Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of fictional swords (4th nomination)

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 keep. The good news is that the inter-AfD interval keeps increasing. Clear consensus to keep. -- RoySmith (talk) 01:14, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

List of fictional swords (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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This list article is mostly WP:OR and fancruft, and has become bloated with massive amounts of non-notable trivia. It should be deleted, as it lacks sufficient references. I have created a basic article for the topic of fictional swords called Swords in fiction, which should function as a replacement that can be more properly soured. _{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 19:33, 24 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 19:46, 24 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Fictional elements-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 19:47, 24 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep The page in question has existed for about 14 years. It is high traffic and so has had hundreds of thousands of readers. The nominator clearly admits that the topic is valid as he has just written a content fork. The new page is inferior to the long-standing page and so, per WP:REDUNDANTFORK, "the more recent article should be merged back into the main article". Andrew D. (talk) 23:01, 24 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • WP:ARTICLEAGE refutes your point about the article being 14 years old. To cite the section, "The article may have achieved its age either because its lack of notability was not discovered until recently, or because the collective interpretation of our inclusion criteria has evolved." It's clearly the latter rather than the former. Large amounts of fancruft was thought to be fine a decade ago but now the criteria have become more strict and the article should have some actual substance. There is very little in the list article that describes swords' usage in fiction, and it is merely a laundry list of various names and trivia._{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 01:25, 25 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Redirect to Swords in fiction. Agree with OP. Any information in the list that might not be OR or fancruft can be preserved in the page history and merged to the new article. The more valid title for this article is the newer one, and Andrew's argument that it is a redundant content fork actually applies more to the older page, not the newer one. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 23:15, 24 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note In its original form the list served as a navigational tool linking articles on fictional swords that existed back in the days when Wikipedia welcomed such articles, but at present almost none of those articles remain. Furthermore, ever since that date fourteen years ago the page has incorrectly characterized legendary/mythical swords as "fictional". WP:TNT would seem to apply here, but very selective merging into Swords in fiction would work. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 04:27, 26 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

And FTR: the large number of previous nominations is a bit misleading: the first one, in 2008, should not count, as it ended in procedural keep and immediate renomination; the "second" was no consensus; the "third" in 2011 ended in "keep", but the majority of arguments were clearly flawed, based on the supposed possibility of cutting the cruft and properly maintaining the article, but this has clearly not been done in the seven years since, and a number of them were actually more equivalent to my !vote here. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 23:22, 24 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't be averse to a histmerge or a merge of the new article onto the old one, speedy deletion of the new one, and a move of the old one to the new title, just to preserve the page history. Either way the majority of the content of the old article has to go, and the list should not be more than, say, half the length of the "final" article. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:22, 25 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep and clarify inclusion criteria. This gathers together a lot of useful and interesting information, including multiple blue-linked swords. A deletion or a redirect without merge would remove a lot of valuable content, especially given the current state of Swords in fiction, which was started yesterday, by the nominator, and covers very little of this so far. In any case, Swords in fiction, which is a valuable page to write, is better reserved for broad tropes and symbolism with illustrative examples. List of fictional swords should be kept more expansive. The "fancruft" can be dealt with by restricting to swords explicitly mentioned in secondary sources or some similar tightening of the inclusion criteria. Mortee (talk) 23:49, 25 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Said argument has been made before, specifically in the last AfD nomination back in 2011 and the page hasn't been improved since then despite plenty of people jumping on the bandwagon of "this can be maintained" and "this has potential". I don't think it holds much water after 7 years of people ignoring it. The page would also have to be completely rewritten regardless, as the sourcing is next to nil. Most of the so-called blue linked articles are just links to subsections, not actual independently notable pages._{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 00:27, 26 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Mortee: I'm curious what you mean by "blue-linked swords"; almost all of them are redirects, either to articles on the fictional works in which they appear or to other lists (in which the same names as in this list, and little else, appear) or to completely unrelated articles (the entries under Malazan Book of the Fallen are the worst offenders). Several of them link to articles on books that are named for the swords in question, which is not the same as having blue links to articles on the swords themselves. The vorpal sword article begins "Vorpal sword" and "vorpal blade" are phrases used by Lewis Carroll in his nonsense poem "Jabberwocky", which is telling. All of the Tolkien ones are linked, but of them all but one (Sting (Middle-earth)) redirect to another list, and two of them (Barrow-blade and Lhang) don't even link to entries in said list. "Shikomizue" is not the name of a fictional sword but rather a simple Japanese word that describes walking stick with a blade hidden inside.[1] Excalibur, which is linked either directly or through its several redirects (Caliburn, Caledfwlch, etc.) probably close to a dozen times throughout the list (making it alone account apparently for around 90% of the entries in the list that link to whole articles about swords), is not actually a "fictional" sword by conventional logic; it's a "legendary" or "mythical" sword, and its inclusion is apparently based on the idea that it "probably doesn't exist", which is not a useful definition and not one used by reliable sources; lots of Japanese fiction mentions the Kusanagi, which is just as "legendary" as Excalibur, with the one difference being that there is a sword (or, rather, have historically been several swords) "officially" considered to be the "real" Kusanagi, and so it doesn't fall into that murky category of "probably doesn't exist". Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:03, 26 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

In my view, the right eventual structure is 1) an article about discussing history, tropes, symbolism etc, i.e. Swords in fiction (I'd be delighted to help write that) plus 2) a more thorough overview of noteworthy cases than would likely fit there, i.e. List of fictional swords. Not every item in a list has to have a standalone article (e.g. WP:LISTCOMPANY); merging into a list is a recognised alternative to deletion. Enough of these are discussed in other articles, some with dedicated subsections, that gathering them together is useful, leaving aside the question of which others deserve mention, and would only serve to overbalance the new article, which at present is not a suitable target for redirection either way. I don't believe the current page is worse than no list at all and, per Andrew D., it's popular with readers. There's work to do and the inclusion criteria could be tightened to reduce bloat, but deleting would be detrimental. Re: "fictional" vs "mythical", see List of mythological objects § Swords, again rightly a mix of bluelinks and not, in an article tagged as needing to be split for length. Mortee (talk) 01:59, 26 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep But clarify, per Mortee's well-presented arguments above. Deletion is not cleanup, and there is lots of good information in the article. It does need some cleanup and tighter sourcing, but it's not beyond fixing. PohranicniStraze (talk) 03:13, 26 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per Andrew D. power~enwiki (π, ν) 19:28, 26 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Keeep - there's problems, but nothing so serious that could not be fixed by normal editing. These many nominations become tendatious. Bearian (talk) 23:22, 28 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Note Even before this AFD has been closed, a "keepist" editor has, apparently based on the emerging "keep [and don't you dare attempt to clean it up through conventional means]" consensus (sorry, but that's how these things are always read), decided to revert blanking of off-topic content that definitely needed to go regardless of whether the page is deleted. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 21:57, 31 July 2018 (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.