Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Boone, Bogdanov, Russell, Ai

These are stub-pages for characters who feature in the novel Red Mars. The content of the stubs has been merged into the main Red Mars page, thus the stub pages are redundant and can be deleted without a loss of content. See the discussion page for Red Mars for details. Mercurius 06:49, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Why not just make the 4 pages into redirects to Red Mars, and avoid the need for any voting? (and avoid the chance of someone creating sub-stubs for them in the future) &mdash;Stormie 06:58, Jul 1, 2004 (UTC)
 * I agree. Change to redirects. Average Earthman 11:37, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Never delete when a redirect makes any sense. jallan 19:28, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * If we have Gimli, we ought to have these as well. Someone will fill them eventually if I don't get to it. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 19:29, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC) I've rewritten John Boone--that will give an example of what the rest of those could be.  Obviously, my writing needs looking over (I'm a fan of the series), but again, if we have Gimli, there's no reason not to have these.  Keep. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 20:07, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Redirect. Red Mars (and the whole trilogy + short stories) is excellent; I've read the whole trilogy twice and will no doubt read it again. And I learned to read by reading The Hobbit: great fun, and Gimli's a lovely Dwarf. That said, we have too damned many pages for favorite characters in favorite books/TV shows/Pokemon games. A page per book? Good idea. A page per character? Unless the character somehow transcends the book or series (Paul Bunyan, George Babbitt, Don Quixote) to become a cultural icon independent of the original work it appeared in, this is nothing more than Wiki contributors indulging and memorializing their personal tastes with an article -- in other words, another sort of vanity page. Redirects are fine for this; separate pages are pollution. -- orthogonal 00:37, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * I must say that I disagree. There's really no room for this information in Red Mars, yet I believe it belongs in any proper encyclopedia entry on the topic.  It's just content that's too much for the main entry, and so needs to be split off. Nevertheless, I'll hold off on rewriting the rest until the debate period is finished. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 01:21, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Just to clarify and expand my above comment: I don't think we should have "one liner" articles on characters, far better to gather all the one-liners together into a "Characters" section in the main article for the book/movie/play/whatever. But when character descriptions get up to the several-paragraph point (as John Boone is currently, after Meelar's fine work), I think is is unwieldy to bundle them up and they should get their own article. But either way, there's nothing here which should be deleted, it's just a matter of article editing. &mdash;Stormie 02:54, Jul 2, 2004 (UTC)
 * From the perspective of a reference librarian, I would much prefer a "character section" on the page for a book -- not only because a separate page for each character seems wasteful, but because that makes things more difficult for the reader. (As someone up the page said, I would make exceptions for obvious iconic characters. Lazarus Long comes to mind.) Maybe wikiisnotpaper, but hyperlinking back and forth is still a slow process for many of us. I recently did a page for Cecelia Holland that includes only a few lines for each of her books, much less the characters in them, and I think it works very well. ---Michael K. Smith 22:56, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)