Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wapsi Square (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 keep. Jayjg ^(talk) 03:19, 4 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wapsi Square

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This page was previously deleted at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wapsi Square. As far as I can tell nothing has changed since that time, there still appears to be no substantive coverage of the comic from independent, reliable sources - as required by the general notability guideline. Sources identified include this article written by a high-school friend and this blog. As was also brought up in the previous AfD the comic did win a Web Cartoonists' Choice award in 2004 The awards themselves, are voted for by the web comic creators themselves and typically receive no independent, reliable coverage. Guest9999 (talk) 17:52, 28 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I'll deal with the issue of deletion later but for now I will comment that there does not seem to be an afd header on Wapsi Square. Someone should add it, and I have no idea how. --Elfwood (talk) 13:03, 29 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Added, sorry about that, first time that's happened to me in about 100 nominations. Guess I must have closed the tab rather than saving or some such thing. Thanks very much for pointing it out. Guest9999 (talk) 22:31, 29 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: This is a prominent webcomic, as prominent as the rest of the Blank Label Comics strips. As for the Web Cartoonist Choice Awards, well, Academy Awards are voted by movie people themselves, Hugos by SF fans and Nebulas by science fiction writers. That is no reason to disregards WCCA. And it's not the only award WS has received - Skysmith (talk) 22:15, 30 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: I'm very disappointed to see this focus on how slim the references in the article were when 2 minutes of googling pointed out another award nomination and other places where the comic has been given recognition (I don't have time to add them all right now - just look and you'll see them). The discrediting of the Web Cartoonists' choice awards is undeserved too. Publishers weekly [has covered them and so has the New York Times, which you should know if you've read the article about them you linked to. They aren't perfect, but they are an indication of notability. Editors who focus on nominating articles on worthy topics for deletion instead of on developing articles to their full potential are, in my mind, one of the major barriers to participation in editing, something we're currently considering in the strategic planning process. The editor who put content into this article should be appreciated for contributing and encouraged with guidance on how to make it better and collaboration on making it so, not have the article attacked. By instead nominating it for deletion, you are actively contributing to the attitudes and frustration displayed here, which discourages everyone from contributing. (I was referred to that discussion in a comment on my request for comments on reader conversion here. I am not a fan of the comic and have never read it.) There's a way to deal with articles that are on good topics but need better citations and that's citations needed, not deletion. Netmouse (talk) 23:50, 30 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The article was previously deleted - award and all - following Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wapsi Square, the recreated version featured no significant changes and after searching - for more than two minutes - I was unable to find any further reliable sourcing (could you please provide links). Under the circumstances I think it was perfectly reasonable to ask for a community opinion in order to establish whether or not there is a consensus to keep the article. If there is it will just prevent the article from being deleted under speedy delete criterion G4 in the future - something it was potentially vulnerable to before this discussion. Guest9999 (talk) 00:58, 31 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You "asked" for consensus but did not bother to put a notice on the talk page of the person who reinstated the article, nor on the talk page of another editor who had recently invested time into it. I suspect you didn't bother to do that the first time you nominated it for deletion in January either, but I don't think I have any way of checking that. I have added a couple more reliable sources into the article. I think wikipedia needs a less confrontational/dramatic process for highlighting articles that need references or other restructuring than proposing them for deletion. In fact we do have one, but you skipped it this time. If you thought notability was the issue, you should have used that tag instead of proposing it for deletion, or you could have tagged it as needing citation. Instead you jumped straight into the deletion process. Netmouse (talk) 16:48, 31 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The editor who most recently worked on the article (User:Elfwood) started after it was nominated for deletion - although admittedly before the article itself was tagged as having been nominated due to a mistake on my part - see [1]. You can see my entire undeleted contribution history arranged by date (and filter by namespace) at Special:Contributions/Guest9999, to save you time I am pretty sure I did not nominate the creator or any other editors of the discussion last time either. Informing editors who are involved with an article is not mandatory and in fact making it mandatory has been rejected several times by the community (See Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#All authors must be notified of deletion). As well as not informing the article's creator I did not inform the editors who were involved in the previous deletion discussion - the majority of whom thought the article should be deleted - or indeed the deleting administrator. I do not believe there is anything inherently confrontational or dramatic about a deletion discussion - it is a discussion the aim of which is to establish consensus. Whether a discussion descends into drama is entirely dependent on its participants and their behaviour. Tagging for notability concerns seemed like an unnecessary step since the topic had been previously deleted as not notable, I could find no new information that would indicate notability and Wikipedia has the facility - through the AfD process - to ask for a community opinion in order to establish - among other things - if a topic is notable. Guest9999 (talk) 18:01, 31 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Your reference to "the majority" of the participants of the earlier debate seems less impressive when I consider that the majority you are referring to was 2 commentators against one other participant. Hardly a sweeping majority. Notifying other major (not all) editors may not be policy, but it's certainly the polite thing to do. Netmouse (talk) 19:41, 31 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: I'm going to have to chime in as keep as well. It passes WP:WEB on point 2 (the 2004 Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards and the 2009 Lulu Award) and possibly point 1 (on the basis of the cited reviews and newspaper article) but I'll admit that this last point is tenuous. In fairness to Guest9999, I would point out that the article had no references when nominated, however that is not an excuse to jump straight to the deletion process. --Elfwood (talk) 00:04, 31 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: The article has been growing considerably from the contributions of multiple users, suggesting a reasonably large group of interested people. I wasn't around for the first deletion debate, but the editing history of the current incarnation shows it to be fairly busy for a stub article. Also, I've looked at an archival version of the previous version (URL lost, sadly) and what's there now is not a copy of the earlier page. It may be that Guest9999 has a deletion hobby, but this page seems to have more than sufficient reason to exist. Wyvern (talk) 14:36, 31 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Comics and animation-related deletion discussions. -- Hiding T 11:45, 30 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per Elfwood.—Chowbok ☠ 20:17, 31 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep but with an emphasis that I do not think Guest9999 was out of line in making the nomination. Given the result of the prior deletion debate, this nomination is justifiable. Powers ^T 14:35, 3 November 2009 (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.