Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Brink of Reality

This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record.
The result of the debate was delete. --Rhobite 19:05, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] The Brink of Reality

Vanity article on a non-notable web bulletin board. Foobaz·✐ 01:47, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• Delete. Non-notable, vanity, currently deadend page. Zzyzx11 03:13, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Its not deadend, and whether or not its non notable is your oppinion. The page contains a lot of site history, and is hardly an advertisement.Rangeley 11:33, 22 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Ok, but it still is non-notable. Zzyzx11 22:23, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
• Delete, non-notable message board --nixie 05:11, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
• Delete, non-notable. 550 members, one active in the past hour is better than the last forum someone insisted was worth an encyclopedia entry, but nowhere near the 50,000, 250 active I'd consider the minimum. --Carnildo 08:37, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
• Concur with Carnildo. Delete. (notability may be POV but we have consensual guidelines for it, too). Radiant! 08:50, Feb 23, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete Completely non-notable even as web forums go. According to the article they only got their own domain a month ago(!!) Agree with Carnildo that 50,000 members, 250 active is a pretty good minimum benchmark for forum notability. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 12:02, Feb 23, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete, It's all been said. Inter 14:09, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. 500 (or even 600 or 700) members does not make a notable message board. -Aranel ("Sarah") 22:25, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. --Paraphelion 01:47, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Rangeley Note: For those who think 50,000 members is the benchmark, You will be hard pressed to find a forum over that. I can think of one, Gaia. [1] Here is one with 8000 members, is that too low too? Why arent you going after all the forums with less then 50,000 members, or is this merely a double standard. And to those who say there is only one active user, that is because this is an American Board, and it was in the middle of the night when you said that... And while the main reason appears to be notability, I dont think this should be enough. The article goes pretty in depth. If this were an article with one paragraph, I would definately see your point, a non notable forum with a silly article. But this does have a lot of information in it, it wasnt thrown together in a few minutes, its taken quite a few days to get where it is.

• (Note: the above by Rangely, the author of the article being VfDed.) Nonsense, there are numerous online communities over the 50,000 mark. Slashdot, DeviantART, Kuro5hin, ChristianForums, Hardware.fr, Anandtech, and many many more. As for why we aren't "going after" other non-notable forum artcles, we are. It just takes time. The vast majority of online message-board articles that come up for VfD get deleted for this very same reason. In fact, I can't remember the last time that one was nominated and ended up being kept. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 16:40, Feb 23, 2005 (UTC)

• My benchmark comes from OCForums, a fairly active overclocking community, where the forum is only loosely attached to any non-forum websites. When I posted my last comment, it had 277 active users in the last however many minutes it counts, at 4AM Eastern (US) time. --Carnildo 00:19, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• Rangeley note: Che-lives has been up since August 31st, quite a lot of time and its still there. While the Brink of Reality isnt as active as some other forums, Is that reason to take a relatively in depth article down? I would think that the top way of judging these types of things is whether the article has a point or not. I could very well be wrong. The Che-Lives article is quite informative and I learned a lot about whats going on there from reading it, and I am not even a member there. I would want to judge that article by its content, not the 'active users' count. I would not mind if this was attempted to be deleted for its content, that I can fix and improve upon, but as is there is literally nothing I can do really. I dont really see this as fair, it should be the articles content not the active users. If there is an article about a small organisation with 100 people in it, is that reason to delete it even if the article is informative and you learn a lot from it? Basically what I am getting at is, if an article has content and informs, that should mean something, and in this case I feel that is being ignored, as noone has yet presented a reason for deletion as being the content. But if the content needs improving, by all means say so and I will get on it!
  • Ok, you bring up some very good points, and I'll try to address them. Point 1: For the most part, very small organisations do not generally deserve articles. There's no official WP-approved number of members an org must have for an article, but usually an article about a 100-member group would really only be of interest to people already within that group. There are exceptions, as always, but that's how it usually goes. Point 2: I wish I could say that the content of this article is blameless in its VfDing. It really focuses far too much on the internal politics of the forum, something that, again, only members of the board would care about. For comparison's sake, let's look at the article for an indisputably notable organisation: the Salvation Army. It's a very good article. Notice that it covers basic history, mission, statistics, and activities of the org. It doesn't get into the internal politics ("X was fired by Y", "X was elected over Y,Z, and N") that those not involved with the org wouldn't care about. Some good questions to ask yourself when deciding what to include are: "Will anyone not inside this group have reason to know or care about this?" "Will anyone need this information in 50 or 100 years?" "How does this information relate to other information? Does it help explain anything?" In my opinion, the first two paragraphs are fine, but the rest is only of interest to those involved in it (who, as a result, probably know it all already). That part should be scrapped or condensed into a sentence or two. If you need more help or advice, just let me know. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 01:43, Feb 24, 2005 (UTC)
    • (Rangeley)Alright, that type of advice is something I can follow up on. Edit: I have removed the questioned paragraph, and replaced with a few sentences in the Government and President sections. I have also added a statistics section.
      • That is indeed a vast improvement over the way the article was. By the way, I registered for a Brink of Reality account today as Starblind. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 23:27, Feb 24, 2005 (UTC)
      • I appreciate the fact that you continue to improve the article. However, for comparison, the game design forum I follow has 2470 members and 103662 posts. What I'm getting at is that, while your article is of decent quality, its subject is not encyclopedic. As an extreme example, I could write a lengthy informative article about my cat, but that doesn't make it worthy of encyclopedia inclusion. Poor articles on good subjects are tagged for improving, and kept. Consequently, good articles on poor subjects can be tagged for deletion. Radiant! 09:35, Feb 24, 2005 (UTC)
• (Rangeley) Alright, lets look at the rules and guidelines for deletion deletion policyI dont see anything about a cut off point for forums, I do see things against Advertisements and Vanity articles. A vanity article would be like something on you, your cat, dog, family, your freind, that type of thing. An Advertisement would be 'Go to this site (link)' As we have clarified this article is not this, and I beleive the consensus is its a pretty good article instead, where is the base for deletion? I see many rules that say deletion is alright if the content is poor, but none in this case.
  • You're right, you'll never see a cut off point for groups in official WP policy. This is because WP generally prefers to take things on a case-by-case basis, like you see here on this VfD. Under this system, each member votes using their own criteria (or perhaps no criteria at all). It works much better than simply "All groups bigger than X need articles" or "all groups bigger than Y need articles". Some WP members believe that anything that can be verified can be included, while others prefer relatively high imclusion criteria. The ability to vote based on our own beliefs rather than a set-in-stone this-is-how-it-is set of rules, as well as the open incouragement of dialogue and discussion, keep the system generally balances and reasonable. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 23:27, Feb 24, 2005 (UTC)
• (Rangeley) Im not sure it keeps it balanced and reasonable. The majority isnt always right, and sometimes some people judge unfairly. While you say discussion is encouraged, such as what is going on now, I am beginning to see that it has one flaw. Even as I have shown this wasnt a deadend site, wasnt a vanity article, and even made it information useful to others, rather then internal goings-on, it still comes down to what others think. And in this case the criteria is something unfixable. While we have discussed this for a day, the issue has been whittled down, and we have reached a point where regardless of the rules saying this article is good, personal oppinions will take it down. Even though the point of view for deletion has no rules to support it, it will win. As you said earlier, you cant remember the last time one of these was nominated for deletion and got off. I doubt this case will end any differently. I do think Wikipedia should add more guidelines for deletion, because when I made this I did look into them, and stayed in the rules. I wouldnt have bothered to make it if I knew that even if I followed the guidelines, it would get deleted because the deletion policy isnt actually written, but just ends up being any given persons own idea.
  • Sorry, but you are mistaken about the process. The guidelines for inclusion (or exclusion) are intentionally vague, because it would be patently impossible to provide for all occasions. There are a few non-debatable issues (e.g. copyvio), but the others will have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. We do not want the 'lawbook for wikipedia' to govern us (apart from the fact that creating it would take too much time). Therefore, a consensual majority will decide the case.
  • As is the case here. You have made your point. We have listened to you. And we disagree. Taking the case to extremes, we obviously want an article on Bill Gates, and we obviously don't want an article on my goldfish. We must draw a line somewhere, and that is called notability. There is too little that distinguishes your forum as being special amongst the thousands of other internet forums. Therefore, the vote to delete stands. Radiant! 22:13, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.