Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of countries by future population (United Nations, medium fertility variant)

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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 deleted as a WP:COPYVIO. This is likely to be an unpopular result, but as RoySmith and Britishfinance point out in the discussion, copyright expertise is required to assess the copyright status of this article, and I am in the unfortunate position of being an admin with the requisite expertise. While it is true that copyright can not inhere to lists of facts, this article is not a list of facts. It is a list of speculations, based on factors chosen by its authors. While these factors may have been chosen with an intent to make the most accurate projections, there is still substantial personal creativity involved in deciding which factors to include and which of the immeasurable set of all possible factors to exclude. This deletion is without prejudice to the creation of an article about this list of projections, which could in context make a fair use discussion replicating a sampling of these factors, and broadly relaying their conclusions. However, replication of the numbers arrived at by the author here, no matter how formatted, lifts this information out of the body of work that Wikipedia is able to publish under its license. As a final thought, the use of this or any material in Wikipedia to further any third-party agenda is irrelevant, and properly rejected as a basis for deletion. bd2412 T 20:23, 29 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

List of countries by future population (United Nations, medium fertility variant)

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List_of_countries_by_future_population_(United_Nations,_medium_fertility_variant) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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Why the page should be deleted Mystery42 (talk) 16:41, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This page is just a copypaste of some UN report. There are no other references, the "references" are only footnotes from the report and other footnotes by some Wikipedia people. Everyone could just get this directly from the UN. If it is relevant to some other article, they need not reference this article, but they can simply refer to the UN report. In my eyes, the technical problem is that this article is irrelevant and this is a reason to delete this article.

The bigger problem is: Context is missing. There is no discussion of the methods, no criticism, not even the context of why this table was created and what purpose it is supposed to be used for. This data necessarily is highly speculative. Noone can estimate the world's population without dubious theoretical assumptions. This is obvious for any academic, but it might not be obvious to children or people with bad access to education. Of course, Wikipedia should educate these groups, but this context-free stub is not going to educate them. It is rather going to make them believe: "This is on Wikipedia, even UN, there is no criticism section, so this is probably objectively true."

This becomes clear when we see that the shooter of Christchurch refers to this article in his manifesto (which will lead many people to this page). Of course, the shooter's reference is not a reason to remove this article. But it is obvious that people like him just take this table to be objective truth, just like the actual population numbers from last year.

The worse problem is: It just appears as if this was a propaganda page by people with the same ideology as the shooter. Just look at the phrase in brackets: "(which is the *recommended* one)". This has not been written by someone who wanted to inform other people, but rather by someone who desperately wanted to persuade other people.

So – as there are clear technical reasons to delete this page –, I suggest doing so. (In that case, better put a note in there, linking to this discussion, so that people do not think Wikipedia is censoring facts because they support an unpopular opinion. This page URL will be called by many people and they would then wonder. It should be clear that this page simply does not make sense for technical reasons.)

The technical reason is: This page is unnecessary and it makes figures look uncontroversial which are not uncontroversial. An alternative would be to extend this page, but I do not see a reason for that at the moment. Mystery42 (talk) 16:41, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but that is not a valid deletion argument. By your logic, EVERY article is copyvio because they all (or nearly all) use copyrighted works as sources. We are certainly allowed to use data to write articles. ‡ Єl Cid of ᐺalencia ᐐT₳LKᐬ 03:23, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
This is a functional copy-and-paste of the report. The logic isn't wrong. We could use this as a reference, but we can't copy the table per the U.N. copyright/terms of use. SportingFlyer T·C 04:15, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. North America1000 00:03, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. North America1000 00:04, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Speedy Delete I agree this is a copyvio. It appears clear from the U.N. website the United Nations does not allow this data to be redistributed (which we are clearly doing) without permission. SportingFlyer T·C 04:14, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, it's clear this is still a copyvio. The Excel spreadsheet this article is completely based on has a copyright with an "all rights reserved" on it, which includes redistribution or creating derivative works. The database rights isn't on point, because you imply databases that aren't covered by that law do not fall under copyright, which is incorrect (if I have this right that actually creates a separate right if you have a database of facts you have worked to compile, and facts cannot be copyrighted.) Further, the data are estimates and not facts so can be copyrighted as they are the work of the U.N. SportingFlyer T·C 16:23, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    Your argument about estimates almost makes sense, but not when there is no originality involved. A set of predictions made by a scientific procedure are meant to be reproducible by anyone who does the same thing. We have many such tables - electronegativity, Mohs hardness scale, oxidation state etc. The number does not have to be a direct observation - a 'fact' you might say -- it can be highly processed by algorithms or clever chemists into some index; nonetheless, if the author didn't have the option to just go into the table and change some numbers for the heck of it, it cannot be a creative work. Wnt (talk) 19:08, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well, databases are copyrightable in the U.S. - see "compilation" here [1]. Even if the facts in the databases aren't copyrightable (assuming the data are "facts" the database itself can be. And in any case, "unoriginal" databases have been held in the past as breach of contracts where distribution occurs through a license even though the work itself isn't available for copyright. In this case, it's crystal clear the UN license is incompatible with the Wikipedia license. See Wikipedia:Non-free_content. SportingFlyer T·C 21:31, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    Wikipedia certainly cannot breach a contract it didn't make. Your argument about "compilation" relies on some indication that the authors compiled and selected their original population data from many different sources in a unique and idiosyncratic way rather than using a few public data sets to base their projections; admittedly I haven't found out enough about the set to disprove that, but I'm not convinced it's true either. Wnt (talk) 23:25, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • But it can breach a license, which is, in essence if not in fact, a contract to use the data. An argument saying the UN copyright/license is invalid because of a legal theory which may or may not be correct isn't an argument to keep per our non-free content terms. SportingFlyer T·C 23:29, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    Claiming copyrights on uncopyrightable material based on "a legal theory which may or may not be correct" is called copyfraud. Every day people are duped into paying royalties on public domain content, and there's no law against it. Even so, I don't see the UN here complaining - I see you propounding what sounds like an overwrought extension of copyrights even beyond their usual miserable nature. Wnt (talk) 0f7:15, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Yes, but again, you're assuming a court would assume the information provided in the table is not creative. Per Wikipedia:Copyright in lists, this is an instance where the UN is not reporting facts, but rather collecting data from a number of different sources and providing their own estimate. It could be considered roughly equivalent to the CCC Information Services case mentioned in that link. It really boils down to whether these have been created by "repeatable calculation" or by "value judgments," and a reading of the methodology here, especially page 5 [2], means that we're much closer to "value judgments" than "repeatable calculations." SportingFlyer T·C 21:00, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Downloading the UN data and uploading here is against their terms of use but my thoughts are that it is not a breach of copyright because the information has been sufficiently transformed. I think WP policy is to respect copyright but not terms of use. I'm not sure because I personally try to respect both. Database rights? No idea. I'm not at all sure how useful this table is (would it not be better to discuss the area of interest in an article and link to the UN?) but I don't think that is an sufficient reason for deletion. Thincat (talk) 12:36, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • We haven't "transformed" the work at all, simply reformatted it. SportingFlyer T·C 16:23, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, maybe you are right. The spreadsheet I looked at (with the same figures) was in quite a different format but perhaps I looked at the wrong one. Another consideration: these figures are not merely counted numbers, i.e. not "facts". Rather, they have been produced using a (mathematical) process that is arguably "creative" to a lawyer. And perhaps a valid copyright claim can be made on that basis. I don't know. Thincat (talk) 16:37, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    A number can be a valid scientific observation or estimate, or it can be a creative work of the human imagination, but it can't be both. Creativity implied someone had an option to change those numbers to tell some other story. Wnt (talk) 19:13, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Discussion should focus on notability, and on whether these data are copyrightable. Neither is particularly clear from the discussion above.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Sandstein 09:14, 28 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete as WP:RAWDATA. I'm also unable to figure out exactly what source was used. There's an external link that gets you to https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/Population/, where you can find a large number of spreadsheets. I can't tell which of those was used to generate this table, so fails WP:V in its current state. I don't honestly know if this is a WP:CV, but it certainly violates the UN's Terms Of Use, which says, The United Nations grants permission to Users to visit the Site and to download and copy the information, documents and materials (collectively, “Materials”) from the Site for the User’s personal, non-commercial use, without any right to resell or redistribute them or to compile or create derivative works. This clearly violates that. -- RoySmith (talk) 13:23, 28 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Found the source spreadsheet, which the first one on the "Probabilistic Projections" tab ([3]). I think if the article survives AfD, then the sourcing and additional methodoligy criteria of how this data was constructed should be added to the WP article so that a reader can see exactly where it came from, and what it represents (e.g. assumptions etc.). Otherwise it is useless to a reader, and just junk. Britishfinance (talk) 16:22, 28 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I understand the COPYVIO concerns, however, I feel that we need some specialist input here; particularly given that there are many WP articles that are effectively "data tables" of other global NGO-type organistations (e.g. our GDP-GNI data tables, and many many more). Should we ping a WP copyvio specialist to this AfD (e.g Dianna)? If we can sort the copyvio one way or another (e.g. is it a WP:G12 or not), then now that I have found the source, we could repair this article. It is very intersting and informative imho. Britishfinance (talk) 16:22, 28 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I am not an expert on copyright / licensing; I certainly agree that we should have input from somebody who is. -- RoySmith (talk) 20:27, 28 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, as the question here really isn't whether it's notable but whether the methodology used by the U.N. is "creative" or whether these are being presented as facts. If there's "creativity" in the methodology (and I think there is), especially given the U.N. license then it's a copyvio. SportingFlyer T·C 00:00, 29 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Diannaa: Per above comments (and additional comment below re WP:NFC); could we get some expert opinion on the COPYVIO issues raised in this AfD, before we try to address the other issues on sourcing etc. thanks Britishfinance (talk)
  • Keep: COPYVIO shouldn't be a concern here as lists or data sets don't apply, only prose, per WP:NFC. And if citing Wikipedia in a shooting manifesto is grounds for deletion then I think we'd see an increase in shootings. (For the humour-deficient, I'm saying the argument that we should delete it because it was cited in the Christchurch shooter's manifesto is rubbish.) SITH (talk) 20:14, 28 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: I'd like some discussion on how this passes the NFC and whether data that is presumably a unique data set can be creative or not. What is the copyright status of the original UN report?
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Spartaz Humbug! 19:23, 29 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete: At first it appeared to me that it was a simple list of raw data, which would not contain any creative content, and thus not be copyrightable. However (after being pinged to offer an opinion and thinking about it for a few hours) I don't think that's actually the case. Countries are grouped as "medium-fertility" if their children per woman is declining but is still somewhere above 2.1 per woman. That seems straightforward enough, but this page, which describes the process of obtaining the final data, says that a number of different variables unique to each country such as mortality, AIDS status, and migration are taken into account to obtain the final result. Therefore my opinion is that the data in this series of UN tables contain enough creative expression to qualify for copyright protection and should not be republished here in their entirety. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 19:45, 29 March 2019 (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.
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