowing the further referents quite yet.

Wife selling is the 'selling of wives' even without desperation, prostitution, or being done by "depraved people"; indeed, the last would either be redundant because anyone doing it is depraved by definition of depravity or irrelevant to the definition of wife selling if not (although interesting as a subarea of study). That it was done to relieve debt does not alter that the wife was sold in those instances for payment, even though no cash changed hands at that moment, just as if a wife were sold on credit (payment in the past and payment in the future are both payments in an economist's view). The means and timing of payment, economic conditions, and moral comparisons are interesting for motivational and other studies, but are not of the definitional essence of wife selling.

Significant minority views are reportable in Wikipedia, albeit without undue weight . Thus, a source saying the Germans did not sell wives is reportable, as is Schmidt's saying they did.

The Roman discussion seems off-point, since if the German case is true the Romans bought wives and the article content deleted before the AfD nomination and not proposed for re-adding is irrelevant to this discussion (as explained in response to user Nev1). However, the Women in Ancient Rome article is, at first glance,interesting; perhaps, if the Roman context is somehow relevant, someone can extract sourcing from that article for use in this one, since WP articles themselves are not permitted as sources for WP articles.

Nick Levinson (talk) 16:03, 19 October 2011 (UTC) (Minor correction: 16:54, 19 October 2011 (UTC))

• Keep Per Kaldari's improvements, it looks like a valid (though imperfect, of course) introduction/summary article now. Mark Arsten (talk) 14:30, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
• Bloody hell is this argument still going on?. All this article seems to be is an attempt to force the viewpoint of an editor (or editors) who hasn't yet managed to railroad Wife selling (English custom) to being about a terrible sexist practice as opposed to an illegal alternative to divorce. And what a surprise (not) to see the Category 'Misogyny' on this article. This sort of game playing is a complete timesink for the editors who contribute a huge amount of content yet have to deal with the constant nagging and walls of text for months on end. I wouldn't blame them if they gave it all up as a bad job. Polequant (talk) 16:52, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

(Sighs, and weighs the relative merits of intellectual integrity and appearing to side with bloviating bullies) I'm finding ample RS to support Wife selling (Chinese custom). Do you have anything to contribute to the discussion? Or did you just need to get that off your chest? Cynwolfe (talk) 17:20, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm going to start a talk page for this AfD, so I can post some lengthy notes without detracting from the poll on this page. These are notes I've made the last several hours as I attempted to verify the existence of this topic and/or the existence of wife selling outside England (or English colonies) and China. I hope that those who vote "keep" will share the scholarship that has convinced them of the topic's verifiability. Cynwolfe (talk) 18:01, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Keep ... I have now been inspired by this discussion to add a series of related articles, by country, or culture, where the practise has been perpetuated: Afghanistan, Mexico, India, Vietnam, Zambia, etc.. We could pick and pull at semantics, like the differences or similarities between bride price, dowry, bride selling, bride buying, arranged marriage, child brides, royal brides, and so on. There are already a few articles on Wikipedia for some of those related topics. Since there's a historical, cultural and geographic validity to the articles being discussed in original request for deletion, then why delete them? I think they should stay. And yes, I'm completely serious about writing up the new articles....OttawaAC (talk) 00:32, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Many people use the word "semantics" in the sense that you've done, implying that it's just nit-picking. But in truth semantics is about meaning, not at all trivial. Surely you would agree that one of the primary characteristics of a practice called wife selling is that it involves a wife being sold? Not a bride or an arranged marriage, but the sale of a wife. Malleus Fatuorum 00:45, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

(Aside: I added a blurb with sources for stuff on some cultures with bride-selling practises over on the Talk tab.) Semantics: It matters and it doesn't, such are the paradoxes of life. Whether we are discussing "bride selling" implying a virgin woman or child sold to a husband, or "wife selling" implying an already deflowered woman being sold to a husband; whether we use the terms "dowry", "bride price", "child bride", "arranged marriage", "concubine" and so on, it all boils down to cultural practises that allow for women/girls to be sold like chattel to the highest bidder. They are simple variations within the wider category of merchandising a uterus that someone else (parents, human traffickers, disgruntled husbands) want to unload for a profit. In my opinion. So if there's documentation that the practise exists (or existed), I don't see a problem with keeping a standalone article that examines it in a national context. If someone thinks these are "garbage" articles because they don't have enough sources, then why not purge all stub articles? OttawaAC (talk) 01:03, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Wife-selling in Iraq is mentioned in the paragraph on "pleasure marriages" in the Women in Iraq article. Linking directly to the USA Today article...[2]. Virginity not essential, apparently. OttawaAC (talk) 01:09, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm afraid I think you've fundamentally misunderstood the concept of wife selling, certainly as it applied in England. It wasn't about selling chattels but about a practical form of divorce. Hence all of the public ritual that surrounded it. Malleus Fatuorum 01:12, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

See overleaf ... Discussion tab, I added links to solid historians' sources for wife-selling in France, United States (1) colonial era and (2) Slavic immigrants in 19C, Japan/Hawaii, Australia colonial era, and there must be more. There's a handful of standalone articles right there, and some citations that I can pop into the main article that's been red-flagged for deletion here. This looks like a hasty railroading of a significant aspect of women's history off from Wikipedia and down into the memory hole. Not much was done to seach the Web and confirm that the historical evidence was non-existent. So what is the justification for deleting this article now? Back to the semantics for a second... is "divorce" being conflated with selling chattel? Depends upon whether you're the one on the auction block, whichever word you would choose to describe the situation. OttawaAC (talk) 02:08, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

No, you didn't, you just think you did. Take the case of Slavs in the USA, for instance. What evidence have you found for a Slavic custom of wife selling? The answer is of course is none. Malleus Fatuorum 17:49, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Lies and calumny. You saw my cited source on the Discussion page (Rowland Berthoff, "Republic of the Dispossessed", published 1997), page 106, footnote 81, he lists 13 separate newspaper articles mentioning examples in the United States among Slav immigrants from the 1840s to the late 1800s. I don't think that makes the practice exceedingly rate among that social group. It appears to me to be an obvious reflection of the fact that chattel marriage and polygamy were widespread in pre-Christian Europe among the Slavs as well as Teutons and Celts (I won't do the heavy lifting for you by citing direct sources for that info, as it can be found easily enough with a Web search, with plenty of historical writing on the subject). Why else would the Slav immigrants practice the custom in America? Did they learn it from the English? Just another custom from pagan days, like Morris dancing and the Easter bunny. If there are historians' works that give evidence that's good enough for me and apparently Wikipedia, since there's a policy here against original research, so I don't feel the need to go beyond reliable historians' published work...OttawaAC (talk) 18:12, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Well, I've said what I have to say about this, but I agree with Malleus. I can't believe you would take a single mention of anti-immigrant rhetoric that accused Slavs of selling their wives in odd cases (not even as a regular practice) as proof that Slavs engaged in wife selling. The logic here seems to be that murder is a Swedish custom, because Swedes commit murders. But murder is committed among nearly all peoples; that a few individuals commit it doesn't make it an identifiable practice of a particular ethnic group or nation. Compare the hefty amount of scholarship used to compile Wife selling (English custom) to these kinds of scattered, questionable mentions that are often driven by ethnic prejudice. If a practice is verifiable and notable, it will be verifiable in more than one source; if not, it's probably a fringe position or scholarly error (these are made, and I suspect Schmidt of making them). I'm also not keen on the sloppy thinking here. Content on men selling their daughters as brides goes in bride-buying or other articles; a man's daughter is not his wife. Content on societies with a documentable practice of a man selling his wife because of the particular (quasi-)legal status of "wife" goes here. If a man might sell his wife or daughter (or son, or himself) to pay off or secure a loan, then that is not "wife selling", because it is not specific to "wifeness"; it goes in another article that deals more broadly with human trafficking or trafficking women or debt bondage. Lots of synth, coatracking, and POV-pushing going on here. Nobody's saying that there aren't men who sell their wives, but this is about defining "wife selling" as a topic distinct from bride-buying (which already exists, so this would be a content fork susceptible to a merge) or other trafficking in women. Cynwolfe (talk) 18:25, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

It's annoying to discuss this on two separate pages (wasn't my idea though). On the Discussion page you mention only 10 cases of wife-selling documented in England between 1690-1750. Over a similar timespan of a few decades, there were 13 documented cases among U.S. Slav immigrants(named in contemporary newspapers, including ones published by the immigrant communities themselves). Yet 10 cases in a larger population constitutes an "English custom" (your description), whereas 13 cases in a smaller, recent immigrant population is some kind of ethnic trashing? No, not logical. You seem to be framing Berthoff's narrative as the anti-Slav diatribe, my reading of that passage of his book is that he says there was "notoriety" attached by the American-born people to an actual verifiable practice among the immigrants; and by "odd" he's saying it was perceived as "strange". I don;t know what order of frequency is being demanded here to prove that a practice is a custom... 1/300 wives being sold? 1/50,000? Whatever the prejudices of the era, it was too repetitive to be coincidental, and I think burying the evidence is a kind of politically correct whitewashing of the historical facts. I don't think it can be denied that there's good reason to look into the possibility that the Slav "custom" was brought from Europe. Just like the English brought it to Australia and colonial America. Or is that ethnic bashing against the English in the colonies to mention that? I'd love to open up another can of worms and see if the selling of concubines as chattel counts as wife-selling (or are lesser, secondary wives not able to be counted as wife-selling?)... in Siam, the main wife could inherit the concubines and their kids and sell them after the husband died...OttawaAC (talk) 19:37, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

It can be interesting to brainstorm on such things, but concubinage already has its own article (which could use some development). My goal was to keep the focus here on criteria for deletion, and to use the talk page for wrestling with specific content arguments. "English custom" isn't "my" description; it's what Wife selling (English custom) is called. "Odd" in the sentence under consideration does not mean "strange, bizarre," but rather "unusual, happening infrequently," as in "The school escaped most of the contagious diseases going around, except for the odd case of measles"; this usage is perhaps more British than American. The issue here isn't the number of occurrences, but the amount of RS. All Berthoff says is that a few Slavs are reported to have sold their wives in late 19th-century America, which hardly supports the highly original conclusion that a Slavic custom of wife-selling dates back to pagan antiquity. (Berthoff himself isn't immigrant-bashing! He's recording what people said and did in the past. Not so long ago—some of us were actually alive then—there used to be an academic discipline called "history.") However, a sufficient accumulation of verifiable incidents that can be distinguished from bride-buying etc. might convince me to keep the article. But only if claims are confined to what the sources actually say; no leaping to original conclusions neither stated nor implied by the sources. I usually think the dangers of synth are exaggerated, but some proponents of this article seem eager to indulge in vast synthesis ("wife or daughter, dowry or debt bondage, it's all bad stuff that happens to women") with the stated goal of getting a socio-political message across. If I support the politicizing of an article because I agree with the message, how can I oppose the politicizing of an article when I find the message repugnant? Cynwolfe (talk) 23:10, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

• Convert to dab. There are two articles on local wife selling customs that should be dabbed here the rest is not appropriate for a Wikipedia article. Eluchil404 (talk) 05:35, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
• Convert to dab. This article is nothing but a hasty arrangement of text based on rather weak results from Google searches. Parrot of Doom 09:34, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

• I'm not the only editor of the article, but my general practice is to use Google, Wikipedia, and library catalogues and my knowledge of many sources I've read over the years, not in that order of priority, to identify some sources for Wikipedia and then eventually to get the sources themselves rather than rely on Google or Amazon page displays, because originals are often more reliable, being full; in some cases, generally for serials, I use full-text databases. Nick Levinson (talk) 15:42, 21 October 2011 (UTC) (Clarified by adding "general": 15:57, 21 October 2011 (UTC))

• Keep The argument for deletion is that more detailed articles on particular historical/geographic areas are possible. Very true, but that's no reason against a comprehensive summary article. DGG ( talk ) 01:10, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

There may be merit in a comprehensive summary article, but it has been demonstrated that this is not it. Nev1 (talk) 01:11, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

• Keep and cleanup, per DGG. If an article needs work, we fix it, we don't delete it. KillerChihuahua^?!? 01:05, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
  • You clean up a cesspit by emptying it, not by shoving more crap into it. Malleus Fatuorum 01:29, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
• Keep It seems clear that this is a notable topic and the rest can and should be left to the normal editing process. I note that !votes for "convert to dab" are in fact !votes for "keep". Cusop Dingle (talk) 06:26, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
• Keep. This article seems notable enough with plenty of refs. Rcsprinter (converse) 15:59, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
• Convert to dab article is about several distinct practices. Attempts to merge them are WP:OR. Stuartyeates (talk) 23:06, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
  • They're all fundamentally the selling of wives. It is neither synthesis nor original research to report them in one article. If it were, most articles in Wikipedia would be subject to that judgment, and people would be demanding that many millions of articles be combined into fewer millions. What varies between practices is some features of how husbands go about selling wives, but that doesn't change the core similarity. Nick Levinson (talk) 02:38, 23 October 2011 (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.