Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Heinleiner

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. Oh, and it's keep, not aganist. Mailer Diablo 17:44, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Heinleiner

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Nominating for deletion as neologism verging on protologism. '+heinleiner -wikipedia' gives just 81 Google hits[1] and just 36 on Google Groups[2]. John Varley's fictional usage is already explained in his article and The Golden Globe; real-world usage appears extremely limited, and not enough reliable source material exists to support an article. --Calair 14:33, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

• against: This word produces a few hundred hits on Google (web), and a usenet search turns up more, going all the way back to 1992...note that the above-mentioned Golden Globe was published in 1998. Sadly, there are no irc search engines to log the common use of "heinleiner" on the various Heinlein-related channels from at least 1995 to the present.

If you specifically exclude Varley and my own name...a very broad brush because I tend to go associate with anyone who identifies with the word, and plenty of Heinlein readers will mention Varley in other context, for many reasons...you get a result which includes a few dozen people mostly saying "I am a heinleiner", or "he is a heinleiner".

It's a rule, in several industries who wish to weigh public attention, that for every written mention of something, there are (as with roaches) a great many people aligned the same way, who are (like normal people) not bothering to state it on the record. In the TV industry, one "fan" or complaint letter is thought to represent somewhere between one and ten thousand people who didn't bother to write, for example. There are different ratios used by the publishing, music, advertising, and political industries.

We can also suppose that those who go on record as "a heinleiner", despite not being associated with various groups or cliques of that name, have their own friends, clique, or subculture from whom they derive or with whom they use that word. It is common enough that The Heinlein Society, founded by Virginia Heinlein to represent RAH, registered the domain name.--Kaz 16:49, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

• against: Word is observably being used with some frequency by fans of the author, polyamorous people, libertarian individualists, etc. Though relatively small, the usage is not anomalous and, as this context exists outside of Varley's novel, it would not be sufficient to simply refer to that reference. As this article could be expanded to go into detail on a Heinleiner lifestyle, aggregates that consider themselves Heinleiners, and so forth, Wiktionary would not be sufficient either. --DiBaggioMA 17:39, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: But can it be expanded to detail a Heinleiner lifestyle, in the absence of good secondary sources? --Calair 01:39, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Comment

• What constitutes "good secondary sources" to you? If you're expecting a sociological text on the subject, you won't find one, but that's not a reasonable standard to hold for such an entry, either. The word and what it describes can be readily seen on blogs, discussion forums, political discussions, litcrit forums and essays, among science fiction, polyamorous, futurists, and libertarian groups. --DiBaggioMA 12:56, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

• Comment WP:RS discusses this issue: "Posts to bulletin boards, Usenet, and wikis, or messages left on blogs, should not be used as primary or secondary sources... self-published books, personal websites, and blogs are largely not acceptable as sources." For more detail on what constitutes a good source, see that page, but in general self-published work that hasn't been critically vetted by anybody but the author is not it. Things like blog posts do demonstrate that there are people out there calling themselves 'Heinleiners', but they can only illustrate one person's understanding of what that word means at a time; claiming a general usage on the basis of such individual uses is synthesis, which violates Wikipedia:No original research. In general, if there are no solid secondary sources on a topic, it's not yet ready for a Wikipedia article. --Calair 14:25, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

I'll add - I've been active on poly forums for years, and I've been a politics & sci-fi geek since long before that. I've certainly run into plenty of people who treat Heinlein as a leading light in any and all of those three spheres... but I had never encountered the term 'Heinleiner' until a few days ago, when it came up on Heinlein's article here. --Calair 14:38, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

• against While, as stated above, there are no irc search engines to log the use of "heinleiner" on channels or groups, a cursory glimpse of these will show a large number of posts and a decent number of members overall. Moreover, posts in said channels and groups will suggest that the members posting identify with the same characteristics as are listed in the article in question.

The suggestion that the article needs to be deleted because the number of people who self identify as Heinleiners is lower than some arbitrary amount should not be heeded any more than the suggestion that an article about a specific tribe of indians should be deleted because the number of people who identify as of that tribe is low. Heinleiners exist, they self identify as such, they have a community, common characteristics, history and even a culture of their own. They exist and the article is valid in referencing them.--Daniel Macintyre 17:49, 26 July 2006 (UTC)(This is user's first edit.)

• against: One reason for the relative scarcity of people who identify as heinleiners is that RAH was careful to not endorse the many people who took his works as road maps leading towards a better future. Some of the people who embraced his work were visionaries, and some were rather strange indeed, but RAH maintained the principle that he wrote what he wrote for the money, and that if anyone chose to take it as more than entertainment, then that was on their head, not his.

This lead to a situation similar to the old saw of "those that know don't tell, while those that tell don't know." After RAH's death, Virginia was kind enough to grant a small degree of recognition to some of "Heinlein's bastards," in our case that came in the form of permission to reprint portions of his works in our newsletter in order to help folks better understand what we were doing and why. A remnant of this is our expection that anyone who wants to become involved in our organization read, at the very least, _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_.

As one of RAH's bastard sons, I can assure you that heinleiners exist, and that we're still working to make his vision manifest since there's nothing more radical than a working model of a better way. Walt Patrick, Windward Foundation Wahkiacus 20:42, 26 July 2006 (UTC)(This is user's first edit.)

• Delete (nominator, lack of verifiable sources). --Calair 01:52, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

• This AfD nomination was incomplete. It is listed now. DumbBOT 11:37, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

• Delete fails WP:OR with the firey passion of a thousand suns. WilyD 13:13, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete of course. Just because its "used on IRC groups and thus can't be searched through google" doesn't mean its notable. Until it is documented by some sort of secondary source, it doesn't belong on Wikipedia. Dark Shikari 13:23, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete - Per nom, despite the several "against" voters arguments. Wickethewok 13:51, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
• Not against per nom. No reliable sources available for documentation. GassyGuy 15:59, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete and ignore all against "votes". Danny Lilithborne 19:28, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per nom. Note that if it is true that "those that know don't tell, while those that tell don't know," then, unfortunately, as with all secret societies, Heinleiners cannot be the subject of a Wikipedia article, because all the information in Wikipedia articles must be traceable to a published source, per the verifiability policy, linked under the edit box in every article creation screen. Dpbsmith (talk) 20:19, 27 July 2006 (UTC) P. S. The use of the word "against," uncapitalized, is a little unusual and idiosyncratic. To see three different accounts, none of which has created a user page, all using the same idiosyncratic style, leads me to wonder whether these users are independent of one another. Multiple and assumed identities were a fairly common theme in some of Heinlein's work... :-) Dpbsmith (talk) 20:29, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

• Comment My impression is that they are real, separate people (one of them has a handful of edits going back a couple of years), but were invited here by one person, and being unfamiliar with Wikipedia took their lead from the first comment. Note that at the time they commented, this AFD wasn't generally visible because I missed a step in the creation (bot fixed it later), but I had notified one person of said creation, which presumably is how they got here. --Calair 00:07, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

• Delete per nom. And I concur with Danny Lilithborne that all of these fanboy "votes" should be ignored. ---Charles 22:09, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete as non-notable. We can't have articles for every internet term. -Royalguard11^Talk 23:17, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per nom. The groups's existence is not at issue, for me, since this has nothing to do with the notability of the group. As it stands, the article is also a dicdef. On an asides, it seems to me Heinliners wouldn't care if WP had an article about them or not, but to each his/her own. Tychocat 09:53, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per nom. (It's not a secret society, it's a secret anarchist "society", as anarchists don't have societies.) And — for what it's worth — I consider myself an early Heinlein fan (that is, a fan of his early works), and I never heard the term before. Then again, I don't read much Varly.) — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 00:50, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, not notable. I've been a fanatical Heinlein fan for thirty years, and have never heard the term used.--WPIsFlawed 16:13, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete not notable, and TANSTAAFL.Edison 03:08, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per nom and Dpbsmith. Angus McLellan (Talk) 20:22, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

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.