Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rulering (punishment)

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 delete. If someone feels the desire to merge it, I will undelete and redirect to facilitate this, but I don't see it as a likely search term otherwise. Stifle (talk) 08:51, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Rulering (punishment)[edit]

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No references. No uses of this term found on a Google search apart from Wikipedia mirrors. Not a real term. I might even describe it as "spankingcruft" The Land (talk) 21:11, 5 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

New Zealand, The Pittsburgh Press - Mar 13, 1941, The News - Feb 15, 1877. There is plenty more in Google Books, too. Royal road to happiness; or, The picture preacher: A book of pictures; John Warner Barber

The poor standard of search skills exhibited by AFD nominators and delete voters never ceases to amaze me.

The edit summary of the original author (User:Geary) is an exquisite example of why WP:POVFORK is not only written from a particular Point of View, but may well represent half or less of the cases it laboriously and unnecessarily describes. In this case, material that the author believes to be PoV is removed from the article "I do not endorse the content of this article. I copied this text from the Ruler article as a way to get it out of that article." Not someone pushing PoV. Someone pushing PoV away.

Were the Ruler article of sufficient size, then I do not believe this material would be undue weight in it, but that seems unlikely. Consider, instead, if meatpuppets were to prevent good material from inclusion in an article, and the person seeking conclusion sees there is enough material to form an article. I imagine there were good articles deleted from WP already, good articles still on WP that were formed this way and more to come; are we to allow them to be jeopardized by a rule that assumes they are POV not only because of the the author's other actions (ad hominem) but because of the actions of other people?

Anarchangel (talk) 21:04, 6 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I can see the term used in the first of those links; with the others, you'll have to point it out. But even though it isn't a neologism, you'll have a hard time convincing me there are enough reliable sources to give this article more than a mixture of dictionary definition and idle speculation. The Land (talk) 21:26, 6 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Trust me, or do a Google News search for "Rulering" without the (punishment) suffix. Makes a big difference. 'Rulering' as punishment is described in detail in the articles, and shown verbatim in the search text. Google searches vary by search date and even user, but I got 13 hits and those three were all on the first of two pages. Anarchangel (talk) 09:54, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Google News comes up with nothing at all. Google News Archives comes up with 13, but if one excludes duplicates, foreign-language articles and apparent OCR errors there seem to be two distinct occurrences of its usage in this context. That might put the term in a dictionary (on a good day with a following wind). It doesn't mean it's a subject for an encyclopedia article. The Land (talk) 22:43, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Sexuality and gender-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 02:30, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete This is a made up word, the correct term is caning. You can be caned with more than a cane, my teachers made do with any old stick :) Tentontunic (talk) 16:49, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - this is likely a neologism, and certainly a made up term. Strap, cane, ruler were all forms of corporal punishment in schools and college yonks ago. That it gets applied to buttocks does not qualify for BDSM either. See the movie Dead_Poets_Society; Charlie gets the pandybat on the buttocks from the Headmaster and re-enacts this in the dorms afterwards. Definitely no sexual element.--Whiteguru (talk) 10:54, 9 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Merge to School corporal punishment with a mention at Ruler. The references provided by Anarchangel clearly indicate that this is not a neologism (still less a "made up term"). Insisting that "the correct term is caning" is a misunderstanding of ENGVAR I think; if one is hit with a cane then it's a caning, if one is hit with a belt (strap) it's a belting (strapping), if one is hit with a paddle it's a paddling, and these printed sources (from as far back as 1871, no less!) use "rulering" to mean being hit with a ruler. Re-labelling it a caning (just because the cane used to be the most common instrument of corporal punishment in British and Commonwealth schools?) makes no sense, just as re-labelling it a paddling or a strapping would make no sense. Whether the practice does or does not feature in BDSM is not relevant to its notability. Unfortunately the BDSM aspects of common corporal punishments mean that there is indeed a proliferation of cruft material in this topic area, and a corresponding reaction to it (for example, as Archangel points out, this article was created in the first place, not as an addition of spankcruft material, but as a content fork to get BDSM-related material relocated out of other articles on grounds of IDONTLIKEIT). However, that's a reason for the historical and cultural topic area (not the cruft) to need to be covered better, not a reason for material about it to deleted as supposedly 140-year-old neologisms. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:00, 11 April 2011 (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.