Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Magician Dor

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 delete. MBisanz ^talk 23:14, 23 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Magician Dor[edit]

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

This article does not establish notability. TTN (talk) 02:37, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Fictional elements-related deletion discussions. TTN (talk) 02:37, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Under this name, I've found a couple of RSS:[1] (and reprinted), and [2]. Jclemens (talk) 04:25, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL) Let's see what we can get with a better search:

Three more: [3], [4], [5], all of which reference Dor as a main character, sufficient to be named in a terse summary of the novels in which it appears. I'll note that the character is already covered in Magicians of Xanth, which would be an appropriate merge target if one were needed. Jclemens (talk) 04:30, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What is any of that supposed to show? There's nothing there. Where's the critical commentary? Where is the analysis? These are useless, one-shot mentions in the majority of those. TTN (talk) 10:40, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Please show me where analysis or critical commentary are required by WP:GNG. Jclemens (talk) 14:11, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  - Both the criteria of Non-trivial coverage as detailed by N and that the article must be more than simple plot regurgitation per NOT, which WAF explains how to accomplish, show the importance of real world info. Non-trivial coverage is quite clear in the guideline. These mentions are just that, trivial with no context dedicated to the character from a real world standpoint. The article is currently just plot, so it fails NOT as well. You seemingly like to ignore both these things, but they are very clear in their application. TTN (talk) 14:25, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    - ... All of which is a roundabout way of you acknowledging that GNG, which says nothing of the sort, is the standard for inclusion, while WAF is a content guideline which helps us organize articles on topics which meet thi inclusion threshold. Jclemens (talk) 04:32, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
      - I do like how you just sort of ignore the argument and cover your ears. Something about fiction cannot be nontrivial without covering it from a real world perspective. If it is not talking about something from a real world perspective, it is talking about the work of fiction and mentioning the character or topic from an in-plot perspective. Something mentioned from in universe perspective cannot be anything other than trivial. Something only mentioned in a trivial context cannot be notable. Playing silly word games does not make you right.TTN (talk) 10:24, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
        What, like we haven't gone round and round on this same debate in a dozen other AfD's? Your ideas of significant coverage and mine differ, so I'm really only replying to demonstrate to other !voters and closing admins that I do not find your rebuttals of my sources compelling. Jclemens (talk) 05:58, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
        The problem is that it's not really an argument with differing opinions. You're just wrong. Significant coverage is specifically defined in the guideline. You just seem to ignore that and bring up the same roundabout logic most of the time. I have never seen anyone truly directly agree with you. TTN (talk) 10:28, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
        When you actually follow WP:BEFORE for every AfD you start--heck, ANY AfD you start--then you'll actually have standing to start that discussion. Or when you actually create or improve any content.... but, to be fair, I haven't examined your entire history--have you ever created or improved any content, or has your entire existence on Wikipedia been dedicated to deleting others' donations? Jclemens (talk) 05:03, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
        BEFORE is utterly irrelevant at this point. When you have hundreds of cookie-cutter 5-10 year old articles that nobody cares about enough to properly deal with (either improving or merging them), we have long passed the point of due consideration. When you have active users who log out and periodically bring back articles fairly merged under merge discussions (bad faith, but it's obviously one or more of the D&D project members), it becomes pointless to try to fairly merge anything. The proper way to deal with fiction is "Article on work --> fictional subject in article has too much weight placed on it --> fictional subject gets split out." Just because these articles existed before that standard was properly implemented, it's not my problem to expend every effort to prove they are not notable. And why exactly should I have to create anything? People like you seem to see the thought process of cleaning up bad articles as some kind of affront to decency. It's no different than a guy who wants to spend four hours per day doing project categorization. I wouldn't particularly call it helpful in the same way as making a FA, but it's just a thing someone wants to do. TTN (talk) 18:24, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
        Contempt for BEFORE is contempt for the volunteers who created things. You might want it to be a perfectly planned encyclopedia run by professionals, but the fact is it's not, and your idealistic thoughts on how fictional element articles ought to be spun out isn't how it has ever happened, anywhere on Wikipedia, to the best of my knowledge. TTN, you've never cleaned up a bad article, ever. You've destroyed volunteered work, sure, but that's not the same as cleaning up a terrible article. That's what *I* do. Go nominate Yellow Star (novel) for AfD if you think it deserves it. THAT is cleaning up a lousy article, and it's exactly what I would be doing more of if I didn't have to consistently watch over your nominations for things that should be improved. Jclemens (talk) 04:18, 8 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
        This is quite bulky and off-topic, but oh well. No, it's the desire to remove a bunch of mostly pointless content without having to go through the same pointless motions each time. I don't know how many times I left a merge tag, let an article sit for a month or two with no discussion because they were utterly devoid of interested editors like most of these articles, finally merged them, and then had some guy like you claim there was still no consensus because there was no discussion, despite the fact that both the idea of the silent consensus and WP:BRD are practiced to great effect. And these were not people who cared about the content, but simply people who wikilawyered over the idea of consensus for no reason. People like you don't seem to understand the very simple idea of returning to zero and then expanding back out. Instead of keeping three hundred bad articles where 2% may have some potential, redirect all of them and let those 2% naturally grow. There is no need to give each article the same weight as if they are all equally valid. If you fide a truly good article during that process, speak up about it obviously, but playing silly semantics games just to "save" them is ludicrous.
        
        You're simply saying someone with a different editing mindset compared to you is "bad" out of a very strange emotional standpoint. Applying standards to content is the normal thing to do. Calling bad content volunteer work is just pure puffery. Most of those D&D articles at least look aesthetically nice compared to something like this, but you and I both know that pretty much all existing content would be wiped out if those articles could be put forward for GA or FA status. Plot information is gutted to a reasonable extent, content is rewritten and removed, and pretty much everything is changed. Unless it's the same core editors editing the article, it is doubtful much of any of the original content remains. You can say it was built on their work, but that's no different in the end (other than edit history in the case of a delete outcome at least). You could have some editor write a plot summary with such beautiful prose that it puts the original author to shame, but it would still have to be cut down if it was too large. Is that destroying volunteer work? No, it's following standards. TTN (talk) 10:16, 8 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
        Eh, I'm willing to continue engaging with you, if for no other reasons than I do appear to be correct about your contempt for volunteer editors' lame contributions. I reiterate: I don't make these messes, but would rather clean them up than delete them if for no other reason than to encourage good-faith editors (acknowledging that at least some of the IP-based de-merges may be otherwise) to keep producing content motivated by enthusiasm for cultural phenomena such as role-playing games or fantasy literature. When I look at problematic content in Wikipedia, fiction isn't what I see: I see ethnic, national, or religious conflict. I see paid advocacy and subtle commercialization. I see Infobox wars and The Beatles vs. the Beatles. Sure, this stuff needs to be improved, all of it, and much of it should be merged appropriately. But it's 1) not a significant problem and 2) the cleanup campaign you carry out leads in some small part to the dismay of new editors and the decline in active editorship. Jclemens (talk) 19:39, 8 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
        You keep reiterating that line like it means anything. Some small kid writing an article about his "cool dad", someone creating a plethora of non-notable articles about their local town, and someone creating articles on non-notable fictional characters are all well-meaning people thinking they're properly contributing to this encyclopedia. But you don't just let that stuff sit because they're well-meaning. It gets quickly deleted and then hopefully someone nicely explains the reasoning to them. There's also a vast difference between a recent article and all these articles from a decade ago. These have been given plenty of time, many having been tagged for just as long, and they still have not reached a state of being able to exist independently. This site is so large at this point that no amount of cleanup is ever going to fix all the problem areas, but this is the area I like to edit. You act like I'm personally slapping the faces of active editors, but pretty much any argument on this site will lead to some kind of hurt feelings. In almost all your examples above, someone is going to feel like they lost. I would objectively agree that removing a BLP violation is more important than removing a bad fictional article, but that doesn't make the act of removing a bad fictional article a pointless either. I also personally feel that removing masses of articles would probably encourage more people to edit than it would drive away. Look at the mess of the Transformers articles. Nobody new is going to touch that jumbled mess of articles. TTN (talk) 11:46, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep per Jclemens. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 19:03, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I only glanced at the article and saw zero third-party (or indeed any) sources cited in the article; this results in an instant "delete" per WP:V and WP:GNG irrespective of other concerns. Only sources cited in the article itself are helpful to readers, not in obscure discussion pages like this one. Sandstein 11:48, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- I'll note that this !vote directly contradicts WP:N, specifically WP:NEXIST. Shame on you @Sandstein:: you surely know better. Jclemens (talk) 00:16, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  - Notability is overrated. If nobody can be bothered to add refs to the actual article even during an AfD, nobody is likely to bother later. And only refs in the actual article itself make it verifiable to the reader and therefore worth existing. Surely you have more worthwhile things to do than reflexively defending fancruft for its own sake? I like good articles about fictional topics as much as anybody, but part of the good writer's skill set is knowing what to leave out. Sandstein 05:29, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 08:29, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - Possibly merge into one of the Xanth related articles, though, I'm not sure where an appropriate place would be. There are simply no sources that show why this character is notable, simply that yes, he exists as the main character of a couple books in the series. The sources provided above are nothing beyond simple plot synopsis, that do nothing to establish any sort of notability. In fact, one of these sources is nothing more than an index that lists brief, couple sentence plot summaries for literally hundreds of books, with the character in question being only mentioned as the main character of them. That is pretty much as trivial of a source that there could possibly be. 64.183.45.226 (talk) 18:45, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I agree with the IP editor above. The sources above show that the character exists, but they don't have any depth at all to them. If all a source says is that a character appeared in a novel, we shouldn't have an article on that character. Wikia can catalog the in-universe details better than we can. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 20:27, 14 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per above two comments. Aoba47 (talk) 17:56, 16 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science fiction-related deletion discussions. Necrothesp (talk) 17:29, 20 October 2016 (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.