Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Glasnost The Game


 * 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 delete. RL0919 (talk) 23:10, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Glasnost The Game

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The case for Deletion
I think the page Glasnost_The_Game should be deleted because it violates:

WP:PROMOTION WP:N WP:Reliability WP:V

Notability: I cannot find any online non-primary reference to this game that could not have simply been cribbed from Wikipedia. Of course it does not help that the name is a bit non-unique - especially in 1989. In fact there is a 1989 game called Glasnost on BGG (bgg id=6590), but it is clearly a different game with different people involved, a different player count and actually a different concept. That game is unranked on BGG (so fairly obscure) and this is more obscure than that.

Also since this game originates in Greek-speaking Cypress, why is there not a page on the Greek Wikipedia if it is notable?

Reliability of Sources: The current article has two sorts of source: 1. references to the product's home page, which have all been archived onto webarchive.org. 2. some off-line sources in Cypriot newspapers (all but one in Greek). This is in the section entitled "Newspaper articles on its release".

Let us consider case 1. first. The "original" links to these references are all dead. I mean they give 404 HTML errors. The archived links all look wrong as if the web-archiving bot was archiving garbage. This is not actually the case. It turns out they are all archiving the product's home page (http://glasnostthegame.com/) which is very much alive and looks okay for a 1989 web page. This is quite interesting. These links all purport to be Greek newspaper articles. They are named:


 * Now also game called Glasnost, article published in Fileleftheros -Cyprus' major newspaper (article in Greek)
 * The Game of "transparency" in Alitheia newspaper (article in Greek)
 * "Glasnost, a new game for children" in newspaper Xaravgi (article in Greek)

And they all effectively point to the product's home page which is in English.

Now for case 2. - the offline newspaper articles. As far as I can work out these are (or were) perfectly decent print newspapers. (At least one of them, the Cypress Weekly went fully online in 2017). So may be if I could speak and read Greek, I could travel to some library in Greece and check them out. Or I could ask a Greek friend - if I had any friends. I totally get that this does not necessarily invalidate the reliability of the sources from Wikipedia's point of view. (I have looked for these articles to see if they had been published online. I briefly thought I had found something, but when I translated it I found it was the Newspaper's T&Cs.)

However we have some clues as to what those articles may have contained. If you click on http://glasnostthegame.com/history.html, you will find that it purports to be "[Extract from Laouris interview in local news in 1990]". Like much original source history from Julius Caesar's Conquest of Gaul onwards, it reads like promotional material. So did the "local news" contact Laouris or the other way round. I am guessing it was the other way round. And thus I conclude that the inventor, Laouris, contacted all those newspapers and that whatever they wrote is not the reliable independent source material we demand.

No Self-Promotion: It should be clear from above that I contend we are dealing with self-promotion.

Verifiability: I think I have made the case for this transgression above.

The case for Keep
The case for the prosecution has based his argument on a fair amount of supposition and guess work. It is indeed very possible that if he bothered to learn Greek, hunt down a suitable library and track down those sources his view would be utterly changed. Καλύτερα να σπάσεις.

Also I am not sure how interesting the game is, but its rules are somewhat different from Risk. It may be at the very least an original piece of work. What is there here, that a "Multiple Issues" template could not fix?

Merge?
I had planned to suggest merging into the Risk (game) article. But I think it is too different from Risk. Slimy asparagus (talk) 19:20, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Games-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 20:31, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Cyprus-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 20:31, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Week delete. The footnotes are to the partially broken website of the game. Cited references are in non-Latin script and I have trouble confirming they exist. I added a link to the game's entry on BGG but it has no review/discussion, and a single file with the 'original German rules', which contradicts the unreferneced claim here that the game was created by Yiannis Laouris (a Greek). I did a BEFORE and failed to find any source about this game in English. While WP:SYSTEMICBIAS is a thing, and there may be a notable topic here with sourced limited to non-English scripts and at the moment not easily findable by people who cannot do a search in Greece, the lack of Greek interwiki is the yet another WP:HOAX red-flag here. Unless someone can confirm that that the cited sources (or others) exist and contain WP:SIGCOV, I am leaning towards calling this a hoax, or a badly written mess about a topic of uncler notability. PS. The scan cover of BGG's Glasnot game here statest that the game developer is Gini Graham Scott. Now, maybe we are dealing with two different games here, but the odds are neither is notable. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 05:04, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Yeah I already argued above they are two different games. I would not guess it was a hoax. I am perfectly willing to assume the game was actually manufactured and the newspaper articles did actually appear. From the order page (http://www.glasnostthegame.com/order.html) it seems only 100 copies were made. That in itself is further evidence this is not notable to me. Slimy asparagus (talk) 05:31, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * , IFF the newspapers appeared and contained SIGCOV then this may be notable, but I am not prepared to AGF this without seeing at least one myself (since I've seen hoaxes with a similar type of references, where the hoax author assumed that most people won't bother trying to find obscure books or newspapers). If the author or someone wants this to stay, first, they need to provide convincing evidence this (and the sources cited) really exists. Then that they contain SIGCOV. And then this will be rescued. I don't see any other shortcut (other than finding totally new sources, which I think we both failed at). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 06:14, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Somehow I missed the inventor has own page. If there were good sources I would vote for merging this into that. However the first reference on that page is images hosted on www.futureworlds.eu, which was founded by Yiannis Laouris. So even the biography page looks like self-promotion to me. Slimy asparagus (talk) 14:24, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Vanamonde (Talk) 17:22, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

So what happens now? It seems the core problem is the uncertainty over the reliability of the sources. That means the article is not in a good state but equally makes it to difficult to justify deleting or merging.Slimy asparagus (talk) 22:08, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * delete The Yiannis Laouris page has been deleted. So merging into that is no longer an option. And the biography people apparently took the view the sources are no good, so I reckon we should follow as our sources are much worse.Slimy asparagus (talk) 09:26, 12 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete - due to the sourcing concerns raised and the fact that it's still within the realms of possibility that this is a hoax, I believe that we need to look at deletion here. Alternatives to deletion have been examined above but there isn't really a suitable one available. Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 19:01, 11 August 2021 (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.