Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Los Angeles in popular culture (2nd 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 delete. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:35, 27 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Los Angeles in popular culture[edit]

[Hide this box] New to Articles for deletion (AfD)? Read these primers!

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

How times change. The last AfD from 4 years ago was a strong keep, with nobody but the nominator (User:TenPoundHammer) supporting deletion. Yet the keep votes were not policy based - they simply repeated WP:ITSNOTABLE, WP:THEREMUSTBESOURCES and like. IMHO the policy falls squarely on the delete side of this debate. The list has almost no references (fails WP:V), if gutted to meet WP:V the article would cease to exist. As a list, it fails WP:LISTN (" One accepted reason why a list topic is considered notable is if it has been discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources" - such sources have not been found; if they were, we still have a WP:V issue). As a potential article, it fails WP:IPC, WP:OR. In fact, the topic might be notable (my BEFORE suggests that indeed there may be some sources), not that anything in the article supports this, but nothing here seems salvageable - a proper analytical piece would have to be written from scratch. WP:TNT applies to this TVTropic list, unless someone rewrites this during the ongoing discussion (then we can preserve the old content in the article's history). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 12:10, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Fictional elements, Popular culture, Lists, and United States of America. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 12:10, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per the precedent established at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Far future in fiction to make way for a proper article. The list has only a smattering of sources regarding specific entries and makes no credible claim of significance for its topic. –LaundryPizza03 (d c̄) 12:30, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of California-related deletion discussions. –LaundryPizza03 (d c̄) 12:32, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete There's List of television shows set in Los Angeles and List of films set in Los Angeles so I'm not sure what the point of this (wildly incomplete) duplication is. Reywas92^Talk 13:56, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Reywas92 And do those lists eve neet WP:NLIST? Something to consider in the future... _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:32, 21 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Disambiguate: Pointing to WP:ITSNOTABLE, WP:THEREMUSTBESOURCES does not seem fitting, because there are secondary sources! Well, at least if one uses "Los Angeles in fiction" as search words. Like this whole book, or the whole book that is reviewed here; or this whole PhD thesis. (Yeah, yeah, I know, the sources were not specifically noted down in the previous discussion...) Which also means that the topic does not fail WP:LISTN. I also don't see any problem whatsoever with WP:V, as the primary sources are self-evident. And primary sources are fine to use, they just don't establish notability... which is not our problem here. For the same reason I don't see WP:OR here. Allright, as there are currently hardly any sources present, I do see the problem with what to include as notable with regard to the topic. So I suggest to, for the time being, change this to a disambiguation page, basically keeping and expanding the See also section, until someone expands it to a proper prose article or a list with more clearly defined inclusion criterea. This would also preserve what we currently have in the history, which I see as a benefit as experience has shown that some entries will be significant and will appear in secondary sources. Daranios (talk) 14:10, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Daranios The sources you found seem to be about Los Angeles in fiction, not Los Angeles in popular culture. Recently I've been thinking about the distinction between such topics, which is a bit hard to pin down. Related to this is the issue whether we need to standardize some article's names. Might be worth discussing at Wikipedia:WikiProject Popular Culture, which is sadly inactive. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:36, 21 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Piotrus: In my experience the two designations are used more or less interchangeably on Wikipedia. The essay you referred to, WP:IPC, does that! Looking at the content of our article, the only section one could argue about is In music. And even that can be fiction, if a songtext or video tells a non-factual story. And if it really would hinge on the distinction, and a simple name change to Los Angeles in fiction would clearly solve any supposed notability issues, than that's surely an alternative to deletion that should be taken in the spirit of WP:AtD. Daranios (talk) 19:25, 21 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Daranios I think the name cultural depictions of Los Angeles would be even better (broadest). Pop culture doesn't cover 'classics', and 'in fiction' does seem limiting when it comes to weird stuff like music, culinary applications, LEGO models, historical reenactment, whatever. I'll probably start an RfC somewhere, and ping many folks active here (regarding mass renaming of all 'in fiction'/'in popular culture' articles to 'cultural depictions of'. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:31, 22 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Piotrus: The question is what the goal is. The current name fits what we currently have. If there are concerns, oh no, that isn't notable, because we only have encompassing sources talking about "in fiction", and not using the term "in popular culture", than the narrower title would solve that. It's not a concern I have, I and I think it would mean playing WP:LISTN against WP:AtD-M for not good reason, but there it is. Changing to "in culture" would open the article to more input, which might solve notability concerns (again, which I don't share) by another route. It does, however, beg the question what to include. Are there some new corners of Category:Culture of Los Angeles that we then would need to think about? So that might be better suited to solve at the more general discussion you have started. Daranios (talk) 10:13, 23 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete I stand by what I said in the last AFD. This is just an unverifiable mess, and no one arguing to "keep" in the last AFD gave a concrete reason. The concept is just a random WP:NOTTVTROPES violation that by design calls for a garden variety of unsourced trivia. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 14:19, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - An actual article on the topic would very likely be notable. This list is not, being a ridiculously broad attempt to seemingly list every time that Los Angeles has appeared in fiction, no matter how brief or unimportant that appearance was. There is zero prose text discussing the concept here, and zero reliable sources that would be usable anywhere else, just a list of mostly terrible trivia. Any potential article or section on the actual topic would not benefit at all from the preservation of this list. Additionally, as Reywas92 pointed out, we already have lists serving a navigational purpose for the notable works set in LA, making this list redundant on top of everything else. Rorshacma (talk) 15:28, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete If no reliable independent sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article about it, according to WP:OR. This article is entirely WP:OR based on the observations of editors, with no reliable sources on the topic of how Los Angeles is portrayed in popular culture. I wouldn't rule out someone could write an article about how Los Angeles is imagined, separate from how Los Angeles is. But there would be nothing to WP:PRESERVE from this article, which is entirely constructed in a way that is WP:NOT compatible with Wikipedia policies. Shooterwalker (talk) 18:20, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Delete don't think we should entertain a disambig. AnM2002 (talk) 10:08, 21 May 2022 (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.