Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hooker with a heart of gold (2nd nomination)

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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 keep. After being relisted per this discussion at deletion review, more input was received herein, and consensus is for the article to be retained. Further discussion about the article can continue on its talk page, if desired. North America1000 12:13, 24 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hooker with a heart of gold[edit]

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Hooker with a heart of gold (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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See maintenance tags: mostly an essay with a list of (admittedly well-sourced) examples attached. This is AfD2, the first having been in 2008 and closed w/ no results. Fourteen years later, the same issues still stand. Just Another Cringy Username (talk) 05:18, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Fictional elements and Literature. Just Another Cringy Username (talk) 05:18, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Not sure, but not excited about a keep.Delete, explained below. My first thought when I looked at the article was WP:TNT since these long lists of examples are often pretty uninformative. I tried searching for some actual coverage of the concept of a hooker with a heart of gold, but didn't find a lot. I've added some info from this sociology article, which specifically says the archetype belongs to 1980s American films, distinguishing it from other narrative tropes about prostitution from other periods. This chapter says it evaluates the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold trope but actually mostly critiques a few versions of Moulin Rouge with very few statements about the trope at large. So I'm not sure how feasible it is to write something that's not just a glorified TVTropes article. I'm also not sure that it's justified to combine "hooker with a heart of gold" and "tart with a heart" in one article. Both seem more like marketing phrases than analytic terms. Of the sources in the article, almost none seem to contribute notability for the overarching concepy. This article on prostitutes in Hindi films, and the article " "Of Names of Women in Hindi Cinema: An Exploration in Semantics", are the only ones which don't seem to just be reviews of individual films. They use the phrase "heart of gold" but not the word "hooker." I wonder if the actual topic about which substantial sourcing exists is the broader one of "prostitution in cinema." Or should it become a list? "List of fictional prostitutes with hearts of gold" sounds a bit silly. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 07:22, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Week keep for the article but considering deletion for the list of examples (but for now, abstain on that, see my following thoughts). The sources LEvalyn found and added suggest this topic (stock character/trope) is notable, but the article suffers from the common problem of wP:NOTTVTROPES. List of fictional prostitutes with hearts of gold is not just "silly", it fails WP:NLIST/WP:SALAT too - while the section possibly fails WP:IPC, WP:GNG, WP:OR, etc. (Example of OR: The list opens with "The story of Rahab in the Bible's Book of Joshua is considered by some the earliest example of this character type", but the quote used in reference does not confirm this is "som eof the earliest" - it's just the earlist entry in the list). That said, I'll note that NLIST applies to stand-alone list, so perhaps this section can be retained as a section, with a note that at present, due to lack of any reliable outside lists of this trope, it should not be split? I'll admit that due to use of quotations (good practice), it does represent above-average level of referencing. Given that most of the entries are referneced with secondary sources, which do describe relevant characters as hookers/whores with hears of gold, it is much better than what we usually discuss here. Ping User:TompaDompa for his thoughts. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:50, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Women, Film, and Television. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:51, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Popular culture-related deletion discussions. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:53, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep This seems to be a genuine stock character, as attested by secondary sources, and therefore should be treated somewhere on Wikipedia. Per WP:AtD, if an article can be improved that's preferable to deletion. First steps for improvement have already been taken by LEvalyn (thanks!). If this should in the end be not enough, an alternative to deletion would be a merge of the core content to List of stock characters, and of the sourced examples in the list to List of prostitutes and courtesans#Fictional. Daranios (talk) 10:34, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    How much of that core content is really usable? As the maintenance tags indicate, this is barely sourced and reads more like an opinion essay. I'd support moving the list. Just Another Cringy Username (talk) 17:17, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I'm finding quite a bit of mention so far, a lot of the coverage describes this as more of a western character trope - or at least that it pretty much originated in the west, particularly the United States. As to when it exactly started, that's less clear. It does seem to have become far more popular in the last 100 or so years, but that there were examples of this earlier on than that - they just didn't use this specific term. One PhD dissertation describes this as a more modern day spinoff of the idea of the sinner/saint trope. In any case my thought is to keep but improve so far. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 12:20, 16 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Well sourced. Discuss on talk page anything you want to change AFD is not cleanup. Dream Focus 11:31, 17 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note: at this point the discussion was closed as keep under WP:SNOW. I am relisting this under today's log in my capacity as an uninvolved admin per WP:NACD. See related discussion at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2022 May 17. Hut 8.5 07:43, 18 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep AfD discussions should be about whether WP should have an article on the subject or not. In this case there is more than enough sources to pass WP:GNG. Maintaince tags, content etc should be discussed on the talk page not at AfD. --John B123 (talk) 20:52, 18 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Explanation for my Delete. Putting my second comment here to preserve the flow of discussion. I do want to state more explicitly that we have exactly one source which is actually about the topic "hooker with a heart of gold." That's the sociological paper by Griffiths, which says it is exclusively present in 1980s American cinema. From what I see right now, everything else is either a discussion of a specific movie, which uses the phrase "hooker with a heart of gold" in passing, or it is about a much broader trope, something like "a prostitute, but what if you liked her because she was a good person" -- which is typically not discussed with the phrase "hooker with a heart of gold." (The analysis of courtesans in Hindi cinema fall into the latter category.) Just because the phrase is used a lot doesn't mean the trope has gotten actual coverage and analysis. Based on the sources, I think a "hooker with a heart of gold" article has to be about 1980s American cinema. I also think the trope in 1980s American cinema is not notable because it only has one source. Therefore, I think the question at hand is whether the 1980s "hooker with a heart of gold" trope can be meaningfully combined with some larger, actually notable topic. The lack of a name for this broader trope does not inspire confidence on that front. I increasingly think that following the sources means merging this article to a new "prostitution in cinema" article. That is the topic about which books and articles have actually been written; indeed, that is the main topic of Griffiths' sociological article. People who simply say there are "a lot of sources" need to address whether those sources are about "hooker with a heart of gold" or merely use the phrase. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 23:43, 18 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    In American literature, the trope (not the term) is attributed to Bret Harte, a contemporary of Mark Twain. I found a couple of sources, but I'm not sure how valid they are. I've listed them on the talk page and would welcome your input. I like the idea of an article on the depiction of sex workers in film (or literature). Seems a lot more encyclopedic and less "TV Tropes." Just Another Cringy Username (talk) 03:52, 19 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Here is another secondary source which discusses the trope('s origins) within Western literature to some degree, mostly on p. 168. It also supports the other two sources' link to Bret Harte, p. 165. Also this article, while only having one longish sentence, tells us about the ubiquitousness of the trope. Daranios (talk) 10:59, 19 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for doing this digging. On reading them, they seem to be about the other major trope for representing prostitutes, the "fallen woman." The examples discussed at length are not women who are considered morally upstanding members of their society who are beloved by the characters and the narrative (ie the hooker with the heart of gold), but rather, women who have been irretrievably ruined by prostitution, get narrative sympathy only as a tragic figure, and even then can only be considered sympathetically because the West itself is already outside of "society". One of the main examples is actually dead for most of the story. I tried pretty hard to find quotes/details to expand this article from those two sources but without luck. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 01:01, 22 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@LEvalyn: Those sources use the exact phrase "hooker with a heart of gold". I guess it's just short enough that I'm allowed to quote: New Wests and Post-Wests says on p. 165 "Modern literary critics attribute the origins of the Western and the stereotype of the frontier hooker with a heart of gold to Harte." P. 168 first talks about a specific example and then "...the role of the hooker with a heart of gold - the prostitute whose kind deeds compensate for her lack of virtue. That this type of prostitute was commonly depicted in works of Harte and Miller suggest that gender on the frontier was flexible. As White points out, the mythic West was a space where women existed as either virgins or whores, but the hooker with a heart of gold stereotype suggested that a woman could be both." Sounds like a summary discussion of the type (also pointing out the pervasiveness) to me. Daranios (talk) 19:10, 22 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Seems to be a recognised stock character, widely used in critical discussion not relating to film. eg from Project Muse (specific subscription only): Kristen D. Amiro (2018). Suzy's Gold Star: A Holistic Education in Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday. Steinbeck Review Volume 15, Number 1: 17-30 ("Steinbeck's many portrayals of sex workers are sometimes criticized as stereotypical "hooker with a heart of gold" tropes." ... "Sweet Thursday is a comedic novel, with Fauna as the ultimate grande dame "hooker with a heart of gold.""); Jung Ha-yun (2020). Of Voice and Men: Kim Hoon Rewrites History as His Story. Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture Volume 13: 11-22 ("As a translator, one of the instances that I found uncomfortable is the chapter in Song of the Sword ... involving the courtesan Yŏ-jin ... Kim's account is a fictional one, which, to the contemporary reader, does far less to achieve verisimilitude about medieval life than clumsily resort to the cliché of the "hooker with a heart of gold.""); Robert Haas (2011). Homer on the Range. Classical World Volume 104, Number 2, 245-251 ("One character, incidentally, has no Homeric precedent: Maudie, the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, who fills the stock Western role of a romantic love interest for Arch."); Katie N. Johnson (2009). Before Katrina: Archiving Performative Downpours and Fallen Women Named Sadie in Rain and The Deluge (1922). Modern Drama Volume 52, Number 3, 351-368 (" both The Deluge and Rain recycle a classic hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold story – a tale about a repentant prostitute called Sadie who reconciles with her scarlet past." ... "while both plays recycled a classic [End Page 354] hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold story, Rain offered a more captivating and resistant scarlet woman, the first of a long line of Sadie Thompsons."); Lee Parpart. "Feminist Ambiguity in the Film Adaptations of Lynne Stopkewich" in The Gendered Screen [1] ("Stopkewich’s adaptation clearly announces itself as a rejection of the “hooker with a heart of gold” template that has so often been recycled in Hollywood products as diverse as Pretty Woman, Trading Places, and Leaving Las Vegas, and in non-film narratives from Nancy in Oliver Twist to the Hebrew Bible’s Rahab.") and many more (31 hits in total for the quoted phrase). ETA: They also include several discussing the use in American film well pre-1980s. ETA2: Also several discussing the trope in Roman/Greek drama, including an interesting note "The notion that possessing a "golden nature" ... makes her a "true hetaira" recalls Theognis's obsessive wish to find a pistos hetairos just like himself, "refined gold when rubbed on a touchstone" (Thgn. 415-18, 449-52). The similarity of language and theme suggests that the "hooker with a heart of gold," who becomes a staple of New Comedy, is an adaptation of an older aristocratic ideal." p185-86 in Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece [2]. ETA3 Open-access article that cites two 1970s books on portrayal women in film that discuss the archetype.[3]. While I'm aware that most of these aren't discussing the trope itself, surely we can source a list of characters that reliable sources discuss using this terminology? I'm not seeing any reason to delete this content, even if a broader article on portrayals of prostitution would be interesting. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:59, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks for doing this digging. Of these sources, most seem to be exactly what I mean about a sourcing using a phrase rather than being about the trope. Only Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold seems to be doing more than identifying a certain text as an example or counterexample of the phenomenon (that one speculates about the origins of the trope). If all we're doing is sourcing examples, then we're talking about a list, which should pass WP:NLIST. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 01:01, 22 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I was initially trying to find examples to show it wasn't just applied to 1980s American film, and was a much broader and older trope. I think the Stopkewich one is also useful. Espresso Addict (talk) 19:59, 22 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I'd just like to highlight LEvalyn's point. It doesn't matter how many examples we can collate; it matters how much the topic has been discussed in secondary sources. Remember WP:NOTTVTROPES, WP:NLIST, and WP:STAND. Just Another Cringy Username (talk) 02:31, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I'm baffled by the repeated assertion that this passes WP:GNG based on the sources we have found so far. Yes, the topic exists - no one disagrees. Yes, this is a recognized stock character. But we need secondary sources that discuss the trope, not merely speak its name. What we have is a massive list of passing mentions ("charactername is a hooker with a heart of gold"), not in-depth coverage of the trope itself. The article that results from these sources will be entirely made of WP:OR, or it will be more properly named "list of hookers with a heart of gold". That already exists, here: [4]. I'm not !voting delete because I still haven't had a chance to do a proper look for better sources, but there isn't sourcing here or in the article for a Keep right now, despite the proliferation of footnotes. -- asilvering (talk) 04:07, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Asilvering: After recent improvements there is currently no content without references (aside from the introductory line, which customarily doesn't need one), so there is no WP:OR going on. And yet we do have a non-stubby article, if a short one, which is the goal of the notability requirement in the first place. And that's when not all found secondary sources have been worked into the article yet. Daranios (talk) 10:30, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. there's emough, especially is one does not get pedatic in expecting the exact phrase, but acepts synonyms. For example, the trophe is discussed in every book about early 20the century film smd popular novels of the period. . I cannot immediately think of a better title--there are many synonyms, of vaious degrees of euphemism. The assumption that he sources merely list the characters ifs falso--they are usually discussed. DGG ( talk ) 06:31, 21 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Snow Keep. Well known trope since at least the time of Rahab. FeydHuxtable (talk) 20:17, 21 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @FeydHuxtable Care to address the issue of WP:NOTTVTROPES? Just Another Cringy Username (talk) 20:25, 21 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @ Just Another Cringy Username In my view the article already contained sufficient analyses to be exempt from WP:NOTTVTROPES, even more so when taking into account the sources detailed by editor Espresso Addict. As you still had concerns I've further expanded the article. To pick out just one of the top tier sources I used, the Cambridge University Press book Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman World has an entire chapter analysing hookers with a heart of gold, talking about the historical development of the trope, mentioning a few real world examples, and discussing the social purpose of the trope. Theres such an abundance of good sources analysing the stereotype that it would be trivial to expand the article to good article status if one had a few days to spare. FeydHuxtable (talk) 22:22, 22 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I was pinged for my opinion by Piotrus.
    Looking at the cited sources, I must say that this isn't by any stretch of the imagination a well-sourced article. The number of sources is really not that important (we're not going for a much-sourced article, but a well-sourced one), the quality is what matters. That's quality as it relates to the topic of the article, specifically.
    What the topic of the article actually is/should be could go two ways: either the character archetype or the phrase (i.e. WP:WORDISSUBJECT). I'm assuming we're going for the former here (the latter would necessitate starting the entire article over from scratch), but it's worth keeping in mind that the character archetype and the phrase used to refer to it are two distinct topics.
    Having said that, this is in a pretty poor state. As pointed out by LEvalyn and Asilvering, what we want is proper secondary (or tertiary, I suppose) sources discussing and analysing the general concept. This should be obvious: an article on X should be based on sources on X. Basing an article on sources about something else makes for an article of poor quality. The reason for this in the specific context of fiction/popular culture is outlined in the essay WP:CARGO: Simply amassing raw data, and hoping that an encyclopaedia article will magically arise from it, doesn't work. [...] Collecting raw data does not produce an analysis. The raw data can be examples, that demonstrate the analysis. (There are some elephant jokes in elephant joke, for example.) But simply amassing huge piles of them doesn't make an analysis. What makes an analysis is finding the works of experts in the field who have done analyses of the raw data, and then condensing and summarizing their published analyses into the article. (Collecting raw data and then producing our own novel analyses of those data is, of course, original research that is forbidden here.) This is also in line with WP:WHYN—we need quality sources to make a quality article. The sources do not need to be exclusively on the topic at hand, but they do need to be significantly on the topic at hand and in-depth in their coverage (WP:Significant coverage). Likewise, the article need not exclusively cite these kinds of top-quality sources—sources on adjacent topics can be useful for fleshing out the details—but they do need to provide the foundation and backbone of the article.
    With all this in mind, we can't really keep the article in its current state, because it is—to be blunt—bad. We have a few different options available to us.
    At minimum, this should be redirected to List of stock characters (and an WP:ANCHOR for direct linking to the relevant entry should be added) if we don't keep it as a stand-alone article. I don't think it's in dispute that this is a widely-recognized character archetype, and we do have sufficient sourcing for a single-sentence definition.
    Another possible solution would be to convert this to an article on the broader topic of Prostitution in fiction or similar, as LEvalyn suggested. I would suggest moving the article to draftspace until the conversion is complete in such a case, since this would entail a complete rewrite.
    The ideal solution would of course be to locate additional sources focused on and analysing the concept in general and rewrite the article based on those, but then we have to actually follow through on that. If we are to keep this as a stand-alone article, the list of examples needs to go. Merely enumerating examples of X in fiction is what TV Tropes does, but Wikipedia is of course WP:NOTTVTROPES. Examples should be integrated in prose alongside relevant analysis (again, WP:CARGO), and their sourcing should meet the requirements set out by MOS:POPCULT: Cultural references about a subject should not be included simply because they exist. Rather, all such references should be discussed in at least one reliable secondary or tertiary source which specifically links the cultural item to the subject of the article. This source should cover the subject of the article in some depth; it should not be a source that merely mentions the subject's appearance in a movie, song, television show, or other cultural item. TompaDompa (talk) 22:49, 21 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. People keep citing Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not TV Tropes, but it is not policy just an essay, and in fact was only moved out of the author TenPoundHammer's userspace on 27 April. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:28, 21 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It's a good essay, and there is nothing wrong with citing them in various discussions. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:33, 22 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Not when some/most of the people citing it think it's a redirect to WP:NOT. Espresso Addict (talk) 19:59, 22 May 2022 (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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