Wikipedia:Deletion policy/Middle-earth items
Attempted consensus
Sometimes, a group of similar or related articles is nominated for deletion over a short period of time. In cases like this, it seems prudent to have one centralized discussion about the entire group, rather than repeating arguments over each member thereof. This is an attempt to forum consensus on one such groups of articles.
Note that individual members from the group may still be considered notable on other grounds. This discussion is purely to determine whether membership of this group, solely on its own, is merit enough for inclusion in Wikipedia.
Description
From the parent category Middle-earth, an enormous number of articles about minor Tolkien-related objects, characters and locations were nominated for deletion, many of which will never possibly grow beyond stub status. The question arises, where does the bar of notability lie for these articles and how is such notability determined?
Arguments for deletion
- Ideally I think many of these articles can be merged into a more comprehensive list of Middle-Earth landmarks/rulers/characters/etc. However, there are several that come into being as an article that not only have no hope of being expanded upon, but there is little reason to suspect that anyone at all would be interested in their existence, even dyed in the wool Tolkien fans. For example there were recently articles featured on VfD about characters whose entire role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (and indeed, the combined works of Tolkien) amounted to a single, one line mention with absolutely no information given regarding them. To maintain a list of characters of such limited importance would be as useful as maintaining a list of every name mentioned in the Books_of_Chronicles. A bar of notability does need to be set and kept as far as minor Tolkien concepts are concerned. I would suggest, as a rather arbitrary standard, that any given character, place, concept or so on, in order to qualify for keeping (either in list format, or as a seperate entry if the information available warrants it), should either be mentioned more than once in the works of Tolkien (indexes do not count), or if limited to one mention in the works, have enough information to distinguish them from any other given character, place, concept, etc. For example, if Joe the Elf is mentioned as one of the elves of Lothlorien and no other information can be given, there is no point wasting space on him. On the other hand, if Jim the Orc was a general of the armies of Mordor who personally oversaw the siege of Osgiliath, that information would be enough to distinguish him. I hope what I've said makes sense. Arkyan 00:32, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Arguments for keeping
Arguments for merging
- I believe that all of these articles can be merged. There are legions of Tolkien fans who care very deeply about every aspect of middle earth. Why can we not have a set of articles that mention minor characters, or minor geography, or what-have-you? My belief is that for any article about some trivial aspect of a fictional universe with an extremely large fan base (ie. Tolkien, Harry Potter, Pokemon), we should merge that information to another article that covers the topic more broadly. DaveTheRed 23:31, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- Wiki is not paper, combined with fans that are interested enough to enter the information, would indicate there is no reason not to include this type of information on wikipedia. That being said, there is also no reason not to ask the fan base to organize thier entries into a reasonable structure. Merging also has the advantage of treating Middle-earth items and characters in a manor similiar to the items and characters dealt with in Wikipedia:Deletion policy/Nintendo items and Wikipedia:Deletion policy/Minor characters. --Allen3 01:31, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)
- Merging has the additional benefit of combining information into larger articles where it can be more easily found. Rather than a dozen stubs on Tolkien Orcs, it would be more interesting to have a single article that lists and describes them all (with redirects from the names of the individual orcs). Radiant_* 10:04, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)
- I agree with all the points for merging and redirecting small articles with little hope of expansion into larger articles along the lines of Minor bounty hunters in Star Wars. In addition I suggest that if we simply delete articles, even about things that are only mentioned once by Tolkein, the likelihood is that they will just be recreated when the next fan stumbles across the fact that it isn't here. -- Lochaber 13:17, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- By having all similar information in one place we make it easier to find. Also it means that most of the information is more likely to be read (a lot of the articles cn minor people, places etc. tend to be near orphans). Rje 01:07, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)
Other
- Another option that I would find acceptable would be the creation of a tolkien wiki. We started a star wars wiki for the trivial star wars stuff. Couldn't we do the same for tolkien, and for that matter, pokemon? DaveTheRed 23:31, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- It isn't possible to make a blanket statement about Middle-earth articles. Some of them are extensive, some of them are one sentence and nothing more can be said about them. Some should be deleted, some should be merged, and some should obviously be kept. We should decide each article on a case-by-case basis. RickK 00:44, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)
- I agree, things have to be reviewed on a case by case basis, unfortunately it means that there will be an intermediate period where there is a bit of a mess. -- Lochaber 13:17, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've found that the most comprehensive online source of information on Middle-Earth is The Encyclopedia of Arda. If something isn't in there, then you'll be hard-pressed to find information about it elsewhere.
As I see it, the Wikipedia articles fall into three groups:
- Articles such as Deeping Coomb, where there's an obvious article to merge into: in the case of Deeping Coomb, that would be Helm's Deep or Battle of the Hornburg.
- Articles such as Brithon, where there is no obvious choice.
- Articles such as Bellakar, which only appear in third-party works such as fanfiction, or that are too minor to get an entry in the Encyclopedia of Arda.
I feel that articles in the first group should be merged into the main article, articles in the second group should either be deleted or merged into articles such as Geography of Middle-Earth, and articles in the third group should simply be deleted. --Carnildo 23:34, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- I strongly endorse creating a Geography of Middle-earth article and merging a lot of the lesser articles into that, with redirects. But not all of them. RickK 00:46, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)
- Concur with that. Geography stubs are less useful than a centralized article. Individual countries such as Lothlorien or Mordor would probably warrant their own article. Radiant_* 10:07, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)
- A note on the Encyclopedia of Arda - its scope does not include anything from the History of Middle-Earth series [1], and I see no reason why we should similarly limit ourselves. —Korath (Talk) 00:33, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)
- I dispute the notion that Brithon has no obvious choice to merge to. I think it would make sense to merge that article to Beleriand, which is the province where the river is. I also agree that articles on things from fan-fic should be deleted. DaveTheRed 17:10, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- I do think that articles on things from fan-fic should be deleted from Wikipedia but I want to make sure we are talking about the same thing. Basically I think if something is canon then it shouldn't be deleted, I'm not sure how it works with the Middle Earth stuff but with Babylon 5 (which you'll all be glad to know doesn't seem to have loads of stubs, I guess that fictional universe isn't as big) there are a fair few novels (see B5 article - novels section) which are not written by JMS but are canon but there others that aren't. I would not support deleting anything with is canon for Middle Earth (see Middle Earth canon and related talk) (or Star Wars / Babylon 5 / Pokémon for that matter) -- Lochaber
- I've made the argument on similar topics that there should be an entire separate wiki dedicated to fictional characters, places, and things (from whatever fictional source), and that mention of such things on Wikipedia should be reserved for those that are notable. --BDAbramson 21:00, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)