Talk:Evil Inc.

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	This article is part of WikiProject Webcomics, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to webcomics on Wikipedia. Please participate by editing the article Evil Inc., or visit the project page for more details on the projects.
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1 Deletion?
2 In my own defense...
3 Wrong.
4 Re-created
5 Deleted again?
6 Why Not Notable?

[edit] Deletion?

I don't undersand why this page was deleted. Guigar is a successful artist who has been publishing his works for years, and has thousands of readers. That makes him both notable and relevant and certainly worthy of inclusion in an Encyclopedia.

Courting disaster is a weekly print comic.

Evil-Inc is also published in graphic novel format.

Phables is also a regular feature in the Philadelphia News.

If lack of third-party verification is the issue, there are plenty of those to be had. It seems to me that someone has a beef against webcomics. That's just silly: with the lack of censorship, webcomics are free to explore things that are simply impossible to do in the newspaper strips, and Some webcomics are very successful and earn a respectable living for their artists without ever having been published in a news paper. self-publishing aside, some webcomics have crossed over in to the commercial arena.

Two guys in Ohio were laughed at by publishers, yet helped a genre. Who knows? In 70 years, maybe the name Guigar will be just as well known. Either way, I don't think it's Wikipedia's job to judge. EI is relevant, and should never have been deleted.

It's also worth noting the Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards 2007 nominees.

TomXP411 09:18, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

It's possible that the subject of this article is encyclopedic, I can't know that because I haven't read it and haven't seen indication that it qualifies for Wikipedia's guidelines for inclusion. Was this web-comic the subject of multiple, non-trivial, reliable published works, whose sources are independent of the subject itself? If so, you should provide these sources in the article to establish notability.

As to Wikipedia being biased against web-comics, there's a grain of truth in that. There are independent guidelines for web-content, but they are still geared towards establishing notability. Still, many articles that qualify against the criteria for inclusion do exist on Wikipedia (see Category:Webcomics for examples). LeaHazel : talk : contribs 09:39, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the references, LeaHazel. That helps clarify things. The [Wikipedia:Notability (web)|page you referenced] contains this text:

The website or content has won a well-known and independent award from either a publication or organization.:

The content is distributed via a medium which is both well known and independent of the creators, either through an online newspaper or magazine, an online publisher, or an online broadcaster.:

Guigar points out below that his comics are published by more than one newspaper, and I don't really think of Philly as a minor market. TomXP411 19:43, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

If this were a comic read by twelve people, I'd agree with pulling the article down. However, the fact that Guigar has become a rather successful artist in his hometown is certainly worthy of note. That having been said, where is the line drawn regarding the merits of inclusion for web comics in an encyclopedia? I'd certainly think that it's better to err on the side of caution and leave an article in rather than delete things that could be relevant to the average reader.

The trouble with establishing relevance based on publications that reference a work is that the references won't show up immediately. I can understand deleting this article ten years from now, if the comic has become nothing but a minor blip on the cultulral radar. On the other hand, EI could become a cultural icon in the superhero comic genre. Certainly, it's predecessor, Greystone Inn, has achieved some noteriety - a Google search for '"Greystone Inn" Comic' turns up 24,600 results. A search for '"Evil Inc" comic' turns up more than 85,000.

Guigar - I'm seeing that the chief complaint here is that you haven't been referenced by independent publications. Have other people written aricles about your work? Are you highlighted in industry rags? Are there news articles about EI? If that's the requirement for inclusion, then dig out all those clippings. Perhaps a new Evil Inc page should be in the works.

Regardless, if there is a debate about whether to keep an article, shouldn't the error be made on the side of keeping the article, rather than throwing it away? It seems silly to, in one click of the mouse, eliminate the work of all the people who have contributed to an article. After all, the opinion of one editor is not the opinion of the 6 billions on this planet, and the mission should be to preserve their heritage, not make a few editors happy. TomXP411 19:35, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] In my own defense...

I'd like to add some facts to argue in favor of re-establishing this page. I am the creator of Evil Inc.

Evil Inc is a daily comic strip that has roughly 11,000 daily readers (as of Jan. 2007). It is a spin-off of my first comic, Greystone Inn, which was launched Feb 2000.

Later this month, I will celebrate seven years of creating a daily comic strip on a Monday-through-Saturday schedule. That's over 2,000 comics.

Evil Inc appears in several daily newspapers -- as did Greystone Inn and my two other comic projects, Courting Disaster and Phables.

The largest newspaper to carry these comics is the Philadelphia Daily News which has a daily circulation of roughly 130,000.

There are two Evil Inc graphic novels, distributed worldwide by Diamond Distribution.

I would very much like to see this page re-established. It is not a webcomic. It is a comic strip with a Web presence.

Thank you Guigar 14:29, 2 February 2007 (UTC)Brad Guigar

This is absurd. However deleted this article should go under review for abuse. --Energman 15:36, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm unclear by what you mean, Energman. Are you implying that deleting the article was abuse, or that our discussion of its deletion is abuse? Based on your user page, I'm guessing that you think the article should be restored. TomXP411 19:14, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wrong.

Somthing has obviously gone horribly wrong here.

What can we do to fix this? Jack Cain 08:33, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Provide citations that it's the subject of multiple, non-trivial, reliable published works, whose sources are independent of the subject itself. LeaHazel : talk : contribs 10:42, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Holy crap, wikitruth was right.

^^ not me So how do we get this page back so we can provide that information? I see too much talk and no action. What does one do to actually make the page come back so we can provide the required data? TomXP411 20:02, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I haven't done this before, but there are instructions at Wikipedia:Deletion_review. I'd suggest first listing here in the talk page the places the comic has been published and the places it's been cited, so the evidence for why we should have the article is clear. (Alas "EI could become a cultural icon in the superhero comic genre" won't win any arguments; it'll just be refuted with "Wikipedia is not a crystal ball". So we need present-day references. I'd also point out that publication by Lulu doesn't mean anything - they'll print anything if you pay them - though of course the Philly newspaper does.) Looking at the archived deletion discussion it seems the only reason the article was deleted was because sources weren't cited in time, so fixing that should fix the problem. --Zeborah 02:51, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re-created

Obviously, the article has been replaced by a new one; one of the admins re-built it for us.

It's now up to us (Guigar's readers and the community at large) to flesh out the article and provide sources. Look at some of the other well-done webcomic articles and get an idea of what this one ought to look like. We need sources, so that the next time someone decides to randomly delete the article, it won't happen quite so easily.

To this end, dig up any newspaper articles, magazine articles, reviews, or whatever you can find. POst them in the Links section at the bottom of the article.

TomXP411 06:19, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Yep, that's what I did. The previous version of the article said, basically, "this is a webcomic! It's by Brad Guigar! Here's the cast list!", and, well, any webcomic can have a cast list. Even ones I like. It has to make some assertion of notability, and simply being by Brad Guigar isn't enough. There's something wrong when all the assertions of notability are only made after the article is deleted. DS 13:56, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

When was the last time you saw the assertion of notability in discussion of a wiki article that didn't have something to do with a motion to delete an article? Most articles on Wikipedia do not contain, in their text bodies or discussion histories, arguments that the article is on a notable topic. There is nothing unusual about it, and it is utterly ridiculous to claim otherwise.

As far as your discussion of "any webcomic", I would point to the fact that a number of relatively obscure print comics have wikistubs with practically no informational content beyond where the comic has been published. The implicit assertion that articles on webcomics must, unlike all other Wikipedia articles, include arguments for the webcomic's notability, is absurd. I had seen previous references to a bias against webcomics on Wikipedia, but this discussion page is the first time I have seen it for myself confirmed in writing. Balancer 01:07, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

In principle, the first paragraph of each article, not just those about webcomics, should establish "why you, the randomly-browsing reader who has never heard of this particular topic, should care". It is not always the case that this happens, but in principle it is supposed to. DS 06:21, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Would you mind pointing me to an official statement of this principle? I seem to have some difficulty finding it or evidence of it within the Wikipedia style manual, and only 2 out of the first 20 articles I randomly sampled just now explained why I should care about the topic in the first paragraph. The vast majority instead spent the first paragraph defining and describing the topic. If this is truly Wikipedia's stated policy, this needs to be made clear within the style manual, which does not currently contain the words "care," or "notable," and only refers to "important" or "relevant" relative to the article's content rather than Wikipedia's standards of notability.

It is particularly important that such a policy, if extant, be thoroughly emphasized in the style manual, because this would mark a definitive departure from the normal encyclopedic style used by print encyclopedias. It is particularly important, if the reputation of Wikipedia is to be tarnished by the minimum amount from this entire incident, that the policy leading to the deletion of articles because they have failed to conform to this not particularly well publicized or frequently adhered to policy be clarified publicly or altered.

Am I clear in the above two paragraphs, or do you need me to clarify it further? Balancer 03:59, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Lead section: "The lead should be capable of standing alone as a concise overview of the article, establishing context, explaining why the subject is interesting or notable, and briefly describing its notable controversies, if there are any." -- Dragonfiend 04:44, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you, Dragonfiend. It is good to know that DS was actually referencing something geniuinely within Wikipedia's style manual, even though I was unable to locate it.

Now, shall I proceed to explain in detail why exactly it is that failure to conform to a point of style mentioned within the third of the four articles on section layout pointed to in section number 4 out of the 26 sections of the manual of style, to which few articles conform, is not a cause for deletion of any article? Or can it be understood from that question alone why such is a bad idea without my writing an entire essay about it? Balancer 05:16, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Deleted again?

The new article, with all its citations, etc, appears to have been deleted again with no comment as to why.--HowardTayler 19:21, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

It currently points to the deletion review, which is still open for commentary for the next few days. Nifboy 19:37, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

but that page contains no reference to the fact that the page was restored, and then deleted again. This is confusing. At the very least somebody should say "page restored out of process, returned to deleted state pending review," or whatever the appropriate WP jargon is for that.--HowardTayler 20:07, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I didn't know it'd been re-created out of band. I'm going to transfer the latest (good) version to my userspace, pending the final results of the deletion review.TomXP411 20:48, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

The DRV nominator just needs to withdraw the review and create a sourced article, is all. An AFD deletion decision is never an injunction against a better article, so if there are sources available that establish notability and that weren't brought up during the AFD discussion just ask the closing admin to restore the article to user space, source the claims and move the article back to mainspace. It's usually considered prudent to double-check with the closing admin if the sources are sufficient (a lot of people have a tendency to overestimate the quality of their sources). As long as the article is under review the decision of the AFD stands, and recreation is out of process. So this nomination was not only frivolous but also counterproductive. ~ trialsanderrors 20:56, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Why Not Notable?

Less talk, more article editing. ;-)

The current page doesn't say anything about what the comic contributes to the webcomics world. It just says the comic exists.

I have no clue myself. Can some folks help me out as to where to start looking for sources?

--Kim Bruning 23:20, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

It’s a printed comic with a website, not a pure webcomic. A reference for the newspaper would be nice, but the assertion of notability is there. —xyzzy_n 23:32, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Still not a very pretty article. I mean, it does mention notability, but it doesn't explain how this comic is influenced by others, or influences them, or what great inventions or concepts make this comic special or, etc... --Kim Bruning 23:35, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

"how this (item) is influenced by others, or influences them, or what great inventions or concepts make this (item)special"--Kim, you've just eliminated any reason to ever mention Harlequin Romances on Wikipedia. Thanks. I'll go delete all such articles now. Actually, I think I can delete most fiction and most Hollywood movies. No real influence and nothing special.Mzmadmike 05:27, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't know much about Harlequin Romances (I should read some? :-P ). I do know some things about fiction. How about influence between Sherlock Holmes and CSI (and real life), or how about influence between Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix (and real life)? I think you're understimating how cool fiction can be :-)... which I guess is my point. --Kim Bruning 12:46, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I think I know much better how cool fiction can be than you do. I make my living writing it;-) I was merely pointing out that a considerable amount of fiction is "pure" entertainment with no real meaning or influence. But it can still be notable and relevant.Mzmadmike 07:58, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Oh, way cool! Maybe I should ask for your autograph? ;-) But, well, surely when you write there's got to be movies you've seen, or books you have read where you get some ideas from, right? --Kim Bruning 20:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I suppose the fans find it more important to have ‘the most recent plot twist’ in the lead. —xyzzy_n 23:42, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

… Well, that was fast. The intro paragraph looks definitely better now. —xyzzy_n 23:59, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Especially I find zero secondary sources in the article. ~ trialsanderrors 01:25, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

So how many websites does it have to appear on independantly? Or does it have to be mentioned in the credits of a film or something? I can work either into an eventuality. Besides, Wikipedia has an article on Internet Memes and Occurences. Webcomics are an internet occurence, no matter what other medium they appear in. - BL

It needs to be mentioned in multiple (more than one) reliable (not just someone's blog) third-party (not the comic's own site) sources (web, tv, film, paper, whatever). My working rule-of-thumb, as a summary: a source which has an editor who's responsible for making sure that content is fact-checked. My other working rule-of-thumb: it should be possible for someone to create an article about the comic without ever having read the comic - they should be able to get all their information from other sources. The vast majority of the articles I've written or drastically-rewritten are on subjects I'd never heard of before I set out to write the article: I gathered information from various reliable sources, synthesised it and wrote it up with references as an article for Wikipedia.

I would happily do the same for this article if someone would provide me with a single reference; I haven't been able to find one myself. I realise that there are huge numbers of fans for this comic, but if all the information on this article comes from the comic strip and its home page itself, then I see no point having the article; people might as well just go to the homepage and read the comic strip. I say this as someone who started off wanting to keep the article; but at the moment I'm frustrated that people keep saying there are plenty of references but no-one's providing any. --Zeborah 07:40, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

(Inquiry) Out of curiosity, since the entire concept of a webcomic is a comic on the internet, why is there a requirement for an offline citation, to say nothing of multiple offline cites? By the time PvP or Penny Arcade gained any sort of offline review, they'd already been running four and five years each, with readerships in the tens of thousands each. At the time "webcomics" weren't yet a phenomenon anyone was doing newspaper articles on, yet their "notability" was clear and obvious.

Moreover, you say you'd "happily" update this article, but can't find references. If those references are offline, how do you expect to find them? Some of my strips were printed in a Russian magazine. If you didn't subscribe to that magazine, you'd never know, and since the mag has no online presence, you wouldn't find it with a Google search. And according to the given rules here, mentioning it on the comics' own page would have been an invalid citation for notability. Meaning I'd have had to hope that someone else found and read the magazine, and posted a review of it and my strip- but, of course, not posting it to a mere blog.

If said references are online, then why require multiple offline references? Further still, you wish to find online references to gather information for an article, yet you specifically disallow the authors' own site, blogs that might have mentioned the strip, and any other works written or posted by the author. What does that leave? Fansites? A post on FARK? In another of the VFD articles on another comic, references by other online scources such as Comixpedia and Blank Label were also specicially disallowed. So I'm rather stumped- what, exactly, sort of references does all that leave? DocsMachine 12:25, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Replying in order of your questions: 1) There is no requirement for an offline citation, as I said; online is quite acceptable as long as it's reliable (cf my rule of thumb "edited").

2) I can't find any reliable online references either. One possibly-relevant item comes up in a Google News search (I'll list this below in a moment); nothing relevant comes up in a Google Scholar search. All I can find in plain Google is blogs and the wikipedia article itself. As for finding offline references, I have access to databases through my university which index a wide variety of print sources (you probably have access to a more limited selection of databases through your public library) and I can't find anything there either. If the website mentioned "Newspaper X has published a review of my comic on day Y" then I could hunt up the appropriate issue of that newspaper and verify that; citing the website is insufficient for notability, but citing the newspaper, if I'd seen the article in it myself, would be fine. However, I can't find any page on the webcomic which boasts of any reviews at all. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places; if so, just tell me where I should be looking.

3) Again, multiple offline references are not required. 4) It leaves online versions of newspapers and magazines; edited webzines; edited review sites (by edited I mean the sort where rather than just anyone logging in and posting an article, instead an editor selects who will write them or which articles will be put up on the site); that sort of thing. If this were science-fiction I could name examples; I don't know what sites exist for webcomics, if any. If none, that makes it harder but there are plenty of places articles could be. --Zeborah 19:29, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

"then I see no point having the article; people might as well just go to the homepage and read the comic strip." ... I'd say, under these strict policis, you might as well not have a Wikipedia. People don't go to an encyclopedia, print or otherwise, just because they want to look up a specific topic. Sometimes people want to find out about new things they've never heard of before... flip open to a random page and start reading. Hence, the link for random articles in the sidebar? Then there's people who wish to know more about a broad subject, like comic strips or supervillains, by reading articles related to it. An Evil Inc. article that contains only information gleaned from the Evil Inc. page would not be any less useful to this endeavor than any other page on a related subject. The question about credibility doesn't even enter into it... if you accept "OMG EVIL INC IS THE BEST COMIC EVER ITS BETTER THAN SHAKESPEARE", it's equally bad whether the "fact" comes from the author or (somehow) the 1911 edition of Brittanica, isn't it? If Wikipedia dropped its freaky, irrelevant newspeak definitions of notability and verifiability and settled for accepting ACTUAL VERIFIABLE notability (like, the fact that many people have noted it!), it would be a more complete reference. I understand you're just stating Wikipedia's policies, not writing them... my real question is, why? Why do people defend these policies? 68.13.21.225 13:54, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

There is a lot of discussion on the notability pages. It might be worth reading and contributing. The key factor is consensus. Perhaps if enough people built a consensus about changing the policy, it could be changed. After all, Wikipedia is a democracy. TomXP411 15:17, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Just to nip that in the bud: No it's NOT. Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia --Kim Bruning 17:19, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I could have phrased that better. Some policies are a little inconsistent, so the community has to build consensus to establish either more precise guidelines or to determine if something should be treated as one of the exceptions to a rule. Personally, I think that the notability requirement is a little tough for some categories, webcomics being one of those. In some cases, a comic's only notability is that so many people check in on a daily basis that the comic's server can't handle it (this happened frequently on Real Life). To me, that, in and of itself, ought to be a reason for inclusion. After all, what is the real reason for the notability requirement? It establishes impact: someone has seen that an item is important enough to write about it. However, there just isn't that much discussion about comics. All too often, we read them and throw them away. But the point is, we read them. Many of the newspaper comics are far from noteworthy, yet higher quality comics go unpublished because the syndicate is afraid to take a risk. I believe that the web-only publishing industry is about to take off in a big way - you'll soon see music, books, and even TV shows and movies released exclusively through the web, either as downloads or as physical product. So how do you measure the notability of these products? I believe firmly that the prime criteria should be viewership or consumption. Alternatively, if a product doesn't have great numbers, but has achieved critical acclaim, then it's obviously notable enough to include. I think the real problem is simply that the official guidelines don't recognize anything that hasn't been commented on outside of its circle, and therefore doesn't see it as important. Most people don't really think about writing articles about comics - they're just there, and we take them for granted. This causes edit wars and things like this - a page that was created, deleted, re-created, re-deleted, and has at least two different entries in the deletion review (although one was speedy closed). The question isn't "is EI notable", the question is "are the notability guidelines adequate?" It's easy to say "The guidelines are what they are; deal with it," but the fact that WP:WEB is, itself, in flux establishes to me that the guidelines CAN change. If they CAN change, it follows that there could exist a situation where they SHOULD change. Now the question is, "Is this one of those situations?" I believe it is. TomXP411 19:28, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

(unindent, replying to TomXP411's 19:28, 7 Feb 07 post) Yes, as you say "the official guidelines don't recognize anything that hasn't been commented on outside of its circle" -- the thing is that an encyclopaedia is a tertiary source, which means that it relies for the most part on secondary sources, which are comments on a thing outside of the thing's circle. It's more or less the definition of the words. If Wikipedia were to write based on the thing itself (ie based on the primary source) it would be doing "original research" and it would be a secondary source, not an encyclopaedia. But it doesn't follow that because a thing doesn't have an article, Wikipedia it "therefore doesn't see it as important"; it only means that Wikipedia doesn't see it as "notable", using a very specific (possibly even Wikipedia-only) meaning of the word "notable". "Noted" would probably be less misleading: if a thing hasn't been mentioned outside of its circle then no matter how important it is, it simply hasn't been noted. (When it is noted, then a Wikipedia article is perfectly appropriate.) --Zeborah 06:38, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

That makes sense. But then, I see a Wikipedia Webcomic project, with the stated goal of producing a comprehensive list of webcomics. How does that fit in to the overall goals of Wikipedia? I'm just confused, because I'm seeing very different attitudes and no clear indication of what to make of all this.

I don't think that list, as you describe it, would fit into the overall goals of Wikipedia. (Also I think it's impossible; there must be a gadzillion webcomics.) But the thing is that Wikipedia isn't run by a monolithic body; it's run by hundreds, thousands, millions? or people who put in a little time here or there as they notice something in their particular area of interest that needs fixing. Probably no-one who particularly cares about those particular policies has noticed the project you mention. So yeah, it's semi-random: that is, it's random that someone has noticed this page, but the conclusions they've drawn from looking at it aren't random but are based on Wikipedia's policies. So if it's fixed to conform to the policies then it'll be safe. (I'm still thinking about the Editor and Publisher citations; it'll be weekend soon and I'll try doing something concrete then.) --Zeborah 18:10, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

(unindent) I shake my fist at subscription publications. Nifboy 18:20, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Don't you hate that? TomXP411 19:29, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Should we post a link anyway? I think I will. If someone reverts it, then that's that.TomXP411 19:31, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Not a good idea to cite something unless you know what it's saying for reasons I have no time to explain right now. I'll see later (about to start work) if I can get access to that somehow. In the meantime, does anyone have access to the London Free Press (Canada, not UK)? Google News lists:

Lost Planet a great find

London Free Press, Canada - 25 Jan 2007

... as a grappling hook that allows you to scale buildings, climb mountains and get on top of strategic piles of crates in Evil Inc.'s subterranean lair. ...

Does this sound like they're talking about Evil Inc the webcomic or something else? --Zeborah 19:33, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. Nifboy 19:34, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

In my own research, I'm finding that "Evil, Inc." is also a pejorative term that's applied to unethical corporations. It's also the name of a video gaming clan. The disambiguation page could have a few dozen entries, if one was to be comprehensive. :) TomXP411 21:46, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Too bad re Lost Planet. Currently investigating the Editor and Publisher citations - my library seems to have access to the magazine but can't find these particular articles for some reason. I've got a colleague on the case and will keep you posted. --Zeborah 01:06, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Alas, after getting three colleagues onto it, we've determined that E & P publish a daily version, which is where these articles are from, and a monthly version which doesn't include them; my library only has the monthly version and we can hardly complain because we get it free as part of a package from another company. --Zeborah 06:38, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

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