Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lynn Willis


 * 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 - CrazyRussian talk/email 18:26, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Lynn Willis
Deprodded. This is a well written article, but there's no indication it meets WP:BIO. The person is non-notable.--Chaser T 07:07, 15 July 2006 (UTC) withdrawn, though I understand that the AfD should continue when there are other votes to delete.--Chaser T 01:21, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Strong delete article fails to assert notability, and as such, fails WP:BIO as nominator mentions  hoopydink  Conas tá tú? 07:12, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete fails WP:BIO per above. Alphachimp  talk  07:18, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
 * The page's creator left the following paragraphs on it's talk page.--Chaser T 08:00, 15 July 2006 (UTC):
 * I am opposing PROD, I wouldn't have created the page if I didn't think he was notable. Also, there were already a few red wikilinks for him, so obviously others thought he was notable. (These were from Worlds of Wonder, Basic Role-Playing, and Ringworld (role-playing game).) Also, though Call of Cthulhu (role-playing game) only mentions original creator Sandy Petersen as the designer, you can see in the graphic of the 6th edition cover that Willis is now being given co-designer credit. I've added Call of Cthulhu into the entry to reflect this.


 * Google claims to have 21,300 hits for "lynn willis", and though a good number of these are for other people, that still leaves thousands of hits. His Chaosium staff bio credits him with being "the constant force behind Call of Cthulhu." This interview describes him as "a stalwart of the gaming industry" and the "longest serving member of the Chaosium staff." If Chaosium is notable enough to get a Wikipedia entry, why shouldn't its Editor-in-Chief and "longest serving member" be notable enough for Wikipedia? If the Cthulhu RPG is notable enough, why not its current co-designer? Not to mention his other work.


 * Perhaps the number of redlinked wargames helped convince you that he only designed non-notable games, but that says more about the weak coverage of wargames on Wikipedia than Lynn Willis. Godsfire, at least, deserves an entry. --Groggy Dice 07:30, 15 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Strong keep Thanks to Chaser for "playing fair" and adding my comments from Talk:Lynn Willis. To summarize:
 * There were already redlinks from three articles for Lynn Willis, so apparently I was not the only one who thought he was notable.
 * The page lists some of his design credits, which implies that those who want to delete him consider all those games to be non-notable themselves. I have to wonder whether pro-deleters are familiar enough with the wargaming and RPG fields to know who is notable in them and who is not. Dungeons & Dragons isn't the only "notable" RPG, after all.
 * Google gives 21,000 hits for "lynn willis", some of these are other people, but adding terms to narrow it down still gives 9,000 12,900 hits. --Groggy Dice 08:13, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm getting better at "playing fair". I don't have an opinion about whether the games themselves are notable, but I'm skeptical about pages for game designers. Perhaps a passing mention in the articles for Chaosium and Cthulhu would be appropriate? In any case, we have plenty of gamers on Wikipedia, so some knowledgeable comments shouldn't be long in coming. I admit my ignorance here.--Chaser T 08:44, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
 * If you're "skeptical about pages for game designers," you can visit Category:Board game designers and Category:Role-playing game designers for more AfD candidates. If you also feel the same way about computer and video games, the list gets even longer.


 * I'm a wargamer, not an RPGer, so defending his notability based on what he's done since going over to the "dark side" feels a little strange. However, to wargamers, saying that games might be notable but not their designers, is akin to saying that Wikipedia should have entries for notable films but not their directors.


 * I think part of the difference in perspective comes from the way mass market boardgame publishers fail to acknowledge designers. Nowhere on the box or in the rules will you find the credits for Monopoly or Risk or Chutes and Ladders. Yes, you can find out from a historical source who designed Monopoly, but Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley want you to associate the games with them, not the designer. Furthermore, such games have relatively simple rules, so designing them doesn't seem like a lot of work.


 * But in fields like wargaming, where the designers are identified (and rules are typically more complex), designers can gain reputation and loyalty. For a "grognard" wargamer, there are designers that walk as gods among men. Now, Willis wasn't prolific enough to be in that category, and I'll admit that there are more prominent designers who don't have entries, but there are also less prominent ones that do. --Groggy Dice 09:52, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

As far as the Google testing goes, I tried to run a search that would clear out false positives, and even err on the side of caution. The reason I revised the result upward is that afterwards I thought of adding "cthulhu" to my terms, and found that just the combination '"lynn willis" cthulhu' got 10,000 hits, more than my previous search terms combined! Also, note that these searches exclude pages where his games and works are mentioned, but he himself is not. For instance, a search designed to turn up hits for his Godsfire game, but excluding pages with "Willis," gets 1,350 results. A similar test for pages mentioning his Olympica game but not him gets over 500 hits. --Groggy Dice 08:39, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep - meets the multiple non-trivial requirements. Has 20K google hits, > 600 with the name in the title. Over a dozen books ( editor/coauthor ) for sale on Amazon. Meets WP:BIO criteria for authorship alone probably - Peripitus (Talk) 11:26, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep per Peripterus. I think it might be good in the long term, though, for List of designers of role-playing games to become more like List of Doctor Who villains, so if an RPG designer narrowly misses the notability criteria for an article of their own, there is still a home for content of this nature.  I shall raise the question with WikiProject RPGs.  Percy Snoodle 16:11, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep, it is notable. Page Up 18:14, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep per Peripitus. Dionyseus 23:06, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep. However, I learned more about Lynn Willis from the talk page (and this discussion) than from the article. If the article could be expanded, I would think this a Speedy Keep. -- Wine Guy  Talk  00:00, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Weak Keep (withdrawing nomination) I still don't think he meets WP:BIO. A more specific google search turns up 600 results, and though he has 16 results on amazon, they're mostly game guides and such and amazon indicates nothing about multiple independent reviews of or awards for them (as WP:BIO requires). However, I'm persuaded by Groggy Dice's argument in his last couple of paragraphs that these particular game designers generate a more substantial reputation. I saw enough minor webpages in those google results where Lynn Willis (and others) was mentioned prominently in a brief blurb about various games (examples:, plus this interview).--Chaser T 01:21, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Ah, but now I've found out from Ghostbusters (role-playing game) that he was a co-designer on that as well, and it won the HG Wells Award for Best Roleplaying Rules of 1986. His name wasn't wikilinked on that page earlier, I'm going to link it now. --Groggy Dice 02:34, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
 * When it comes to awards, one problem is that his work for Chaosium seems to have been very collaborative, so it's hard to find an award for which he would get sole credit. On the Chaosium site's list of awards, I did find an award from the "Game Designer's Guild" for Lords of the Middle Sea. (Since that was the only wargame he put out for Chaosium, it's possible his other wargames also garnered some now-obscure awards.) But he should get partial credit for some of those awards, besides the Ghostbusters award I mentioned earlier. For example, the 3rd edition of Masks of Nyarlathotep won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Adventure of 1996. Though he was not the primary author of the original edition, he edited, rewrote, and contributed to it, and got co-author credit. And he also edited and did the art assignments, though not the layout, for the third edition. (This is from an interview with the co-authors.) Given his role as editor and contributor, I'm sure he deserves a good measure of credit for a lot of those awards, the Cthulhu-related ones in particular.

Comment. I have now incorporated some of the additional information into the article, as suggested by Wine Guy. In fact, this whole process has actually been a blessing in disguise. I first intended to create the article based on his wargaming work alone; I didn't know what had happened to Willis since the seemingly abrupt end of his wargame designing. In the process of checking "what links here" I found him linked from some RPG articles, and was able to put that into what I was writing. And having to defend him against PROD and AfD has forced me to turn up more information, which has now gone into the entry as well.

Since AfD started, I have found four additional Wikipedia articles where he was already mentioned but not wikilinked; I have now linked him, sometimes finding someone else to link, too. I added a sentence into the Call of Cthulhu page, noting Willis' assumption of the game after its original creator left. I looked at the Chaosium entry, which I found to be very Stafford-centric, and put in a mention for Willis and the other designers whose names I had run across. As a result, I think there is now a healthy number of other Wikipedia articles linking to him, and that's before any entries have been created for any of his wargames! --Groggy Dice 08:39, 18 July 2006 (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.