Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/King's Hand


 * 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 merge to Works based on dreams. I do, however, note that an alternative merge target, List of Internet phenomena also gained consensus, so if you don't like the first target, feel free to change it to the second. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont)  17:17, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

King's Hand

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Article subject does not meet criteria for notability StandardUser2 (talk) 15:19, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep. The subject is definitely not the most important thing I’ve written about, but it still does meet notability criteria. It’s admittedly on the edge in terms of range of existing coverage (there is a refreshing amount of original reporting for such a “small” story, but on the other hand the high-quality coverage is mostly clustered together in time), but as per my previous writing on the importance of covering “weird” or “trivial” (not to be confused with non-notable) subjects on Wikipedia, I’m personally in favor of inclusion. Yitz (talk) 06:58, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Plenty of short-lived Internet phenomena like this get this amount of coverage, given the nature of news media as well as social media nowadays. I don't see how it would qualify as having "significant" coverage. I even find it kind of absurd that the subject of the article is treated as an ordinary food topic. Outside a two-month window of trivial news reporting (which isn't sufficient to attribute it any notability as per WP:SBST), this dish has no real world presence, not even as a joke dish. In my opinion, the substance of the article boils down to a semi-viral tweet which got a few minor articles written about it, which would not make it notable. StandardUser2 (talk) 21:53, 9 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Food and drink-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 16:50, 7 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Delete. (See below.) Yitz, I know you've put a considerable amount of work into the article, and for what it is it's well-attested and well-written. But ultimately, it was a three-week fad that died out almost two years ago, and there's not really a lot of value to be had in its having its own page in 2022. I believe that King's Hand belongs, if anywhere, as an entry in the List of Internet phenomena. Etherjammer (talk) 02:38, 10 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep. Straight from the WP:Notability:

"Notability is not temporary; once a topic has been the subject of 'significant coverage' in accordance with the general notability guideline, it does not need to have ongoing coverage."
 * This clearly meets the requirements of notability, and the only reason to delete it is specifically called out as non-valid. The article is high-quality, so absent any other reason for deletion should be kept. Nickelpro (talk) 04:27, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I would argue the subject was not notable to begin with. NTEMP even says "While notability itself is not temporary, from time to time a reassessment of the evidence of notability or suitability of existing articles may be requested by any user via a deletion discussion". As I've previously discussed, SBST states "it takes more than just routine news reports about a single event or topic to constitute significant coverage". Other users have suggested that the subject of the article be merged into larger lists, like List of Internet phenomena or Works based on dreams, which I find much more appropriate. Wikipedia isn't supposed to have a standalone article for every quaint Internet story that the media inevitably picks up as part of their routine news reporting. The article is well-written, but that isn't enough to keep it on Wikipedia. StandardUser2 (talk) 16:55, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Except this is not "routine" coverage. This is not traffic conditions, weather report, crime blotter, etc. This is a singular notable phenomenon, there is nothing routine about it. Therefore SBST does not apply. Nickelpro (talk) 01:53, 13 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Merge to Works based on dreams per WP:EVENT (Routine kinds of news events (including most crimes, accidents, deaths, celebrity or political news, "shock" news, stories lacking lasting value such as "water cooler stories," and viral phenomena) – whether or not tragic or widely reported at the time – are usually not notable unless something further gives them additional enduring significance.) Two years on the story doesn't seem to have had significant WP:CONTINUEDCOVERAGE, with all press stories ending after a couple of weeks, and even the "strangest food combinations of 2020" mention being within that window, the Hand having been created in December 2020. All I can find that post-dates that is a mention in a "Twitter's Best Moments" listicle from April 2022. --Lord Belbury (talk) 06:54, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment Thanks @Lord Belbury(and everyone else in this discussion) for the compliments and for making some excellent arguments for deletion/merging. My current position after going through them is that the page is definitely on the edge of notability, but still falls on the side of inclusion, at least under my reading of the MoS (which may of course be biased, so take with appropriate salt). Specifically, WP:CONTINUEDCOVERAGE states the following (emphasis my own): “Events that are only covered in sources published during or immediately after an event, without further analysis or discussion, are likely not suitable for an encyclopedia article……editors cannot know whether an event will receive further coverage or not……If an event is cited as a case study in multiple sources after the initial coverage has died down, this may be an indication of lasting significance..” The “without further analysis or discussion” carries a lot of weight here, in my opinion. Purely factual reporting of a situation for a limited duration does not a notable event make, but (under current guidelines) if there’s significant analysis or discussion made at the time (as has happened here), then even if the event is temporally limited, it can still be notable. It’s also worth noting that it has indeed been cited in 2022, as @Lord Belbury has pointed out, albeit only once rather than multiple times so far. This two year renewal of coverage (as relatively trivial as it is) suggests to me that the media has not forgotten about the King’s Hand, and I would place significant probability on it being cited again in the future. One reason for my confidence in this is that I have seen multiple, recent viral tweets which mention the dish, as well as people who are still replicating it for personal consumption (although the number of people I’ve seen doing that is small). This is not direct evidence for notability, but imo does give weight to the possibility that one more future article will cite it as a case study, at the very least (which would make it unambiguously pass notability). As such, I don’t think calling this a dead passing fad provides sufficient reason for deletion/merging. Yitz (talk) 18:58, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure these sources really show significant further analysis or discussion. They write about a viral tweet at the time of its popularity, some lightly interview the tweeter, and some copy and paste contemporary tweets of other people describing their food dreams. The interview quotes are a cut above the generic coverage that you'd be able to find for any meme of any week, but it's very much still the at the "softball Q&A" end of Interviews.
 * The 2022 Intelligencer article is asking 24 of its staff to name their favourite Twitter moment, and one person picks the Hand. People haven't forgotten the Hand and future in-depth works may yet be written about it, but the same goes for a lot of memes and ideas which still see use but haven't really been written about. You can browse Category:Internet memes introduced in the 2020s to see how much weight something generally needs to get a full article rather than an italicised redirect to a wider subject.
 * I'm glad that you managed to get a King's Hand image solidly CC-licenced at the time, though, which would allow the hand to live on, with photo, if it were merged elsewhere. --Lord Belbury (talk) 12:59, 13 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Redirect - to Works based on dreams per Lord Belbury's analysis. Per WP:PERSISTENCE, there's not enough lasting significance for the subject to warrant a standalone article. However the image and some content is already at the redirect target, so the Hand of the King will live on, unlike some other Hands of the King who shall go unnamed. - Aoidh (talk) 06:18, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Keep per the significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources. The article cites numerous sources published in December 2020 when King's Hand was introduced. Notability (events) says, "Notable events usually receive coverage beyond a relatively short news cycle." The subject was discussed in two sources in 2022, over one year after the initial burst of coverage in December 2020:  The article notes: "As with Cassandra, it came to him in a dream: a hollow M&M’s cookie shaped like a hand and filled with Greek salad, a dish that Twitter user @thatfrood re-created using a silicone mold with M&M’s marking the knuckle bones. The King’s Hand moment was full of the toothsome weirdness I associate with a certain corner of Twitter. Like an image that circulated in 2019 doctored to mimic the feeling of having a stroke, the impression it produces becomes less clear the longer you contemplate it: Which king’s hand is this? Are we honoring him or cannibalizing him? (@Thatfrood told BuzzFeed News that, in his dream, it was the main course of a festival feast.) It’s ornate, ceremonial, childish. “I was thinking, This doesn’t make sense,” he told BuzzFeed. “But of course it doesn’t make sense. I saw it in a dream.”"  The article notes: "On Twitter, people sometimes post attempts to recreate strange memes or products that existed in their dreams. One user had a dream in which people ate a food called “King’s Hand,” a “hollow [human] hand made of M&M cookie, filled with Greek salad.” He chronicled his exhaustive quest to recreate the (disgusting) dessert, which other users replicated. (The “King’s Hand” now has its own Wikipedia entry and was featured on the Today Show.)" There is sufficient coverage in reliable sources to allow King's Hand' to pass Notability, which requires "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". I oppose a merge to Works based on dreams as there is enough information for a standalone article. A merge would be undue weight or would result in the loss of sourced, encyclopedic content. Cunard (talk) 08:27, 14 August 2022 (UTC)  Relisting comment: Relisting. And wondering about the influx of new editors posting nominations at AFD.... Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz <sup style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: #006400;">Read! Talk! 23:15, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
 * <p class="xfd_relist" style="margin:0 0 0 -1em;border-top: 1px solid #AAA; border-bottom: 1px solid #AAA; padding: 0px 2em;"> Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * @Liz I noticed this nomination happened the day after Depths of Wikipedia tweeted about the page and it went viral (again, this time as far as I know not because of me), leading to a massive spike in views. I'd assume that explains why this AfD happened (more eyes means more chances for critique to come up, usually), though that doesn't explain the more general rise in new AfD nominators. @StandardUser2, may I ask how you discovered the page? Yitz (talk) 18:33, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Found it on r/wikipedia about a few days before I made this thread. That post might've been shared after the Depths of Wikipedia tweet, though I was not aware of it. I wouldn't know why new nominators are coming in though, didn't expect this AfD to go for so long lol. I will admit I am new to Wikipedia editing after years of lurking. I made this AfD after reading some old thread on the King's Hand talk page. Could you link the Depths of Wikipedia tweet? Thanks. StandardUser2 (talk) 18:44, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Sure! It turns out I was slightly mistaken, the link is to Works based on dreams, not King's hand directly, but a lot of the comments below it are about the King's Hand. Here's the link: By the way, welcome @StandardUser2 to the delightful (and sometimes very drawn out!) world of Wikipedia editing and its internal politics; I'm glad you're with us, and look forward to seeing what you contribute! :) Yitz (talk) 02:21, 18 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Delete Flash in the pan, fails WP:SUSTAINED, more recent coverage brought up by Cunard is only passing, and does not add to notability. Hemiauchenia (talk) 03:27, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I an also okay with a merge to list of internet phenomena and/or works based on dreams. Hemiauchenia (talk) 11:38, 20 August 2022 (UTC)


 * delete This could just as well be nuked from orbit on a ignore all rules basis, but no, we are not here to chronicle every minor fad that got picked up and passed around for a few weeks. 04:51, 17 August 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mangoe (talk • contribs)
 * Question (hope it's okay to ask this here): While this deletion discussion is ongoing, would it be okay if I reached out to a journalist I know (who regularly writes about internet culture) about the possibility of them covering the King's Hand? I'm not sure if that would be against any rules (either directly or in spirit), but my goal there would be to speed along a story that I suspect will come out later with or without my input, and it seems silly to wait on that if the page is going to be deleted then reconstructed soon after. (note that I do not have access to any non-public information here; this projection is just based on my understanding of how the media works.). Obviously I don't want to cause any WP:MEATPUPPET headaches, so if I do this I'd explicitly ask for the current AfD situation not to be mentioned unless/until the process is closed. If the answer to the above is "omg no please don't do that while an AfD is going on," would it be okay to do it if the page does end up deleted/kept? Yitz (talk) 02:47, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * If you think the page is likely to get coverage that will make it viable later, the you are free to move a copy to your userspace. In that case, the reconstruction will take exactly zero effort. Hemiauchenia (talk) 06:19, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * @Hemiauchenia is WP:USERFY a concern? My understanding is that I would be required to move contribution history as well, which would require administrator action to do (though I may be misunderstanding; the page isn't very clear on that). Yitz (talk) 11:16, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't think so, as you are the primary contributor. You can always just credit people in the edit history somewhere like on the articles taklpage. Hemiauchenia (talk) 16:22, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Relisting comment: Relisting. Some support for Keeping this article and some for Merge but several Merge targets are recommended. Does one have more support in this discussion? Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz <sup style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: #006400;">Read! Talk! 04:06, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep or Merge Every single entry on List of Internet challenges for example is just as flash-in-the-pan. --~ ฅ(ↀωↀ&#61;) neko-channyan 17:14, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Merge into List of Internet phenomena or Works based on dreams. Does and will not have lasting significant coverage. ɱ  (talk) 23:10, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Merge into List of Internet phenomena or Works based on dreams. Lord Belbury's argument (and others'!) above is compelling, while I find Cunard's continuing-coverage sources to be less so; one of them seems to be based at least in part on the fact that King's Hand has a Wikipedia page, which is a self-sustaining loop unless we interrupt it, and one is simply a list of "our favorite Twitter moments", which is less coverage and more a single person's reminiscence in a clickbait feature. I maintain my earlier objection that this was a brief fad, and that if you check other entries on the List of Internet phenomena or List of Internet challenges, you'll find equivalent coverage in secondary sources, because many of these sites are driven by "what's everybody talking about today?" clicks and have pages that could easily be dropped a week after publication with little to no notice. Should we have separate pages for | The Ridiculous Order Dunkin' Workers Were Literally Crying Over or | Reddit Is Cracking Up Over An Aldi Pizza Mistake? -- Etherjammer (talk) 14:25, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I found this article helpful and insightful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:8003:3C09:E501:941A:E3A9:9862:8E1E (talk) 22:57, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Merge to List of Internet phenomena - I agree with the others above that this topic fails WP:SUSTAINED - the two recent articles brought up above are extremely short, trivial mentions, and not significant coverage. Like many other viral internet fads, it got a bit of coverage when the fad first took off, but then faded into obscurity just as fast after, and has no real sustained notability, as evidenced by the fact that the only two pieces of recent coverage that anyone has found so far is almost nothing. Merging would also preserve the article's history, so if, as Yitz mentioned above, sources come out in the future that do demonstrate sustained notability, it would be an easy matter to restore the page back out from that merge. Rorshacma (talk) 02:29, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * <p class="xfd_relist" style="margin:0 0 0 -1em;border-top: 1px solid #AAA; border-bottom: 1px solid #AAA; padding: 0px 2em;"> Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * Merge to List of Internet phenomena: "Works based on dreams" is a fun idea, but RSes treated this as a viral sensation, not a serious culinary invention. I also agree that WP:PERSISTENCE just isn't met here: Notable events usually receive coverage beyond a relatively short news cycle. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/they) 05:33, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep. I found this article because the item was referenced in a lively FB discussion today. Did some searching and it comes up pretty often. 2 years later, that level of attention is not a "flash in the pan." If Merged, probably should go to Internet Phenomenon, not Works from Dreams. JamesG5 (talk) 03:21, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * @JamesG5: Does it come up in reliable sources often these days, or just in facebook groups? theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/they) 03:27, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * many things considered notable in the past get discussed now but aren't continually covered because they're not ongoing. Note I did say Merge was a valid choice & weighed in on that as requested in relisting. JamesG5 (talk) 04:35, 26 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Merge, per above points on lacking sustained/persistent coverage, as alternative to deletion. czar  16:54, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Merge to Works based on dreams Bruxton (talk) 16:08, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Merge Lightburst (talk) 01:53, 30 August 2022 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. <b style="color:red">Please do not modify it.</b> 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.