Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/16 mm filmmaking

16_mm_filmmaking
This is just a badly written, jokey how-to on making no-budget films. It's not encyclopedic, either. There may indeed be merit for folding a tiny bit of this into a filmmaking article, but little of it applies specifically to 16mm per se. The style is all wrong, it's very overly specific to the UK only, and I think that in many respects it's nothing more than an overly clever cookbook recipe on how to put together some necessary resources for a film. There's plenty of merit to a general filmmaking article that goes through the typical steps of what happens to prepare and actually make a film, but a guide for tricks to pull this off seems like a project better suited for a volume in Wikibooks. Girolamo Savonarola 13:55, 2004 Sep 30 (UTC)
 * Delete. Maybe some parts are salvageable to 16 mm film, or it can be moved to wikibooks, but otherwise delete. -- Chris 73 Talk 14:02, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

Delete There could be an article written about 16mm film-making, which I assume varies from other types of film-making in significant ways. It could even have a significant how-to aspect. This is not that article. This is an article on how to get the requisite materials for a 16mm short cheaply in London. Dsmdgold 17:05, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * Delete. Not encyclopedic. Would be neat if we had a companion to Wikipedia for how-tos, but even then it'd need expansion and rewriting. --Improv 15:03, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * How-tos? We seem to have a page devoted to them. -- [[User:Bobdoe| Bob Doe ]] 15:23, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * Borderline Keep. Maybe send to cleanup. Don't like the breezy style but there is quite a lot of interesting, specific information in there. Despite frequent assertions, there is no policy or consensus against "how-tos" in Wikipedia. The great traditional encyclopedias (Diderot, Britannica, etc.) was included a good deal of practical "domain knowledge." Perhaps you couldn't actually build a lighthouse or a telegraph system just from the information contained in the 1911 Britannica, but you got a lot more than abstract principles and stylized schematic diagrams. The omission of this information is part of the "dumbing down" of modern encyclopedias. The article sounds like the author knows the topic he or she is writing about. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 16:20, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * Delete. Ambi 03:35, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Delete - I can't make much sense of this. Plus it's a how-to (I think). -- Cyrius|&#9998; 05:50, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Response from author Well, I'm gutted that you'd decided to delete my article. I do agree that it's not necessarily appropriate for Wikipedia.  I admit, I wrote it for a UK-based magazine on filmmaking but I thought it would be of interest to a wider audience so I put it into Wikipedia.  Yes, it's overly specific to the UK but my hope was that others could add details that were relevant to their country.  However, the deletion of my article flags up some serious concerns about WikiPedia:
 * 1) If I can't put this article in Wikipedia then where else can it go?  I've been involved in a London-based Film Wiki but I've been arguing the case that most of the knowledge should be on WikiPedia.  It's ridiculous to fractionate knowledge - it's far better to have knowledge in one place.
 * 2) Authors MUST be emailed when their articles are considered for deletion.  If I'd been given a chance then I would have modified the old article.
 * 3) What is wrong with writing in a jokey style?!?  I know it's against the Wikipedia style manual but - come on - style manuals are utterly arbitrary things written by people who don't understand linguistics.  The real issue here is information content.
 * 4) All knowledge tells us how to 'do' something.  The distinction between "encyclopeadic" and "how-to" is arbitrary at best and dangerous at worse. When I first heard of WikiPedia I imagined it to be a central repository for all information.  If I woke up one morning and decided "I want to be a formula one racing engineer" then I could, if I had the time, learn everything there was to know about F1 engineering from WikiPedia.  I'd start with the simple articles on mechanical construction, mathematics for engineers etc and slowly work my way up to the more advanced topics.  But it's now clear to me that many of those with loud voices in the WikiPedia community have less ambition.  They want WikiPedia to be like a regular encyclopedia.  This frustrates me hugely - it's blindingly obvious that WikiPedia can be so much more than just an encyclopaedia.  It can, literally, revolutionalise learning.
 * 5) What harm does it do to leave the article on Wikipedia?  Surely all decisions to delete should be based on one criterion and one criterion only: will deleting this article increase WikiPedia's signal to noise ratio?  And, given that there's very little filmmaking content on wikipedia, I think my article most certainly increased WikiPedia's SNR.  You've deleted it because it doesn't conform to some wholly arbitrary rules such as "articles must not have jokes" and "articles must not be how-tos".
 * 6) This 'voting' system is farcical.  The people who vote will be the ones who don't like the article... those who do like the article wont be motivated to find the "Votes for deletion" page.  This is basic statistics - you always have to be aware of slanted sample distributions.  Wouldn't it be more democratic to base these "votes for deletion" on page hits?  You're in serious danger of coming across like you're running some tedious school club rather than a revolution in knowledge management.
 * 7) My article was not badly written - it just didn't fit into Wikipedia's house style.  I received a lot of very positive feedback from the article when I published it in Shooting People (the UK filmmaking forum).  The information it delivers is accurate and informative - therefore it has a place in Wikipedia.  You've successfully decreased WikiPedia's breadth by deleting my article because you weren't interested in it.  Hurray for the democratisation of information. dan_aka_jack 18:21, 26th Oct 2004 (UTC)