Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Spells in Harry Potter (3rd nomination)
1) There are no inherent |verifiablity problems, as the information can be verified by reading the books themselves. Using the primary source is not only acceptable, but necessary in cases like this, as the existence of a spell in a book is a simple fact rather than original interpretation. As an analogy, would we |require secondary sources to verify a ''List of characters in Hamlet''? I think not. As others have said elsewhere, the spells can be considered "characters" in these books, and a list of them is valid content in an encyclopedia article. In this case the list was split off for practical reasons of |article size, not necessarily because of the "encyclopedic" (whatever that means) importance of the topic; in a paper encyclopedia, this content might be included as a sidebar, table, or appendix. 2) The list membership criteria should be obvious from the title, as this is a relatively short list and every spell in the books can be included. It's not like a ''List of people from the United Kingdom'', which would be too large in principle and would require inclusion criteria. 3) The final concern in the nomination seems to be |notability. While it is true that "OTINHERITED|notability is not inherited", some of it may be. Remember that there are many millions of fans, and many thousands at least will be interested in a list of spells. This interest can be verified from secondary sources such as websites that have been mentioned. Sure, there is no Britannica article with a list of spells, but WP is different because it is OT#PAPER|not paper and it has more people writing the articles than Britannica does. Using some websites for recent, popular-culture topics seems legitimate to me; not every conceivable Wikipedia topic has an academic journal devoted to it! Finally, some comments who use the |*cruft argument have said things like "who else could have an interest in this article but Harry Potter fans?". But we have many articles on much more obscure topics on quantum physics or mathematics and (fortunately) no one wants to delete them with the argument that "who cares about it besides theoretical physicists?". I would bet that there are more Harry Potter fans that theoretical physicists
— User:Itub, 13:49, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Stance: keep
Cited policy: WP:V||WP:RS||WP:LONG||WP:N||WP:NOTINHERITED||WP:NOT||WP:CRUFT (Wikipedia:Verifiability)