Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sword and planet

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 Planetary romance. There was no consensus on what content could be merged to that target, so no merge for now. Objections to merging were based on sourcing issues, not appropriateness of merging in principle; accordingly, if reliable sources are found, merging content from the page history to the target would likely be in accordance with consensus here. (non-admin closure) Actualcpscm^{scrutinize, talk} 16:31, 20 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sword and planet[edit]

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"Sword and planet" is a rarely used term that is more or less synonymous with "planetary romance", which is much more widely used. A conversation on Talk:Sword and planet has led to a consensus that redirecting the page to planetary romance is the right approach, perhaps with a sentence added to the target page mentioning the term, if that can be sourced well enough. Piotrus, one of the participants in that discussion, suggested that since most of sword and planet is unsourced, and what is sourced would not survive as an article if the unsourced material were deleted and would not be merged into the target, it would be effectively equivalent to a deletion and so AfD should be the venue. Siroxo found these uses of the term: [1][2][3][4][5][6] but none are enough to establish that GNG is met for the term. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:43, 13 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Fictional elements and Science fiction and fantasy. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:43, 13 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Merge lightly to planetary romance. didn’t know this wasn’t supposed to be synonymous. Not an individually notable genre. Dronebogus (talk) 15:10, 13 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

For unsourced but unproblematic content (no copyvio, promotion, or attack/defamation) redirection or merging is always preferable to outright deletion, because the history is maintained and it is possible for a non-admin to see the history and retrieve content for improvement from it. Jclemens (talk) 21:13, 13 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. I would propose to simply change the article to a redirect, without deleting history. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:16, 13 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect or weak merge while preserving history, per my talk page comments on the article talk page (I've also done my BEFORE, tried to verify some content in the article, and sadly conclude that it is very ORish). And yes, most sources treat those terms as synonyms, so proposed redirect/merge target is correct. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:58, 14 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to Planetary romance. As noted here and on the talk page, sources largely treat the terms as synonymous. I don't know that there is any content worth merging as both articles are at the moment rather poor. A "Terminology" section explaining the connection to sword and sorcery/sword and sandal on the one hand and Romance (prose fiction) on the other would be helpful, and such a section could also potentially go into detail about what distinctions sources that do not treat the terms as synonymous make. TompaDompa (talk) 02:36, 14 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
By the way—and this has no bearing on this discussion as such but might nevertheless be of interest—I found the following quote from Gary Westfahl on the appeal of Edgar Rice Burroughs's approach to portraying Barsoom in this manner (though Westfahl never mentions either "planetary romance" or "sword and planet", so it might not be useable here): Burroughs's depiction of an advanced but decadent civilization further allowed for stimulating inconsistencies, in that one could logically believe a culture at that stage would have retained aspects of its past science and lost others; by picking and choosing what might have been remembered and what might have been forgotten, Burroughs could generate scenarios for thrilling encounters, like the incongruous scene depicted on the Ballantine Books cover of The Gods of Mars—a furious sword-fight waged on top of a futuristic aircraft. (The Stuff of Science Fiction: Hardware, Settings, Characters, p. 154). TompaDompa (talk) 02:44, 14 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to Planetary romance. I don't think anything on the page is reliably sourced and worth preserving. There's sources saying the two are synonymous and none differentiating between them. CohenTheBohemian (talk) 03:45, 14 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect or merge per the research I performed in the talk page discussion. I would not be surprised if this splits out again in a few years, but in the current state of access to sources, we can't establish WP:GNG —siro χ o 05:15, 14 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep / merge to section it's ambiguous about whether these are actually the same thing. Sword and planet is based on the fantasy genre known as sword and sorcery, where planetary romance may seen as the science fiction extension of the lost world genre. Sword and sorcery may be a better merge target. And wherever this is merged, sword and planet will need to be distinguished as a distinct subgroup. Shooterwalker (talk) 04:38, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to planetary romance. There is little sourced content to merge and I do not see a consistent usage of the terms as distinct genres. Eluchil404 (talk) 00:35, 20 August 2023 (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.