Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Yerf

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 of the debate was Delete. The reasons to keep were 'anyone in the fandom knows about it', 'I don't see an AFD on foo', and 'referred to in it's domain'. Only one decent argument to keep (from User:GreenReaper), and far better ones to delete from the nom, Kotepho, Andrew, Reyk and so on. And not the "Pokemon test" is WP:NOTPOLICY. No issue with this being redirected to furry fandom afterwards. Proto||type 13:38, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Yerf

Website for the collection of furry art. Completely fails WP:WEB. - Motor (talk) 07:40, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

• Delete. nn furcruft. Fan1967 13:45, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per nom. -- Kicking222 14:52, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. Anyone in the fandom knows of its existence, as it's one of the most prominent art archives. Passes the Pokemon test with flying colours. Googling for "yerf art -wikipedia" gives 146,000 hits, and judging by the first page, most or all are relevant. --Christopher Thomas 15:13, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Second choice: Merge/redirect to furry fandom. I fail to see why a redirect shouldn't exist, as the term has obviously been searched for by users. Spare the hundred bytes to do this. --Christopher Thomas 04:25, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment, "anyone in the fandom knows of its existence"... can be used to justify the inclusion of absolutely anything at all. - Motor (talk) 15:50, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
    • Only if you accept any fandom at all as being significant. The furry fandom has enough support to hold multiple annual conventions with attendance in the thousands in North America alone, and is noteworthy enough to be ridiculed in national press a couple of times per year. Surely that merits inclusion of at least the top half-dozen touchstones of the fandom? Yerf, VCL, FurryMUCK, and Anthrocon would be the top four (in no particular order). If we can have articles on every village in the US, and every last pokemon character, how exactly can you justify setting the bar this high for a fandom? What I'm asking for is a _consistent_ bar, and I believe the Yerf article is well above anywhere you could reasonably place such a threshold based on the contents of Wikipedia. --Christopher Thomas 05:10, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
      • Comment, no-one is stopping you from mentioning the website on furry fandom. This is about whether it has enough notability/relevance in the rest of the world outside of furries to justify its own article. It does not. - Motor (talk) 07:28, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
        • You keep _stating_ this, but you haven't yet stated _why_ you consider it acceptable to have a varying standard for notability. Go and AfD all of the minor Pokemon articles referenced by the essay you dislike, and all but the more notable of the 30,000 US cities added by Rambot, if you're sincere about removing cruft from Wikipedia. Failing that, explain why furry fancruft should be removed while the other material in this example shouldn't. I have no problem with _standards_; I have a problem with _double_-standards. --Christopher Thomas 16:23, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
          • Asking me to AFD every bit of cruft before I get around to your personal favourite is just a little unreasonable, don't you think? Have you watched AFD recently -- did you see the mass Trekcruft nominations a couple of days ago? There's still a lot more of that to go. You aren't making an argument for Yerf... you are arguing that because there is lots of cruft in Wikipedia, we should have more. - Motor (talk) 16:49, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
            • I am asking you to go about your anti-cruft campaign in order of inverse notability. Go after the items with hundreds, instead of hundreds of thousands, of Google hits first. My argument is that given that all of this cruft that is far less notable than Yerf is currently being _kept_, a) Yerf satisfies whatever de-facto threshold for notability is being used on Wikipedia at present, and b) people seem to be using this de-facto threshold, as otherwise the cruft wouldn't be present at all. --Christopher Thomas 20:38, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
              • 1. Yerf does not satisfy the WP:WEB criteria. 2. Notability is about more than just being known to a few fans of the genre. 3. Keeping cruft in Wikipedia is easy, deleting it is hard work since block voting is commonplace. People vote keep regardless of guidelines, policies or arguments -- and this includes you. There's a much larger argument here about how Wikipedia is collecting unencylopedic rubbish because people can't get it in to their heads that Wikipedia isn't their personal diary, or a directory of fan crud, and that the AFD is so horribly broken that any crappy article can be block voted indefinitely by half a dozen fans (even though it is technically not supposed to be a vote). 4. Your argument boils down to this: there's already worse crap in Wikipedia, so why get rid of this. This is unjustifiable given the way Wikipedia works. We are dealing with Yerf now. - Motor (talk) 22:18, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
        • Comment Would creating a new page, something like Furry art sites, and using that to combine the current Yerf, FA, and VCL articles, be an acceptable compromise? Tevildo 18:05, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
          • Comment, This isn't the place to be striking bargains about other articles. This is a discussion of the notability of Yerf. However, I can't say how other editors would react. All I can say is that if you create an article for Furry art sites, I will put it up for deletion. You don't need it, and they are not notable outside of the furry sub-culture. If you want to discuss Yerf, do it on Furry fandom. It does not justify its own article. - Motor (talk) 18:20, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
          • In practice what'll probably happen is that I'll do a minor rewrite of furry fandom to list the most notable art sites, conventions, people, and so forth (top handful that most people in the fandom know about), and a few years down the road when enough mentions in the press exist to stave off an AfD, expand the sections out into articles. It just annoys me, greatly, that a) this article is being deleted vastly out-of-order if we're sorting by notability, and b) User:Motor seems to be dismissing all offshoot articles relating to furry fandom as non-notable out of hand. To give an analogy, this would be like doing the same to the goth subculture 10-15 years ago (which is the main reason I'm not worried about this dismissal affecting the long-term outlook for inclusion). --Christopher Thomas 20:38, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
          • Conditional merge I still think Yerf deserves its own article, but, if the consensus is against this, I would support merging the content with furry fandom as per Motor and Christopher Thomas rather than deleting it altogether. Tevildo 11:59, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
            • Delete, is my choice not merge. I've no trouble with the content being copied into furry fandom, but with no "Yerf" article, redirect or otherwise. - Motor (talk) 15:12, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
              • "Merge without redirect" isn't a valid vote. Your choices are (more or less) "keep", "delete", "merge and redirect", and "redirect without merge". Zetawoof^(ζ) 21:23, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
                • I know what my choices are. That's why the vote to which you just replied said very clearly Delete in bold at the beginning of the line. - Motor (talk) 21:40, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
                  • Brain fart. Never mind. Zetawoof^(ζ) 22:12, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment, What "Pokemon test"? Oh you mean the opinion essay with no status at all in this discussion? - Motor (talk) 16:28, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
    • Comment. Bingo. Per WP:NOTPOLICY. — WCityMike (talk • contribs) 19:38, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. Certainly as famous/notorious as VCL, and I don't see an AfD there. Tevildo 15:57, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment, I'm testing the water per the deletion guidelines. - Motor (talk) 16:36, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
    • Surely that's what proposed deletion is for? GreenReaper 17:47, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
      • Comment, no Prod is just for articles that you don't think anyone cares about. I was planning to put a lot of furry website/cruft up for deletion. The guidelines say to just put up a few and see how things go before doing that. - Motor (talk) 18:15, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
        • Comment * smiles * - In that case, you're going to find the general consensus is to delete all references to the fandom. We _are_ universally despised, after all. :) If Yerf goes, certainly we can {prod} all the furry websites - probably Doug Winger, as well. Tevildo 22:47, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
          • Comment, not really since furry fandom is notable by itself, and if someone else AFDed that I'd vote Keep. For what it's worth... I don't despise Furries... I don't care about them at all. I have the same attitude to the growth of cruft from whatever fangroup it happens to originate. - Motor (talk) 23:17, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. I'm somewhat hesitant to weigh in on some furry AFDs, but not this one. Yerf is a decade-old website whose significance as the premiere all-ages anthropomorphic art site is hard to underestimate. It has been temporarily less busy (alexa ranking details) because for a time the site was down, and it is still ramping back up to full operational status, but that does not diminish its historical impact. If the WP:WEB guidelines do not cover it, then I believe they are in error. It may be that this article does not sufficiently establish the site's notability. If so, I suggest inclusion of some of the information available at WikiFur's version. GreenReaper 17:47, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment, I was about to suggest you take the other direction and move it to Wikifur, where it belongs. - Motor (talk) 18:20, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
    • WikiFur is not a furry dumping ground. There are many, many topics on WikiFur that would not be suitable for Wikipedia. I believe that Yerf is one of the few that is. Of art archives, the ones I would judge "noteworthy" nowadays apart from it would be FurAffinity, the VCL (Vixen Controlled Library), SheezyArt (not specifically furry) and Yiffstar. Funnily enough, those are the ones that already have articles here. GreenReaper 18:48, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per nom. Angus McLellan (Talk) 19:49, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Delete as per nom. Wikipedia is not a dumping ground for article sabout minor websites Bwithh 22:06, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
• Weak delete I tried to be convinced of this site's notability but it just doesn't seem to be of encyclopaedic stature GassyGuy 23:21, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
• Delete unless sourced. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia--not a cylindrical receptacle for information on every website. Kotepho 02:09, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
• Weak delete for the same reasons as FurAffinity, below. Article is all hard-drive-failure this and server-downtime that, with no mention of any cultural relevance, media attention, etc. Might be possible to clean up, but current article is unacceptable. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 15:24, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
• Delete - If Wikipedia accepted articles on every website that is known only among a small group of enthusiasts, it would soon be flooded with fancruft. Also, the Pokemon test is not a guideline and it never should be. Reyk _YO! 20:39, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep - Definitely well-known and heavily referenced within its domain. Calling it "cruft" is prejudicial. The page needs work, though... "yerf" is a term with some history and story, not just some website. -- Taral 05:40, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment, I hear this a lot when people defend articles. I'm heavily referenced within "my domain" too. - Motor (talk) 07:19, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
    • Comment - Yes, but "your domain" doesn't have an entry in Wikipedia. -- Taral 21:05, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
      • Comment, actually, it does. But like Furries, it's rather small and only just notable... hence the reason "I" don't have my own article separate from it. - Motor (talk) 21:16, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
• Keep as per precedent of VCL. Zetawoof^(ζ) 21:11, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per nomination, per Motor's reason. --Starionwolf 01:53, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
• Delete nn, nom Deleuze 14:19, 14 June 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.