Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Total Drama 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 keep. Consensus is also clear that the article is in need of major improvement, thus no prejudice against future relisting if the article hasn't been improved in a reasonable time. —Darkwind (talk) 19:30, 8 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

List of Total Drama characters[edit]

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This article is 100% composed of in-universe trivia, ridiculously over-burdened with overly-detailed character bios, and outright fails to establish any out-of-universe notability. The sources are generally not reliable, or say nothing about the characters, just the show. Giggett (talk · contribs) seems to be borderline WP:OWNing the article, as almost all of it has been edited by them. The article has a whopping seven maintenance tags on it. Strongly suggest WP:TNT at the very least — this is just a clusterfuck. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 13:18, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: This page has more than 5000 revisions, so if this closes as delete, a steward needs to carry out the actual deletion. Jackmcbarn (talk) 14:57, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
~~Oppose:~~ This article has been here long before I ever joined Wikipedia 3 years ago. I have only been editing it a lot recently since a new season is currently airing this month and since the article is semi-protected so almost no one else is able to edit the article other than me. Giggett (talk) 15:30, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've struck your !vote here per your statement below. Jackmcbarn (talk) 18:34, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The page can easily be edited by other users as well if it's semi-protected. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 19:06, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. tutterMouse (talk) 19:09, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Television-related deletion discussions. tutterMouse (talk) 19:09, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Merge to the respective series. Wow, what a mess of an article. Take the character bios, trim them down, and place them in the series where they appeared in. If this does close as keep, I also advocate a TNT. Taylor Trescott - ^{my talk} + _{my edits} 19:15, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have already started to trim down the character summaries in my most recent string of edits as you can see here. Giggett (talk) 19:22, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, as much as I hate to defend anything in the sorry state this was in at its arrival. Character-list articles aren't anything unusual or controversial: Category:Lists of television characters is well-populated. I reject the nomination's claim that such lists violate Wikipedia policy or practice on writing about fictional material; should the nominator feel otherwise, this is not an appropriate venue to object to such a broad category of extant material in general. As for this article, it is absolutely true that it contains vastly too much plot summary, trivia, and the like. It also contains, appropriately, the list of characters, their appearances, and their voice actors, precisely as would be expected of an article at this title. Neither deletion nor TNT is the answer. AFD is not intended as an alternative to the basic editorial process of trimming undesirable material from articles. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 20:07, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that, if you trim the crap, you're left with a blank page, which is why I'm suggesting WP:TNT. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 21:22, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not true, if we shorten them all to only include a few sentences to describe their interactions throughout each season, then that's only about 300 words per character, not 0. Trimming would be the same effect as TNT. Giggett (talk) 21:25, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hardly the case, although clearly you'd have much less than you have now. I'd cull the entire Contestant summary section, incorporate the cameos, to the extent they are relevant, into the characters' main entries, strip off the wacky formatting, pare down the descriptions somewhat and call it a day. That's major surgery, so far as editing-down goes, but it's hardly TNT: the content that should be here is here; that there is also a lot that shouldn't be here is not a valid deletion rationale. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 21:36, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment to closing admin. This page has been edited more than 25,000 times, so if you close it as "delete", you'll be unable to implement the close; you'll have to make a request at Meta:Steward requests/Miscellaneous. Nyttend (talk) 22:03, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- You're a little late there ;) Jackmcbarn (talk) 22:19, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  - Oh, oops :-) But mine's more easily visible (if a non-closing admin overlooks yours and posts a similar note, a closing admin might not see yours either) and has a link :-þ Nyttend (talk) 23:05, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    - Wait, so an admin can just delete the article without discussing about it? Giggett (talk) 23:06, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      - They can, but they aren't supposed to and doing it would probably be met with backlash. Taylor Trescott - ^{my talk} + _{my edits} 23:29, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        Actually, no, they can't, because our software's set up so that only a very few people ("stewards") can delete pages that have been edited more than 5,000 times. Jackmcbarn and I were talking about something different: right now, everyone except the nominator has said that the page should be kept, but of course it's possible that other people could come along and all advocate for its deletion. An administrator has to close an Articles for Deletion discussion (we wouldn't want it to go on indefinitely) and declare what the consensus of the discussion ended up being, and if he close it with a "delete" decision, he'll delete the page. That's the problem Jackmcbarn and I have mentioned, since it's not possible for an administrator to delete this specific page. Nyttend (talk) 00:15, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        Oh, sorry, I thought he was asking if admins had the power to just wipe any page they wanted without discussion. Taylor Trescott - ^{my talk} + _{my edits} 01:38, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        You misunderstand; I'm sorry that I confused you. If this were a normal article, I wouldn't have contradicted you, because I understood him the same way; the only technical thing is that this article requires the bigdelete permission, which only stewards have: it's really rare that an article would need to be deleted when it's gotten so many revisions, and preventing normal admins from deleting such pages is therefore restricted for very good reasons. Of course you're right in saying that backlash would (and should) result from an out-of-process deletion. Nyttend (talk) 03:11, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        Oh okay, thanks for answering my question. I guess I had no idea what a steward was until now. Giggett (talk) 15:35, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Comics and animation-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:41, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Fictional elements-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:42, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Strong Keep Total Drama is averaging more ratings than Survivor. It is one of the highest rated Cartoon Network shows in the United States. Each character diverse in their own way, equally has notoriety in the series. Not to mention new characters are being developed as we speak. Boaxy (talk) 03:17, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and trim, a valid WP:SPINOUT of the main article; trimming/cleanup of the cruft should have been attempted by the nominator prior to tossing it to the AfD wolves. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 03:20, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, but only because of Bushranger's point. Cutting this down to nothing more than the characters' names would result in something that's basically acceptable, marginally better than what we have now, and simple enough that anyone could do it. I'm all in favor of WP:TNT deletions (I've argued for them in the past), but generally only when deleting the junk article would help to induce the addition of good new content. I don't see anything getting added to this list except for some basic nice tables (which might be encouraged by the simple raw list of names only) or tons and tons of trivia like what we have now. Nyttend (talk) 03:23, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, but with each character's section trimmed down to remove trivial info and keep just the important stuff. A brief description of each character ought to suffice. Creativity-II (talk) 12:12, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So is anyone gonna do the trimming, or are we just gonna keep passing the buck and letting the article continue to gather cruft? Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 13:00, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to tidy it up somewhat, although I will likely leave the task of shortening the character bios to someone else. I'm doing this because I think that's the right decision for the project, not out of any interest whatsoever in this article topic. And I'm doing so expressly under a measure of protest; there are far, far too many articles, mostly on fictional material, that are showing up at AFD when they should simply be being trimmed or merged to appropriate targets as editorial measures. AFD is not intended as a way to force other editors to clean up articles in difficult conditions: I consider this nomination as much a passing of the buck as any other commenter here who did not take action. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 16:07, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No way that I'm going to do anything while the AFD is still running, but I wouldn't mind doing it afterward. We can wait until the AFD closes; it's not a copyvio or anything else that's immediately harmful. Nyttend (talk) 22:22, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What do you mean about a "brief description of each character"? Is that just supposed to be just a sentence, or is it more like a short summary? Since some of these character descriptions are very short like below 300 words while other ones are very long like 1,000 words or more. So are the 300 word character summaries fine, or do they need to be even shorter? Giggett (talk) 15:32, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'd go with a short summary, about 300 words or less like you mentioned. Creativity-II (talk) 09:35, 2 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete or merge - List of Total Drama characters largely is original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors after received 25,000+ edits. This AfD was mentioned at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard The pages' 25,365 edits presently ranks it No. 7 behind George W. Bush 45,254, List of WWE personnel 38,061, United States 32,242, Wikipedia 32,031, Michael Jackson 27,023, and Jesus 26,546.[1] It seems clear that review is needed when the edit count of an animated television show ranks among articles whose large receipt of edits is understandable. When you additionally look at the articles with the most revisions listed below List of Total Drama characters, List of Total Drama characters clearly stands out as unexplainably receiving so many page edits. Yes, the page needs trimming/cleanup of the cruft, but that merely skirts past the problem. With 25,365 edits to the page, I think the culture that has developed in editing this page is so engrained that the page is hopelessly irreparable. In other words, while the article is fixable, reality is that it will not happen. The results after 25,000+ contributions to the page show that the page is being editing with little concern in posting Wikipedian original analysis or in using the Total Drama television itself to source the entire article and/or large passages. Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. See WP:PSTS. For the page content that is not original analysis, it appears that Wikipedia is being used as a first reporter of Total Drama characters statistics. Even though this is the first AfD for the list, WP:TNT seems an appropriate solution given the above. -- Jreferee (talk) 14:10, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, helpful and useful information here, just needs some improvement with secondary sources, however, WP:AFDISNOTFORCLEANUP. Cheers, — Cirt (talk) 16:43, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - fails the general notability guideline as no evidence has been provided which demonstrates that the characters are notable by our standards. Notability is not inherited from the work in which the characters appear in. Also violates What Wikipedia is Not due to the inuniverse only content. Simone 17:14, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well in that case, I now agree that this page should be deleted Giggett (talk) 18:28, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I really that it's an archetypal WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument, but an awful lot of other stuff does exist. It has long been my reading of consensus that Lists of [Foo Show] characters, especially for long-running notable series, have been (within reason) considered acceptable WP:SPINOUT articles even in the absence of sources which demonstrate notability for the character list independently of the show they are part of (if such a thing were even possible). Certainly, there are over 500 articles in Category:Lists of television characters and subcats. Given that scope, a declaration that such articles are problematic from the WP:NOTINHERITED perspective probably should have an RFC. This article obviously has a litany of other problems, but those are editorial concerns. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 19:02, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep but major cleanup required Yes, I will agree that there's no immediate notability for this, but at the same time, we are talking about a character list of a multi-season, serial show. We have generally allowed these lists as long as the descriptions are kept in check, and whenever possible, out-of-universe sourcing is used to help back it up. The current list fails the first part, and while I understand the show builds around a fictional reality show with elimination voting, such details aren't appropriate here. Trimmed down to, as suggested, 300 words or such, is completely reasonable. --MASEM (t) 03:32, 3 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per above, I think the is list is notable enough to provide coverage of it. JJ98 (Talk) 08:19, 7 October 2013 (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.