Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/WoWWiki (second nomination)

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 no consensus, defaulting to keep. Can't sleep, clown will eat me 20:19, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WoWWiki

Article covering a wiki about the game World of Warcraft. The first afds resulted in a keep. Imo, it is not notable enough to be included on Wikipedia and fails WP:V and WP:WEB. The notability template has been slapped on the article but the editors have not provided any evidence of significant coverage by any reliable sources since the last afd and have removed the notability template. Forums and blogs appear to be the only linking pages to this site.

To compare: FFXIclopedia, a wiki about the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI has been up for AfD 3 times. Also, FFXIclopedia continues to rise in Alexa rankings, surpassing the official Final Fantasy XI website. WoWWiki remains an underdog to the official World of Warcraft site. The editors of the WoWWiki article still haven't provided any evidence of outside coverage by reliable sources (WP:RS). --Ganiman 18:50, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: Blatant WP:POINT nomination from User:Ganiman in an effort to keep the FFXIclopedia article. And a badly executed afd as well. --Peephole 19:42, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Funny, the AfD is a copy and paste of your AfD for FFXIclopedia. Bravo! Also, there is a difference between guidelines and policies. I suggest people start learning that. --Ganiman 21:24, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Comment: As I said, blatant WP:POINT. --Peephole 00:07, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Disregarding the mess above, I think the article should be deleted as well. I have slapped a notability tag on it last week but no reliable sources covering the wiki have been added. Currently the article fails WP:WEB and WP:V. The result of the last afd was keep but no actual evidence of notability was given there either, other than the site having a high alexa ranking. The wiki has received about 22 million page views but wikis with similar amounts of page views have had their article deleted or are being put up for afd at the moment. Peephole 20:11, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

• Delete as non-notable. Akradecki 22:45, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
• Delete as above, this fails WP:WEB, WP:NOT, and WP:V. (Two of those are policies, one is an interpretation of policy or what we call a guideline.) Just because a site uses the mediawiki software doesnot make it a notable. Just because a page has a high Alexa rank or a lot of content also does not make it notable. It's hit counter should also not be considered in its notability. --Kunzite 01:23, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
• Redirect to World of Warcraft per WP:WEB and precedents established in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/GuildWiki. Merge a single sentence into the external links section. — Kaustuv Chaudhuri 01:47, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: we have conflicting precedents here, now that FFXIclopedia was outright deleted. I have summarised the situation for the three MMORPG-related wikis in the table directly below.

  Wiki	WP article	AfD consensus	Alexa rank	{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}	# users	# hits
  WoWWiki	WoWWiki	keep	5,318 [1]	14,315	38,151	22,593,490
  GuildWiki	GuildWiki	merge to Guild Wars	6,055 [2]	9,030	11,668	114,958,863
  FFXIclopedia	FFXIclopedia	delete no consensue delete	33,697 [3]	15,075	104,263	17,825,895

  All three wikis are linked to from their respective game websites. — Kaustuv Chaudhuri 01:10, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been added to the list of CVG deletions. — Kaustuv Chaudhuri 01:54, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been added to the list of Warcraft deletions. Dread Lord CyberSkull ✎☠ 11:04, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
• Keep: This is more or less the same flimsy argument that was given last time and this nomination being so similar to the FFXI wiki nomination reeks of bad faith. Dread Lord CyberSkull ✎☠ 11:04, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Per CyberSkull. Havok (T/C/c) 11:07, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment As for notability, Blizzard's official WoW site has links to WoWWiki. [4] Havok (T/C/c) 11:10, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

And? A link does not convey notability. Recognition outside of the community of users does. i.e a major newspaper or a major award for something would do it. If it's just a link, why not make WoWWiki a link on the game's article? --Kunzite 12:09, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Why not just leave it as an article? It's been AfDed before, and survived, why not just leave it alone? Havok (T/C/c) 12:15, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Because other concerns have come up. Concencuses change. A quick search shows that it has good company. There seem to be articles 10,000 articles with second nomination for deletion. Also, how does the link convey notability? What recognition has this site gotten apart from those in the community of users of that game? Is there anything besides a lot of content, a good alexa rank, and the use of wikimedia software that would make the article notable in anyway? It's often argued that these sites are top in alexa for their gaming category .. That's not a good rationale for a seperate article, that's rationale for including the article in the external links list. --Kunzite 12:36, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

• Keep Obviously notable website if the game itself lays reference to it and links directly to it. What is the Alexa rank? and what are the daily hits etc. Without this information you cannot really say its not notable, yet its inclusion on the wow site says it has some major backing. Without more information against it being kept I think a keep is in order, especially if the mess above is true and its a bad faith nomination. --zero faults ^{|sockpuppets|} 12:23, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
• Comment But has it received outside coverage by reliable sources? Alexa rank is about 5000 I believe.--Peephole 12:50, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment Who is a more reliable source about what are important and factual Warcraft websites then the creators of World of Warcraft lore itself? Didnt you put the Warcraft characters AfD up? --zero faults ^{|sockpuppets|} 17:16, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Comment No. Newspapers, gaming magazines are all more reliable sources.--Peephole 17:52, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
      • Comment Yes I am sure a newspaper will let us know what Warcraft is about better then the creators of warcraft, the ones making warcraft what it is ... I hope you were kidding. --zero faults ^{|sockpuppets|} 20:50, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
        • Comment Read WP:RS. And discover that I'm not kidding. --Peephole 21:34, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
          • Comment Read about first party sources, they are valid when talking about themselves. --zero faults ^{|sockpuppets|} 00:10, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
            • Comment This is true, but an article should not consist solely of said first-party sources. I brough this question up at the talk page for WP:V (see Wikipedia talk:Verifiability#WP:V_.26_self-references), and I believe Jossi's explanation of taking all policies & guidelines into account applies here - claims of notability and other material linked to in WoWWiki's website is original research if not properly backed up by reliable sources. --AbsolutDan ^(talk) 16:53, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. Amazingly enough, despite this website's popularity, I only get 7 unique ghits (out of over 200K total): [5]. There are no reliable sources here. And for a site so thoroughly on-line, I just can't believe there would be sources that aren't online sources. Mangojuice^talk 15:41, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
• Redirect per Kaustuv Chaudhuri. I'm not really seeing the notability here, so that seems like a reasonable compromise. -Hit bull, win steak^(Moo!) 16:18, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
• Delete: I highly disapprove of the WP:POINT but this is in the same category as the FFXI wiki. Blizzard thinks highly enough of the wiki to post a link to it, not incorporate it into the WoW client. Likewise, the WoW article should have a link to the wiki. But why does WoWWiki need an article? The link itself can tell a wikipedia reader what it is. Having so many users, so many pages and a title that is a portmanteau(is putting WoW & Wiki together a portmanteau?) does not merit an article. Mitaphane _talk 18:10, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
• Weak delete per WP:WEB and WP:RS. --Slgr@ndson (page - messages - contribs) 18:15, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
• Delete: Despite the WP:POINT factor of this nomination, it does blatantly fail WP:V. Having been the subject of an AfD over 4 months ago, there's been ample time to fix this. --AbsolutDan ^(talk) 21:39, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: I'm a WoWWiki contributor, and would just like to set a few points straight: WoWWiki does have more and more well-notarized information about game lore and facts than any other WoW-related site, including http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/ itself. It is also the prime source of information on developing for the game (http://www.wowwiki.com/Interface_Customization); there is no other site with the same information - Blizzard's sites included. So, as such, the wowwiki really is a unique information source about World of Warcraft. I also wonder how the "who links to the site" (mostly blogs and forums you say?) applies to begin with. Now, having said that, I'm not necessarily in favor of Wikipedia keeping the article, hence this being a comment rather than a vote for keeping; WoWWiki explains itself well enough. But, yes, I do think a link from the World of Warcraft page is in order at the very least. --Mikeclueby4 05:18, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
• Keep: See comment above. Wikipedia itself is mostly notable only because it's free and people don't want to pay for an on-line encyclopedia. It can arguably be said that Wikipedia itself fails WP:NOT (which is sad in its truth). I'm biased in that I'm an admin at WoWWiki, but I can pretty much guarantee that WoWWiki gets more hits than Wikipedia on WoWWiki :-P Fandyllic 5:33 AM PDT 12 Aug 2006

This argument the wikipedia fails for content inclusion is not valid. Wikipedia passes WP:WEB and is otherwise notable because it has appeared many times in various news media, it's won major awards, and it's even been the subject of a comparison by a highly regarded scientific journal. Has WoWWiki gotten any strong international press of this sort? Has it won any major web design awards? Ok. WoW users like free things, the site has a lot of information on the subject, and get lots of hits. So? How does that make it notable? This more of an argument to include it in the external links section of the WoW article than as its own article. --Kunzite 14:59, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: I feel I should also mention that for some of the Wikipedia articles on World of Warcraft, the main source was wowwiki. -- Kirkburn 14:22, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment Seeing as both WoWWiki and Wikipedia give out their text under GPL, this whole comment is void. WoWWiki has also taken things from Wikipedia and used it in their articles. So again, the comment is void. Havok (T/C/c) 19:43, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

That's contrary to the WP:RS guidelines. "Personal websites, wikis, and posts on bulletin boards, Usenet and blogs should still not be used as secondary sources." --Kunzite 14:59, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

WP:RS is actually stricter even than that: wikis cannot be primary sources either. In several Warcraft-related articles WoWWiki is used as a primary source. There are articles (eg. Hakkar the Soulflayer) that even document conjecture and discussions on WoWWiki. — Kaustuv Chaudhuri 00:38, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

• Delete This article has no reliable sources right now, so it clearly fails WP:V. Ziggurat 03:53, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
• Comment from WP:V: Wikis, like other non-reliable sources, can be legitimate citations for non-controversial statements about themselves. This says nothing about notability. I express no opinion, except to wonder: why isn't this a paragraph in World of Warcraft? Septentrionalis 05:39, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment The people who work on Wikipedia:Wikiproject Warcraft try as much as possible not to put any more information in World of Warcraft seeing as the article allready is as big as it should be, could use even more cutting down. Havok (T/C/c) 05:54, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment:The wiki is already linked there, yes? I see no problem. --Peephole 14:06, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment And I see no problem leaving this article right where it is. Havok (T/C/c) 14:14, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

• KeepThis is a very high traffic site, and is an important source of WoW related information. It also appears on the top 10 pages on Google for a search of "World of Warcraft", which returns 64,900,000 results. The fact that Wikipedia also references this Wiki numerous times backs up its notability. Also, I do not think it should be merged with the main WoW article as this would cause it to become to large, and many search engines including MSN will time-out while trying to index the whole page. --Ariadoss 19:28, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment 1. A game wiki with five times the traffic has also been deleted.

2. Wikipedia shouldn't reference this, as wikis aren't reliable sources (see WP:RS).

3. The article wouldn't become bigger as the wiki is already included in the external links. --Peephole 21:45, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

• Comment I changed my mind, I guess the issue here is I'm not very happy with Wikipedia policy on these types of articles, or rather how policy is interpreted in regard to websites and other Iternet related material. I better save all the programming articles, before those get deleted too. --Ariadoss 01:07, 16 August 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.