Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Yugoloth

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 delete. WP:GOOGLEHITS and undergrad papers are not accepted as supporting notability, so comments based on those are discounted. General arguments about notability policies should be taken to a broader forum. RL0919 (talk) 14:17, 1 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yugoloth[edit]

[Hide this box] New to Articles for deletion (AfD)? Read these primers!

Yugoloth (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

Non-notable topic TTN (talk) 10:45, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Fictional elements-related deletion discussions. TTN (talk) 10:45, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Games-related deletion discussions. TTN (talk) 10:45, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. I'm more favorably inclined to some of this material than some other editors. And, unquestionably, Monsters in Dungeons & Dragons is a notable topic. That doesn't mean that every bit-player category of creature deserves breakout examination in this project. Sorry, yugoloths. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:34, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - Unlike a lot of the other D&D monsters that have come up on AFD, this one has considerably more primary sources. Unfortunately, primary sources do not help establish notability, and reliable secondary sources are seemingly non-existent. There are none present currently in the article, and doing some searches only brings up more primary sources only. Rorshacma (talk) 15:50, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per nom and others.ZXCVBNM (TALK) 20:19, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - A simple Google search for the word yugoloth brings up a myriad of secondary sources, including even Youtube videos. Notability established. Sciovore (talk) 08:26, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • You may want to brush up on WP:Reliable sources. None of those google results qualify. Rorshacma (talk) 15:04, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • You'd need to point some out. You may also not understand what's required from sources if you're mentioning Youtube. TTN (talk) 15:00, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • The fact that a Google search producing a myriad of topically pertinent results is somehow not considered a measure of notability indicates a flaw in Wikipedia's attempts to define policy on notability. Wikipedia policy confuses notability versus veracity; source reliability is pertinent to veracity, but source reliability has little to nothing to do with notability, which is simply a measure of cultural significance/impact, not a measure of veracity or reliability. Wikipedia's confused concept of notability needs amending. Sciovore (talk) 09:19, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • Notability is determined by quality secondary sources with significant coverage on the topic, significant meaning real world information when pertaining to fiction. You're welcome to disagree and take it to relevant policy/guideline talk pages, but that simply means you're ignoring WP:N, WP:PLOT, and WP:WAF. If you cannot provide any sources, then you don't have an actual policy backed argument. TTN (talk) 12:23, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        • The non-fan source which is Google.com itself does provide real-world machine-generated information regarding the cultural significance of yugoloths/daemons, and there is the academic thesis on censorship which explicitly cites D&D daemons, but...
        • It looks like bossman Jimmy prefers Wikipedia policy which pushes this type of content toward his for-profit Fandom.com site. Sciovore (talk) 09:09, 29 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
          • An undergrad's school paper that he put up on his personal Tripod site is hardly an "academic thesis", and its ridiculously disingenuous to try to claim it is. Rorshacma (talk) 14:54, 29 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
            • A "school paper" submitted for a university degree (read: thesis) is by definition an academic thesis. The fact that you are attempting to gaslight that an academic thesis is somehow not an academic thesis reveals your lack of encyclopedic neutrality here. Sciovore (talk) 09:48, 30 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
              • All of which is thoroughly irrelevant here. A non-published, undergrad thesis is not a WP:reliable source (nor even remotely approaching one) under our relevant policies. I'm not going to get into parsing whether you or Rorschama are being disingenuous as you accuse each-other of being; it's simply not germane to this discussion and you both ought to stay away from speculating that the other is attempting to "gaslight" or misrepresent matters. But he is correct: this is not a "thesis" as the term is used within our relevant policy, which says that a thesis only potentially qualifies for WP:RS status if it is a doctoral thesis--and even then only under certain very specific circumstances and with significant caveats and restrictions. Furthermore, even if you did have a genuine thesis here, it would need to do more than incidentally mention the topic: you need in-depth discussion of the article's topic in order for a source to function in support of notability. Lastly, even if this was doctoral thesis, and it was published, and it did discuss the topic at length, as a thesis it would be incapable of carrying a determination of notability on its own weight: you'd still need other secondary, reliable, independent sources.
I'm sorry, but as others have already told you above, if you feel this project's notability standards should be differently formulated, there are discussion spaces where you can share that perspective and try to move the needle. However, disagreeing with policy as a representation of community consensus on an editorial issue does not obviate you from having the conform to said consensus and said policies. You have been told by at least three editors so far that you need to read WP:RS, and I highly recommend you do that before commenting further, because at present your arguments run quite contrary to those very basic editorial standards. Snow let's rap 04:11, 1 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Again, disagree all you like on the relevant talk pages, but that's irrelevant to current guidelines and policies. Also, with that methodology, you'd be opening the site up to literally millions of articles on the smallest minutia of the most trivial works of fiction. TTN (talk) 11:27, 29 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Some Google searches produce more pertinent results than others, so a threshold could be defined to differentiate a significant number of pertinent results versus insufficient results, and that would prevent the millions of trivial articles. Sciovore (talk) 13:38, 29 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sorry, but that's just not how the process works here. What you are suggesting does not meet this community's editorial standards, and whether you have faith that it is the case or not, said community hasn't arrived at those standards arbitrarily: there are many, many complex and important reasons why we do not allow individual editors to decide for themselves what a "pertinent" source is, utilizing their own idiosyncratic, subjective standards, but instead use the RS model. Snow let's rap 04:19, 1 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete The top nine results for a quick Google search are, respectively:
  1. Article in a fan wiki
  2. Article in a different fan wiki, whose content is copied from the previous fan wiki article
  3. Article in a fan wiki
  4. Wikipedia article
  5. Article in a fan wiki
  6. Youtube video
  7. Youtube video
  8. Self-published strategy guide
  9. D&D Beyond article
None of these qualify as reliable sources. 1, 2, 3 and 5 don't qualify because they are user-generated content, 6, 7 and 8 are self-published, 9 seems to be a primary source, and 4 doesn't qualify for obvious reasons. Because of this, I think it's safe to say the topic of the article totally fails WP:GNG, as it has received no significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. Not a very active user (talk) 13:49, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Fantasy-related deletion discussions. Necrothesp (talk) 10:02, 28 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete With absolutely no demonstration of independent WP:reliable sources discussing the topic, the article clearly fails WP:GNG. And even if some degree of in-depth secondary coverage did exist, there would still be a serious bar in that content of this article violates numerous WP:WWIN principles and would not pass a WP:ONUS test. This article, like many hundreds (if not thousands) of others, was created in early 2000's as part of an effort to import the entirety of the "Monsters Manual" D&D product into Wikipedia mainspace, with such articles almost invariably including massive amounts of straight WP:COPYVIO content, use of proprietary non-free images against our image use policy, and massive ref sections which (as in the present case) do not include a single cite that clears our WP:RS standards. That all may have flown (or flown under the radar) in 2004, but our project's standards and notability thresholds have come a long way.
Unfortunately, many hundreds of these articles remain and some day we're going to need an organized effort to remove the vast majority of them en masse (there are some creatures connected to the lore of this game which will qualify as notable in their own right, but they are the extremely rare exception), but in the meantime, its heartening to see that this massive pile of fancruft, copyright violations, and thoroughly WP:indiscriminate content is at least being addressed at the edges. But pulling back from the broader view and re-anchoring my !vote on this article in it's own particular shortcomings, the article fails WP:N and multiple prongs of WP:NOT. It's well past time the community made it clear to D&D aficionados that this project is not going to serve as database/back-up (or even extended summary) for the content of the game's own commercial lore books: anyone wishing to engage in such efforts should take them to Wikia or any of the other numerous free and fan-friendly platforms that embrace such archiving of such indiscriminate and exhaustive lore projects. Snow let's rap 19:20, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • For what it's worth, I'm working on it. The D&D topic space has a lot of challenges right now. Poorly designed templates, terrible categorization, lots and lots of partial article forks. And that's without addressing the volume of probably-not-notable articles... although more are likely salvageable via careful trims and mergers than might be expected (but yes, an awful lot is likely gonna go). The current state of sourcing just makes it hard to recognize what's what. All of it is more the result of age than ill-intention; much of this was begun before 2010, and in the project's early days, things like WAF were far less codified. That said, this article? Probably not anything to save. But more broadly, I sure wouldn't object to the AFD regulars giving a (brief!) pause from the D&D nominations while I help get things better organized over there. It's a big job. Deferred maintenance sucks. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 23:54, 31 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well I for one will express my gratitude for your hard work on the matter: I've been saying for years that we really need to put together a serious task force to address this issue holistically, rather than the piece-meal manner in which we have to date. If you should ever raise the issue in a community space, please feel encouraged to ping me to the discussion. My own take on the question of how of the articles may be salvaged is that it will probably end up being a very small fraction of the non-notable articles that exist in the subject area at present. Certainly there are certain creatures which came about exclusively as a consequence of the game and its associated franchises and which have achieved a degree of pop culture permeation that extends beyond super fans of the game itself: creatures like the 'Beholder' and 'Mind Flayer' which (for whateve reason) have become popular enough to be discussed in at least a handful of independent reliable sources. But I'm going to guess that these are the extreme rarity--though of course every article will have to be evaluated independently in that regard.
But it's really the massive list articles that are going to represent the most pitched battles between the community of regular editors and the D&D fans who have utilized this encyclopedia as a platform to create a reference corpus that replicates hundreds of pages of material from D&D's commercial works, only with Wikilinks. Those articles mostly have no more truly reliable sources than does this one (which is to say, absolutely zero) and they almost always run afoul of some combination of WP:NOTDIR and other obvious WP:WWIN violations (and, at least as concerning, are thick WP:COPYVIO issues), but nevertheless they are also often fat with vast amounts of indiscriminate lore and tables ripped straight from the official manuals and the larger they are, the more likely they are to be under the attention of large numbers of amateur editors who are more concerned with replicating the corpus D&D lore in fine detail than they are with adapting to and upholding this project/community's WP:NOTABILITY and WP:WEIGHT standards. Which is why when the community of regular editors finally decides to address the matter, its going to need to be organized in a centralized fashion: there will need to be more than one WP:VPP discussion on this matter: just look at how much effort was needed when the community decided to clean up just a few fancrufty areas of pro wrestling articles--and those articles were/are nowhere near as bad, undersourced, or bloated as this area is.
Of course, as with the pro wrestling area, in time we should be able to make headway with the cooperation of editors who are capable of threading the needle between their fan's devotion to the game and understanding that this project is not meant to be a fan compendium of just any random piece of lore or gameplay minutia, and who will work with the rank and file editors here to preserve and augment that content which actually does constitute notable articles. And while we will have to keep an open mind for each and every AfD determination, I'll frankly be gobsmacked if it turns out that more than one in a hundred of the thousands of current D&D articles on en.Wikipedia turns out to be compliant with our policies or even can be salvaged with additional sources. I think the vast, vast majority of the content is non-notable trivia. Snow let's rap 04:56, 1 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Suggesting that removing D&D content is purely for profit motive makes no sense when said content is allowed on Wikipedia as well as long as it fulfills the notability criteria. Wikipedia was always meant to be a general encyclopedia and not a fan-centric hub for miscellaneous trivia.ZXCVBNM (TALK) 14:14, 1 November 2019 (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.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Yugoloth&oldid=924052516"