Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/-ism

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. King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 18:16, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

-ism[edit]

Pure dictionary definition with no hope of making encyclopedia article

The article name is invalid; article names in encyclopedias are supposed to be nouns or verbs (and not even adjectives), so it violates WP:MOS, whereas affixes are valid articles in wiktionary.[1]

The topic is invalid as well, the topic is supposed to be an underlying concept and not purely a word or purely lexical- that's what dictionaries do, and do it far better than we can here.

The article contains a simple list of words that happen to match a particular lexical pattern- again, dictionaries do it much better, and are usually more complete as well.

There is a good wiktionary article that covers the same ground: wiktionary:-ism, and a list of isms that is linked from there.

This is a textbook case of Wikipedia is not a dictionary, this is a dictionary entry with no realistic chance of recovery. - (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 13:16, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. You might wan to add a few items from Category:Greek suffixes (or even Category:Suffixes) to your nomination, since the same reasoning applies to them. Jafeluv (talk) 14:21, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm doing them one at a time, because it helps the review run smoothly if you make sure that the associated wiktionary article is in a good state before you start.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 14:45, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Wikipedia is not a dictionary. ApprenticeFan ^{talk contribs} 16:38, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as a dicdef. JJL (talk) 16:49, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep "-ism" is a case where ignoring the rules needs to be invoked: there is a colloquial use of "-ism" by itself which makes it into a noun, pertaining to various schools of thought. This idea is explained in the "History" section -- & although brief, it contains material & sources that would not normally be found in the typical dictionary. If kept, though, this article needs to be rewritten to make it appear less like a dictionary entry. (The present shape of the lead paragraph & first section seem to be what created the impression that this is no more than a "dicdef" Wolfkeeper describes above.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:45, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Whether or not this would be found in a typical dictionary, it's word-for-word the same in the wiktionary. And I'm simply not finding that this is on a single topic, it seems to be a bit of a grab-bag of things that end in -ism. For example baptism and cubism, one is something you do, the others a style of painting. I don't really think that these are synonymous in any sense; articles in the wikipedia, here articles have multiple usages combined or not based on whether or not they are largely or completely synonymous, it's in the wiktionary that it's based solely on lexical commonalities.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 23:00, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that there could be an article like history of isms or something, but this just isn't that article, it's written, defined and named wrongly for that.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 23:05, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. WP:NOTDICT Niteshift36 (talk) 18:25, 24 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - Same reason as "-itis" Shadowjams (talk) 06:49, 26 July 2009 (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.