Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of American Horror Story: Freak Show characters

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 merge‎ to American Horror Story: Freak Show#Cast and characters following significant trimming Star Mississippi 20:26, 22 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

List of American Horror Story: Freak Show characters[edit]

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I redirected the 42k character long list with two primary sources as references, but it was restored and the user undoing my revert has stated to have no intention of improving the article.

As a list of characters from a particular series of a TV show, it's an unnecessary split of American Horror Story: Freak Show. It has no actual encyclopedic information to speak of, e.g., creation and inspiration, development, reception, legacy, etc. It just rehashes the plot of the series from the characters' point of view. Unnecessary, suitable for Fandom or a dedicated fansite. soetermans. ^{↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK} 17:36, 14 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Fictional elements-related deletion discussions. soetermans. ^{↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK} 17:36, 14 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Keep for multiple reasons: A) "it's unnecessary" is not a good argument for article deletion, per WP:WEDONTNEEDIT. B) The burden to carry out the checks under step B, especially B2, of WP:BEFORE rests on the contributor requesting deletion prior to nominating article(s) for deletion, and this has not been done in this case. C) The article can be fixed through normal editing, meaning it is not a candidate for AfD per WP:BEFORE, Step C, D) the wiki user requesting deletion did not search for sources that might be added, instead deciding that it's not their job and thus is nobody's and deletion is preferable (bad practice per Step D of WP:BEFORE). E) This article does, in fact, have encyclopedic value, as much as any other list of characters in a fictional work does. Per MOS:TVLISTLEAD, Characters of Kingdom Hearts is considered "a good character list example [...] although it is not a television-related article". This sets precedent for character list articles (potentially) having encyclopedic value and not just being devoid of value by default by virtue of being a list article of fictional characters. E) the statement "It just rehashes the plot of the series from the characters' point of view" does not seem true at first glance. Can any concrete examples of this be given? The first main section, on Bette and Dot Tattler, is written from a neutral point of view and includes encyclopedic information about critical/award circuit reception to the actor's portrayal of the character(s) and information about the VFX production process. F) The statement that "the user undoing [the] revert[sic] has stated to have no intention of improving the article." is false (and would be irrelevant, in any case). The user in question (me) only stated that the burden to WP:IMPROVE does not rest solely on me, but on all contributors that are interested, and that if any issues are observed, you need to either try to fix them yourself, or raise them and give others time to fix them before deletion can be considered. This has not been done as of the time of this writing. Recommend speedykeep, this article can be fixed and is not worthless. Thranduil (talk) 18:19, 14 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure if my reply on the AFD page will automatically be transferred over to here, so sorry if it's a duplicate.

Keep for multiple reasons:

A) "it's unnecessary" is not a good argument for article deletion, per WP:WEDONTNEEDIT.

B) The burden to carry out the checks under step B, especially B2, of WP:BEFORE rests on the contributor requesting deletion prior to nominating article(s) for deletion, and this has not been done in this case.

C) The article can be fixed through normal editing, meaning it is not a candidate for AfD per WP:BEFORE, Step C,

D) the wiki user requesting deletion did not search for sources that might be added, instead deciding that it's not their job and thus is nobody's and deletion is preferable (bad practice per Step D of WP:BEFORE).

E) This article does, in fact, have encyclopedic value, as much as any other list of characters in a fictional work does. Per MOS:TVLISTLEAD, Characters of Kingdom Hearts is considered "a good character list example [...] although it is not a television-related article". This sets precedent for character list articles (potentially) having encyclopedic value and not just being devoid of value by default by virtue of being a list article of fictional characters.

F) the statement "It just rehashes the plot of the series from the characters' point of view" does not seem true at first glance. Can any concrete examples of this be given? The first main section, on Bette and Dot Tattler, is written from a neutral point of view and includes encyclopedic information about critical/award circuit reception to the actor's portrayal of the character(s) and information about the VFX production process.

G) The statement that "the user undoing [the] revert[sic] has stated to have no intention of improving the article." is false (and would be irrelevant, in any case). The user in question (me) only stated that the burden to WP:IMPROVE does not rest solely on me, but on all contributors that are interested, and that if any issues are observed, you need to either try to fix them yourself, or raise them and give others time to fix them before deletion can be considered. This has not been done as of the time of this writing. Recommend speedykeep, this article can be fixed and is not worthless. Thranduil (talk) 18:22, 14 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I'd appreciate it if someone could clean up my entry here and on the AFD page proper (or tell me how to do so myself), apparently the text was duplicated on both. The text before "I'm not sure" shouldn't be here, and "Keep" should have been bolded. Thranduil (talk) 18:24, 14 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Merge with American Horror Story: Freak Show#Cast and characters (after significant trimming). In my opinion, lists of characters should only exist if the main article is long and needs to be split, or if information about the characters would be split across many pages (i.e., different seasons or different shows). Here, neither reason is met and basic background on the characters could be reasonably incorporated into the main article. RunningTiger123 (talk) 03:17, 18 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't disagree with a merge. As a user, that's where I expected to see more/sufficient info about the characters (somewhere between just the character names and lengthy in-universe bios). But then again, other seasons of AHS have the same structure - just the character names in the main article, linking to a "list of.." article that's been (perhaps a bit overzealously) now removed by User:Soetermans Thranduil (talk) 12:54, 18 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For what it's worth, character lists for any AHS season are probably unnecessary for the same reasons I listed above, so I agree with those redirects. RunningTiger123 (talk) 18:51, 18 June 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.