Talk:Rat bike

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What is the specific nature of the dispute over this entry?

It's not written from a neutral point of view. Sentences like: "The ratbiker knows that todays shiny sportsbike is tomorrows forlorn wreck awaiting resurrection by cunning artistry and skill." are unencyclopedic. The article should be rewritten by somebody who knows more about motorcycles than I do... Eliot 19:05, 26 July 20

this content wirtten by kishor

I revised this page a while ago, and have found it has had several portions removed. I have readded "Bikes deliberately distressed to look like a rat bike should be refered to as fake rats." as I feel it is important to realise that deliberatly customised bikes are not rats.

this page is just awful, i wish i knew about the subject so i can re-write it, it seems like the person writing it was drunk or somethingRagingbullfrog (talk) 14:23, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Problems with this article

The basic issue with this article is that it is a set of opinions that to me appear to come from either a single source, or a small set of sources, consisting of sites like http://www.ratbike.org/ which have taken upon themselves the task of defining and policing their idea of what a particular subculture is and is not. The aspire to be arbiters of what is a "real" rat bike, but what is the basis of their authority? You see this with chopper (motorcycle), cafe racer, outlaw motorcycle gang and many others. In other words, WP:POV and lack of reliable sources.

There is coverage of rat bikes in books and mainstream news sources. The contents here should be mostly thrown out, and replaced with information that comes only from good sources. For the most part, the blogs and forums should be left out. You'd like to include them because they matter, but how can you tell if it isn't just one person's opinion? If mass numbers of forum participants do or say or think something, it's going to get reported in the MSM.

"Survival bike," as far as I can tell, is a neologism coined by one of these blogs or forums, and has no reliable sources to support it, and so should be removed and left out.--Dbratland (talk) 21:53, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

It reads like a personal reflection or essay.

I have attempted to rewrite some of the sections to read as more encyclopedic. Obviously it is difficult to find good sources to cite when discussing aesthetics. Basically what I've done is: I have broken some run on sentences into separate shorter sentences. I have removed unnecessary commas. I have taken sentences that read like a personal essay and restated them as the aesthetic values common to styles of these two motorcycle aesthetic movements. There are numerous websites that restate these aesthetic values. Perhaps someone else would like to cite references to them in this article. DasKreestof (talk) 21:56, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

It still looks like a lot of opinions and original research. You've added some weasel words which paper over the lack of sources. Such as "It is argued that this defies the organic growth into a rat bike..." It is argued? Who argues it? Does a reliable source make that argument or just some guys somewhere? " The rat bike enthusiast believes that..." Which rat bike enthusiasts, precisely? Was a survey taken? Again, this has to come from a reliable source. If it's just what your mates say, or what anonymous commenters say on a forum, it's not good enough.

Even if the subject is, well, Aesthetics -- note that Aesthetics has footnotes pointing to books and papers written by people who meet Wikipedia's criteria. Just because you're talking about cubism or expressionism or any aesthetic theory, there's no reason to not stick to what the sources say.

I think the real problem is that the lack of sources is due to the subject, rat bikes, not meeting Wikipedia's criteria for having an article. I think we probably need to propose deleting this page if no real sources can be found.--Dbratland (talk) 01:28, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

If you have the time to do something negative like nominate it for deletion, why not just spend the time citing the numerous websites about rat bikes. I never claimed to have made the article perfect. I'm too busy to take on this project. I did request that someone else quote some of the rat bike sites to make the article more encyclopedic. I think the article is a little better after my edits. I only rewrote what was there to improve the grammar. I didn't edit for content. Instead of deleting it, why not just improve it yourself? DasKreestof (talk) 19:57, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm aware of several websites about rat bikes, but which sites, if any, meet Wikipedia's standards for reliable sources? Similarly, I haven't found any books that verify the claims made in the article. All there are, that I know of, are the unverified offline citations of Easyriders. These might be good, but Easyriders magazine is unfortunately very difficult to check. There is no article index, in print or in electronic form, that I'm aware of, and no library I know of has back issues. But if you know of web sites that are independent and are written by recognized authorities, please elaborate. --Dbratland (talk) 21:26, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I'd like to request that you err on the side of caution and not delete the article unless you've got proof that the citations to Easyriders are invalid. If you're unable to purchase the back issues or contact the editors of Easyriders, I don't think the destructive act of deleting the article is benefiting anyone. The article is categorized as "start class", so please allow the community to get started, elaborate, add citations. Even the Hayabusa doesn't have relevant links on BBC news and obviously this is a niche genre, which is why I think it's valuable to have it in Wikipedia because it makes it easy for someone to find out what a rat bike is. Which libraries containing large sections of motorcycle books did you check for rat bike mentions? My local library has no books about Linux, but surely that doesn't mean it's not a noteworthy operating system. I encourage you to rewrite or improve the article as you see fit, but nominating for deletion without verification that the Easyriders citations are invalid seems like a destructive act to me.DasKreestof (talk) 17:17, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, you can rest easy knowing that the policy Wikipedia:Assume good faith says that we have to take the Easyriders cites at face value, even if it difficult to verify them. I do think that without those citations, this article would stand no chance of surviving a deletion discussion. The page Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions might clear that up. For example, the claim that it is a niche genre (lacking in mainstream sources) is a reason to delete the page, not to keep it. Wikipedia does not want obscure or fringe ideas that lack authoritative sources. But the whole entire rest of the internet warmly welcomes non-authoritative fringe ideas, so it's not like it would disappear anyway.

I would wager the Easyriders cites will fail verification some day, and then that will be that. But it might take a while and so there is time to keep digging.

My fundamental objection here is that you can only verify a dictionary definition -- rat bikes are decrepit motorcycles. But all the stuff about what is a "real" or "true" or "good" rat bike is just the opinions of some guys on the internet, nothing more. And the whole bit about "survival bikes" is a fabrication.--Dbratland (talk) 18:19, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

I will take your EasyRiders wager. There's an article in American Motorcyclist (June 2004) discussing rat bikes. It's not definitive, but it does restate some of the aesthetics listed in the article. There's also an article in "Walneck's Classic Cycle Trader, May 2005" and a section in The Brotherhoods: Inside the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs By Arthur Veno". I don't have these so I'm limited to excerpts. Perhaps some more verification about rat bike aesthetics can be found in the book "The Ultimate Guide to Choppers" by John Carroll. I haven't had time to review it, but my point is the information is most likely out there for the community to cite given time. I've seen and read enough about survival bikes to know it's not a fabrication, when I have the time I'll find verifiable sources and add them. When discussing aesthetic theory it's worthy to note that there's a 1000 contradictory opinions about what Post-Modernism is. All of which published from good verifiable sources yet agree upon almost nothing. This hasn't stopped Post-Modernism from having a page on Wikipedia.DasKreestof (talk) 20:08, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

You lot need to stop only looking at the US for sources. In 1983, the british bike magazine Back Street Heroes first came off the shelves. Over 30 years later, it still comes out every month and in its heyday actually defined what Rat and Survival bikes are. The Rat Bike first came out in 1988 or thereabouts (when I started reading the magazine). Survival bikes came out a year or two later. Survival bikes are definitely influenced by the movie, Mad Max II. AWoL was a rival magazine in 1991, started by ex-employees of Myatt McFarlane Publications (who were behind BSH – as it is still known) with a more anarchistic worldview, and the bikes on show in the magazine tended to reflect this, featuring a lot more Rat and Survival bikes (as they were what the average reader could afford) while BSH featured more and more exotic custom machinery. The company which owned BSH bought out AWoL due to Plan Z (AWoL's publishers) ran into difficulty after they tried bringing out a magazine about an ethical lifestyle, using the same name as a US publication and were sued, forcing them out of business.

Time for me to dig the magazines out of the attic! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mitchelljohn93 (talk • contribs) 19:44, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

The question is, if a "rat bike" is only a bike of an aware owner, specially painted matt black, or any bike in rural areas of Africa or Russia, whose owner uses parts, that he has at hand, and never heard about rat bike culture ;) Pibwl ←« 18:01, 7 July 2017 (UTC)