Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ash (Alien)


 * 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 Ash (Alien), redirect others to List of Alien characters. Black Kite (t) (c) 22:16, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Ash (Alien)

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Declined PROD. Reason for PROD was "Non-notable character from a single film, completely covered in film article. No indication of significance." Reason for decline was "consider redirect or merge". This is unacceptable because (A) there would be no point to a redirect, partly due to the ridiculous dab in the title, and (B) there is nothing to merge and nowhere to merge it; all of the pertinent info on the characters and their roles is already contained in Alien (film)...there is nothing new or useful in this article, which consists of 100% plot regurgitation. This article and those below were created by cutting-and-pasting from List of Alien characters. Nothing new was added except for infoboxes. Content should not be moved in this way, and these characters do not warrant separate articles...that was the impetus behind creating a character list article in the first place. None of these characters have had any appearances outside of the film Alien, nor are they given significant coverage in reliable secondary sources outside the context of that single film to warrant independent articles.

I am also nominating the following related pages for identical reasons. All were created by the same editor in the same manner, none merit independent articles:

--IllaZilla (talk) 02:19, 29 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Redirect all to the character list. 76.66.195.196 (talk) 06:12, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * You're missing the point. Redirecting is pointless, as these are copied directly from the character list. Also they are highly unlikely search terms due to the ridiculous disambiguation in the title, and absolutely nothing in article space links to them. No one is going to type "Lambert (Alien)" into a search. They're likely to just type "Lambert", or at best "Lambert (character)" if they understand WP's dab'ing system, which the majority of non-editing readers don't. --IllaZilla (talk) 06:17, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * If you point to a hypertext anchor at each character's entry in the list, the redirects can be used in piped links, wherever people might drop a link. 76.66.195.196 (talk) 12:58, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete all per nom. If someone writes a major book analysing one of the characters we can create a real-world-focus article about it then. dramatic (talk) 09:12, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * That does seem like a good candidate for the most poorly researched rationale today. A major book that will be written at some indefinite point in the future?  There are quite a number of books covering this film in extensive detail that already exist, having been published long since during the past 30 years, as a mere 30 seconds' effort expended with Google Books would have revealed.  I know because I expended the 30 seconds of effort &mdash; and then regretted it for the next few hours.  &#9786;  I recommend always expending that 30 seconds of effort before writing an AFD rationale. Uncle G (talk) 21:07, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete all for the reasons given above, and also because this copy-paste editing is a copyright infringement: see Copying within Wikipedia. JamesBWatson (talk) 10:28, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep Ash per recent expansion, delete rest unless similarly expanded. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 18:50, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep for sure. Then do whatever Uncle G recommends with the rest.  He seems to know the subject best. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 20:46, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Erk! I make no such claim to authority.  I just happen to have helped work on related articles such as  in the past, and have encountered some of the source material before.  I also note, as above, that after the simplest of Google Books searches Ash (Alien) is a no-brainer.  I have no comment, as yet, on the rest, simply because one's enough for today.  Uncle G (talk) 21:07, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Film-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 18:42, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Fictional elements-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 18:42, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science fiction-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 18:42, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Redirect all as PROD decliner. Nom makes an overwhelming argument against a merge that was not obvious at the time, but the fact remains that these can be valid/useful search terms.  If they were indeed cut/pasted from the list, then they should be deleted as GFDL violations.  Still, a redirect is perfectly acceptable, and in my opinion preferable, to leaving nothing behind at all. Jclemens (talk) 21:01, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep the lot, per the improvements made and the documented probabilities for more. The ones that aren't up to snuff can be redirected without prejudice until properly expanded. Jclemens (talk) 06:44, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete Delete all except, Ash (Alien), as completely unnotable, useless redirects and inappropriate copy/pasting from main list. Fix name of Ash (Alien), and do appropriate clean up. --  AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 18:31, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete all, none of these characters have proven real notability, with deep coverage by reliable secondary sources discussing the characters independently from the film. Also, neither of them has impact in popular culture or become a cultural icon, like Jabba the Hutt, Mickey Mouse, Homer Simpson, etc. -- LoЯd  ۞pεth  18:49, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep all per User:Uncle G who, as usual, has taken the trouble to inform himself. It is remarkable that other editors have difficulty finding sources when, as Uncle G observes, they are so abundant.  See for example, Synthetics, Humanity and the Life Force in the Alien Quartet, The Fractures of Desire: Psychoanalytic Notes on ALIEN and the Contemporary “Cruel” Horror Film or Alien: Can an android reason, problem solve and be conscious?. Colonel Warden (talk) 21:40, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep all Ash and any others that are so improved As recent suberb improvement and sourcing of Ash (Alien) indicates that improvement is indeed possible... and kudus to User:Uncle G for turning on the light and illuminating the darkness. If the others are not improved, they can be relisted.  Time to fix, not delete.  Schmidt,  MICHAEL Q. 00:01, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment: I strongly applaud UngleG's improvements to the Ash article, however I also strongly feel that the critical analysis being added would be better suited to the Alien (film) article itself, as its FA review specifically called for more content of exactly this type. Building a separate character article first for a character that only appears in 1 work is putting the cart before the horse. I therefore now favor mergeing the (now much improved) Ash (Alien) into Alien (film). As for the other articles, however, I still strongly endorse deletion as I do not see evidence that they could be similarly expanded. The sources that have been added, while excellent, cover the entire film, and therefore would be better applied to the article about the film as a whole. Precedent, if I'm not mistaken, has shown that fictional characters that only appear in a single work should be covered in the article about the work, unless/until the coverage becomes extensive enough that a summary style split seems like a good idea. Like I said, cart before the horse. The sources added would be a huge improvement to Alien (film), and would contribute to better coverage of the topic as a whole. --IllaZilla (talk) 01:01, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I should also note that "keep all" !votes ignore the fact that 5 of the 6 nominated articles are still directly copy/pasted from List of Alien characters, and the content is thus misattributed. See Copying within Wikipedia. --IllaZilla (talk) 05:51, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Uncle G has shown by his excellent example that this may be addressed by ordinary editing. I have made a start on the other characters by editing Dallas to a sourced stub and will attend to the others as time permits.  The list article is irrelevant to this process as it contains no sourced content and so it might as well be knocked down to a navigational list of articles because an unsourced compendium of character articles is inferior to the same material broken out in the manner of the Ash article.  By taking each character separately, we are encouraged to do a proper job while the character's names are superior as article titles, being better for navigation, search and cross-linking. Colonel Warden (talk) 13:04, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Uncle G has only shown that 1 of the 6 characters have received significant secondary source coverage. While I certainly applaud him for it, the other 5 characters remain question marks. Your edits to Dallas reduced it down to a 2-sentence stub that merely repeats his role in the plot (which now makes 3 places on WP that this character's plot summary is covered: the film article, the character list article, now a separate article). This certaily doesn't demonstrate that the article could be expanded in the same way as the Ash article. As for editing, no amount of editing can fix the fact that the initial versions of these articles are misattributed to due to his copy/pasting. You can't fix misattribution through regular editing. --IllaZilla (talk) 23:22, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * No, WP:CWW explains that "pages that contain unattributed text do not normally need to be deleted". Also, I have continued to expand the article about Dallas and experienced no special difficulty in doing so.  This certainly demonstrates that further improvement may be made in accordance with our editing policy which also requires that we keep such additions. Colonel Warden (talk) 10:31, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I repeat my earlier point that you are not fully appreciating the extent that Kaldari's "a lot" denotes. As I said, there appears to me to be enough to almost certainly support articles of this length for Ash, Ellen Ripley, and Bishop.  From the additional material that I read in order to write about Ash, I suspect that there might be enough to write about Lambert standalone, too.  Although that one I would start off as a section expansion at List of Alien characters, because it is less certain than the others.  However, there is material in sources that exceeds our current treatment of that character by a fair margin, not least noting the difference between the stereotypical empathic passive female of Lambert and the hard-edged, logical, and ruthless Ripley.  Similarly, sources discuss more about Parker than we do, the stuff that I encountered (but wasn't primarily looking for) mainly dealing with the racial connotations of a black male versus a white female.  That, again, I'd start as a section expansion. Again, what's in Ash (Alien) is the character-specific stuff.  When it comes to the film as a whole, there's a lot of further material that isn't so character-specific (such as the aforemented Ash&rarr;Bishop&rarr;Call progression analysis) that isn't in Ash (Alien) and that in fact isn't yet anywhere in Wikipedia at all, that will fill up the overall film article(s) without need for merging in the Ash, Ripley, and Bishop character articles, all (especially the latter two) of which should definitely be viewed with a mindset of expansion, not one of contraction and merger. Uncle G (talk) 04:13, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I note, for clarity, that I have no disagreement with junking the bogus unattributed copies and pastes, that haven't been touched at all, subject to the proviso that it is without prejudice to future articles that are done properly. After all, I did junk all of the prior content at Ash (Alien). Uncle G (talk) 04:28, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I should note, too, for clarity, that I have no prejudice against future articles that are done properly (ie. that make some claim to notability of the character, that have some manner of sources to back up that claim, that aren't just repetition of plot, and that aren't just copy/pasted content from another article). However, given that both an article on the film and a character list article both already exist, launching separate articles for each individual character (as Jake Picasso did) without adding any additional content or sources is entirely the wrong way to go about this. There is a natural way that topics of this type grow and expand: We start with the article Alien (film), covering in it all of the significant detail about the characters. If the information about the characters grows to the point where it seems to warrant splitting, we have List of Alien characters, an article devoted specifically to characters from the films, where that information can move to and continue to expand. Then if there are individual characters about whom so much source material exists that they seem to merit stand-alone articles, those can be spun out too (Ellen Ripley being the most obviouse example, as the central character of the entire franchise). The natural progression of article growth and creation is Film article → character list → stand-alone articles (see WP:SS, in particular WP:AVOIDSPLIT); this is the best process for developing well-written and comprehensive articles. When misguided editors skip straight to creating a bunch of stand-alone spinout articles, as Jake Picasso has done, we are inevitably left with a bunch of plot-repeating unreferenced stubs that are likely to remain that way for years, if not forever. Inevitably, through merging and redirecting, we wind up going through the whole process in reverse: merging the character articles into a list and, when that article is never improved and remains just another plot repository for years, merging it back into the film articles.
 * I should note that at one point we had unreferenced stubs of exactly these types for every marine and every weapon from Aliens; all were inevitably merged into the character list or redirected to the film article. That's why I nominated these articles for deletion: they were merely plagiarized from another WP article and gave no indication of a potential for improvement. Uncle G has demonstrated that some of these characters have received broader coverage in secondary sources, and I certainly have no objection to information on these characters being expanded from such sources. But it would be greatly preferrable if the information were expanded in the manner described above (content added to the film article first, then out to the character list if it seems to warrant more space, and finally consideration of stand-alone articles for the most notable characters). At this point the Ash article has been improved to a point where the content indeed shouldn't be deleted, though whether it remains a separate article entirely may change through future editing (and in any case it certainly ought to be moved to a different dab). A couple of referenced sentences have been added to the Dallas article, and IMO that content ought to move over to the film article. The remaining 4 can (and IMO should) still be deleted outright. Nothing would be lost, as it is merely copy/pasted content from another existing article, and again it does not demonstrate any prejudice against coverage of these character on Wikipedia, as there are already 2 other articles (the film article and character list) which devote coverage to these characters. If editors wish to expand on these characters, they are certainly welcome to do so in both the film article and character list, and there will be no prejudice against future splits if the depth of coverage and sources seem to warrant it. --IllaZilla (talk) 15:35, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep Ash, redirect the rest Of all the characters Ash was always going to be the most notable (in terms of attention from the stroky-beard types, not WP's guideline), and we now have an interesting article thanks to Uncle G's efforts. They should remain contained in that character list until someone chooses to put the legwork in and expand them beyond that, assuming that each of them are genuinely notable and have received enough coverage. Someoneanother 22:59, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep ash, redirect the rest aka Redirect all but ash which appears to be the emerging consensus. Can't WP:verifynotability for any except for ash. Shooterwalker (talk) 05:02, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep Ash, redirect all others - Ash seems to have received significant coverage in reliable sources, passing WP:GNG, but there's no indication of that for any of the others. Claritas § 10:59, 7 July 2010 (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.