Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of alternative Dungeons & Dragons classes

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 Character class (Dungeons & Dragons)#Alternative base classes. Disregarding the standard copypasta by BOZ, there's consensus to not keep this, but no consensus to merge. Redirection allows editors to figure out whether and what should be merged from the history. Sandstein 07:23, 10 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

List of alternative Dungeons & Dragons classes[edit]

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Pure WP:GAMEGUIDE content. Sourced to primary sources, tweets, and other things that are inadmissible on their own without reliable secondary sources. Written by fans for fans and doesn't put anything in real world context. Fails notability criteria. _{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 19:26, 2 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Fictional elements-related deletion discussions. _{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 19:26, 2 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science fiction and fantasy-related deletion discussions. _{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 19:26, 2 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Games-related deletion discussions. _{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 19:26, 2 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 20:45, 2 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - Very few of the individual entries are independently notable, and the few that could be considered to be are already covered at the Character class (Dungeons & Dragons) article. There are also no reliable, independent sources that I can find that discuss the concept of this multitude of "Alternative classes" as a group, so it fails WP:LISTN. Even if the concept of alternative character classes in D&D were notable (which by all appearances, it is not), this excessively crufty list would still not be appropriate. Rorshacma (talk) 23:42, 2 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, albeit somewhat weakly / with conditions. Please see arguments (on both sides) at the similar Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Character class (Dungeons & Dragons), so it's consistent that Zxcvbnm also believes this topic should go too. I'll repeat from the earlier AFD that nom's comment about "written by fans for fans" is not a deletion criteria and is essentially meaningless (only topics that nobody likes written by people who don't care are allowed on Wikipedia? what?). Wikipedia is good precisely because it covers all sorts of obscure topics seemingly only of interest to fans - go check out WP:DYK and nominees there, and you can find all sorts of weird stuff from fans of the history of New Netherlands, or 1920 US politics, or Eurovision. Okay, that aside... the real criteria is references - are there reliable sources that cover the matter and show notability? Now, this is a spinoff article created to not glom the main article up with all the "asterisk" cases, so references are inherently spottier, per Rorshacma above. The sources clearly exist in the current article but there's way too much WP:PRIMARY and not enough secondary sources as they stand. Additionally, the article could do with some trimming to just the relevant classes. That said, insert usual "AFD is not cleanup" comment here - help with cleanup and additional sources would be good, and maybe even a merge-back to the parent Character class article if this is truly unfixable, but deletion is probably over the top. SnowFire (talk) 01:37, 3 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep or merge to Character class (Dungeons & Dragons) per above comments since there are WP:RS to retain, per WP:PRESERVE and WP:ATD. BOZ (talk) 04:20, 3 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Delete This appears to fail WP:GNG/WP:LISTN in spite of its many sources, as those all appear unreliable or not secondary. This is probably on the wrong wiki, to be honest. SportingFlyer T·C 01:36, 4 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Merge to Character class (Dungeons & Dragons). SnowFire makes good points about why this shouldn't be flatly deleted, as does BOZ with their citings of policy. Subject matter like this is unfortunately going to be mostly reliant on primary sources, but that on its own does not make this or any other topic non-notable. I believe this list should be heavily scaled down, and its edition sections moved to subsections of the Character class article's edition sections. The mechanical descriptions of most of these classes are not needed, and it would probably be better to only mention the more widely-known classes in prose; the sections on Original, AD&D 1e, and Basic do this well, and can be easily integrated as-is. Everything below that is a mess of tables and cruft, but I believe it can all be written following that style. (For example, the 3e/3.5e section can include one sentence about the classes introduced in Player's Handbook II, one sentence about those from Oriental Adventures, another covering the "Complete X" series of books, one for "Tome of X", and so on. The 5e section might be discarded entirely, since the Character class article already includes a mention of Artificer and where it was released; nothing more than that is needed.) This requires significant cleanup, but the material here has a clear home. —⁠烏⁠Γ ^(kaw) │ 05:03, 05 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep as a WP:SUMMARY-style split off from Character class (Dungeons & Dragons), an article that has already been kept by consensus at AfD. (Re) merging would not be appropriate as it would make the main article too long.

So there's the policy-and-guideline-based argument. Now here's the question that the nom has never answered. How does removing this information improve the encyclopedia? How is having a less-comprehensive coverage of a subject via focused sub-pages in any way an improvement of the project as a whole? Just trotting out a link to a project page does not answer that question at all. oknazevad (talk) 18:04, 5 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It improves the project because if there are no limits on the notability requirements for inclusion, Wikipedia would be flooded by irrelevant, original-research material, making it nigh-impossible to concentrate on what is actually notable and improve on it. We have to draw lines somewhere, and this article is clearly over that line. If this clearly indiscriminate list is allowed to stay, we might as well just allow anything. Relative toenail size of a certain game's monsters? Yup, allowed, because it exists._{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 20:23, 5 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Slippery slope fallacy is your argument then. This list is clearly not indiscriminate. It has a very specific and fixed criteria for inclusion and is a subtopic of a topic that is well covered and notable. There's nothing here that crosses any lines, let alone ones that are made up whole cloth by the nomination. oknazevad (talk) 13:47, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's actually not well covered - it's a regurgitation of primary source material which fails WP:LISTN which fails the spirit if not the letter of WP:GAMECRUFT. That's the true problem with most of these D&D articles, and why they're better off on another wiki - rarely will you find any truly secondary coverage, most "secondary" coverage is actually from players of the game, as if football players were also journalists for the games in which they played. SportingFlyer T·C 15:32, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A false analogy. That's like saying the we can't use reporting by car magazines because the writers drive to work, or that we can't use food magazines because the writers eat. Or that we can't use medical texts because they're written by doctors. oknazevad (talk) 17:41, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The real analogy here would be making an article about a car model that is solely referenced to the car manufacturer's website and marketing materials. If there is nobody else talking about it besides the manufacturer, it's not considered notable._{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 18:11, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Delete or merge not seeing enough sources to support an independent article about this topic. As a suggestion, you could summarize it and include it in an existing article about the character classes. Shooterwalker (talk) 20:39, 7 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Merge per SnowFire and KarasuGamma - I'm sure this belongs on a Wiki, but not on Wikipedia. It's either unacceptable listcruft with no notability or a game manual. But if there are useful sources, then we can transplant them to the proper page. Ikjbagl (talk) 06:02, 10 May 2020 (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.