Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fictional universe of Carnivàle

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 Merged by sgeureka (talk · contribs) and redirected, a perfectly appropriate move that is probably better than a straight keep. — Scientizzle 15:45, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fictional universe of Carnivàle

Fictional universe of Carnivàle (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

Delete - fails WP:PLOT. Otto4711 18:26, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

• Strongest possible keep for now as article creator. Reason: This article hasn't existed very long, and I'm currently putting my effort into making Carnivàle a featured article and couldn't really pay much attention to expanding the show's subarticles. As I've said in the FAC nom, I deliberately moved all of the plot to this subpage because of the extremely spoilery storyline of the show – have a look at Carnivàle, and you'll see that there is no plot section, just a plot introduction. And since I think it's stupid to create episode articles for this show (as the sourced(!) intro sentence of this article says), I opted to create a "Fictional universe" article where all 24 episodes are shortly summarized and, when finished, are accompanied by comment and analysis by both creators and reviewers. See my current collection of reviewers' opinions here, here and here in my userspace where I'm doing most of my work on the articles in order to not interrupt the subarticles by work-in-progress info drops. If someone thinks that I was not able to produce a good referenced and encyclopedic article in maybe two months, then go ahead and re-nominate this article, but as it is now, no. If you (general you) don't know what others felt was important to this show before I started working on the main article, see here.– sgeureka ^t•c 19:37, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

• Comment - if this is userfied and taken out of article space then that is satisfactory pending continued work on it to bring in real-world significance and sourced analysis. If you're agreeable to that solution and a passing admin wants to userfy the article and close this nomination then that works for me. Otto4711 19:49, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

• (Longish) Reply. Is there really the need or hurry to take the whole article out of wiki main space? I mean, the current accepted guideline is that episode summaries should be limited to 500 words per hour. The whole article including the current sourced analysis is currently 6500 words, a far cry from the allowed 24*500=12000 words. And there is not much wiki resistance in having hundreds and thousands of episode articles with almost always just plot summaries (Category:Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, Category:Stargate SG-1 episodes, and my personal favorite Lost (Season 1), heck, even Category:Band of Brothers episodes for a 10 episode show). Because of Carnivàle being the type of show it is, I decided to be a provident wikipedian and only (reluctanty) split off material from the main article when WP:SIZE applied, resulting in 4 new articles where I knew that two might be on shaky notability ground for some weeks. Does this article require some work? I'm not denying it. Is there enough secondary material? Seems so. Is there a dedicated person to work on the article? Yes (how more dedicated can a wikipedian get if he works an article up to WP:FAC status?). BTW, it's perfectly possible that even I will feel in a few weeks that this article should be split or merged into other subarticles (eg. I already thought of merging the Genealogy section to Characters of Carnivàle and the "Route of the carnivale" section to List of Carnivàle episodes), but as wikipedia is a wiki with allegedly no time limit, I can't predict what (new) options will come up for this article that everyone will be comfortable with. So unless there is unanimous agreement to delete this article with all the info I've provided, I do not really favor userfying the article as it would severely hurt both the Carnivàle main article and the (my) wiki process in the meantime. – sgeureka ^t•c 21:34, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

• Comment: A reasonable compromise might be to keep this for now but reassess it for potential deletion in a couple of week's time. That will give Sgeurekat the opportunity to see where it fits after further work is done on the main Carnivàle article. Grutness...wha? 01:04, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
• Keep, because well-referenced, well-organized, and with lots of good images. Best, --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles^Tally-ho! 01:25, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
• Keep The program did in fact have a complicated plot arc in a universe of good and evil, and the potential viewer or Wikipedia reader is ill-served by mere plot summaries of each episode. The usual problem is that the writing is all original research, but it appears the article creators have relied on sources such as published interviews with the show's producer and other materials. Edison 03:06, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
• Delete this is an attempted description of a fictional world. There already exists Characters of Carnivàle which expands on the characters of the show - The rest is just pure plot summary Corpx 06:16, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

• Reply If you want to cover a work of fiction in an encyclopedic manner, of course you have to describe/summarize the plot (and the related fictional world) somewhere. Now that {{spoiler}} tags are as much as officially banned from wikipedia, you can't just mix in the plot (especially of a complex serial like Carnivàle) into the main article any longer. And summarizing/describing the whole overarching plot in a list article about the characters does not seem feasible to me. So what other options are there to summarize the plot and main elements of a show like this? Have an article for each episode - I already explained above why this is not suitable. Split the article/plot into Carnivàle (Season 1) and Carnivàle (Season 2) - not really suitable because per the producers, two seasons make up one "book". Rename the article into Carnivàle (Book 1) - not really suitable because only one of the planned three books was produced. So I chose the name Fictional universe of Carnivàle. (If someone can think of a better title, shoot. I thought about this for a week and couldn't come up with something better than the current title.) The last question is whether the plot itself is notable enough and written about enough to be covered on wikipedia, and the answer seems to point to yes. The plot of the show has been sufficiently covered by independent reviewers both online (see my userspace links above) and in print (eg. TV Zone Issues 168-172, 187, 188, 191, 193; I only have Issue 172 where three Carnivàle episodes received a two page coverage, so I guess the coverage was similar in the other magazine issues). – sgeureka ^t•c 12:06, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

• Keep very informative - Fosnez 07:25, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
• The article could use better referencing in terms of published, reliable third-party sources, but its perspective is surprisingly real world oriented and provides information beyond a simple plot summary. This is an admittedly weak rationale, but I like the article despite the fact that I'm something of a WP:WAF "zealot". —AldeBaer 13:52, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
• Keep This article is an exemplar of the content that makes wikipedia vital to the ordinary user such as myself. Where else could this information be found? Without wikipedia I would go through life with far more nagging questions unresolved. Such content deserves to be perpetuated.-Jabrim 22:31, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
• Important note as article creator: The content of this article will be merged to all the other Carnivàle articles in the next few minute/hours, and this article will/should remain as {{R from merge}}. I have shared my thoughts about this procedure at Talk:Fictional universe of Carnivàle#Future of this article. Thank you. – sgeureka ^t•c 08:11, 3 September 2007 (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.