Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cytherean

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 merge‎ to Kythira#Mythology (selectively). (non-admin closure) Dclemens1971 (talk) 14:31, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Cytherean

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Per WP:NOTDICT, likely fails WP:GNG as well. A significant portion of the article's content is unsourced and likely WP:OR and is of minimal encyclopedic value; the remaining content could easily be merged into the primary Venus article as a brief section about nomenclature. Ark Hyena (they/any) 06:06, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

delete, it's quite a pretty article, but ArkHyena is right; all but one of the sources is a dictionary (not a great sign). The bits that are less dictionary-like are, unfortunately, written in the tone of a lecturer giving a light afternoon public talk, and unsourced (e.g. "...was felt to be unfortunately similar to "aphrodisiac", again evoking sex rather than astronomy"... was felt by whom? where did this come from?). Elemimele (talk) 08:47, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Astronomy-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 11:04, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: perhaps a redirect/partial merge to Kythira#Mythology would serve? Praemonitus (talk) 20:04, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Mythology and Greece. –LaundryPizza03 (d c̄) 04:08, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Merge to Kythira#Mythology Agree with application of WP:NOTDICT. As for whether to redirect to Kythira#Mythology, we lack a high-quality reliable source to supplement that section with discussion of the adjectival shift among astronomers. We could instead have the wikilinks to this article on Venus and List of adjectivals and demonyms of astronomical bodies go the wikitionary entry for "Cytherean" for the reader curious about the relation but lacking an OED subscription. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 14:27, 29 April 2025 (UTC) Andrew's reference to pages 316-317 of Sagan and Shklovsky's 1966 book are enough to include it in that mythology section, which I'll do now. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 13:51, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Merge the verifiable parts; anything that can be verified and seems germane to the use of the term relative to Venus (the planet or the goddess) should be kept, unless it duplicates something already there. I expect that some reliable source will at least have mentioned why some people prefer or once preferred this to Venerean, even if it's not encyclopedically explained here. P Aculeius (talk) 15:14, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This article dates from almost twenty years back and our norms on citing (or on tone...) weren't quite as they are now, unfortunately! Interesting trip down memory lane to salvage this one.

I think it originally came from Sagan & Shklovsky's "Intelligent Life in the Universe" (1966) - I dug that out tonight and confirmed it has a section by Sagan discussing this. He seems to have had fun, describing 'venerean' as "preempted by other areas of human activity", 'venusian' as "a barbarism", 'aphrodisian or aphrodisial' as having "other connotations, which some astronomers, in the interests of clarity and decorousness, prefer to avoid". So "people didn't want to use the terms that were associated with sex" comes straight from Sagan, who I think we can take as a fairly solid source, rather than being original research.

I'm happy for it to be merged elsewhere - no strong preferences on where that might be - but I've given it a going over tonight to remove some of the cruft and cite it a bit more clearly by modern standards, and hopefully that will be useful wherever it ends up. The dictionary refs were added at a later date I think just to source the pronunciations; not sure they're needed but have left them in. Andrew Gray (talk) 20:53, 29 April 2025 (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.