Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sun and Moon (Middle-earth)
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- 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 Keep. Davewild (talk) 21:49, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Sun and Moon (Middle-earth)
Non-notable and completely in-universe. Wikipedia policy requires topics of articles to be relevant outside of the body of fiction to be relevant - major Tolkien characters are usually notable, minor aspects of his universe are not. See WP:FICT, WP:N. Chardish 19:44, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
- Comment This was a prod contested by the creator of the article. - Chardish 19:46, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
- Delete as it fails to establish notability or present real-world context about these elements in the fictional universe. Best suited for a Middle-earth Wikia of some sort. —Erik (talk • contrib) - 19:50, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
- Delete - Needless, trivial, no notability. Tarc 19:55, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
- Keep... this isn't a terribly well-written article right now, and it needs its primary sources better specified and referenced and some more out-of-universe perspective, but it has what appears to be one real live academic reference, and as with other Tolkien subjects, there's a pretty good chance there are others out there. Pinball22 20:37, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
- Keep - Notability is not totally in doubt, as there appears to be a section of creation information, which if referenced would establish some notability. I say if there is doubt, which there is, don't delete. Judgesurreal777 22:05, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
- Keep. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Man in the Moon (Middle-earth) is leaning toward redirecting that article here; prodding this article while that merge was under consideration was premature. The subject seems to have some notability beyond the setting; although this particular article is in need of heavy cleanup, that's not cause for deletion. Powers T 23:35, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
- Thank-you for agreeing with me that prodding this article was premature. It will have an extremely chilling effect (reducing the freedom of discussion) if people feel that something as innocuous as suggesting a merge destination will produce a response of the suggested merge destination being nominated at AfD. I would be even happier if Chardish would also acknowledge this. Chardish, how do you feel about all this? Carcharoth 00:09, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- Background to the nomination - please see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Man in the Moon (Middle-earth) for the background to this. Two people suggested merging that article to this one, first Uthanc, and then me. Nine minutes after I suggested the merge, one of the 'delete' voters in that other discussion, Chardish, placed a prod tag on this article. See here for my noting of this in that discussion. When discussing merge destinations for a particular article, it is disruptive for participants in that discussion to prod the proposed merge destination article while the other discussion is still going on. If this isn't in a guideline somewhere, it should be. Carcharoth 00:27, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- I call them like I see them - I don't go out of my way looking for non-notable articles to nominate for deletion, but if someone kindly links me to one, I'll nominate it for deletion. Process is important, but instead of arguing process, could you instead find sources that say that this topic is notable independently of Tolkien's work? - Chardish 02:58, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- I'll help find the sources. Just to be clear: if you are aware of a discussion about an article going on in one location, you see nothing wrong with nominating that article for deletion without having the courtesy to inform people at the original discussion? Wikipedia is a collaborative editing environment, not an exercise in tagging. If you had said at the original AfD that you had concerns about this article, then something could have been done about it. Did you consider discussing your concerns with anyone (you knew there was a discussion going on where you could have voiced your concerns), or do you think that communication should be done via prod tags, edit summaries and AfD nominations? What about the article talk page? Did you consider using that first? Why did you jump several possible stages and go straight to prod? Carcharoth 05:07, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- Chardish, thanks for the message on my talk page. Please don't take the above personally. It is the general philosophy some people have of tagging and nominating for deletion without discussion that I'm unhappy with. Your nomination just brought that to the surface. As I said on my talk page, I'll try and stick to finding sources. For your part, I would hope that you might consider discussing things in future before tagging or nominating. Carcharoth 06:14, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- No offense taken. Personally, I feel that nomination for deletion generates discussion and generally improves articles that get kept - I've found that of the articles I nominate for deletion, the ones that don't get deleted wind up being better articles. This is a side-effect, however - I don't nominate articles that I think can be saved via cleanup. (I do a lot of tagging of pages with cleanup tags, too.) - Chardish 06:24, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- I can see merits on both sides, but (as I have previously discussed with Carcharoth) I am also concerned that some potential mergers are discussed without adequate assessment of the notability of the merge target. There is a danger of a lot of energy being expended on merging non-notable stubs into a non-notable list of trivia. Sometimes these mergers can produce a good article, but it should not be automatically assumed that merger solves the problem; the first question that needs to be asked is what level of detailed coverage of a subject can both establish notability and remain within the boundaries of WP:PLOT. In a situation where masses of trivial stubs have been created, it seems unlikely that all of them are worth keeping, even by merger. If AfDs prompt closer examination of that question, they serve a useful purpose ... and (as I have also suggested several times before to Carcharoth), projects such as M-E could greatly reduce the likelihood of outsiders tagging and nominating articles if they were more clearly making that sort of assessment themselves. The middle-earth project has recently made big strides in that direction, but that's partly because of piking from outside. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:03, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- The assumption has never been that merging solves the problem. It just makes it easier to tackle larger articles in one go, instead of tens of smaller articles. And mergers can make articles better. See here, where another editor says: "Second, and more important, depending on the alleged grounds for deletion merger could solve the problem for both articles, e.g. in the case of notability or an article being little more than a definition." Also, I fear people are falling into the trap of thinking that each separate section or part of an article needs to be independently notable. It is only the article topic as a whole that needs to be notable. There is ample precedent for this. Also, as I said when you first got involved in this area, excessive amounts of AfD discussion and tagging and so on, detracts efforts from finding sources (as I did below). I recognise that you haven't made these nominations, but when I provide sources like I have here, I was thinking that you might have considered adding support? In the end, I think that low-level continuous improvement of a group of articles over several years is more productive and more efficient than a set of tagging and AfD nominations (as you encounter groups of articles) in an attempt to "poke" people into working harder and faster. You may see yourself as performing a valuable service by dispassionately finding these areas and tagging them and raising concerns, but the end goal should be improving things, not disrupting ongoing efforts to clean-up an area. Some of your contributions have been very helpful, but as you can see from several ANI threads, your approach leads to more drama than other approaches might. Do you think you might possibly think about considering whether to try another approach (such as adding sources or discussing with other editors, as opposed to tagging and nominating for deletion) and see if you get better results with less effort (ie. more efficiency)? Now, this post has turned out to be more about your approach than I intended, and so is out of place here. But equally, your post about general strategy is one that is better discussed on the WikiProject talk page. I find the best and most productive editors drop by WikiProject talk pages or article talk pages and try and discuss things before tagging or nominating. Carcharoth 13:33, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) I agree with your basic point, but the recent spate of fiction-related nominations can make it difficult to perform those assessments within the time constraints of the AfD discussions. I continue to maintain that it would have been more productive to try to establish a consensus for broad guidelines within the subject area rather than nominate apparently random articles for deletion. Not accusing you of doing so, BHG; it's just your comment that sparked this one. Powers T 13:34, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- LtPowers, you may not have noticed that establishing that consensus at WikiProject Middle-earth was exactly what I did, and new referencing guidelines are now in place. Carcharoth suggests that it is a good idea to drop by a wikiproject and discuss things, which I also did, for long enough to each a consensus on a number of points.
Carcharoth, your point about notability of the merged article as a whole was exactly the one I was trying to make: the merged one may be notable, but it will not necessarily be notable, and I see far too many cases where the assumption is not tested and WP:PLOT is not considered. As above, my concern is that editors who ask for breathing space because they are overstretched may be spending their energies merging articles which should all be deleted.
As to tagging, if an article is sub-standard, that can be changed over time, and one of the purposes of tagging articles is to note that the improvement is needed and to give time for that to be done. I hoped we had reached some sort of agreement about tagging substandard articles, but maybe not as much as I had thought. :( And I'm still concerned that there appears somewhere in the midst of this to be a trace of WP:OWNership, a resentment that anyone outside a project might have the temerity to identify deficiencies in articles within its scope. The quote from Jimbo Wales in WP:V is quite blunt on this subject, that unsourced material should simply be removed. He argues there that tagging is often far too lax an approach (particularly wrt to BLP cases, which of coure don't apply here), but I can see nothing to justify the view that unsourced material should remain in place without being tagged as such. I have no problem with an article remaining as a stub for ages if notability is demonstrated and the facts are referenced, but I'm rather fed up with the repeated suggestions from some quarters that verifiability and notability are something we should not even mention, because someone might address them some day.
This is not myspace, it is an encyclopedia whose core principles include verfiability. Lack of verifiability should not missing word inserted later. be treated as a dirty secret which should go unmentioned in case some editors are offended by it, and there is too great a tendency to blame the messenger in these cases. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:26, 15 November 2007 (UTC)- Some brief responses: (1) I think you mean "shouldn't be treateted as a dirty secret". (2) The Jimbo quote had an important qualifier that you forgot: "unless it can be sourced" - my view is that if you don't know whether it can be sourced, look for a source or ask those who do know. If you remove material that is later found to have been verifiable, then you haven't really helped. If you remove information that was libellous or misleading, then you have helped. But please do try and find out which it is before editing. (3) I am not shooting the messenger, I'm saying that the method of delivery (AfD) is more blunt and aggressive than discussion on talk pages or at WikiProjects. (4) Not asking for breathing time, but asking who determines at what pace things get done? You or the editors working on the articles? (5) Not 'ownership' - I have invited you several times to participate and get involved with helping, and that offer is, as always, open to anyone - anyone can edit. Not everyone can delete though, which is why people wanting deletion have to go through AfD. (6) No resentment. Pointing out deficiencies is always welcomed. There is no guarantee though that people will agree with you (or me for that matter). (7) The need for verifiability and notability - no disagreement from me there now (we've discussed this in the past), though I may disagree on your interpretation of notability. Tag away, but please discuss at the same time if people ask you to do so. Carcharoth 15:08, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
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- 1)Yes, you're right about the typo.2) We've had this discussion before, when you supported IronGargoyle's second removal of {{unreferenced}} tags from about a hundred unreferenced articles. The people in a position to add sources are the people who know the subject, but a passing editor can note the lack of them. That's the fundamental problem here: the assumption that it it is rude or disruptive to mark an article as needing attention, or that this should only be one by an editor prepared to devote their energies to the subject. Nor does this necessarily need discussion: {{unreferenced}} means just that. 3) The bluntness is more in the receiving than in the delivery. Noting that something is unsourced or under-sourced should not be perceived as rude, unless editors place a very low priority on verifiability 4) Who determines the pace? Ultimately, the community. But as before, if the editors working on article want to remove the markers indicating that there is a problem, I think that it's right to assume that they don't want to fix it, and to put the article up for wider assessment. 5) As above, anyone can edit, but not everyone has to fix every problem, and it's the responsibility of whoever adds material to source it. 7) I am always ready to discuss whether any tags I have applied are accurate. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:00, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
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- Try to avoid assuming that an AfD nomination is anything other than a good-faith attempt to improve the encyclopedia. To quote fuddlemark: "Mate, keeping or deleting an article is not an insult to whatever the article's about. I'm not notable, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest." - Chardish 17:36, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
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- As I said, BHG, I wasn't accusing you of doing (or failing to do) these things. Powers T 19:08, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- Some brief responses: (1) I think you mean "shouldn't be treateted as a dirty secret". (2) The Jimbo quote had an important qualifier that you forgot: "unless it can be sourced" - my view is that if you don't know whether it can be sourced, look for a source or ask those who do know. If you remove material that is later found to have been verifiable, then you haven't really helped. If you remove information that was libellous or misleading, then you have helped. But please do try and find out which it is before editing. (3) I am not shooting the messenger, I'm saying that the method of delivery (AfD) is more blunt and aggressive than discussion on talk pages or at WikiProjects. (4) Not asking for breathing time, but asking who determines at what pace things get done? You or the editors working on the articles? (5) Not 'ownership' - I have invited you several times to participate and get involved with helping, and that offer is, as always, open to anyone - anyone can edit. Not everyone can delete though, which is why people wanting deletion have to go through AfD. (6) No resentment. Pointing out deficiencies is always welcomed. There is no guarantee though that people will agree with you (or me for that matter). (7) The need for verifiability and notability - no disagreement from me there now (we've discussed this in the past), though I may disagree on your interpretation of notability. Tag away, but please discuss at the same time if people ask you to do so. Carcharoth 15:08, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- LtPowers, you may not have noticed that establishing that consensus at WikiProject Middle-earth was exactly what I did, and new referencing guidelines are now in place. Carcharoth suggests that it is a good idea to drop by a wikiproject and discuss things, which I also did, for long enough to each a consensus on a number of points.
- I can see merits on both sides, but (as I have previously discussed with Carcharoth) I am also concerned that some potential mergers are discussed without adequate assessment of the notability of the merge target. There is a danger of a lot of energy being expended on merging non-notable stubs into a non-notable list of trivia. Sometimes these mergers can produce a good article, but it should not be automatically assumed that merger solves the problem; the first question that needs to be asked is what level of detailed coverage of a subject can both establish notability and remain within the boundaries of WP:PLOT. In a situation where masses of trivial stubs have been created, it seems unlikely that all of them are worth keeping, even by merger. If AfDs prompt closer examination of that question, they serve a useful purpose ... and (as I have also suggested several times before to Carcharoth), projects such as M-E could greatly reduce the likelihood of outsiders tagging and nominating articles if they were more clearly making that sort of assessment themselves. The middle-earth project has recently made big strides in that direction, but that's partly because of piking from outside. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:03, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- No offense taken. Personally, I feel that nomination for deletion generates discussion and generally improves articles that get kept - I've found that of the articles I nominate for deletion, the ones that don't get deleted wind up being better articles. This is a side-effect, however - I don't nominate articles that I think can be saved via cleanup. (I do a lot of tagging of pages with cleanup tags, too.) - Chardish 06:24, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- Chardish, thanks for the message on my talk page. Please don't take the above personally. It is the general philosophy some people have of tagging and nominating for deletion without discussion that I'm unhappy with. Your nomination just brought that to the surface. As I said on my talk page, I'll try and stick to finding sources. For your part, I would hope that you might consider discussing things in future before tagging or nominating. Carcharoth 06:14, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- I'll help find the sources. Just to be clear: if you are aware of a discussion about an article going on in one location, you see nothing wrong with nominating that article for deletion without having the courtesy to inform people at the original discussion? Wikipedia is a collaborative editing environment, not an exercise in tagging. If you had said at the original AfD that you had concerns about this article, then something could have been done about it. Did you consider discussing your concerns with anyone (you knew there was a discussion going on where you could have voiced your concerns), or do you think that communication should be done via prod tags, edit summaries and AfD nominations? What about the article talk page? Did you consider using that first? Why did you jump several possible stages and go straight to prod? Carcharoth 05:07, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- I call them like I see them - I don't go out of my way looking for non-notable articles to nominate for deletion, but if someone kindly links me to one, I'll nominate it for deletion. Process is important, but instead of arguing process, could you instead find sources that say that this topic is notable independently of Tolkien's work? - Chardish 02:58, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- Sources - four found so far, one in the article, other three to be added:
- Bolintineanu, Alexandra (2006). "Astronomy and Cosmology, Middle-earth" - an entry in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia
- The Astronomy of Middle-earth: Astronomical Motifs and Motivations in the Work of J.R.R. Tolkien, a collection of papers presented by Kristine Larsen
- from Larsen: "A Little Earth of His Own: Tolkien's Lunar Creation Myths." Tolkien 2005, Birmingham, UK. August 12, 2005.
- Kisor, Yvette L. "Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She": Some Notes on a Note in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien Studies - Volume 4, 2007, pp. 212-222
- Honnegger, Thomas "The Man in the Moon: Structural Depth in Tolkien", published in "Root and Branch" (2000), from Walking Tree Publishers book review.
- Does this satisfy the nominator's concerns? Carcharoth 05:54, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- If the article were re-written, based on those sources and using an out-of-universe perspective, possibly. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, and the purpose of Wikipedia is not to describe fictional universes in their entirety. This means that the article should probably contain a brief overview of the importance of the Sun and Moon, and literary criticisms that explain why they are important to Tolkien's work. We are building an encyclopedia of general knowledge - knowing what to omit is equally as important as knowing what to include, and I think that it must be shown that content such as this is relevant to the real world and worth knowing by those unfamiliar with Tolkien's work. - Chardish 06:20, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- Fair enough. I'll try and do a rewrite in the next few days. I'm not entirely convinced that there isn't room in Wikipedia for specialist (rather than generalist) knowledge - it seems to be the case that many areas already go beyond generalist knowledge into specialist knowledge. I agree that WP:PLOT and WP:WAF are important considerations when writing about a fictional topic. I'm also sure that we could have a long debate about what "relevant to the real world" means, and when something is "worth knowing", but this probably isn't the time or place. Carcharoth 06:41, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- Chardish, I think you're demanding something that's both impossible in the time this AfD will run and beyond the scope of what AfD is meant for. We're here to decide if it's appropriate to have an article on this subject, and Carcharoth has shown that multiple independent sources exist, which means this subject is notable by our standards, and thus it is appropriate to have an article about it. AfD isn't meant to be a means for deleting articles on notable subjects just because they're not as well-written as we'd like; we're not on a deadline, and there's no need to demand that the article be perfect before the AfD is done. Also, we're making more than an encyclopedia of general knowledge... as the first pillar says, "It includes elements of general encyclopedias, specialized encyclopedias, and almanacs." There's no reason we shouldn't include something that's verifiable and notable just because it may not fall into the realm of general knowledge... it's not like we're going to run out of paper. Pinball22 13:57, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- indeed. if you think the article is badly written, slap a cleanup notice on it (or even better, clean it up), but don't bother afd with it. Incidentially, I don't even happen to think this particular article is extremely bad. Of course it can be improved, but compared to what passes as "bad" on Wikipedia, it is actually rather fair. dab (𒁳) 14:55, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- Fair enough. I'll try and do a rewrite in the next few days. I'm not entirely convinced that there isn't room in Wikipedia for specialist (rather than generalist) knowledge - it seems to be the case that many areas already go beyond generalist knowledge into specialist knowledge. I agree that WP:PLOT and WP:WAF are important considerations when writing about a fictional topic. I'm also sure that we could have a long debate about what "relevant to the real world" means, and when something is "worth knowing", but this probably isn't the time or place. Carcharoth 06:41, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- If the article were re-written, based on those sources and using an out-of-universe perspective, possibly. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, and the purpose of Wikipedia is not to describe fictional universes in their entirety. This means that the article should probably contain a brief overview of the importance of the Sun and Moon, and literary criticisms that explain why they are important to Tolkien's work. We are building an encyclopedia of general knowledge - knowing what to omit is equally as important as knowing what to include, and I think that it must be shown that content such as this is relevant to the real world and worth knowing by those unfamiliar with Tolkien's work. - Chardish 06:20, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
Keepchanged toSpeedy keep per sourcing and serious concerns with the potential that this was improperly nommed in the first place. K. Scott Bailey 06:11, 15 November 2007 (UTC)- speedy keep. arguably merge to Middle-earth cosmology, but this can be discussed calmly off Afd. dab (𒁳) 14:52, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- Very weak keep for now in the hope that it can be rewritten per the sources mentioned, and demonstrate notability. There might be a decent article to be written on the subject, but this is not it, and a complete rewrite would probably be a better approach, but if editors prefer to start from here, let's give them a chance. However, if it's still like this in a few months, it should be a strong delete. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:23, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- Keep or merge with Middle-earth cosmology Will (talk) 22:28, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- Keep - Needing to be rewritten is not a valid reason for deletion. Rray 23:56, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
- Keep because of the sources. If it's better merged somewhere, this can be discussed elsewhere. Uthanc (talk) 02:48, 17 November 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.
