Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Crayola crayon colors (3rd nomination)


 * 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 keep. It's clear that there's no consensus to delete or merge. I suppose some people will quibble about keep vs no consensus, but I can't get worked up over that distinction, so I'm just going to call this keep.

One question raised is whether this runs afoul of WP:NOTCATALOG. I find the arguments that it doesn't to be persuasive. My own reading of WP:NOTCATALOG finds only a prohibition against product pricing or availability information, which, as XOR'easter said, this isn't.

The other big question is the sourcing. There's a claim that the color details are unsourced, but P Aculeius makes a strong argument why the sourcing is adequate and appropriate. -- RoySmith (talk) 04:09, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

List of Crayola crayon colors
AfDs for this article: 
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This page is listcruft (who would need a exhaustive list of all the crayon colors produced by a company?), and is mostly sourced to Crayola official corporate pages, crayon collecting websites, and broken links to image hosting services. It also attracts a prolific LTA (who I am not naming, for obvious reasons). Lojbanist remove cattle from stage 22:09, 22 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 22:30, 22 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Visual arts-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 22:31, 22 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Comment: This has been speedy kept twice, why would #3 be any different? Also, "It also attracts a prolific LTA" is a poor rationale; we shouldn't let LTAs intimidate us into deleting articles.  p  b  p  23:01, 22 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I'd like to think that our standards are a little higher now but I do agree that the LTA should not be a consideration. --DanielRigal (talk) 23:08, 22 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Limited merge to History of Crayola crayons which this effectively duplicates. This article has been speedily kept before so I am not bothering to !vote "delete" although I'd be quite happy to see it go. I am not sure what state it was in last time it was deemed a "keep" but it looks pretty awful now with much of it being unverifiable WP:OR. A lot of it is referenced to primary sources and most of the rest of it rehashes content from CrayonCollecting.com, which may or may not be Wp:RS although it certainly looks like a serious effort to document this stuff (Maybe so that we don't have to?). None of the Hex values are reliable. If kept or merged at all the article needs to be cut down drastically and have all the unreferenced RGB, HSV and Hex values removed completely. Also the background colours used on the lists should go too. If we merge then we only have one article to keep clean and a flat out "No hex codes" rule would make a lot of sense. --DanielRigal (talk) 23:08, 22 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep - this needs to be separate from any other article or it will drown the other article. Too much detail to have anywhere else. Red   Slash  23:53, 24 July 2018 (UTC)
 * That is why I only suggest a limited merge. --DanielRigal (talk) 22:17, 26 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep. Obscure but encyclopedic. Andrewa (talk) 00:01, 25 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete. Crayola is a brand and the colours are products so this essentially breaches WP:NOTCATALOGUE Ajf773 (talk) 09:36, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep. This is the parent article for History of Crayola crayons and Alternative names of Crayola crayons, all of which have been nominated for deletion by Lojbanist, supported by DanielRigal and Ajf773, on the theory that it's "fancruft", a pejorative meaning, "useless garbage created by obsessed fanatics". Pretty much the same arguments have been proposed for deleting List of Crayola marker colors, List of Crayola paint colors, List of Crayola colored pencil colors, and Timeline of Crayola, in a mass effort to expunge all Crayola-related topics from Wikipedia.
 * We should begin by dismissing the argument that NOTCATALOGUE has anything to do with this article, as the only part of that policy that relates to products clearly doesn't apply here:
 * "Sales catalogues. An article should not include product pricing or availability information unless there is an independent source and a justified reason for the mention. Encyclopedic significance may be indicated if mainstream media sources (not just product reviews) provide commentary on these details instead of just passing mention. Prices and product availability can vary widely from place to place and over time. Wikipedia is not a price comparison service to compare the prices of competing products, or the prices and availability of a single product from different vendors or retailers."
 * Neither this nor any of the other articles have anything to do with pricing or availability or in any way constitutes a catalogue. The policy cited is not relevant to the present debate.
 * Similarly, other policies are clearly being misapplied in support of this nomination. Wikipedia policy does not forbid the use of primary sources; it says that they may be used where appropriate, and one perfectly appropriate use is to supply the official description of a product, which in this case consists of numerical data rather than advertising or opinion.  Furthermore, CrayonCollecting.com isn't itself a source, but a web site created by Ed Welter, one of several authors whose work documenting Crayola and other companies, as well as related topics, appears there.  The actual source is Welter's "The Definitive History of the Colors of Crayola", which itself is a piece of scholarly work indicating how the information was gathered and analyzed, giving the basis for the author's statements and reasoning, together with images documenting both the product and its packaging at different stages in time, as well as color swatches that anyone can look at and compare in support of the author's claims.  This is the definition of a reliable third-party source on the topic, and the only reason it's being questioned is because it's on the internet, rather than a book printed by an old-media publishing house.  That's not a reason to dismiss an otherwise reliable source.
 * The idea that because a subject is documented by another source, in this case Mr. Welter's history of Crayola Crayons, means that "we don't have to", is antithetical to the very purpose of Wikipedia. The editor is suggesting that Wikipedia articles don't need to exist for topics that are documented elsewhere!  Imagine applying this logic to articles on history, biography, science, or art!  We'd pretty much have to purge all of Wikipedia.
 * The nominators seem to be under the illusion that hexadecimal and RGB codes come from nowhere, despite being documented by the cited sources, as well as by the colors themselves. It's well-established that subjects of Wikipedia articles are reliable sources for their own descriptions: editors are entitled to describe what an object looks like, what the plot of a book is, who the characters in a movie are, or in this case, what color is produced by a crayon, so long as it's possible to do so without editorializing about it.  Anyone who examines an object, reads a book, watches a movie, or colors with a crayon can see for themselves.  But Mr. Rigal isn't just proposing to delete all of the information as well as the colors themselves; he's proposing a rule against including this type of information in this article, and presumably other similar articles, apparently whether or not there are reliable sources.
 * So, why this crusade against all things Crayola? Serious efforts have been made to document a topic of interest to many readers over the years, and the present page is a great improvement over previous versions that survived nominations for deletion in the past.  The original page was split into different articles a few years ago because it wasn't practical to have both a comprehensive table of all colors and separate tables showing the color lineup at different points in time, which is of interest because the color palette has changed significantly over more than a century since the introduction of Crayola crayons, everyday objects that have been found in nearly every school and every household with children for decades.  Over the years different colors have shared the same names, and some colors have been known by different names for various reasons.  This information seems perfectly appropriate to document on Wikipedia, as are markers, paints, colored pencils, etc.  These things were split off into their own pages because the parent topics would become too large and cover too many subjects to fit in one place comfortably.  But space is not at a premium on Wikipedia.  We don't need to jam together all related topics in order to save space.
 * One of the most ridiculous arguments put forward for deleting these articles is that some of them have attracted the attention of a notorious vandal. This has had no long-term effect on the integrity of the article, since they're regularly patrolled by a number of editors who ensure that everything added or removed seems to be a serious effort to improve the content.  But the fact that an article attracts vandals is evidence that it's not trivial; trivial articles can go months or years without any attention being paid to them.
 * If the nominators of this and all of the other related articles aren't satisfied by the existing sources, they can go find more and "better" ones if they want to, but they're not entitled to ignore reliable sources that already exist—including the crayons themselves as sources for their names and colors—just because they don't like them, or use that as an argument to delete all Crayola-related articles from Wikipedia, as they're doing. The real reason for this nomination storm seems to be that the nominators consider the subject to be "trivial", hence spamming the pejorative "listcruft" and "fancruft" all over their arguments.  Calling it "cruft" presupposes the outcome of the debate: the material is useless, pointless, worthless, and therefore should be deleted.  Adding that it's "fancruft" simply makes it personal.  But you don't have to be a fanatic, or obsessed with crayons to want to document them.  Apart from checking what I had in old boxes, I haven't touched my crayons in decades.  I don't collect crayon memorabilia or go to crayon conventions or anything of the sort.  And I suspect that many of the other editors who've collaborated on these pages are the same: we simply find the subject interesting and worth documenting.  That doesn't make us fanatical or our work-product trivial or worthless.  I really think that these nominators should withdraw their mass deletion nominations, and find some more worthwhile windmills to tilt at.  P Aculeius (talk) 12:40, 27 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Comment Listed for deletion by the same nominators:
 * Articles for deletion/List of Crayola crayon colors (3rd nomination)
 * Articles for deletion/History of Crayola crayons
 * Articles for deletion/Timeline of Crayola
 * Articles for deletion/List of Crayola paint colors
 * Articles for deletion/List of Crayola marker colors
 * Articles for deletion/List of Crayola colored pencil colors


 * P Aculeius (talk) 12:59, 27 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep Crayola is a brand, but historical information is not a product catalogue. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 18:09, 28 July 2018 (UTC)
 * As I see it, the actual history part of this article belongs in History of Crayola crayons, which I don't think has any real risk of being deleted. What this seems to be is a history of the changes to Crayola's product catalogue. I don't think it is unreasonable to invoke the rule against rehashing catalogues, even when the catalogues are old. Sure, there can be historical details of genuine relevance buried in old catalogues which can be selectively extracted and used but indiscriminately reproducing the entire Crayola colour range seems far more catalogue than history to me. --DanielRigal (talk) 18:45, 28 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep - Reasonable tie-in to the story of an iconic consumer product. Carrite (talk) 15:57, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete and redirect to History of Crayola crayons. This list is redundant, as the colors are presented in a more organized fashion in the history article. Clarityfiend (talk) 20:57, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete and redirect to History of Crayola crayons. The most useful part of this article, the color values, are unsourced. Much of its content can never be reliably sourced. Hopefully editors of this article find a nice spot somewhere else on the internet to host their work, but it's not reliable or notable. Daask (talk) 19:42, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Completely false. They're all sourced A) from the crayons themselves; B) from at least one of two reliable sources that provide color swatches that can be reliably accessed and measured by anyone.  Wikipedia policy is quite clear that describing an object or its contents in neutral language that anyone who examines it can verify is perfectly acceptable as sourcing, and does not constitute original research.  The idea that it's impossible for there ever to be a reliable source for the description of common and easily examinable objects is thoroughly ridiculous.  Claim that the subject is non-notable is clearly disputed by multiple editors here and in the other topics affected by the deletion spam.  P Aculeius (talk) 20:18, 30 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep - Interesting and historic. Czolgolz (talk) 20:44, 30 July 2018 (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.