Wikipedia talk:Notability (fiction)/Archive 14

message: This rewrite of WP:FICT looks good. A few  questions: (1) Can someone point me to the point where it was decided that a rewrite was needed? (2) Can someone provide useful links to older versions of the policy (ie. versions that were substantially different and stable for a long time) - keeping a tidy record of the history is an important part of the process. (3) How much latitude is given to long-term efforts to evolve articles from a collection of stubs through merging into lists and (eventually) into something like the examples mentioned here ("World of Final Fantasy VIII, Characters of Final Fantasy VIII, and Clone Wars (Star Wars) were evolved from lists of terms, characters, events, and concepts into articles with both real-world content and an out-of-universe perspective.")? I ask because I'm working on one such area, and it would be discouraging if deletion debates were started while I (and others) were partway through the process. Obviously some progress has to be seen, but how little is too little? Carcharoth (talk) 03:34, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I think Masem's proposal is looking really good right now, and even if it's not perfect yet, we might be at a point to start requesting comments from the greater community? Or should we wait a little bit still? -- Ned Scott 06:13, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks to be like a few things still need forming up and reinforcing. Some more examples (maybe on a subpage) would be good. Carcharoth (talk) 15:21, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

text: Thanks for the reply, Masem. Unfortunately many of these articles are not nascent. I'm talking about clean-up efforts on old articles. The topic here is that covered by the articles that have been tagged and are being edited by Wikipedia:WikiProject Middle-earth. Some date back 4 or 5 years to near the beginning of Wikipedia, but clear-up didn't really start until a year or so ago. See Talk:Elros for an old debate from 2004, and a later debate at Wikipedia:Deletion policy/Middle-earth items. There are still several months work involved, some of which involves adding sources to demonstrate notability. I'm still deep in the merging stage, as can be seen here (others are working on other areas of this topic). The progress over the past year has been a reduction (mainly due to merging or removing the project tag from existing redirects) from 1403 articles to 948 articles. That's over 450 articles merged or redirected. A recent debate around these issues of allowing time for merging and adding of sources (for both notability and verification) can be seen here. What I'm hoping is that the bit here from the nutshell: "Non-notable information should be deleted only when other options have been exhausted." can be actually agreed upon in good-faith by all sides, and that time is given to complete long-term plans like this. One thing that may be a problem is that I can't quite see yet where that bit in the nutshell is made clear in the main part of the guideline. Carcharoth (talk) 15:21, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, more about avoiding deletion is described in the "How to deal with non-notable articles" - it is urged that all other actions be taken before using AfD.  In the case of Middle Earth, the fact that you are talking about means there's good faith effort to improve, which means none of your articles should go to AfD.  If we get consensus on this WP-wide and it becomes the guideline, then we'd make sure to approach the AfD process board and make sure the admins there are aware of this change, and if say someone takes a ME article to AfD without necessarily being aware of this, then make sure to argue that the new consensus version of WP:FICT states this is against WP:AGF.  So hopefully, once the new WP:FICT is given for all to see, editors will see volunteer steps to improve notability/reduce in-universe content as good things and not to be touched.  How we'll deal with someone who is more aggressive, we'll likely have to work at that when the time comes. --MASEM 14:30, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

text: I think I took it out to streamline the text; the largest complaint was that the draft was too long.  I think with the reduced version, we want to keep the first 4 sections (up to how to deal with non-notable works) streamlined so that someone doesn't assert "tl;dr" when they are told their article does not follow WP:FICT.  A short sentence in Depth of Coverage, or possibly even a new section "Specific guidance" as is done in WP:BIO, can be added (and please go ahead to add this if you desire.) --MASEM 14:30, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Looks good & questions