Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Water pipe percolator

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 Bong. Disregarding the blocked Denarivs's opinion. Sandstein 18:48, 9 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Water pipe percolator[edit]

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

This is an article about subassembly within bongs. I assume that standard Wikipedia rules apply to this field. The article itself has no suitable sources, despite its length and detail. Due to the subject matter, I doubt any good sources are available. I searched and found this one, for example: Types of Percolator Bongs, published by ‘Best Bong Reviews’. It doesn't seem to meet WP:IRS standards. If editors think a properly sourced article is possible I'd be happy to withdraw this AFD, but I believe it's destined to remain a collection of original research and, at best, dubious sources. Felsic2 (talk) 19:51, 4 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, GeoffreyT2000 (talk, contribs) 00:23, 12 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

keep ~~for now~~ the subject appears notable. There is likely a source somewhere -or- it's also possible the device falls under another name that is more popular in the industry. More research is required to determine why there are no good sources from a simple Google search. Unless a more comprehensive search and explanation is given, I see no reason to delete at this time. --David Tornheim (talk) 13:33, 12 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I did a search. If you can't find any sources either then who are we thinking will find them? If good sources are found in the future then the article can be recreated using them. Felsic2 (talk) 16:05, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I realized that hookah is the same technology. It appears the appropriate term is waterpipe rather than water pipe percolator. There is plenty of WP:RS for waterpipe smoking (e.g. [1]), much of it having to do with safety concerns of "waterpipe smoking": [2] [3]. A search of "waterpipe smoking" gives an unlimited number of articles that constitute WP:RS. There are quite a few different terms for the device: "A medical librarian was consulted and agreed with the search strategy used. The PubMed search was carried out using a strategy employing synonyms of ‘waterpipe’: waterpipe OR hookah OR shisha OR goza OR narghileh OR arghileh OR hubble-bubble." [4] Example of article on shisa [5]. I think it quite premature to assume this is an insignificant device technology. There is also [6] and [7] regarding percolators used in pharmacy and chemistry. Our [Percolation] article is quite weak! I am surprised. --David Tornheim (talk) 11:34, 16 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Bong and Hookah are fine articles. This article, though concerns a minor part of those water pipes. The first sources you offer don't mention the word "percolator" at all. The last two sources you provided don't concern water pipes but would be good for a general article on Percolator, if we had one. Felsic2 (talk) 16:19, 17 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Delete or redirect to Bong. This is a trivial detail of a somewhat notable subject. There are no reliable sources. Glendoremus (talk) 05:44, 13 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Technology-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 09:23, 16 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I would tend not to agree that the article "Types of Percolator Bongs" isn't reliable for our purposes here. All vetting of reliable sources comes down to the different ways to answer the question "how confident are we that this information is accurate"?

That is why we will, often enough, take even a blog post as a good source. If a Nobel Prize winning academic with a solid reputation for expertise and veracity gives some neutral (not controversial or contended) statement of fact within his field of expertise on his blog (and assuming we're confident it he really wrote it), we're usually OK with that, even though it's just one guy writing.

Ideally, we prefer material that we are confident has been gone over by a rigorous fact-checking operation, though. But always in the service of answer the question "how confident are we that this information is accurate?".

And when you're getting down into more obscure areas, you often just are not going to find a reference from a major daily newspaper or a mainstream magazines or peer-reviewed journals. So then you have to go Plan B. And fine, unless you're just going to give up on covering large areas. Lots of our articles on comic books and music and a lot else don't ref to mainstream or peer-reviewed journals because they can't. Anyway, Best Bong Reviews is Plan B.

How confident am I that the article was gone over rigorously by a fact checker, who (for instance) called up manufacturers and talked to experts there and so forth, to make sure the writer got his facts right? Not very. Best Bong Reviews is not Der Spiegel.

But consider:

First of all, there's no reason for Best Bong Reviews to lie about this stuff. I can't see any incentive for that. There're no ideological issues in play. (It's not impossible that they get under-the-table money to push certain products or whatever. However, this article doesn't mention any products or manufacturers, so this seem quite unlikely here.)
And they do have some incentive to get this stuff right. If their stuff is riddled with errors, people are going to avoid their website, and they probably don't want that.
They seem to have expertise in this field. The internal evidence of that article indicates that it was written by a person who cares about this stuff and seems to know something about it. Same as with the Nobel Prize winning academic's blog: it's in their wheelhouse.

All in all, that adds up, to me to an answer for "how confident are we that this information is accurate?" of "pretty confident". Could be wrong. I wouldn't bet my house on the veracity of any fact in the article. I wouldn't use Best Bong Reviews as a source for an article on the Palestinian peace process. But for this? Looks OK to me.

Since it's OK (if you buy my reasoning) then a properly sourced article is possible, which pretty much knocks out one of the pins of the deletion argument. (The argument that this is too much detail for a general encyclopedia is still in play though.) Herostratus (talk) 03:54, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

OK, but I might go through and delete the unsourced material. Felsic2 (talk) 20:35, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Felsic2: How about putting a tag above the appropriate sections (or at top of article) warning about unsourced material instead? We have a number of articles on major subjects of law that have either no sourcing or almost no sourcing and have stayed that way for quite some time:

Licensee
Bundle of rights
Petit jury
Implied-in-fact contract
Mortgage law#Equitable_mortgage
Concurrent estate -- includes joint tenancy, tenancy-in-common.

Also, it seems like much of the material in our article can be found in Types of Percolator Bongs. I am not going to say that is good WP:RS--I have not researched it. --David Tornheim (talk) 21:16, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Since no section of the article has sources, the tag could be applied to the whole article. And then the whole article, minus its first sentence, could be deleted. (The only sources are primary sources used inappropriately to reference one sentence.) As for the listed articles, while they may not have cited sources there are dozens if not hundreds of easily available sources that are eminently reliable which address common legal terms. They are very different situations. Felsic2 (talk) 21:27, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Felsic2: I agree there are plenty of high quality sources that are relatively easy to find on the legal articles I mentioned, so you are right this situation is different because of that. We will have to agree to disagree about whether there exists or is likely to exist sufficiently reliable sources for the article under discussion to justify keeping the article and any of the content. I have the feeling they must exist somewhere, but I just don't know where to look and I am not that motivated to spend more time looking. Hopefully those who have created or added substantially to the article will do some research to find better sources, or convincingly show any of sources identified so far meet WP:RS standards.

I would request that if the article is deleted, it is done in such a way that the material that was so diligently worked on is saved. From working at AfD, I see that there are different kinds of deletes. I'm not sure how to make the appropriate request to preserve the edit history if the article is deleted. (It bothers me how often we lose the entire edit history when there is not universal agreement to delete an article. It's not like the articles take up that space on the server. I will be happy to discuss that somewhere else that is appropriate.) I believe a redirect does that.

Please let me know If you are aware of any policy or guideline that discusses how long an article without proper sourcing might stick around--especially for the case where there is reason to believe such sourcing might be available, but simply has not been sufficiently researched by the authors. The law articles don't meet that standard since the sourcing is definitely available but no one has taken the time to add it. --David Tornheim (talk) 14:38, 27 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The issue with the lack of sourcing, WP:V, feeds back to the lack of notability, WP:N. If a topic hasn't been written about in reliable sources, then it's impossible to write a verifiable article about it, and maybe we shouldn't try. As for preserving the material pending the discovery of sources, that's putting the cart before the horse. If we find a reliable source then we should write content based upon it, not simply add some citations to the existing text. If you'd like to keep working on it you can always create a copy in your personal sandbox or copy it to your own computer. See Wikipedia:Userfication. Attribution of any previously written text would be an issue to resolve if it's ever posted again. Another option would be to republish the material elsewhere. Wikia may have a "Stonerpedia". The content on http://bestbongreviews.com/types-percolator-bongs/, while not a verbatim copy, seems to cover the topic equally well. Felsic2 (talk) 16:36, 27 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Kurykh (talk) 02:04, 20 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Keep per the excellent points made by the guy above me. This is exactly the sort of high-value content wikipedia should strive to provide. Denarivs (talk) 03:39, 20 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Final
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Nördic Nightfury 12:02, 28 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to bong or delete entirely. Felsic2 makes a strong point about the lack of available sources indicating a lack of notability. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 15:21, 1 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. To quote WP:NPOSSIBLE: "If it is likely that significant coverage in independent sources can be found for a topic, deletion due to lack of notability is inappropriate. However, once an article's notability has been challenged, merely asserting that unspecified sources exist is seldom persuasive, especially if time passes and actual proof does not surface." There don't seem to be enough sources that people agree meet WP:RS. If such sources are found in the future, the article can be rewritten based on those sources. I agree with Felsic2 that the sources provided in this discussion by David Tornheim appear to be more about water pipes in general, not water pipe percolators in particular. I welcome them to be added to relevant articles, such as bong or hookah, but I don't think they suffice for this article. 786b6364 (talk) 17:37, 8 March 2017 (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.