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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 redirect to List of Choose Your Own Adventure books. While the series has potential to meet WP:BK, the individual works do not. I did check out some of the references mentioned - however they were either not reliable (one was by a child) or did not deal in depth with the book in question. Searches for some of the other titles came up with the same sort of results: a title would be mentioned in passing during a wider discussion of the series. Of the options people offered, deletion was not appropriate as the titles are viable search terms. Keep was equally not appropriate due to the notability concerns. All titles should be redirected to List of Choose Your Own Adventure books, and individual decisions made as to how much of the content to merge into that list. As the plots are variable - that being the basis of these books - some indication of theme or location may be more appropriate than a strict focus on plot. However, how editors deal with the content of the books will depend on the circumstances. I did consider going through each book to make a judgement on merge or redirect, though I felt that consensus in the discussion wasn't clear enough on that, and my judgement should not have more weight than others. So the conclusion is redirect all titles, with selective merging to be done as appropriate' SilkTork *YES! 10:08, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Individual Choose Your Own Adventure Books[edit]

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We are currently hosting plot summaries for individual Choose Your Own Adventure books none of which, individually, come close to meeting our book notability requirements. The entire series itself is notable, but Wikipedia is not meant to be an indiscriminate collection of plot summaries for books which fail our notability requirements. Extremely short plot summaries can be incorporated into our List of Choose Your Own Adventure books, but articles for individual books should not have been made.

Here is the list:

Extended content

ScienceApologist (talk) 22:00, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete as per nom. Buckshot06 (talk) 22:49, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete correct, the series is notable, but individual books are not. some of the material on the first 3 books could be retained in the article on the series, or in the list as cited above, as those authors are notable, but i wouldnt go further than that. I think this group of articles was possibly created to promote their reissue by r a montgomery's publishing company. we are not a promotional site.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 04:21, 28 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete or redirect to List of Choose Your Own Adventure books as all article fail notability criteria for books. Armbrust Talk Contribs 07:33, 28 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete all. I agree w/ the nom's assessment & the rationales of those who have already !voted. --IllaZilla (talk) 16:27, 28 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete most - I think a few as Mercurywoodrose notes may be individually notable. A table listing the books, publication dates, authors, pages, and maybe a plot blurb is an appropriate replacement. --MASEM (t) 19:57, 28 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to List of Choose Your Own Adventure books, and specifically do not delete first (though feel free to protect the redirs if necessary). These are reasonable search terms; they're covered there; the content underneath the redirects may be useful in creating plot blurbs within the list if consensus there is to do so; and the redirects will cut down on recreation. —Korath (Talk) 02:07, 29 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect all some, keep some leaving the history intact. Korath is right, these are reasonable search terms. Plus I know that there were reviews of these books published (I can remember reading a review of at least one 30 years ago or so...). If and when people find sources some of these can return. For the record I've only looked at a handful of these. The problem with mass nominations is that one might be notable... Hobit (talk) 05:07, 29 July 2010 (UTC) updated based on sources found below. Some of these are notable. Way too many to walk though. So probably keep all for now and have a discussion about the best way forward, this mass AfD probably isn't it. Hobit (talk) 02:18, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reject out of hand, some of these articles meet WP:N and WP:V in the slightest of senses, while other seem to have numerous sources that could clear basic guidelines easily. This is improper packing of articles. -- Jelly Soup (talk) 06:58, 29 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Additionally, nominator has created an AfD for each book on list and then another one listing all of the articles as a group. There is no need to have, essentially, two AfDs going for each article. While I am assuming good faith, this is borderline ballot stuffing. -- Jelly Soup (talk) 07:18, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • Isn't it more convenient to have all these AfDs in one location? They all fail the same criteria essentially identically. If you have a counter-example, feel free to list it here or at the AfD in question. ScienceApologist (talk) 08:15, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        • I agree that having a single AfD covering multiple same subject articles is convenient, but that's not what we have here. You didn't create one AfD with 50 articles under it. You created 50 AfD pages, then one more grouping them all again. This is improper packing and makes discussion a pain in the ass, as editors have to repeat posts across 51 different pages or risk having mixed results on each individual AfD, as there is effectively two AfD's currently running for each of those 50 articles. -- Jelly Soup (talk) 08:23, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Strange circumstances call for strange practices. I use a standard add-on to nominate articles for deletion. After looking at every single article and considering all of the sources associated with each one, I went through the normal AfD procedure. Would you have preferred me not to make the clearinghouse page? Is there any policy or guideline for how one is supposed to handle such a case? I would say this is a topic rife for discussion on the talk page as it is not germane to the issue at hand (whether any or all of these articles deserve to be removed from public database viewing). ScienceApologist (talk) 08:28, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete all - per nom, there's no significant coverage of any of them. If anyone can find sources to substantiate notability for any single book, we can remove it from the nomination and consider it seperately. Redirects can be created after deletion. Claritas § 09:52, 29 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • What purpose is served by deleting then redirecting rather than just redirecting? If someone wants to build a list that has some summary information (as we have for many episodes of TV shows) they are going to have to ask for them all to be undeleted. That's just making work. Hobit (talk) 12:21, 29 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • Much of the content is unverified including emphasis on plot elements that are originally researched and none of these articles are referenced (for example, the page numbers are haphazardly present, if at all). It would be better to get plot summaries from a publisher's guide or a librarian's review than from Wikipedia articles that shouldn't have been written in the first place. If you're concerned about losing them, feel free to ask for an administrator to port them to your userspace. ScienceApologist (talk) 13:30, 29 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No context for the usefulness of keeping redirects was given. Since Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, especially not information that is almost wholly originally researched, there is actual harm, I think, done in preserving this text lest it be taken to be properly vetted. Since there is no reason to have an article on individual books in this series, there is no reason to keep these articles. Their "utility" is an irrelevant argument. These pages are not disambiguation pages, category pages, or redirects. The quotation you provide is irrelevant to our discussion. ScienceApologist (talk) 05:41, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Hobit argued that these pages should be redirected. You then link to WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS and WP:ITSUSEFUL. Therefore, my quotation from WP:ITSUSEFUL is valid because I am referring to the fact that the redirects may be useful. Because these book articles are valid search terms, and because most of the authors of these books are notable, I propose redirecting the book articles to the authors. The plot information can be sourced by the books themselves per WP:PRIMARY: For example, an article about a novel may cite passages to describe the plot, but any interpretation needs a secondary source. Cunard (talk) 06:15, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • Ahh, I see. Redirects may indeed be useful, but they can certainly be done after deleting content that lacks verifiability and notability. The plot information itself is emphasized in ways that seem to me to be overly-detailed and perhaps inappropriately synthesized in order to offer commentary that, in my mind, is essentially interpretation of the major ideations of the book. For example, I checked out The Third Planet from Altair and found that the emphasis placed in the article on certain plot elements to be certainly indicating a particular opinion of the book (namely that it was full of potential disaster). This is not appropriate -- especially not when the reviews are few and far between with a sparseness that indicates little concern for their content from the third-party sources. Note that these plot summaries are manifestly not quoting passages directly from the books but rather are offering the "cliff-notes" version of what the book is supposedly "doing", sometimes via plot analysis but sometimes via some sort of meta-analysis of the adventure style of the book. None of this stuff is referenced to third-party independent sources. It would be one thing if each and every book here was the subject of multiple, non-trivial reviews that we could reference and refer to as guidelines for writing a plot summary (e.g. the way it's done for One Hundred Years of Solitude). But as far as I can tell, this is far from the case. ScienceApologist (talk) 08:09, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reject out of hand per Jelly Soup (talk · contribs). This is an improper mass nomination of articles that does not give editors the chance to individually evaluate which books are notable and which ones are not. Cunard (talk) 05:26, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • I nominated each article listed individually, checked each one's sources, and came to the same conclusion for each. But I acknowledged the potential for these deletions to be controversial, so instead of appealing to PROD, I thought I'd start a discussion. It took me a long time to do this. If there is even one articles you think I've not evaluated correctly, please let me know. ScienceApologist (talk) 05:41, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all The books all have distinct titles and so these are useful search terms. When some or all of these titles seems notable, as indicated above, deletion en masse is not a sensible suggestion. Per our deletion policy, alternatives to deletion such as merger should be explored more thoroughly as these are easier to reverse in case of error and would give a better result for our readership. Colonel Warden (talk) 08:56, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all , or merge, keeping the full content. This is a little deceptive. The series is so important that the individual ones are sufficiently important to be individually notable,and whether or not to merge them is a matter of style, not a decision about content. I would normally incline to merge, as i would for episodes, because I think the material is more understandable that way. In answer to some of the arguments above:
INDISCRIMINATE does not apply. Indiscriminate is including all published books. These are all much more widely read than the average book,& there's enough evidence to show it.
DISCUSS SEPARATELY is in my opinion not a good idea, because the results will be essentially random. The reviews that Cunard found above are probably a small fraction of those that exist,as children's literature is very poorly indexed & requires specialist sources--myself, I'm not an expert here. The GNG is in my opinion not applicable to books, for -- depending on the type of book -- it is either much too broad or much too narrow. and discussions are no doubt available, though it might take specialist sources--children's literature is very poorly indexed. I consider a group nomination in a case like this perfectly reasonable, otherwise we will end up with scattered articles --we might equally accurately flip a coin for each.
DELETE ALL is cultural bias and POV. It's based on a prejudice that intellectually trivial works of literature cannot be notable, and that children's literature is not worth serious consideration.
WP:PLOT can be met, because there is publication information of every one of them; if not present in the article, it can be added from such sources as the catalog records.
WP:V is met, for the plot information is verifiable from the correct source, the works themselves, or available information about them.
Redirects would normally not be done after deletion, to preserve content. The only reasons for deleting first is when the deleted content would be harmful, such as BLP or Copyvio or blatant advertising. For non-admins, it's easier to work on the content if it is still findable. WP:V is met, and WP:N is not enough of a reason--WP:N refers to separate articles, and if they are judged non-notable and don't have separate articles, there's no need to totally remove content in this manner. One of the purposes of redirects is to avoid this.
Fortunately, a discussion here is not conclusive. If the decision is to delete all, any which do have references can be reconstructed, for they won't then be subject to the reason for deletion. If only the ones that happen to have references now are kept, the others can be restored when references are found, as they will be. It takes quite a lot of work--when I taught library school, I'd have considered such a project worth a Master's thesis. If they're all kept, they can still be merged--a discussion concerning only those two options would make sense. If they're all merged, just the same. Just as we never reached firm consensus for episodes, that applies here also. DGG ( talk ) 17:00, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the thoughtful commentary, DGG. I must, however, strongly disagree that this is about cultural bias. This is about standards on Wikipedia. The articles, as currently written, fail to rise to the minimum standards for an encyclopedia that has the policies and guidelines of Wikipedia. There is a standard procedure at Wikipedia to write the parent articles and then spin-out daughter articles as the sources and verifiable content that gets created merit. This is the way to approach your Master's thesis ideal. Right now we're putting the cart before the horse and creating something of a moral hazard by having an incomplete but widely distributed list of individual books reports. I do think preserving such content harms Wikipedia: we should not be in the business of harboring original research and promotions written by the Chooseco company, and by keeping all these articles -- even under redirects -- we are essentially endorsing this kind of activity which is far from appropriate. I, frankly, do not want the hypothetical Master's thesis writer to use these poorly-vetted and haphazardly-considered articles as starting points for a documentation project. It would be better to encourage them to write the main article first and then spin-off as is the usual way to approach such projects here at Wikipedia. ScienceApologist (talk) 20:31, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm no more happy with the quality of the articles than you are, but if anyone does write a thesis on this, what I expect will happen is that they'll go read the books and find the reviews and improve the articles. I've yet to see someone get a MA based on information learned only at Wikipedia, but I've seen many people who write MA theses go on to write good Wikipedia articles on the subject. DGG ( talk ) 05:17, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all and decide individually. Despite lumping all these together, the RS coverage is going to vary from book to book. The first few books definitely received more press and reviews than the latter ones. Consider The Cave of Time:
    Thus, while many of the latter individual books are not separately notable and might be appropriately merged into a list, the earlier ones defined a genre. Jclemens (talk) 23:57, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect all to List of Choose Your Own Adventure books (and source that article, while you're at it). This article doesn't have the best title either, btw. Erpert (let's talk about it) 06:26, 1 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • If you believe there's no reason to delete these summaries, turn to page 43 and vote Keep - content is reasonably organized as is, no need to combine into bigger articles and risk losing content with no net gain in quality that I can see. Also, there's no doubt that The Cave of Time and a few others are independently notable.--Milowent • talkblp-r 04:04, 3 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect for now. Someone who cares can merge what they like later. They were a big deal, but I don't know anyone who cares enough to go and Lexis Nexis each one and improve them. But, they'll have a bit to start from if they ever do. Else, they're good search terms. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 05:03, 3 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect all to List of Choose Your Own Adventure books, as all of then are apparently unreferenced and unnotable. If any individual books are notable enough for a stand alone article they can be spun off, provided it is properly referenced.--PinkBull 14:31, 3 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect all to List of Choose Your Own Adventure books. They seem to all be plot summary articles with nothing indicating independent notability. A single article covering the series is appropriate, but what we have now is a textbook example of undue weight. And reject calls to shut this discussion down on procedural grounds- the fact is that there's no good way of doing mass nominations like this. If someone creates a batch nom, there's always some rules lawyer who wants to invalidate the entire discussion by quibbling about a single entry, and if they're nominated individually people complain that commenting on so many different discussions is a hassle. Reyk YO! 19:49, 3 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • That people always complain about it and that they tend to group notable and non-notable subjects (as they have here) making the discussion very difficult would seem like good reasons not to do this. The best way is in general to A) try to merge editorially B) nominate a few at a time. So yes, the fact this is done in a way that makes the discussion very difficult seems like a good reason to object. Some of these clearly have coverage up to the GNG, some don't. Can you figure out which is which at this point? Did you actually search or even look at each one of these before you suggested a solution to all of them? I know I didn't because I couldn't realistically do so... Hobit (talk) 12:25, 4 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • If you nominate a few at a time you'll get people complaining and asking why they were not batch nominated, particularly if the first few are deleted near-unanimously. The fact is that the system is slanted very much in favour of people who create a hundred million crappy cookie-cutter articles and against people who wish to perform maintenance and uphold standards; and that's the exact opposite of how things should be. In any case, it has not yet been adequately explained why a close along the lines of "Delete X, Y, Z. Keep A and B. Merge Q." cannot be done, or why suggestions along those lines are met with frantic hand-waving and shouts of "Do not discuss! Do not discuss!!!. Reyk YO! 22:56, 4 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        • My point wasn't that we shouldn't discuss because someone forgot to dot an I. The way this is set up, there are two discussions going on for each of the 50 articles being discussed. THIS AfD should be closed in favor of letting the other 50 previously created AfDs to play out. Inversely, the other 50 could be closed so this one can play out (which is what happened, so some one with the ability to make this happen must have agreed with this view). -- Jelly Soup (talk) 00:14, 5 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment all other discussions for the articles have been deleted (except Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Statue of Liberty Adventure, where Cunard made a comment). Armbrust Talk Contribs 09:14, 4 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect all to the list with liberty to merge sourced and relevant information. Stifle (talk) 15:33, 4 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all and relist individually as necessary I feel that discussing all of these as a group is too much - I haven't looked at all of the articles (I don't have time at the moment), but some may be worthy of deletion, some may be worthy of deletion - it should be decided on a case-by-case basis. -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 16:35, 5 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
These "default to keep because I didn't read any of the articles or try to find any sources" arguments are pretty vacuous, in my opinion. If I had listed 50 articles here, we'd be getting "keep because the nominator nominated too many articles and I don't have time to read any of them or look for sources." Well, I did read all of them and I did look for sources for each one. It took me hours. If you don't feel like spending the time, why comment? ScienceApologist (talk) 16:52, 5 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I just picked one at random and was able to add some sources, see The Mystery of Chimney Rock. I don't see how deletion of that article benefits the project.--Milowent • talkblp-r 18:32, 5 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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.
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