Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Minor characters of Crash Bandicoot

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 List of Crash Bandicoot characters. Ryan Postlethwaite^{See the mess I've created or let's have banter} 17:04, 5 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Minor characters of Crash Bandicoot[edit]

Article fails to meet Wikipedia's Notability guidelines because there are no reliable third-party sources that can verify the contents of this article. (I previously tagged the article for speedy deletion, but it was disputed.) Randomran (talk) 19:11, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. No notability shown. RobJ1981 (talk) 19:50, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Strong oppose. The most notable characters in the article have appeared in eight video games at the most. We just have to make a team effort to expand the article and assert its notability. Cat's Tuxedo (talk) 20:21, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Common sense kicking in. I have a better idea. How about we move this back to List of Crash Bandicoot characters and include sections on the major characters (with redirects to their respective sections in Major characters of Crash Bandicoot included, of course). The List of Mario series characters follows this same format and it appears to be doing alright. Cat's Tuxedo (talk) 21:26, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - Perhaps merge to Crash Bandicoot, but there is no inherent notability otherwise. / Blaxthos ( t / c ) 20:42, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been added to the list of video game related deletions. MuZemike (talk) 21:38, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Merge & Redirect to List of Crash Bandicoot characters per Cat's Tuxedo. -- Jelly Soup (talk) 00:07, 1 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Merge Per Cat's Tuxedo--UltraMagnus (talk) 00:10, 1 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep minor character lists are a good thing for the organization of material. I've no objection to the merge proposed by Cat's Tuxedo, but don't think it is needed. Hobit (talk) 01:48, 1 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per Hobit. --Yowuza ZX Wolfie 11:48, 1 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete — I cannot find any verifiable, third-party sources verifying any of this. MuZemike (talk) 04:55, 3 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nutshell of WP:V is "This page in a nutshell: Material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source.". Notice that 3rd party isn't there. If you wanted WP:N, that's more than fair of course. I do think that minor character lists are a fine organizational scheme for an overall notable subject as long as the material is verifiable (and it is here). Hobit (talk) 18:21, 3 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It might help to look at WP:PROVEIT which is a subsection of our verifiability policy, stating that "if no reliable, third-party sources can be found for an article topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it." Randomran (talk) 22:41, 3 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I should have known that eh? Thanks for pointing it out. In any case, there seem to be plenty of reliable 3rd party sources for each of these characters. The articles just aren't primarily focused on the character, making WP:N still an issue, but third party sources exist (for example [1] and [2]. Hobit (talk) 08:55, 4 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Err, I definitely see some coverage of other more notable characters in there. But I'm having trouble parsing out any information on these "minor characters" in those two sources. Also, the first source looks to be a reprint of a press release, which makes it insufficiently independent. Randomran (talk) 22:58, 4 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In that case, could you explain the difference between WP:N and WP:V? I read WP:V as saying we shouldn't have articles on things that don't have third-party RS that _can_ be cited. But WP:V allows us to use primary sources as sources. So we have a RS (more than one: as only part of that is a press release and I didn't spend that long looking for other sources) and we have all the info in primary sources. The material is verifiable. Hobit (talk) 00:27, 5 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My reading of the two, combined, is that we don't allow articles written entirely from primary sources, and that a reliable third party source with only a trivial mention (e.g.: "X exists") would be gaming the system. You'd need to verify at least a few important facts in a reliable third party source in order to have have "significant" coverage. WP:N says "significant coverage is more than trivial but may be less than exclusive". But again, I'm not sure I saw mention of the minor characters in the source you dug up. Not trying to be difficult, but I might have missed it. Do you have a quote? Randomran (talk) 00:39, 5 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The easiest portion of the difference is that WP:V applies to content while WP:N applies to articles. WP:V may stop us from making some specific claim which would be contentious. WP:N would stop us from writing on a topic without some coverage of that topic in a substantive (WP:N says "significant") way. Basically, WP:V is the fundamental tenet that makes wikipedia legitimate (since none of us can be trusted as an authority on anything, as we edit anon). WP:N is sort of a a functional guideline. It allows us to keep article topic selection free from Original research and (hopefully) helps us keep the distribution of articles NPOV in a meaningful sense. Because it is a functional guideline it is difficult to articulate--it doesn't follow from first principles like WP:CON or WP:V and it isn't a unique solution to the problem. WP:N also runs into some problems (like with this AfD) when the reasons for creation of a new article are stylistic, rather than editorial. We didn't spin out Minor characters of Crash Bandicoot because we felt that it was a notionally different topic from Crash Bandicoot but because the Crash Bandicoot article wouldn't hold a full list of characters. In that case, we find ourselves at a loss. the original topic (what WP:N purports to govern) is still notable, but this section of it (what would previously NOT been subject to WP:N) is not. Even FURTHER, fictional topics generate more trouble because coverage of fictional works is nested and hierarchical. Elements of fiction (characters) tend to almost never be covered outside of the work of fiction itself. By contrast, real life relationships are much more free form. We would expect that a discussion of Calculus would mention Newton (as he kinda-sorta created it) but most applications of calc. and even some stories about its derivation would not cover Newton exclusively. As such, it is harder to assign "real life" articles parents and daughters. Fictional elements, however, naturally fit into parent/daughter relationships. So while we couldn't say that "Company X is notable because sector A (which company X is a part of) is notable" but it seems more logical to say "Crash Bandicoot is notable, why wouldn't a list of characters in it be notable?" That's an artifact of this particular second best solution. In my mind, notability is similar to patent protection. Without patents, the incentive to invent new things would be small because those inventions couldn't be protected from copying (which is easy once the original "insight" is done). As a "second best" solution, the government grants a temporary monopoly to the patent holder in exchange for a promise that the invention be released into the public domain after a certain time. In this case the government can't get every inventor to invent without some incentive and its tools are blunt. Wikipedia can't force every item to be sourced from a third party (as that would gut many legit fiction and business articles). We also can't allow articles to be created for any reason. We have a particular solution to the problem in WP:N, but it is by no means unique. Does that huge wall of text help answer your question? Protonk (talk) 05:11, 5 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Fictional characters-related deletion discussions. -- Fabrictramp | talk to me 21:54, 3 September 2008 (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.