Deletion
This is an unreleased project. It evidently has no publicly available demos. Therefore, it does not meet our WAD notability criteria.
- Delete. Ryan W 17:00, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
- Actually, it might not be a bad idea to allow articles for projects from known authors that have screen shots or other signs of progress. Don't the IMDb and the Wikipedia often include entries on notable entertainment that hasn't been released yet? Who is like God? 21:08, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
- I understand the principle behind that idea, but I think in practice it would attract far more bad edits than good ones. An unreleased project of such significance will already have a thread at the Doomworld projects forum. If it has an official site and posts an update with screen shots, we can put a link on the news board; that's why it's there. To go beyond that and create our own article would just be rewording other people's statements, without being able to add anything ourselves because we can't see the maps. It would also be in perpetual danger of misinterpretation as "The Doom Wiki is a community portal with free hosting and promotional space." (Which, to judge by the content of Special:Newpages, is a very common perception already.)
- My limited understanding of IMDb is that its notability criteria, and questions about whether a project meets them, are not open to the editorship at large but are discussed among a small committee whose decisions are final. I imagine that that greatly streamlines questions like "Who is considered a known author?" and "How many months of inactivity is acceptable before an article is deleted?", which would take us years to decide. The wikipedia policy, WP:CRYSTAL, may or may not have broad approval there — it's hard to tell nowadays because the "BLP fundamentalists" tend to remove anything that looks like speculation about a living person, even when it has citations, so the prediction has to be impeccably sourced to survive the carpet-bombing. Ryan W 19:53, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
- I wouldn't worry so much. I'm sure us editors can judge notability well enough, and promotional activity (which isn't exactly a sin) would be limited by this and by any NPOV-oriented editing on the contributions. If the Wikipedia has Doom 4 and Solomon Kane articles, it can't hurt us to have one for the megawad-in-progress by the two main authors of 2002: A Doom Odyssey. We could add a category for it, in fact (the Wikipedia has various "upcoming" categories). We can of course discuss notability in this respect a bit further, so we can make sure there are few, if any, misunderstandings in regard to more doubtful WADs-in-progress, although I brought this up in relation to this WAD because I felt it is clearly notable.
- My limited understanding of IMDb is that its notability criteria, and questions about whether a project meets them, are not open to the editorship at large but are discussed among a small committee whose decisions are final. I imagine that that greatly streamlines questions like "Who is considered a known author?" and "How many months of inactivity is acceptable before an article is deleted?", which would take us years to decide. The wikipedia policy, WP:CRYSTAL, may or may not have broad approval there — it's hard to tell nowadays because the "BLP fundamentalists" tend to remove anything that looks like speculation about a living person, even when it has citations, so the prediction has to be impeccably sourced to survive the carpet-bombing. Ryan W 19:53, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
- In accordance to what I've said, I think we should keep this article. I think it should go through some editing, ideally; its contents should match external sources, and any statements about specifics should be contextualized (links to where stuff is said should be provided, that is, as inline citations if necessary). I know it may add work to editors, and not all entries might end up being perfect, but hacking out potentially reasonable articles out of fear that they may "go out of hand" doesn't seem sensible to me. Who is like God? 22:56, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
- This may be getting too abstract for an individual VfD thread. (Big shock!)
- I'm learning here that you and I see very different things when a new stub appears. You say, "This stub could be extended and improved by doing X, Y, and Z." I say, "This stub could be extended and improved... but before someone finds the time for that, it will almost certainly attract 10 to 20 similar stubs in the same topic area. How does that relate to the 'big picture' on our site?" Deleting one new article at a time can be explained by saying that, well, we did try to warn them after all. Deleting 10 articles simultaneously is more likely to be interpreted as newbie-slapping. (Or even not-so-newbie-slapping, if our notability criteria for people ever stabilize.) In our long conversation on the policy talk page, you said that the 'big picture' is much more flexible and dynamic than I think it is. Maybe you're right in the sense that the site has a low overall edit rate and turnover is high. I still postulate that all those discussion threads which produced the notability section really happened, and weren't just in my head.
- I realize what an asshole I must sound like when I talk about inclusion criteria that appear stricter than Wikipedia's. I think your analogy breaks down because Wikipedia asks for a different *type* of bibliography, quite apart from the scope of the media: a newbie there can at least say, "This unreleased movie was discussed in the New York Times, or the Daily Variety, and those people are darn well supposed to double-check the production status before describing it!" For a noncommercial mod of a 15-year-old game, such double-checked citations do not exist, and AFAICT the potential players simply take the designer at his word that progress is being made. Fair enough. But mapping is hard, and finding time to push a project through alpha testing is even harder, and many people don't realize both of those things when they start. In a community that has somewhat aged with its software, mods can be interrupted by real life, too. In the end, most never materialize.
- I'm trying to imagine the consequences of allowing articles about unreleased WADs. The original idea of writing about all released WADs and no unreleased WADs has the operational virtue of simplicity. Now the criteria become far less boolean, as you imply above — we agree that every mapper will not suddenly warrant five articles. At first, each of our regulars has a different interpretation of the criteria and of what constitutes a borderline case, including but not limited to each administrator closing deletion discussions somewhat differently. (In all honesty, a few of our founding editors have very strong opinions on notability and every once in a while an article vanishes with precious little chance for discussion, no matter how much I yell afterward.) Ever so gradually, fingers crossed, the smoke clears and the criteria settle down. There will be quite a backlog by that time, though, because most mappers probably do want five articles and hey, it's much easier than getting hosting space on Doomworld, right? Just click the link and start typing! (As you've perhaps noticed, this happens even when the policy rules out any coverage of unreleased projects.)
- You might tell me that this is nothing but the bold wiki process of building consensus, and ordinarily I agree. Certain topics have however turned out unusually volatile: many contributors take things much to heart when writing about their own maps, or homebrew games, or clans, and I believe we have cause to proceed more carefully. I do not look forward to a lot of people sinking a lot of hours into the kind of research you describe, copyediting articles and digging up sources for them, then devoting yet more time to acrimonious VfDs when the policy becomes more concrete (maybe anyone reading this talk page is tired of the two of us already, but you at least use deduction and punctuation), only to have 90 percent of them get deleted anyway leaving their originators howling 'admin cabal'. In hopes of calming all that down, *if* the consensus is in fact to make a change, I would suggest that we all collaborate on some tentative guidelines before accepting test cases, not the other way around.
- With great respect to all that you and the other Doomworld people have achieved together over the years, yes, promotional activity is sometimes bad. In particular, it undermines the sole claim to distinction of this site, which is that we write about what is collectively agreed to be important, not about what individual fans feel like hyping during a given week. This site exists for the readers, not for the contributors (both as a reference document and in terms of its financial backing), and the historical and literary significance of the games and related activities should speak for itself. Ryan W 16:18, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
- If you feel the task of managing notability and fairness in regard to what can be said about WIPs is problematic, just leave it to others. It's best for each editor to concentrate on what comes naturally to them, and not hinder other things. I'm very confident I can manage and that I'm not the only one. I only breezed through what you've said lastly (which was enough to get the idea); hopefully it will be of more use to others and not just wasted time for you or largely text spam... perhaps for people with more time to spend on talk pages? I'll wait for other people to comment; as it stands there is evidently no consensus for deletion. I do not edit by blind policy, but case by case (which is why I refuse the generic "no unreleased" policy in the fist place, and how I reached the opinion that this can be a valid article).
- By the way, the way you are associating me with Doomworld and assuming stances or things about me (basically flagging me as POV) in the process is rather insulting and dumb. I'm just a moderator there (I move forum threads around and ban trolls, basically) and my editing opinion on this article really has NOTHING to do with it. Who is like God? 17:38, 1 September 2008 (UTC)