Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Denialism (2nd nomination)
All the arguments for deletion are spurious. (1) We have continually been given references to , but nowhere are we clearly told what has been synthesised, either in this discussion or in the article's talk page. At a guess I should say that we are supposed to infer that AIDS denialism , Holocaust denialism etc are separate, and have been arbitrarily lumped together. However, the concept of denialism (refusal to accept an empirically verifiable reality) is exactly the same in each case, and is applied to different examples.  refers to combining elements of different sources together to reach a conclusion which is not given in any of the sources: if those claiming  think this has been done then they should be able to say exactly what conclusion has been falsely reached in this way, but nowhere have they done so. To take content from sources which refer to ''denialism'' in connection with AIDS together with sources which refer to ''denialism'' in connection with the "holocaust" is not  unless doing so reaches some conclusion not found in either group of sources, such as that anyone who denies AIDS is also a holocaust denier. AS long as no such unwarranted conclusions are drawn there is nothing wrong with combining such sources, any more than in an article about trees one cannot refer to both sources on oaks and sources on sycamores. (2) We have the claim that "this word does not exist". This line of argument has been used much more on the article's talk page. The word does exist, and is used in numerous books and other works. The claim that the word does not exist seems to be based on its absence from certain dictionaries. However, the view that a word exists only if it is listed in a dictionary, although popular, is untenable. Lexicographers put words in dictionaries because they are used, and there is always a time lag between the word's coming into use and its being recorded. This issue is discussed at much greater length on the article's talk page. Curiously, the person who above says the word "does not exist" goes on '''in the same sentence''' to refer to it as a "word used exclusively in relation to HIV and AIDS (Occasionally in reference to the Holocaust)", thereby acknowledging that it is a word, and is used. The fact that the word is used only in limited contexts does not disqualify it for coverage: the word "oak" is used only in reference to one genus of trees, but that does not stop us from having an article on it. Besides, there are other uses of the term, even if less common, as has been pointed out above. (3) We are told that we need "sources ... about the term—not books and papers that use the term". No, we need sources about ''the concept to which the term refers'': that is not the same as sources about ''the term''. The article on Oak gives references to sources about oaks, not to sources about the word "oak". The quotation "reliable secondary sources such as books and papers about the term—not books and papers that use the term" taken from Wikipedia:Avoid neologisms is poorly worded: in general we do not have articles about terms (Wikipedia is not a dictionary), we have articles about the concepts referred to by the terms. That wording was introduced by
— User:cmh, 11:07, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
Stance: keep
Cited policy: WP:SYNTH||WP:SYNTH||WP:SYNTH||WP:SYNTH (Wikipedia:No original research)