Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Warcraft characters

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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 No consensus — I can't close a discussion as "weak delete", but I would note that this totally fails notability guidelines. The most compelling argument on the "Keep" side is the assertion that it can be cleaned up. I would strongly suggest that users work on this aspect, and pronto, because articles cannot persist indefinitely on such a basis. In addition arguments like "gamecruft", "lots of things link to this" and "but this article is the same as it too" are not compelling, and add nothing. Clean it up, or I reckon the next discussion will be a delete. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Haemo (talk • contribs) 01:08, 4 November 2007

List of Warcraft characters[edit]

List of Warcraft characters (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

While the reference template have been recently added, it still appears as if it is cruft. Even if the template has been placed recently, it has still failed notability, as only players and readers of the series would be interested.

While the books do exist in hard copy, there are no references to justify keeping the article for it.

Seeing as how the article is very large in the first place also (127 KB) and its contents, it can be assumed that it is not notable to the real world. IAmSasori 20:34, 25 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep Being not notable to "the real world" does not qualify it for deletion. There are many articles that are about fictional locations and people on wikipedia. The reference for this list is the game itself, no different from other lists based on books, movies and television. --Pinkkeith 21:23, 25 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Gamecruft. This info is of no use to anyone not playing the games. Ridernyc 06:08, 26 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per Ridernyc. Wikipedia is not a game guide. If someone wants to transwiki to WoWWiki, they can, and if the article is already gone by then, let me know and I'll send you the content. Stifle (talk) 11:10, 26 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Much as I love this article, it fails the notability guidelines at WP:FICT, and is basically fancruft. Take it to WoWWiki instead. Terraxos 14:00, 26 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note: This debate has been included in the list of Game-related deletions. --Gavin Collins 20:57, 27 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete as article has no reliable primary or secondary sources. --Gavin Collins 11:38, 28 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Can't meet WP:RS, fancruft Pilotbob 03:37, 29 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I found this Generally speaking, the perception that an article is fancruft can be a contributing factor in its nomination and deletion, but it is not the actual reason for deletion. Rather, the term fancruft is a shorthand for content which one or more editors consider unencyclopedic, possibly to the extent of violating policies on verifiability, neutrality or original research.
Here. Based on this, it is not suitable as an actual reason for it's deletion. And those other 3 reasons we could fix, verifiability, neutraility or original research can be fixed with some work. businessman332211 21:37, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per the nomination, pure fancruft. Burntsauce 18:14, 29 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Once again the objectors seems to dislike fans. If every article on wiki which was only of interest to 'fans' was deleted, then very many of the technical articles would be the first to go. The reality is that those articles typically described as 'fancruft' are frequently those which have greatest interest to the real world and the greatest numbers of hits. Obviously the justification for the existence of this sub-article is that it contains information too lengthy to fit in the parent article about warcraft, as per Wikipedia:Notability (fiction)#Dealing with fiction Sandpiper 08:48, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
WP:Fiction is a guideline not a policy, I also feel that it is a flawed guideline that contradicts WP:Plot. Ridernyc 14:00, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
also just noticed that the article fails the scetion you cited. This article fails to maintain encyclopedic standards. There is no real world context to this at all.Ridernyc 16:37, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This might be true, but we could easily rewrite it in less than an hour to make it up to standards. businessman332211 21:23, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, articles like this is what Wikipedia is good at. We should not be trying to delete stuff like this, but give it proper referencing (which, in this case, can be perfectly valid done from primary sources). --Cpt. Morgan (Reinoutr) 11:09, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, no different than List of The Young and the Restless characters or List of Harry Potter characters. Lists are an excellent way to include basic information on fictional characters that lack sufficient notability for articles of their own. Powers T 15:00, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Potentially near-endless due to the many characters needed to flesh out a game world and no possible references other than playing/reading the work and summarizing it. There isn't any need to have an article with a section for every boss, background character, incidental character, or supporting character in the Warcraft games due to the complete lack of anything to say about the vast, vast majority of them. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 15:07, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Gamecruft that simply does not conform to the notability standards asserted at WP:N and WP:FICT. There must be thousands of Warcraft gaming sites that would welcome work on such a list, so why bother fighting the out-of-universe notability policies of an encyclopedia? Eusebeus 15:36, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, considering the hundreds of pages that link and redirect to this list, deleting seems counter-intuitive, particularly if this was the product of former articles being merged and redirected.--Alf melmac 22:51, 30 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
a random check of the links to this article shows that we have hundreds of Warcraft articles that should be up for deletion for the same reasons as this article. Ridernyc 00:30, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Keep, I think it's a very comprehensive list. It is not violation the "Not a gameguide" policy as it's mentioning nothing about how to play/beat the game. I don't see any other policies it is breaching. A lot of the games on here have (list of characters). For example, halo series has it's own article related to the characters in halo (Which is a very good, and beneficial article). I don't think it should be deleted. There are many articles like this. They are not harming anyone, they are providing great amounts of information, and they are under the video games project. So it's obviously updated, and taken care of. I think it could use some "editing" as some of the characters are useless, and not notable. However I can see it now, this'll lead to some crusade in getting rid of all articles that are like this. A lot of them I find very useless. I really thing this one should be let here. businessman332211 01:54, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I just checked some of the policies. Wikipedia:Deletion_policy and if you look here carefully. It tells you that deletion should be a last result. There other things we can pursue on this article before the deletion process takes place. Some of the valid things (based on the deletion policy) are cleanup, expert, npov, verify or merge tags. We could easily just add in cleanup, and veify tags. This will get it in the request lists to start the cleanup and verify progress. businessman332211 21:29, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The Final Fantasy list you link to is a perfect example of why this list needs to go, it is a well written article full of real world context. This has none of that. Ridernyc 11:37, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
"Not up to FA standards" is hardly grounds for deletion. The fact that the FF8 article is featured means that it's possible for character articles such as this to be made encyclopedic. Thus, no need to delete. Powers T 12:41, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Who said it needs to be up to FA standards. it' needs to meet basic requirements like WP:Plot, not sure why everyone thinks they can just ignore that. Ridernyc 12:45, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
From WP:Plot "Plot summaries. Wikipedia articles on published works (such as fictional stories) should cover their real-world context and sourced analysis, offering detail on a work's development, impact or historical significance, not solely a detailed summary of that work's plot. This applies both to stand-alone works, and also to series. A brief plot summary may sometimes be appropriate as an aspect of a larger topic. (See also: Wikipedia:Television episodes, Wikipedia:Manual of Style (writing about fiction), Wikipedia:WikiProject Films/Style guidelines#Plot)." It's needs to have real word context, you can not just write a plot summary about characters. Show me anywhere in this article that covers "sourced analysis, offering detail on a work's development, impact or historical significance." Ridernyc 13:36, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You were holding up the FF8 article as an reason to delete this one. The fact that one article is a FA and another is not is not a reason to delete the latter; it's a reason to improve it to the former's status. Powers T 14:39, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Although these are all good arguments, can I point out that first, the article will almost certainly be recreated, although perhaps without some of the more obscure characters, one can hope. And second, the main reason the article is so long and cruft-y is because it is itself the result of many other individual character articles merging.--Pharod42 21:52, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Because the information is going to be recreated Is reason to keep articles? Second single crufty articles do not combine to make one large non-crufty article. We still have an article that falls short of policy. Ridernyc 22:09, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Conditional Keep This article isn't particularly good and I'm not a fan of Warcraft, but it is a very notable game series with a large cast of characters and information on them is undoubtedly valuable to the understanding of related articles. It should be kept and totally rewritten, organized by notability and which games the characters are in citing both primary sources for factual integrity and secondary sources for development and other information. Warcraft fans are numerous and lively, they can accomplish this. - 4.154.236.26 01:19, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Let's look at some of these "characters". I'd like to take a bit of time and point out how inane most of this list is.
    1. Aku'mai is one of several large hydras that are dungeon bosses in World of Warcraft. He has zero dialogue (besides a few inarticulate roars froma generic sound pool), little to no backstory that most players ever see, and is simply a large version of a monster that is frequently seen in generic form elsewhere in the game. He's nothing but an obstacle for players doing a certain dungeon to overcome.
    2. Anetheron is one of several generic demons guarding an important character at one point. He only appears twice because the same battle is in two different games, from different perspectives. Azgalor is similar.
    3. Arator the Redeemer has a conversation with another NPC in an inn in World of Warcraft, and gives the player a quest or two to do. There are dozens upon dozens upon dozens of characters like this in every single MMORPG ever created. Baine Bloodhoof is similar.
    4. Baron Rivendare is the final boss of one of several dozen dungeons in World of Warcraft. He has little backstory, no dialogue beyond a single scene where he executes an NPC players need to try and save, and again exists only as an obstacle for players to overcome.
    And that's only after doing A and B. About half of this list is just fluff, minor characters of a sort so plentiful and generic that they are quite unlistable. The rest of these characters need to be broken up into lists of each major work, like WC3, the Sunwell Trilogy, the Warcraft manga, and so on. This list as-is is just unworkable. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 01:37, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Just like the Pokemon lists. Or are they still an 'exception' to the notability rule?--Nydas(Talk) 08:15, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
can you move on from the WP:OTHERSTUFF argument, yes you can point to 1000's of pages on wikipedia that should not be here we are not talking about them we are talking about this one.Ridernyc 14:16, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No, I won't. WP:OTHERSTUFF is just an aid to help people hold contradictory, biased views on what is notable and what isn't. They can target rival fancruft whilst dodging questions about their fancruft.--Nydas(Talk) 21:12, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hi! You're talking to the person who championed merging the Pokemon character lists, then trimming the lamest ones, and continues to push for further refining of such lists. Also, I've been pushing for the Pokemon species to be merged into lists and dealt with in the most reasonable, concise, and encyclopedic manner possible. If you're looking for hypocrisy, you've got the wrong person.
Basically, this sucks. This is far beyond "List of Pokemon species" into "List of each NPC in the towns of Pokemon Red." At least a Pokemon species appears in at least a half-dozen games; Aku'mai is one of several dozen monsters that use the same design, isn't remarkable in a story or game design or any other fashion, and has no dialogue or story or anything. Baron Rivendare is the same, except he has three lines. This is typical to the content of this list.
The vast, vast majority of this info isn't lending useful context to any article. I don't need to know who Aku'mai is to understand what WOW is, to understand Warcraft's setting or story or game design. Hell, I don't even need to know anything about Aku'mai if I'm running Blackfathom Deeps.
This list is unworkably broad, and would not be a useful tool in writing narrower topical lists. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 08:37, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Ignore the single-appearace characters. There plenty of characters in this list which have appeared in multiple media, similar to an average Pokemon. And we have twenty-five Pokemon lists, sourced almost entirely from in-game text fragments. It is certain that similar giddy heights of encyclopedic worth could be achieved for this list.--Nydas(Talk) 09:47, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
answer, maybe. See WP:OTHERSTUFF. Ridernyc 19:48, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Bringing up other similar articles that exist is not always an "Other stuff exists" argument. Sometimes it's an appeal to precedent. Powers T 13:34, 2 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
an appeal to precedent would be "article X survived AFD and this is why". Ridernyc 15:41, 2 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge a winnowed list of characters and brief descriptions on to the Warcraft universe page. Clearly some are notable in that context, so they should be preserved on the main article and supported by external sources. — RJH (talk) 16:03, 2 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, certainly cannot meet WP:FICT. Doubtful that reliable sources independent of the subject have devoted significant coverage to anything of this list. Doctorfluffy 04:30, 3 November 2007 (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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