Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Samurai Shodown 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 no consensus. Yamamoto Ichiro (山本一郎)(会話) 03:35, 20 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

List of Samurai Shodown characters[edit]

This is a placeholder I created for a bunch of non-notable characters to be merged into. After two months, nothing has changed. The characters themselves have no possibility of having any view on them beyond the games, so this is about the peak of their existence. The character entries are only a retelling of the various games of the series, so all of the information can easily be covered in those articles. TTN 20:29, 14 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been added to the list of video game deletions. QuagmireDog 20:50, 14 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Strong Delete. Hooray! A list of video game deletions. Hopefully, overly voluminous articles about TV episodes and songs off of an album are next. Mandsford 21:37, 14 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: I don't see a reason to delete the list. Given the length of the list if the main game articles contained the same information it would probably be split out to slim down the articles in question. Dread Lord CyberSkull ✎☠ 23:15, 14 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- There is no way to cover it in an encyclopedic manner. Keeping it just for the reason of keeping it doesn't really help us. The information for each game pretty much takes up the normal length of a story section for a video game anyways. If it does become too large, all we have to do is trim it. We really don't need to cover each character's full story in the games. TTN 23:19, 14 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and cleanup, and wasn't this an anime as well? 132.205.44.134 02:18, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- That implies that some sort of cleanup method has been found. At this point, not one single person actually wants to work on it beyond doing minor things. TTN 14:07, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as marginal-interest cruft. Or move to games-wiki -- SockpuppetSamuelson 08:55, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - If it were multiple articles, I would urge delete, on the basis of WP:NOT#IINFO - However, this is, explicitly, a list - Tiswas^(t) 09:39, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- It originally was a bunch of articles, but I don't see how that matters. Lists must also conform to our writing and notablity guidelines (WP:WAF and WP:FICT in this case), so the fact that it's a list shouldn't make a difference. TTN 14:07, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - WP:FICT#Fiction in Wikipedia#2 covers the list format. If the list were substantially shorter, it would be perfectly at home in the parent article. Which part of WP:WAF do you consider relevant? It is, after all, a long article in itself. - Tiswas^(t) 14:18, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That doesn't automatically mean the we just shove all characters of every series onto a list. A topic needs to show relevance outside of the series to be covered here (as shown in WAF). Every single fictional topic has characters in one way or another, but unless they can be separated from the plot, it is pointless to mention them. TTN 14:23, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No, it doesn't. But neither does it preclude the creation of such a list, however much it is to your or my chagrin. Unfortunately, there are no clear guidelines, but there is clear precedent. I can't say that it give me much cheer. - Tiswas^(t) 14:34, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Uh, the Pokemon test page is used against that argument, not for it (They are also going under a large reconstuction, so it is best not to even talk about them). We cannot say there is a precedent just because WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS. We only have two featured character pages, and both have at least a little bit of real world information, so that would be the precedent. TTN 16:14, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sentiment that I have expressed myself on more than one occasion. However, in this instance, we are considering a list that contains in-universe information, as opposed to multiple in universe articles. I'm not expounding a "better here than there" argument, more that WP:FICT and WP:WAF allow for this sort of cruft, and, whilst it would be best kept to the parent article, it is too long a list to be kept there. - Tiswas^(t) 18:25, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That isn't the guidelines allowing these (hopefully the rewrite of FICT will help in the future). Fans of fluffy fiction articles and people that don't believe in notability expressed by non-trivial sources allow them. If this were actually a true discussion instead of a vote as we claim they are, stuff like this would be quick. It's just an annoying flaw in the site's system. Anyways, the list won't be kept anywhere. The characters can easily be split off between the series article and the ten separate game articles. All of these paragraphs are just small parts of the overall story, so most would be trimmed to a sentence (not that they would actually be merged.) TTN 18:52, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it's not a vote, but there are legitimate arguments against your position simply as for what Wikipedia should be. I for one take the "comprehensive" part of Wikipedia seriously, but also think that proper writing style means that minutiae shouldn't be endlessly harped on in the main article. Hence, daughter articles with the details and summary style. That said, if this article is kept, by all means go ahead and clean it up and chop it down, if you think redundancy can adequately be reduced. SnowFire 06:24, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Child articles are created if they are a suitable sub-topic that has enough information to write about. If not, the main article is usually trimmed (This isn't how it happens, but that is the actual way that it should be done.). This article is going to be kept because people are ignoring the whole "These have no out of universe information, thus fail the criteria to be covered here" bit, and replacing it with "This is good information." TTN 12:01, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

(de-indent) I'm not familiar with Samurai Shodown, but "enough information" strikes me as a WP:V issue which is easily dealt with by using the games themselves. Obviously sourcing could be better and any speculation should be sourced or removed, but those are vanilla cleanup issues. More out of universe information would be good of course, but that's more the difference between a Start or B class article and a GA/FA article; if this information is adequately sourced, it would be proper to have in a comprehensive article on an individual game if it wasn't for clutter issues and summary style. SnowFire 15:34, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Primary sources are completely irrelevant when dealing with fiction articles. They will always be there, so they are not part of the equation. Real world information must be present to assert the need to cover it. We can be lax only up to a certain point with these kinds of articles. This has become more than a simple split off or "It can/will get better" thing. If an article cannot even show the ability to meet the fiction guidelines, they should be merged or deleted as needed. After two months of sitting, nothing has been found, and even after searching a good while by myself, I found nothing. TTN 15:48, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

They are irrelevant for proving notability, but not for verifiability. Which is what I was referring to, and what (I believe) your earlier argument was getting at. As for notability, my thoughts are that a "daughter" article generally shares the notability of its parent article; it's just in a separate Wikipedia article for purely organizational reasons. And I fully agree that there is definitely a limit to "how far" this can go, but a single characters article for an entire series seems reasonable enough to me.

Honest question, just to get a feel for your position: what do you think of the Pokemon articles? I've been trying to avoid a "other crap exists" argument here, but I think this is on point. I'm not overly familiar with it, but my suspicion is that there isn't much strictly defined *individual* notability on 98% of Pokemon... but the Pokemon franchise itself is notable with scads of sales, newspaper articles, etc. and it's reasonable to think that people interested in the topic in-depth might be interested in the actual characters. I'm not referring to organization here (whether they should be merged or not, etc.), but simply whether the content is worthy of keeping on Wikipedia, which you don't seem to think it is in this case since you don't even want to merge. SnowFire 16:19, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Those verify the in-game stuff, but that doesn't really matter. We need to verify real world information, which has been my argument the entire time. If the sub-topic is not large enough to stand on its own (notability), it doesn't need to be split in the first place, so just shoving a bunch of junk isn't going to help us organize anything. That information needs to be trimmed instead. In this case, a main character section in the series article can cover them in general, and more specific section in each game can cover the specifics, so there is no need to even split in the bad way that we do it. If this article could possibly look like Characters of Final Fantasy VIII, it would be worth keeping. There is not enough information for that to happen.

Most of the Pokemon should be merged into lists, and the major ones like Pikachu can keep their articles. As a whole, they have enough information to warrant lists and stuff, just not articles. The Pokemon project is trying to accomplish a pretty large merger, by the way. TTN 16:34, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. I actually enjoyed reading it. I don't see any reason to delete it. And Samurai Shodown is quite a notable and popular series of video games, manga, and (if I remember correctly) anime. It's not trivial. --Melanochromis 00:15, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I hate to comment on every keep, but WP:ILIKEIT is not a valid reason to keep it. The series is notable, but that doesn't extend to the characters. TTN 00:23, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. If moved to articles on the individual games, it'd clutter them up horribly. Plus, I'm going to presume that at least some of these characters span multiple games, making a merge tricky? A giant merged character article is the best option here. This isn't an issue of notability so much (any reasonable article on an individual game would mention the characters in it) as proper organization of content. SnowFire 06:19, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

They aren't going to be merged. Each game has its own story that can be beefed up to like three paragraphs by including these. That is a fine length for a story section. Its also very possible to include a couple paragraph characters section. We aren't going to cover each character separately because they are not notable enough. TTN 12:01, 16 June 2007 (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.