Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Diary
Ok, here's the comment I promised. I'm sorry I couldn't get around to it sooner, been doing stuff around the wiki. As I've said above, when writing an article for an encyclopedia, one has to have good sources on the ''subject'' one is writing about (in this case, a work called The Diary). Most encyclopedias have very high standards for for "inclusion": the subject must be noteworthy enough that it is a recognized field of study, or at least has several scholarly or otherwise good quality works devoted to it. Wikipedia is a very inclusive encyclopedia, comparatively. Where the Britannica might only accept subjects with at least several high quality books, monographs, these, journal articles etc devoted to it, Wikipedia accepts even subjects whose only basis is, say, a newspaper article (this does not mean the subject will automatically get its ''own page'', but it can find a place somewhere in it). Do note that although Wikipedia is very liberal in this way, it is nevertheless an encyclopedia and has rules for sourcing/referencing that must be followed.What are these rules? The official documents  and  provides the basic ones. Multiple independent sources attesting to the claims made in the article are strongly urged, although sometimes a single independent, very reputable or high quality source for a claim is quite sufficient.For an article on a book, these sources could be many things. For example, a thesis written on a book is a good source for an article written on that book. A book review in ''The New York Times'' is a good source. Critiques of the book in scholarly journals are a good source. A book written on the book is an excellent source. A magazine article about the book is an acceptable source (for Wikipedia), etc. Of course, ''the book itself'' is one source, the primary, but one generally cannot write a good encyclopedia article on the book if ''it'' itself is the ''only'' thing available—certainly not on Wikipedia, whose contributors are anonymous editors who cannot write original analysis and let it stand on their names. When writing a NPOV article, you'd have to write a balanced work, and if the book is so un-noteworthy that no one has ever critiqued or written anything on it in a thesis or book or magazine/newspaper article, that suggests the work is not suitable for an encyclopedia article. There are no works of any kind on The Diary. It's basically something written by a person ("Bodster"—himself or herself anonymous) and placed in parts on the net. There are no sources. To claim that the piece on the net is itself a sufficient source is incorrect: this is self-referential (I cannot write a story about my dog, place it on a website, and then claim that encyclopedias should have an article on my dog using the website as a source. We depend on reputable publishers who are able to fact-check and peer-review to denote noteworthiness for us: if for some reason my dog is very notable—the last of a breeed that has had a story written in ''National Geographic'', for example, then yes, that's a perfectly acceptable source. But not a self-referential website I wrote myself). In writing about a book the book is always a primary source (even one only placed on the net), but it is by no means sufficient for an article. Otherwise, Wikipedia will simply be a directory of things and claims made on the net; it most certainly |is not. For a good example of a proper article written on a book, see '''''Oroonoko'''''. Note the reference not just to the work itself, but to multiple sources ''on the work''. Note the NPOV nature of the writing. Now, you might say that this is a bit unfair: that article is a feaured article written by one of Wikipedia's best editors, himself a literature professor/expert; shouldn't you be able to write a short stubby piece that might grow? Fair question. However, there must be a good solid reason for us to take the m:eventualist view, ie., why should we believe that  5 years from now or ten years from now The Diary will be a profoundly noteworthy subject, with multiple reviews, books, theses, or monographs written on it? Will ''The London Review of Books'' be saying something about it in a few years, in the way we have no doubt whatsoever they'll be saying on Harry_Potter:_Book_Seven|Ms Rowling's seventh? There is absolutely no reason to believe that, and we have no evidence for it. But perhaps. Perhaps one day The Diary will be famous and noted. But until then, until it can satisfy  and  and  and , I don't see a reason for us to how we can write an article on it
— User:Encephalon, 15:33, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
Stance: comment
Cited policy: WP:ISNOT||WP:V||WP:RS||WP:NOT||WP:NOR (Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not)