Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth

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. Master of Puppets _{Call me MoP!☺} 21:56, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth

Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) (delete) – (View log)

This article has been tagged with the notability tag since November 2007. Since then, no attempt has been made to establish notability. Rockfang (talk) 00:54, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

• Delete. Tons and tons and tons of plot summary, but very little about the comic's notability. Even if notability is established, the plot summary needs to be trimmed a lot. Zetawoof_(ζ) 01:28, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete Article doesn't establish real-world notability. (It also looks like a link-farm, with over 90 links to this one website).--brewcrewer (yada, yada) 03:33, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
  • I wouldn't assume malice in the overlinking. As far as I can tell, they were mainly trying to cite all the plot points to specific comics. I can't fault article authors too heavily for adding references, even if they're a little excessive here. Zetawoof_(ζ) 04:37, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
• Keep Editors did "attempt to establish notability" in Talk. I found 825 ghits for ("Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth" -wikipedia). This is about a webcomic and most sources I could find are blogs, wikis, forums, etc., with lots of expression of regret that it had been cancelled, but I did find [1], a newspaper source. There have been about 360 edits to the article since it was created as a stub two years ago, with many different editors. On creation as a very brief stub, it was immediately proposed for deletion. Since then, massively expanded. A lot of work on the line. As to links, this is a webcomic maintained on a single web site and, naturally, when something from the comic is described, there is a note linking to the episode involved. It's all verifiable in that sense. I'm disturbed by the loss of good-faith efforts by so many editors if this is deleted.--Abd (talk) 04:40, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
  • "I do believe this comic meets the notability guidelines, especially for a webcomic. However, I can't produce any specific proof..." (User:Dreadknot69, on Talk:Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth) Google hits are not notability. Even if they were, 825 is not very many. Can you point to any reliable sources which discuss the comic which are independent from the comic itself? Zetawoof_(ζ) 07:42, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
    • Well, there was one source which rated this webcomic compared to others, it was in the middle of the pack. How reliable was it? Should we require that sources be peer-reviewed academic journals? This is a genre where there is a lot of activity. On the internet. Mostly informally organized, it seems. I didn't look further into that rating site, but it's possible it could be considered relatively reliable. It was pretty clearly independent.--Abd (talk) 06:48, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. As much as it contains a lot of information, there's only a single notable reference. This would be a great article for a fansite or repository for Warcraft related information, but I don't think it's suitable here.Gazimoff (talk) 12:12, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
• Keep per Gazimoff who demonstrates that this article meets the requirements set out in Wikipedia:Verifiability, a policy which Wikipedia:Notability purportedly supports but apparently in this instance contradicts. Where policy and guidance conflict, I believe it is the case that policy is preferred. Hiding T 18:43, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
  • My only point was that while the content is indeed verifiable (by linking to the webcominc episodes in question repeatedly), is it notable? I could only find one external secondary reference on this as others have mentioned above, although it has recieved extensive coverage in World of Warcraft fansites and Warcraft-related websites in general. I'm happy to defer to the guidance of others though, as I'm most definately a newbie in this areaGazimoff (talk) 19:44, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
    • WP:V only requires the one. Hiding T 23:39, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
      • You do raise a good point there. WP:V is a policy (which means it does have to be followed), and it does say that information does require a reliable source to be included, but one thing it does NOT say is how many sources are required for an article to be kept. Reliable sources serve to make information verifiable, according to Wikipedia policy. Note also that the WP:RS page also states that it serves the verifiability policy, which as you point out, does not have a specific requirement on number of sources (beyond a minimum of one). Note that I've seen a number of editors in deletion debates stating that reliable sources are linked to notability. Note that nowhere on the WP:RS page do the words "notability" or "notable" appear, and "notability" only appears once on the WP:V page, and only then in reference to self-published and questionable sources. The WP:N page, which is a policy and not a guideline, does seem to differ a bit, but as you say Policies do take preference over Guidelines. BOZ (talk) 03:25, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. Within the WoW fanbase this comic certainly has notability, enough that Blizzard gave a nod to it by naming a game item after the comic. That's irrelevant though as the dozens of WoW-related article deletions attest to. Abd did a great job digging up that reference. But I still think it isn't enough. While WP:N is a guideline, it's a very important one and it does state "The number and nature of reliable sources needed varies depending on the depth of coverage and quality of the sources". I don't know if the OC Register is a "quality" source or not, but it merely mentions the comic so the "depth of coverage" is certainly lacking. It's not like it's an article about the Flintlocke comic. If other such sources were found or at least one that gives more than a passing mention to the comic I'd change my mind and give this a "keep" vote. By the way, I'm also a fan of Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth, and I've read every comic (I love Lowping) but as an objective editor I can't justify keeping this article. -- Atama^chat 02:33, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. Seeing as this is my article, I suppose I better comment. I'm not purposing a Keep simply because it is my article. That'd be contradictory to Wikipedia's NPOV policies. Instead, look at it like this. There are countless things on Wikipedia that likely just barely meet notability guidelines. The mere fact that a company referenced the webcomic in a major game played by millions is notability enough for me. Prior to that I'd have hesitated even making the article. Stormscape 23:15, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
• Keep Meets minimum criteria...I mean minimum. It could really use a cleanup though. — BQZip01 — ^talk 06:37, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. Wikipedia is not an internet guide. We have no verifiable information on historical significance or impact, and with only a paragraph in a newspaper as a source, we really don't have the sources to meet our neutrality policy, or to meet our notability guideline, or to create an encyclopedia article. --Dragonfiend (talk) 07:17, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. There are not enough sources to verify the notability of this comic. I agree with Dragonfiend. I am sympathetic to Stormscape's position that mention in the game adds notability, but I don't feel it offers enough notability to establish an article. It may be worth a mention (but not a merge) in the game article. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 21:19, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

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.