Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ernie Prang

 This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record. The result of the debate was MERGE and REDIRECT to Knight Bus. (This had already been done.) &mdash;Korath (Talk) 00:20, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)

Ernie Prang
Non-"notable" bus driver. The fact that it is a Harry Potter bus driver does not make it notable. It is fancruft, pure and simple. I expect this to get a load of keep votes but this will just prove that votes for deletion is a biased system and truly notable articles get deleted (Such as schools affecting the communities of tens of thousands people yet get deleted in favour of fancruft like this). Norman Rogers\talk 09:40, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * He's "important". Merge somewhere or failing that, keep. I hope voters will come back and vote on other 'fancruft' which gets deleted because it has a less high profile than this. Kappa 09:47, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * The bus driver on my local 310 bus is also "important", after all he will transport thousands of communters throughout his career, yet he does not get an article. Norman Rogers\talk 10:29, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Your bus driver is unverifiable, and no-one would think to look for him in an encyclopedia. Kappa 11:13, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep or merge. Anything Harry Potter is inherently notable. Being some of the most sold books ever and all. And schools are welcome. But not when the article consists only of its name and school district. Btw abusing the vfd to make a point? Come on.. Watch out for that wikistress :) Preisler 09:54, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * So anything "Harry Potter", a load of fiction (fiction as in not real) is "inherently notable" while people argue that schools are not, despite affecting more people than Harry Potter bus driver? This is more systematic bias, where fiction has a low barrier of notabillity. Also, many of the Harry Potter articles are stubs, yet schools have to be high quality articles and have to face a big debate to be included. Which is more bias. Norman Rogers\talk 10:29, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Comment. Your logic is basically flawed. By your logic everything should be here. Every McDonalds outlet have several thousand customers a day and scores of employees, should they have a article each? Water wells service thousands of people all the time. Powerplants provide electricity for millions of people. Receptionist and call center people talk to hundreds of people every day. Should every telemarketer have their own page? They certainly come into contact with a lot of people. And so forth and so on. Every single one of the 6.500.000.000 people on earth comes into contact with all kinds of people and services (such as schools) every single day. What makes schools special? My high school certainly don't belong here. But that not might not have been my viewpoint when I was in school where it seemed much more important because it took up so much of my time. The Harry Potter books have sold 250.000.000 copies worldwide... Preisler 11:16, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * My true point is not that my bus driver should have an article, but that fictional topics are given more space than "real" topics, in traditional encyclopedias it is the other way around. Of course the main characters such as Harry get and article, but the bus driver, which only a few fans cares about it not right. Replace fictional bus driver with "school" and you see the whole point. Minor fictioanl characters get articles while real, tangible entities do not. And you argument of 250 million copies does not hold. There is reams of fancruft for much less notable fiction, just look around, and it shows. The Geography of Madagascar, the forth largest island in the world is a stub, while Middle-earth, a fictional land is a featured article. The bias of notabillity of real and fictional objects is absurd. If fictional bus drivers who are minor characters are allowed articles, then so should secondary schools, shopping centres, stadiums, roads and more. Another thing, a group of notorius internet trolls known as the GNAA ha successfully managed to beat the VFD system, because they were trolling enough to make themselves "notable". VFD is broken, this article will be kept, another school will be deleted and more and more fancruft will pile up. Norman Rogers\talk 13:09, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * The reason for inclusion is not the reality of topics, but the notability thereof. Since there are more people who have read Harry Potter books than people who know your bus driver, the former is more notable. That the Geography of Madagascar is currently a stub is unfortunate but not relevant since everyone agrees it should be expanded. Radiant! 13:35, Feb 21, 2005 (UTC)
 * The fact that Geography of Madagascar is a stub is relevent. People have been working too hard on fictional topics rather than real topics, therefore giving them a false sense of notabillity. Listen to people like Xed. He has been complaining for ages about this. More people need to stop working on fictional trivia and work on the important topics. People fighting the current bias are having an up hill battle. Once you start working in the real world topics you reailize wow big the world is. We have 746,163 articles in Wikipedia, but we have the potential to cover a lot more. Notabillity is still a POV idea, and fictional topics have artifiial notabillity. Think about it, the fictional work is heavily marketed, gobbled up by fans and gives an artifical sense of notabillity. That is the complaint. Fictional objects have a notabillity bias. The same thing applies to Internet-based phenomina. Many of these things are traditionally non-notable, but are "notable" becase of the medium the spread through, therefore bias. Norman Rogers\talk 13:58, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Being somewhat of a deletionist there's nothing I would love more than to see some of all those pokemon or digimon or whatever articles disappear.. And you're right, it is sad that articles like Mother Teresa or Atheism or all the fancruft gets so many man hours of work and energy while articles of a, lets face it, more befitting nature to a encyclopedia as the geography of madagascar remains stubs. But I don't think there's any hope of that ever changing as long as the demographic of Wikipedia is as it is. Fighting the bias might be something of a Sisyphus task.. But those pages just containing minimal information on the school still bug me alot. These Harry Potter stubs should probably be gathered together and, because we can't shoot them, collected in Minor Characters of Harry Potter or something like that.Preisler 14:29, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * What I meant by 'not relevant', is that the argument that an article should be kept because a given worse article exist, or that an article should be deleted because a given better article does not exist (or is a stub) is invalid. This is because those arguments can be equally applied to any article. Consensus has already been established that not everything should be in wikipedia, thus an argument that is equally usable to support every article, must therefore be invalid. I concur with Preisler, too. Radiant! 15:55, Feb 21, 2005 (UTC)


 * Merge with some other page of collected harrypottercruft. / u p p l a n d 10:26, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * This is unlikely to evolve beyond a stub unless he ends up having a larger role in the next two books. I vote Merge if we have an article on obscure Potterverse characters.  If not, then go ahead and Keep it. Andrew Lenahan - St ar bli nd  12:27, Feb 21, 2005 (UTC)
 * Merge unto something like Minor characters in Harry Potter. Radiant! 13:35, Feb 21, 2005 (UTC)
 * Sure, he's notable by association, but giving him an entire article is a bit over the top. Especially, when there's really not that much to say about him. Articles should carry some info. Merge into List of minor characters in Harry Potter. He can still have his own article if he turns out more important, or if the article gets significant expansion. Mgm|(talk) 14:17, Feb 21, 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. Sub-trivia.  Serves no valid encyclopedic purpose.   Almost anything is more suitable for an encyclopedia article than this. I agree with Preisler that the existence of such articles as this does make it seem like an uphill battle to make Wikipedia an encyclopedia instead of a compilation of miscelleanous articles about whatever people take the fancy to write about. --BM 16:29, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. Subtrivial fancruft. Everything in Harry Potter is notable? What a joke. Wile E. Heresiarch 16:47, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Merge and redirect to Knight Bus or somewhere appropriate. Do not delete. Gamaliel 17:12, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment: Knight Bus already mentions both the driver and the conductor, which is practically all there is to say on the subject. --BM 18:34, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Delete. Fancruft is getting out of hand. We now have a full article for every character from every fantasy novel ever written, as well as anyone who has ever appeared in cartoon form, but notable subjects like Charles Darnay, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Mr. Rochester, George Babbitt, Captain Ahab, and Simon Legree have no articles (the blue links are redirects). If someone wants to kill the absolutely useless template, trim to a sentence or two, and merge to some Harry Potter page (I think we have one or two), I could live with that. (My comments are basically identical for the other bus driver listed below.) -R. fiend 20:24, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * I mostly agree; book-related articles are fine, but minor characters such as the bus drivers are not deserving of their own articles. Radiant! 09:50, Feb 23, 2005 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Knight Bus. Megan1967 00:39, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete secondary character at best - Skysmith 09:13, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Merge, then Delete. This character isn't significant enough even for a redirect. DaveTheRed 22:02, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete. ComCat 08:54, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Merge and delete. RadicalSubversiv E 13:32, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Merge and redirect to Knight Bus, which already says all there is to say. (Note: Redirecting discourages recreation of the same article.) -Aranel (" Sarah ") 00:56, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Merge and redirect to Knight Bus. Redirect is cheap and tends to prevent future re-creation. Yes, actually, I do think that pretty much everything in the most popular English-language children's book series in history is inherently at least notable enough for a redirect. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:11, Feb 26, 2005 (UTC)

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.