Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Interlocking puzzle

 This page is an archive of the proposed deletion of the article below. Further comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or on a Votes for Undeletion nomination). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was KEEP ALL 7. -Splash 02:52, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Interlocking puzzle

 * (Likewise: Lock puzzle, Sliding puzzle, Stick puzzle, Dissection puzzle, String puzzle, Tiling puzzle -- Curps 13:01, 13 August 2005 (UTC))

I'm just VFD'ing this to prevent speedy deletion. User:-Ril- thinks it should be speedied as: "undeletion of VFD'd content - Votes for deletion/Zillions games - the now deceased category referred to in that VFD also exists as a list at Votes for deletion/Zillions games/list}}". I find this hard to understand. Kappa 12:40, 13 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Keep. This will be a bit long-winded, please bear with me.

User Karl Scherer created a number of spam pages for puzzle games produced by his company, Zillions of Games, and a Vfd was created to delete them. This Vfd explicitly named only pages such as Cleanup (Zillions game), Spaghetti (Zillions game) and a few dozen others in the same vein, however a mandate was claimed to delete a total of 200 pages (basically, every page ever created or edited by Karl Scherer), including seemingly generic terms with numerous Google hits such as interlocking puzzle, which did not contain any spam links, and lock puzzle, which had numerous contributions from other editors.

After this was done, the VfD proposer (User:-Ril-) noticed that he had missed Burr puzzle and proposed it for deletion separately. However Votes for deletion/Burr puzzle turned out to be a keep: after a few rapid-fire delete votes, some research was done and it was verified that this was a generic and legitimate mathematical topic, and the tide turned and the vote was to keep.

Arguably, a number of generic terms such as interlocking puzzle were unjustifiably deleted in the original VfD ("throwing the baby out with the bathwater") and should be restored. These were not in fact explicitly named in that VfD page, but could only be known about by clicking to a separate page, where they were buried among a large listing of obvious spam pages. No doubt Burr puzzle would have suffered the same fate, but for the accidental circumstance that the VfD proposer missed it the first time around.

To prevent this from happening in the first place, the original VfD should have been split into more than one VfD, to distinguish between the no-brainer deletions such as Spaghetti (Zillions game) and legitimate generic terms such as interlocking puzzle and a handful of others. Arguably, every single page that is being proposed for deletion needs to be individually listed on the VfD page, in order for that page's deletion to be validly decided. The wholesale nomination of 200 pages (with some pages requiring careful consideration mixed in among a large number of no-brainers, on a separate page that many voters didn't look at) is a bit too much, and it's easy for mistakes to be made.

It seems to be -Ril-'s position that the mere existence of an interlocking puzzle page constitutes advertising (or "original research spam") for Karl Scherer; perhaps he believes that this is a term coined or used only by Karl Scherer rather than a generic term. However, I believe that Google shows it is in fairly widespread use. Another user has claimed (in an entirely separate context) that -Ril- sometimes uses an overbroad definition of "advertising" in recommending deletion of articles.

Even if an article on a topic was originally created or edited by a spammer, that's not the topic's fault. There is no reason why we can't have a non-spammy article on that topic. After all, we wouldn't delete mystery novel just because some spammer created My Stupid Book (mystery novel), would we? -- Curps 13:18, 13 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Keep all - although if you can expand on your argument Curps it might help ;) --Doc (?) 14:41, 13 August 2005 (UTC) --Doc (?) 14:41, 13 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Keep all -same as above G Clark 14:58, 2005 August 13 (UTC)
 * Keep and award a master's degree to Curps for that thesis defense ;) Fernando Rizo T/C 17:15, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep per Curps. -- DS1953 19:18, August 13, 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep --malathion talk 20:19, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep all—These stubs will be expanded with history and photos to become fine game articles one day. --Tysto 20:32, 2005 August 13 (UTC)
 * Delete basically, this is already VFD'd content that shouldn't have been undeleted and certainly not without going through Requests for undeletion first. The original reason for its deletion and VFD was that it is part of an original research categorisation of puzzles, that Karl Scherer was pushing into Wikipedia. Specifically, one article was created per class. "Lock puzzle" returns under 1000 hits in google, and most of those are describing a puzzle "with a lock". We don't have square puzzle or egg shaped puzzle or puzzle with a drawer or keyhole puzzle or puzzle on a chain, because even though this describes a group of puzzles, it isn't a correct classification of them, and pushing that classification would be original research. While there are things that fit the description in the text, there are also Cows that have been painted red, but we don't have an article on those, because they are not a proper classification of cows.     ( ! | ? | * ) 23:48, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Because these pages were never actually mentioned within any VfD page, it is questionable whether you ever had a mandate to delete them. The cautionary example of Votes for deletion/Burr puzzle strongly suggests that you did not.  -- Curps 02:44, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
 * A "lock puzzle" is mentioned in this description of an episode from The Amazing Race: . As the article itself mentions, the novel and movie Hellraiser incorporates a lock puzzle. There are publications dedicated to puzzle solving and companies that make puzzles and hobbyists who solve them and they do have terminology to generically describe different types of puzzles.  It is not hard to find Google hits for "lock puzzle" that have nothing to do with Karl Scherer, for instance  among quite a number of others. -- Curps 02:51, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Keep all. They range from good stubs to good, complete articles. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:42, 2005 August 14 (UTC)
 * Keep EASports 06:50, 19 August 2005 (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 an undeletion request). No further edits should be made to this page.