Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/No Love Lost (book)


 * 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 redirect to List of short stories by Alice Munro. General consensus that this collection has not received sufficient coverage for a stand-alone article. Eddie891 Talk Work 12:53, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

No Love Lost (book)

 * – ( View AfD View log )

Short story collection, tagged with unrefenced for 10+ years and notability for over half a year. I prodded this with "The coverage (references, external links, etc.) does not seem sufficient to justify this article passing General notability guideline requirementnor the more detailed Notability (books) supplement. WP:BEFORE did not reveal any significant coverage on Gnews, Gbooks or Gscholar." There is no evidence this collection generated any coverage (no awards, reviews, etc.). It was deprodded by User:Andrew Davidson with boilerplate edit summary that did nothing to resolve problems this article has. At best, I think this could be redirected to the author, Alice Munro. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 08:32, 2 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Literature-related deletion discussions, but since the prod was challenged, we now need to go through a full AfD set of motions... Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  08:32, 2 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Canada-related deletion discussions. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  08:32, 2 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Speedy Keep Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her short stories. The topic therefore passes WP:NBOOK, "The book's author is so historically significant that any of the author's written works may be considered notable."  See also WP:NOTCLEANUP. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:19, 2 October 2021 (UTC)
 * WP:NOTINHERITED. And "may" does not equal "are". Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 07:40, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * NOTINHERITED is not appropriate because the author's short stories are not some incidental association; they are the basis of her fame and the reason that she won all those prizes. NOTINHERITED is also not a policy or guideline.  It's just an essay whereas WP:NBOOK is the appropriate guideline and so outranks it.  And, in any case, the issue takes the topic well outside the scope of WP:PROD which is only for "uncontroversial deletion".  As the nominator is now backtracking and only proposing redirection, they are wasting our time by abusing our deletion processes.  My !vote stands. Andrew🐉(talk) 08:10, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * NOTINHERITED is very relevant. IF those stories are connected, and we have reliable sources for this, which discuss this with WP:SIGCOV, then this collection is notable. Have you found such sources? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 14:12, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * NOTINHERITED is still not relevant no matter how many times you spam it here. Sources have been found, as noted below and, in any case, WP:NBOOK tells us that they are not needed.  A further consideration is that this author is noted for reworking their stories quite radically when they are republished and so each publication is a separate literary event.  My !vote stands. Andrew🐉(talk) 16:07, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect per nom. Although I was the original creator of this, I did so at a very different time in Wikipedia's history — once upon a time the only notability criterion a book had to clear was that it verifiably existed as a book by a notable writer, and actually showing any evidence of reliable source coverage about the book was strictly optional. But we've tightened up our rules a lot in the intervening 15 years; the bar is now a lot higher than just "the book exists", and does require a lot more analysis of the book's significance in reliable sources. This was essentially a sort of "greatest hits" book, just repackaging a selection of previously published stories that were already and are still all available in other books, and didn't include any new stories — but on analogy to music, greatest hits albums aren't all considered inherently notable in the absence of some meaningful evidence of significance. Precisely because they're just a repackaging of existing material, "greatest hits" don't normally get analyzed by critics as artistic statements the way albums of new original work do, and thus don't necessarily need or warrant their own standalone articles separately from being mentioned in the artist's discography — and "greatest hits" books should be treated the same. If there had been stories in this book that were new, and weren't already available in any of her other collections, then there would be a stronger basis for keeping this, but if it's just a compilation of previously published "greatest hits" then it does need to clear a higher bar than just existing. And yes, I've searched for other sources to see if this can be brought up to a contemporary reading of WP:GNG instead of a 2005 reading of GNG — and it just can't, because all I actually get is glancing namechecks of its existence in lists of her overall body of work. Bearcat (talk) 12:57, 2 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep. Certainly not her most important book, but the publication is discussed in detail in . pburka (talk) 14:37, 2 October 2021 (UTC)
 * @Pburka Good find, the source is reliable and I see there are at least two paragraphs about this book there. Can we find one more? GNG requires multiple reliable and in-depth sources, which I always interpreted as "at least two". --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 07:39, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It's easy to find more sources such this which discusses the choice of cover art for the collection. Andrew🐉(talk) 08:10, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Half a sentence, if even that, is not 'discussion'. This source does not meet WP:SIGCOV. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 08:06, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
 * This is an excellent illustration of why we have NBOOK#5. Nobel Prize winning authors are extensively studied. Even their lesser works have SIGCOV. Prodding and AFDing them wastes everybody's time. pburka (talk) 13:39, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Books, yes. Short stories, yes. Anthologies, much less so, as there is nothing to say about them usually. They are just packaging. I am all for creating articles about books and short stories, and have done so many times. But I am increasingly thinking we have an 'anthology' problem, many pages are just ISBN numbers and list of short stories. That's not encyclopedic. Probably - now that I think of it, one could perhaps argue that table of contents could be a form of a navigational list... but that's a discussion for the VP or NBOOK page. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  14:15, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Obvious Keep. Highly notable author. RomanSpa (talk) 18:16, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
 * WP:NOTINHERITED. Most works by highly notable authors are notable. But anthologies usually are not. Arguably many of her short stories are notable and should be written about, but that's a separate issue. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 14:11, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Merge/redirect to List of short stories by Alice Munro. I do not believe that because the author is notable, every compilation automatically needs an article. Reywas92Talk 13:45, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment. If someone has access to the full text, I suspect they'll find additional commentary about this collection in Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism. pburka (talk) 16:41, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep, this is a book by a Nobel prize winner, of course it is notable and covered.--Droid I am (talk) 07:32, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Merge If there is no coverage of this particular collection then it should be redirected to the main article, because there is nothing to write the article with. The closer should disregard votes that are contrary to policy. Hemiauchenia (talk) 00:18, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Merge Couldn't find significant coverage about subject. I think it's better to be redirected to Alice Munro or List of short stories by Alice Munro.Brayan ocaner (talk) 14:34, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect to List of short stories by Alice Munro, which already contains pretty much the entirety of what is at this current article. While this collection technically passes point number 5 of our WP:NBOOK guideline, that does not automatically mean that a standalone page is guaranteed or required, per WP:PAGEDECIDE.  In this case, a book that is merely a collection of previously published stories does not have enough significant coverage written about it that a WP:SPLIT into a separate article is really warranted. There are some bits of information in the source found by pburka above that should be added to the collection's section on the target article (namely that Jane Urquhart is the one that selected the stories included per a specific theme, as the current section merely states that she wrote the afterward), but as there is no real sourced information at this article that is not already included in the main list, merging seems unnecessary.  Rorshacma (talk) 16:10, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect per Rorshacma. The keeps !votes display a fundamental lack of knowledge of WP policy. Notability is never, ever, automatic: it absolutely, positively, requires verifiable evidence, and not everything that may meet some criteria warrants a separate article if the information can be more easily conveyed to our readers in another article, as is the case here. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 21:44, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Merge per Reywas92 and Rorshacma. The found sources fail WP:SIGCOV of the actual contents of the collection, and therefore do not warrant a standalone article. Heartmusic678 (talk) 16:14, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect per Reywas92 and Rorshacma. It's a collection of reprinted stories from previous collections - rather like a literary greatest hits - which is likely why there's such a complete dearth of critical commentary on it specifically. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 07:01, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect Notability is inherited from the book's author. MrsSnoozyTurtle 08:14, 19 October 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.